TOTSE Conspiracy: The fall of the Temple Of the Screaming Electron.
To those who are fellow totseans, this is how I view what went down. To non-totseans, Totse.com was a website that allowed freedom of speech. It was full of hacking, drugs, bomb making, scamming, phishing, anti-gov't ideologies, and some of the best political talk in internet history. It was created by a Man who went by the name "Jeff Hunter"(not his real name, which was never revealed). The final post on totse said that Jeff was "burnt out", and wanted to move onto something new, but many people did not buy this explanation for the shutdown [This post was originally a response to a person who claimed the FBI had nothing to do with the shutting down of Totse, for context] Jeff Hunter made a huge server upgrade, after years of having the same server, just a few weeks before he shut the website down. Why would he have made this huge investment, after not doing it for years, if he knew he was going to shut Totse down in a few weeks(when it would take months, or years to re-coop his investment)? Did he get "burnt out" overnight, and burnt out enough to take severe financial losses? He also made it clear to Totse members that the FBI was pressuring him, on numerous occasions.
In response, to the pressure, Jeff made it a perma ban to say "Totse Army", "TA", "T&A", or ANYTHING that could be construed to be talking about the Totse army(which was likely the reason the FBI was so interested in TOTSE). This was OBVIOUSLY an attempt to keep totse from getting shut down by the FBI, for being an actual terrorist organization(like I said, the Australian Gov't had already officially declared TOTSE.COM a terrorist organization). If totse was a terrorist org, then Jeff was its leader(so he was potentially looking at life in prison).
On numerous occasions, totse, grouped up, in real life, and on the internet, to cause mayhem. They put neon signs on Bridges in the USA, causing a nationwide bomb scare. They repetitively called people, harassing them(Bill Keller's Liveprayer is example). They would go around in groups, spraypainting totse graffiti all over(not to mention hacking government traffic signs, and displaying pro totse messages). Combine this with the fact that there was recipes for all kinds of explosives, and how to properly lead an uprising against the US gov't(or how to hack into its telecomm systems), you can see why the FBI, and Australian Gov't were seriously threatened by Totse.
In addition, There is no way to explain why the website was not simply passed on, to somebody like ZOK, who made Zoklet(totse clone), or the creators of things like totse2.com. Many people in the community offered to take it over. Jeff could have easily made money, AND respected the Totse community.
Instead, we're to believe that for no apparent reason, and with no warning, he pulled the plug, without selling the domain name, or allowing another user to take over. I think one likely scenario is that he was bribed to shut it down, which would explain why he didn't allow anybody to take over, or sell the domain(because that would have been part of the deal with the FBI). It would also explain why he was willing to shut down so shortly after making the investment in the server.
Or maybe they just arrested him, charged him, and seized the servers, then shut it down. They could have easily gotten him to write that final message for a reduced sentence.
Jeff never revealed his identity, so we'll never know what happened to him. Some even say it was a honeypot from the start( I don't though). Some say he got hired by intelligence services because he was one of the most knowledgeable people about the internet, and internet crime.
Regardless, even if he was not killed, arrested, or bribed, the FBI was still probably the primary cause for the end of Totse. If he really did get "burnt out"(another word for scared), it was because the FBI was all over him, and everybody knew it.
source: totse2.com
