Welcome to The Flashlight where Grifters and Gaslighters are Trapped and Exposed.
Is Church Militant (CM) collecting information about visitors to their website? Do they have malware embedded that allows them to collect your IP address and other personal information about you? Restoring the Faith makes a credible case that they did exactly that -- until their lies and falsehoods were exposed. Here's the video. I'm a little late catching this since the video was from last March, but it illustrates exactly how devious CM is. They act like Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal with his enemies list.
Interesting eh? The group that always preaches at us from the moral high ground seems to be engaging in immoral behavior to spy on and trap their perceived enemies (which is a growing and endless list). But presumably, they also collected information on their supporters. Does it make you want to send them another check!
Michael Voris and Christine Niles have shown over and over that they are willing to use donors' money to engage in questionable "investigations" and groom young, manipulatable "whistleblowers" who are happy to get their fifteen minutes of fame. They use scandal like crack to suck in viewers. People love a good, juicy scandal. But obviously that's not all the questionable acts they engage in. Getting people to pay to be spied on is brilliant! Exactly the kind of thing grifters do!
CM uses attacks, threats, and even blackmail to go after just about everyone who isn't them. Remember their assaults on The Remnant, LifeSiteNews, Catholic Family News, etc. ad nauseum. I'm convinced at this point that CM is a personality cult with cult leader, Michael Voris, running the show with the help of his sidekicks Christine and Simon. And there's plenty of information on the internet that points that way.
Let's look at a few facts from the RTF video.
1. CM inserted a malicious link into their website that allowed them to collect information from those who clicked on the link for "proof" that Mike Parrott of RTF was the Armchair Philosopher. Armchair, they said, defamed them. Now why would they want info on those who clicked on the link? One can surmise that they wanted to identify folks interested in their lawsuit against Parrott and Restoring the Faith (RTF). Gotta identify more enemies ya know, and, on the other hand potential donors. Lies and fraud, anyone? Did you click on that link? If so, ask CM if they collected your private information and still have it.
2. Mike Parrott claims (circumstantial evidence which certainly makes it seem likely) that CM created a fake identity on Twitter, supposedly a mom of an employee, in order to entice "Armchair Philosopher" into clicking on the info-gathering link. The video shows a before and after screen shot showing that as soon as CM was exposed they removed the phishing link. The mom's Twitter page also immediately went POOF! Hmmm....Who was the Twitter account mama? Christine Niles? Simon Rafe? He loves to play games. Anyway, inquiring minds want to know.
3. Church Militant has in fact threatened and bullied lots of people, as Susan and I well know, since they threatened us with a lawsuit. I mean, we are such a threat to them! But narcissists can't stand any criticism even if it's the equivalent of a few gnats buzzing around their ears. As for their penchant for suing other Catholic groups, how Catholic are they? Hey, Mike and Christine, read 1 Corinthians lately about the scandal of Christians dragging other Christians into secular courts?
I'll be posting another damning video from RTF soon. It's time for CM to be in the dock. Who is funding the $700,000 plus for them to hire more private servers and what are those private servers doing for their money? Let's have some accountability from CM for a change. Where does their money come from? Nobody can convince me that they are bringing in millions from premium subscribers. So who carries the moneybags and what are the strings attached to them?
Thank you!
ReplyDeleteA large part of this is way overblown.
ReplyDeleteA great deal of information about a visiter is known by any website. After all, if the website didn't know your IP address, it couldn't send back the webpage. Think about that for minute! If you investigated your blogger.com options, you should be able to get reports on all the IP addresses of all your visitors. That is very standard for website and marketing analytics.
In addition your browser client sends to the webserver the originating webpage (where you came from), your OS, web browser type, mobile/PC. possible location, etc., etc.. This info can be forged, but it is standard.
A deeper dive would be to try to access the cookies in your cache to figure out where you've been. Haven't you ever gone browsing on merchant site and find that other sites start showing ads for that merchant or similar items? How do you think that happens?
That's not to say that CM didn't use a more malicious technique. But don't think you are anonymous when you are out surfing the web. You aren't.
If want to disguise your IP address, then you can buy one of the private VPN services. Together with than you can use your browser's "incognito" mode. However, that only goes so far.
Thanks for the tech lesson. If CM has all that information about a visitor, why put a malware "click" on the site? What other information can malware provide other than what you describe here? It doesn't make much sense to me. Can you offer some additional insight?
ReplyDeleteI think the point is that CM is alleged to have created a specific link designed to lure specific people into clicking it for the express reason of identifying them. It's true that a website admin can learn quite a bit about visitors to his website, but this sort of thing violates the standard of privacy most people reasonably expect from a public website. It's like a merchant setting out a booby-trapped product specifically designed to entice a specific person to pick it up so that when he does, they can identify him. Beyond any moral questions, it's also likely to identify the wrong person.
ReplyDelete"You're in George Kaplan's hotel room. You answer his phone and respond to his name -- yet you are not George Kaplan?" For my fellow film geeks.
Followup:
ReplyDeleteMalware is usually defined as something that does damage or steals information. I'm not sure Malware is the right word for what CM did.
It is possible that the site that Armchair was directed to has some extra tools (or Malware) attached to it to extract more information than normally available.
However, the main objective would likely to have been to direct a known person to click on it during an identifiable time period. Otherwise, it is not possible to link a particular visitor record to the known person. By telling Armchair -- go click on this link -- they would be more likely to be able to pinpoint which visitor was him.
The normal record would say something like: At 10:50 visitor 12345 at IP 192.168.1.13 using gecko browser on OS .... and so on.
If you had a reasonable idea that Armchair clicked between 10:30 and 11:00, it would start to give you an idea of which visitor was him. Otherwise he is just one of a list of x other visitors.