HACKER, CREEPER SOLDIER, SPY
A former U.S. soldier seeking asylum in Canada claims he’s wanted for working with Anonymous. The Americans say he may be a spy — and more.
In a five-part series, the National Post’s Adrian Humphreys investigates.
Milton, Ont., April 2014 Guards at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex, a maximumsecurity jail near Toronto nicknamed the Milton Hilton, came to rouse their newest prisoner from a concrete bed in the intake holding cells. Pulling back the hoodie covering his face, they found his T-shirt had been yanked up and twisted around his throat as a ligature.
The distraught prisoner was Matt DeHart, a 29-year-old American who had been brought to jail days earlier by a Canada Border Services Agency official and five police officers, who arrested him at the apartment he shares with his parents while fighting for refugee protection here.
Pulled from the cell and taken to hospital, he appeared to suffer no serious physical injury but underwent a mental health assessment. After returning to jail, Matt then dived headfirst from his bunk onto the concrete floor of his cell, requiring another urgent hospital visit. He told doctors he had crashed on purpose because he “had no hope.”
Days later, Matt appeared by video link at a detention review before a tribunal of Canada’s Immigration & Refugee Board (IR B).
It took half an hour for jail guards to retrieve him from a one-to-one suicide watch cell and sit him in front of the camera. Matt peered into the lens. He looked dreadful: unshaven and unkempt, his eyes red and swollen, his lids heavy from medication. He squinted and grimaced.
Gone was his bravado and the wide, almost goofy smile he seemed shy about flashing during many meetings with the National Post over the past eight months, while he was on bail from immigration detention on strict conditions.
His father, Paul DeHart, a retired U.S. Air Force major who worked in the powerful National Security Agency, sat grim-faced, watching his son on the video monitor.
“We’re here on a claim of torture,” Paul said, his voice straining as he stated Matt has been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. “To visit your son in a maximumsecurity prison in a suicide smock … more heavily medicated than he’s ever been … For anyone with PTSD to be treated that way, much less your own child … is very disturbing.”
This is decidedly not how the DeHarts envisioned life in Canada as they drove across the border little more than a year earlier, on April 3, 2013, seeking refugee protection. They claim U.S. authorities tortured Matt during a national security investigation.
Everything about the case of Matthew Paul DeHart is unusual; much of it is also dramatic and perplexing.
It is a story moving from his early involvement in Anonymous, the international hacktivist group, to his discovery of a sensitive national security document — perhaps destined for WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing organization — on a hidden computer server he hosted, back when he was a cocky Internet freedom fighter.
From there, it twists to being charged in the United States with soliciting the production of child pornography, something he and his parents claim is a cruel ruse by U.S. agents to help them attack Anonymous and WikiLeaks.
And then, still another bombshell: claims made in classified documents Matt might have tried to help sell military secrets to the Russian government and had moved to Canada to facilitate contact with Russian agents through Moscow’s embassy in Ottawa.
It all might seem absurd. Hacker, creeper, soldier, spy?
A months-long investigation by the National Post reveals a case deserving close scrutiny, despite — perhaps because of — its layers of secrecy and occasional stumble into dark crevices of security, surveillance and spies, as well as questions of mental health, sexual deviancy and crime.
Documents confirm, for instance, that while Matt is charged in the U.S. only for child porn, he was actually arrested, imprisoned and interrogated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an espionage probe; once in Canada, he was interviewed by Canada’s spy agency and his file assigned to Canada Border Services Agency’s security and war crimes unit. As for the porn charge, it, too, is “odd,” as described by a U.S. judge. A second U.S. judge, after hearing the government’s porn case, added: “The weight of the evidence is not as firm as I thought.”
The criminal case against Matt remains open in the U.S., where authorities consider him a fugitive from justice. Meanwhile, his asylum claim in Canada puts everyone in a tough spot. His only hope is for the IRB to accept that our closest neighbour, staunchest ally and largest trading part- ner breached international law and tortured its own citizen in zealous pursuit of a national security case.
This is the in-depth story of these remarkable events.
NEWBURGH, IND., 2009
Matt DeHart was exactly where he liked to be, sitting at his Gateway FX gaming laptop logged into an Internet chat channel with a clutch of likeminded geeks. He easily spent 20 hours a week socializing online, usually on a private Internet Relay Chat channel masked by privacy software.
This time, in mid-Septem- ber 2009, Matt and his online clique, calling themselves Anonymous Anti-Security, chatted amiably through typed messages as they played computer games, but one of his friends was agitated.
It can be difficult, online, to discern jokes from angst, and it took a bit for Matt to realize this was a legitimate alarm. The fuss was about an unusual file recently uploaded onto The Shell, the computer server they jointly ran on the Tor network, the “hidden Internet,” where tracing location is extremely difficult. Matt hosted web access for The Shell on a computer inside his bedroom closet in his parents’ home in Newburgh, Ind.
In a modern variation of the old “dead drop” spy technique, secret documents could be placed on a hidden computer server and a recipient told where to download it, and the two parties would never have to meet.
Matt found the alarming file. It wasn’t large, about four megabytes, he said. It had a seemingly meaningless name and a .7z file extension, meaning it was archived with 7-Zip software for a high compression ratio. The file opened without a password. It was a folder with several more files inside.
“We were pretty much unanimous on agreeing this was pretty serious,” he recalled. “The contents of the file were very disconcerting to my entire group.”
He doesn’t like talking about the file, seeing it as the source of all his tribulation.
“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t discuss what the file actually contained because that hasn’t been revealed yet,” Matt said. After prodding, he offered this summary: “It was an FBI investigation into the CIA’s practices.”
Matt removed the file. Not long after, he saw the same file — or at least one about the same size with the same name — on another hidden server, called sTORage. This version was encrypted, suggesting it had been a mistake to upload it to The Shell without password protection.
Matt believes the file was meant for WikiLeaks.
“That was the first time we realized that people were uploading really sensitive stuff [to The Shell].”
He could not have fully realized what that discovery meant, but he now faced an abrupt transition from lip-service Internet freedom fighter to the front lines in the dawning battle over government mass surveillance and security.
It was a tension that had chased him most of his life.
FORT MEADE, MD., 1985
The imposing, black buildings of the National Security Agency headquarters, surrounded by an ocean of 18,000 parking spaces, loomed in view almost every time the DeHart family left their home at the U.S. military base of Fort Meade, home to one of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies.
The NSA’s dark obelisks dazzled Matt at the age of eight as he stared at them from the back seat of the family car. He knew his father worked inside those black boxes, but his dad’s tight lips whenever he asked about it stoked his intrigue.
“He couldn’t talk about it; I had no idea what he did,” Matt said, trying to pinpoint the start of his interest — his obsession — with security, secrecy and information technology.
Seeking asylum abroad is a bizarre place for the DeHart clan to find themselves, being a devoutly Christian, conservative, gun-owning, military family.
“It’s not that I’m not patriotic — I am. I voted for Bush,” Matt said. “My family is military, pretty gung ho. But everything has changed.”
The DeHarts are the sort of family that keeps armed forces alive: generation after generation of smart, working-class Americans enlisting for their country. Many relatives serve or have served in various branches of the military.
Paul enlisted straight from high school and was trained to monitor East German broadcasts during the Cold War. Matt’s mother, Leann, also enlisted. She learned to monitor Polish broadcasts and was assigned to Fort Hood, a large base in Texas, where she spent more time changing oil than monitoring radios. The couple met on the base; she thinks it was in the motor pool, he thinks it was the barracks. They married in 1978.
Paul took the career track in the military, enrolling in college on a military scholarship and after graduation was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Air Force.
After intelligence training and gaining Top Secret clearance, he did a stint at Field Station Augsburg in West Germany, a listening post for the NSA, the masters of interception. From there he was assigned to the agency’s enormous headquarters at Fort Meade. Paul still won’t say what he did there.
We tried to revive the anti-security movement
It was when Paul and Leann were settling into their home at Fort Meade that Matt was born, on June 11, 1984, arriving prematurely as a high-risk birth at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington. Afterward, doctors said Leann could not bear any more children.
Matt grew up moving homes with his father’s postings, including to the NSA’s underground bunker in Hawaii. As a wide-eyed child, he visited the facility, which was replaced in 2012 by a new building nearby, where Edward Snowden worked before leaking scads of classified documents. After Hawaii, the DeHarts moved back to Fort Meade, with Paul again reporting for duty at NSA headquarters until he retired in 1994 with the rank of major. Paul then moved into Christian ministry, becoming a church pastor.
Matt did well in school. His reading comprehension was far-above grade level. In Grade 7 he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The first worrying sign of the trouble computers could play in his life came in Grade 9: After Christmas break he issued a bomb threat against his school as a prank, using AOL Instant Messenger. Someone saw it and called police. He was charged with causing public alarm.
In 2000, Matt started a group called KAOS, the “Kaos Anti-Security Operations Syndicate,” he said. The cluster of tech-savvy pals tapped into an arcane online movement concerned about the computer security industry. He still rails against anti-virus vendors who widely publicize obscure vulnerabilities, “just so they can sell more of their product.”
“The only thing I actually got in trouble for, back then, for computer hacking, was [when] we got into our school server,” he said. “We got a copy of our 10th grade science midterm which was on an encrypted server. My friends had the idea of selling that for $10 apiece. The school administration couldn’t prove it, but they knew I was responsible.”
In 2004, he discovered 4chan.org, a soon-to-be popular image and message board. It nudged his online shenanigans to a new level.
It was on 4chan, where posts by people not using a registered nickname were automatically listed as being by “Anonymous,” that the hacktivist group Anonymous was born. A repetitive joke by 4chan regulars, that they are all named Anonymous, would morph into one the hacking group’s main mottoes: “We are Anonymous.”
“In 2005, it was ‘ Ha, we’re Anonymous’ and people were joking around on the message board, but I didn’t really consider myself a ‘member’ of Anonymous probably until 2006. You don’t sign a membership form; anybody can be Anonymous,” Matt said.
By 2007, his bedroom was decorated with Guy Fawkes masks, the stylized face coverings used as a meme on 4chan before becoming the symbol of Anonymous. At the time, the masks slung on the ends of Matt’s bedroom curtains held no meaning for his parents beyond décor. For Matt, though, they signalled a call to arms.
He renamed KAOS, with a nod to the emerging ethos, Anonymous Anti-Security.
“You don’t write it anywhere, but that is what we called ourselves, and we tried to revive the anti-security movement,” he said. (His group is distinct from the similarly named “Operation Anti-Security,” known as #AntiSec, a subsequent Anonymous campaign.)
“We tried to push anti-security as more of an opposition to private security contractors. The new anti-security,” Matt said. At the time, the use of private military contractors was a hot issue after Blackwater workers employed as security guards were involved in a Baghdad gun battle in which civilians were killed.
The emerging Anonymous network appealed to Matt’s interest in Internet freedom, government secrecy and his immature sense of pranksterism.
“Part of my job with Anonymous was I helped people communicate securely. I would protect people from NSA spying,” he said. The irony of his specialty in light of his dad’s former job is not lost on him.
Using several aliases, often just the letter K, sometimes words beginning with K — including KMFDMK, Kaiser and Koenig — Matt became a specialist in encryption and protecting online privacy. He loved showing it, not only because of his information-freedom beliefs, but because he enjoyed his new status as a guru.
Matt does not claim to have been a big wheel in Anonymous. But he does claim to have used his expertise for the group and to have helped in a landmark campaign that made Anonymous a household name.
In early 2008, the Church of Scientology had drawn online scorn when it forced YouTube to remove a leaked video of actor Tom Cruise enthusing about his beliefs. The backlash brewed on 4chan and evolved into Project Chanology, an Anonymous campaign against the church.
On Jan. 21, 2008, an eerie, engaging video was released online: “Hello, leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous,” the computerized voice begins, accompanied by ambient music and moody video of passing clouds. “Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; your suppression of dissent; your litigious nature; all of these things have caught our eye,” the message continues.
“Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed.”
It was a defining moment for Anonymous. It received huge media coverage and was pushed into mainstream consciousness. The video went viral and the campaign blossomed into global, real-world protests and online attacks against the church.
“Even today,” the Scientology campaign “is considered by Anonymous to be one of their most legendary raids,” said Gabriella Coleman, a McGill University professor who is a leading academic expert on Anonymous.
It was Matt who helped register the YouTube account hosting that iconic video, using a series of dead-end online identities to avoid it being traced, he said. In those early days, a few motivated people pushed the strategy of Anonymous, steering the masses where they wanted.
“You have your original people,” he said, “the movers and shakers. You have a lot of people who are there for the ride and you have a few people who push policy.” For Project Chanology, that push came from Gregg Housh, the acknowledged mastermind behind the campaign after he was indicted for it. Charges were later dropped.
Matt tried to prove his involvement in the Anonymous campaign, offering the Post details outsiders wouldn’t know. He said the video used a text-to-speech engine published by Cepstral, called the David voice; the music was by E.S. Posthumus; and the graphics and video were compiled in Britain.
True to its name, most members of Anonymous do not know the identities of those they work with online, so Mr. Housh can’t confirm Matt was helping him. But he confirmed a man in the United States registered the YouTube account. He confirmed the accuracy of Matt’s details about the video, music, graphics and narrative of its creation.
“All of that is true,” Mr. Housh said. Eight people did the heavy lifting on Project Chanology and they specifically chose a song that was not identifiable when run through identification software.
“This guy knows stuff that I don’t know of anyone else who was uninvolved knowing,” said Mr. Housh.
He then summed up Matt’s problem in the blunt rhetoric of chat boards: “I hope, if he is innocent and his story checks out, that Canada is nice about it. And I hope, if he’s a child pornographer, he ends up dead in prison.”
Increasingly, even Matt himself sees these as his looming options.
His account of working in Anonymous has the ring of truth, said Prof. Coleman. He displays suitable “technical capacities and ideological commitments,” for it. “It does seem credible that he was involved, definitely in some cap- acity, with Anonymous in its early stages at least.”
At the same time the Scientology campaign was hatching, Matt used 4chan to recruit players of the online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, to his “guild” — a band of players acting as a team. The overlap between his guild and Anonymous became substantial. Of approximately 130 members of the guild, about 80% were involved in Anonymous.
In the midst of all this — and despite Matt’s opposition to military contractors and government surveillance — he maintained his family’s military tradition.
“I didn’t see a lot of conflict between me and the government back then, in 2008. I enlisted. I wasn’t anti-American.”
In March 2008, two months after Anonymous launched Project Chanology, Matt joined the U.S. Air National Guard. He was subjected to a security check and cleared for top secret training in the 181st Intelligence Wing. At Hulman Field, Ind., he was learning to fly MQ-1 Predators, RQ-4 Global Hawks and other drone aircraft.
These, then, were the converging influences as Matt lurched into adulthood: an abiding concern about secrecy, privacy and Internet freedom; nascent involvement in Anonymous, which would become one of the U.S. government’s top security concerns; immersive and addictive online gaming; and stepping into a new role as a U.S. military recruit in its secretive drone program.
For a brief moment, the young man felt fulfilled. Any doubt of his ability to wear all these disparate masks was erased by bravado and blissful online reinforcement.
“While you’re running it, it’s like ‘I’m a champion of free speech,’ and you feel good about it,” he said. “But then, when the whole law is suddenly attacking you, you realize how much power they have.”
Soon after finding that sensitive, unencrypted file on his hidden server, Matt discovered the combination of his preferred activities was toxic.
NEWBURGH, IND., 2010
On Monday, Jan. 25, 2010, after his parents left for work, Matt opened his laptop and started playing Soldiers: Heroes of World War Two, a strategy war game.
The previous Friday, he had shut down his hidden computer server, The Shell, after he received “a pretty detailed tip” to pull the plug. The warning came in a protected online chat from a friend who told him the FBI had just approached him asking about the server. The apparent scrutiny seemed linked to the sensitive file found on The Shell a few months before.
“I took the hard drives out of it, destroyed them. I took the platters out and took two pairs of pliers and bent them,” said Matt. “It’s not because you’re paranoid, it’s because you know what the United States government can do and having any affiliation, any peripheral involvement in WikiLeaks in any way, shape or form, makes you a target.”
At the same time Anonymous had been forming, Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks to publish secret material. The group released its first document in 2006. And just as the brash Scientology campaign made Anonymous a household name, WikiLeaks became famous in 2010 after U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning slipped Mr. Assange a trove of classified diplomatic cables and battlefield reports, including gunsight video of a U.S. Apache helicopter shooting a dozen people in Iraq, among them children and two Reuters war correspondents.
The d a magi n g leaks brought intense scrutiny to WikiLeaks and Anonymous.
The links between the two became clear in 2008, when Anonymous hacked the email account of Sarah Palin, then the Republican vice-presidential candidate, and its contents were released by WikiLeaks. If the Anonymous hacktivists were not already a target, teaming up with WikiLeaks put them squarely in the U.S. Justice department’s sights.
While the anti-Scientology campaign harnessed Anonymous’ digital activism, turning it from near-mindless trolling into political and social partisanship, the growing network of “Anons” targeted PayPal, MasterCard and Visa in support of WikiLeaks, and protested copyright controls and piracy crackdowns.
Matt followed these events closely, not only as an Internet activist but because his fledgling military career had already been grounded. In June 2009, he received an honourable discharge from the Air National Guard; his diagnosis of depression was seen as incompatible with remotely flying drones.
All of this was conjugating in Matt’s mind even as he opted for the indolence of a computer game — until he heard pounding on his front door a little before 9 a.m.
“I opened the door and it was the police task force,” he said. Five or six officers, some in uniform and some in civilian clothes, with badges slung around their neck, poured inside. “Your stomach drops and your heart beats like crazy. It takes you by surprise, even though I had nothing to hide once the server was destroyed.”
Matt was handcuffed as officers spread out through the house. After a while, the FBI agent in charge told a local police officer to remove the cuffs, pointing out they came with a search warrant not an arrest warrant, Matt said. He sat down at the kitchen table while officers continued their search. Joining Matt, the FBI agent asked him what online aliases he used. “I’m sorry, it’s none of your business, I don’t have a lawyer here,” Matt recalled replying.
Matt heard the whirring of digital cameras as officers came and went, taking pictures and stuffing things in black plastic bags and taking them away.
“They went through everything; they took all my parents’ stuff. Anything that could store digital data in the house was taken. The Xbox was taken, the controllers for the Xbox were taken, the games for the Xbox were taken.
“But the only thing of value that would be interesting to the government, other than the server, were two Iron Key [USB] thumb drives,” Matt said. Whenever he left his home he would take them with him, stuffed in his wallet; whenever he was at home he would tuck them behind the padding of his dad’s gun case that was kept locked and bolted to a wall.
Apparently not knowing that, an officer asked the agent if they should force the gun case open. The agent said that wasn’t necessary and everyone left.
“I was shook up,” Matt said. “I don’t know everything they took, but I know they took everything. After they had left I looked at the search warrant, which was left on the couch. It was a generic warrant from the Memphis FBI field office and it said they were searching for child pornography.”
It is one of the harshest of accusations.
“Once you’re painted with that, you never get the stench of that off of you. It doesn’t matter if someone is guilty or not guilty,” said Matt. “I don’t have child pornography on my stuff. Didn’t have it at the time, never had it. I wasn’t concerned about that. I thought they were going to come back for my thumb drives. From that moment, I knew they wanted my server and they wanted information related to Anonymous.”
Either way, it was distressing.
“I got a call from Matt,” Paul, said. “He was real upset. I knew something was up, he didn’t tell me over the phone so I rushed home.”
Matt told his dad about the police raid and what they said they were looking for. And then, sitting together amid the mess of the search, their floor littered with discarded latex gloves, Matt told his father for the first time about his involvement in Anonymous.
“That was interesting,” Paul said. “We didn’t know anything about it.”
The child porn allegation is harder to digest.
“It is hard to talk about this,” the father said. “But here’s the bottom line about all of this: Matt’s been with us all his life, except for when he came up here [to Canada] to go to college; we know he’s not a pedophile. He’s never had a proclivity for anything like that. All the time he’s been in youth groups he hasn’t tried to hang around with kids or anything like that.”
Added Leann, “I used to clean his room and look at his computers, you know? Nothing. Nothing.”
Matt’s parents said the unanswered questions were traumatic.
“When we’re trying to process all of this, without exaggerating, for the first week we couldn’t get through an hour without breaking down and crying, not even an hour,” said Paul. “And sleeping at night? Forget about that.”
In 2005, their house had been hit by an F4 tornado, the second-most powerful type on the tornado intensity scale, almost destroying it as they huddled together. “This was even scarier,” Paul said.
Confused, worried, panicked, Matt took the family car and drove south to Mexico with his two encrypted thumb drives, which he said contained Anonymous contact information, server logs from The Shell and — “hypothetically” he said, trying to maintain some caution — documents from his military unit. He mailed one drive to a contact in Britain, the other to someone in the United States, with notes asking they be kept safe. Then, he came home. “I didn’t have to return to the United States. I had cash with me, I was right next to an airport, I could have flown anywhere. I had my passport. I had no criminal charges in the United States; they just executed a search warrant. But I crossed back into the United States.” Life has not been the same. The DeHarts thought things would move quickly. They figured if any child pornography was found, police would come and arrest Matt. If nothing was found, as they said they expected, the investigation would be formally closed. As for Matt, he was fully expecting the FBI agents to return at any moment for the thumb drives they had missed.
Instead, nothing seemed to happen and Matt found himself at loose ends.
“I used to fix people’s computers. That was my job. That was my livelihood. Now all of my equipment to do that was gone,” he said. “They took all that stuff. I couldn’t work.”
Waiting and wondering about his future was excruciating. Anxious to be proactive, Matt hatched a plan that, in hindsight, he admitted was crazy.
He planned to defect to the enemy.