For those skimming, Aum Shinrikyo is the cult responsible for the Tokyo subway sarin attack. What's often overlooked is that the cult synthesized the sarin gas themselves in a self-made sophisticated chemical weapons lab:
When their headquarters were raided, police found enough weaponry to fight a small war:
>Over the next week, the full scale of Aum's activities was revealed for the first time. At the cult's headquarters in Kamikuishiki on the foot of Mount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons, and a Russian Mil Mi-17 military helicopter. While the finding of biological warfare agents such as anthrax and Ebola cultures was reported, those claims now appear to have been widely exaggerated.[52] There were stockpiles of chemicals that could be used for producing enough sarin to kill four million people.[53]
They bought a sheep farm in Australia to mine uranium in order to enrich it and build nuclear weapons:
Murakami wrote a non-fiction book about the Sarin attacks and the Aum cult, Underworld.
I’m not sure if it’s accurate (he’s a fiction writer, afterall) but it’s very fascinating and sent many chills down my spine.
No different than other cults. A bunch of once aimless people who found purpose by subsuming their existences to the will of a venerated man (who teaches yoga in his apartment.)
One downside of having an industrialized high technology society with a good education system is that radicals will tend to have the skills and knowledge required to create harm on a large scale.
I've never seen this alleged "suicide counter" on the website, though I've only looked at it closely in the past couple weeks.
The site owner posted this rebuttal to assignment of blame for these suicides, which I find compelling. For instance, the widow of one victim decried Vice News (one source referenced in the article) for using her death to attack Kiwi Farms:
The "suicide count" in question was in one user's mini-bio (the bit below someone's profile pic where they can put custom text - not sure what that's called). Keffals' claim that it's a site "feature" is deceitful and that multiple users had it is an outright falsehood.
If you want a real conspiracy theory, recall that original and long-running KF thread subject Christine Weston Chandler was persuaded to incestuously assault her mother by a person named Isabella Janke. Kiwi Farms uncovered Isabella's history with Christine, and extensively documented her online activities to include allegations of extortion, CASM, and animal abuse:
The site was tried not in a court of law but in the court of public opinion. Removing evidence from the one court where it matters, especially as precedent for similar extralegal trials in the future, is harmful to the open web.
They've extensively documented actual alt-right figures such as neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who they consider one of their "lolcows." They also followed and recorded the activity of accused rapist Christine (formerly Christopher) Weston Chandler, the original "lolcow", though several users interacted with Chris over the years in ways that may have contributed to his/her decline:
They also discovered and documented Isabella Janke, allegedly the person most responsible for convincing Christine to abuse her mother, among other allegations:
This truth of these allegations will likely come out at at Christine's upcoming trial, assuming enough evidence was preserved. Incidentally, Isabella's father Mike Janke has a professional relationship with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince:
There were no dumps of bank account numbers. As far as I saw, Kiwi Farms users posted only publicly-available info about thread subjects. In my opinion, certain categories of public yet personally-identifying information should be covered by US law in a way similar to HIPAA. However, that is not currently the case.
Also, info like someone's phone number and home address are only a click away once you have their full name and approximate age/geographic location, at least for people haven't taken extraordinary steps to limit discoverability on Spokeo or White Pages. People post full names and locations to Twitter all the time. They call it "unmasking" when it's someone the ruling consensus dislikes, while they know the info will be used to look up the "dox." This is not Twitter or Kiwi Farms' fault. It is the result of flaws in our legal system which allow sites like Spokeo and White pages to operate.
It's easily verifiable that bank details were shared on KF. It's also easily verifiable to see that non-public information about folks was posted, especially when real details were posted about folks commonly known by their pseudonyms online.
Whether it's legal or not is unimportant. My question is for the internet archive: is it ethical for them to knowingly rehost dumps of PII? Just because it's public doesn't mean it's right for them to treat it like any other page. The goal of the KF users is to harass by putting that information out there: if IA rehosts that intentionally, they're making an active choice to further the goals of KF users.
>It's easily verifiable that bank details were shared on KF.
I see you've backed off from "bank account numbers" to "bank account details," perhaps after Googling the same Twitter screenshots I just found in an attempt to verify your claim. Those screenshots show a user describing a hacked bank account's balance and recent purchases. That's pretty bad; hacking into bank accounts is very illegal. The individual who broke into the account very likely committed a crime. Regardless, the screenshots don't show any credentials or account numbers. I'm not sure if posting someone's bank balance is illegal, but I'm guessing it isn't; maybe it depends on how it was obtained... don't know, not a lawyer.
Of course, the screenshot is totally unverifiable now that KF is wiped from the Internet Archives, which is the point of the submitted link.
