M.O.Ms:
Some events have taken place in the past few days that you need to be aware of.
Snidley (sp) Whiplash has seen fit to violate the privacy of the Star Chamber Google Group and to selectively capture and distribute email content exchanged between Star Chamber members within the group. From a body of roughly five thousand emails spanning hundreds of threads he and his cohorts took out of context a handful of potentially damaging references then shared them with people not privy to the group.
Among the people to whom Whiplash volunteered this unsolicited, unauthorized material was Joaquin. As a result, and for reasons I frankly don't understand, Joaquin has elected to disband the Moderator group. There now are no Moderators policing Dogfight or the forum.
The petty, malicious actions of Whiplash and his accomplices were taken after my having shared my personal email address with Whiplash's wife, Thulsa Doom, in an effort to help her with a problem she was having in leaving a squad she'd mistakenly joined. What they did with my email address was use it to gain access to the SC Google Group. The security settings of the group had been compromised without my knowledge, although had I known we were vulnerable to this sort of attack I still would never have predicted it. A greater amount of effort would have to have been exerted to get from my email address to the rummaging of an entire group's two year output of ramblings than I would ever have thought anyone in Dogfight small enough minded or vicious enough to exert. A Private Message to vent his spleen over whatever grievances Whiplash has with me should have sufficed, but he chose to do otherwise while pretending to be on good terms with me, and now M.O.M and Dogfight are suffering for it. I find it unconscionable that while he was raping our privacy with the expressed intention of damaging me and M.O.M he was inviting me to join one of his Google+ circles and he and his wife were disingenuously thanking me for my help..
It's been brought to my attention that sabotaging my relationship with Joaquin is only a portion of their plan. Other people will be contacted with pieces of our private exchanges if they haven't already. There's also reason to believe that personal phone numbers captured in the group are being misused.
Anyone in M.O.M and anyone who has ever applied to join M.O.M needs to assume that whatever information you shared via email with us has now been accessed and may be abused by these individuals. This includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, locations and.or home addresses, names of family members, work contact information and any affiliations with Google or related products such as Google+, Gmail and Google Groups. Any photos or documents you might have shared with us in confidence have now become public.
A member of the Star Chamber is an attorney and other members have contacted their attorneys. We feel that there is potential grounds for legal action. I do not anticipate that this will involve Dogfight or echoboom but that remains to be determined.
The impact of what amounts to a childish attempt at cyber-terrorism is already damaging this community. Joaquin's decision to disband the Mods clearly has something to do with the incident, although it's difficult to guess what that might be. Neither I nor any of the other Mods has ever behaved with anything but Dogfight's and this community's best interests at heart. I know of not a single solitary case of a Mod abusing his powers or shirking his responsibilities, and we've devoted countless hours to keeping Dogfight clean and family friendly...hours that we could have been spending playing.
That someone pretending to be a "leader" in this community is capable of resorting to subterfuge, privacy invasion and smear campaigns should give everyone pause. I have apologized to Joaquin for the private content that was shared with him. I'm not proud of some comments we've made but I don't know of a group of friends who don't share such passing nonsense or vent their frustrations freely, sometimes recklessly, behind what they assume to be closed doors.
As I said, we haven't seen the end of these puerile attempts to undermine me and our club. I advise everyone to proceed with caution where the sharing of anything remotely personal or sensitive is concerned. Your private information is not safe here, and "here" clearly now extends well outside the boundaries of this forum.
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