A purported exposé of KKK members is proving an enormous dud, with the flagship names revealed—U.S. Senators and mayors of major cities—obviously no such such thing.
The mayor of Lexington, Ky., says he's not a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Anonymous postings saying otherwise are "false, insulting and ridiculous," Jim Gray said in a statement on Monday.
Gray, the city's Democratic mayor, was responding to the release of names of purported KKK members by someone claiming to be with the hacktivist group Anonymous.
"I have never had any relationship of any kind with the KKK. I am opposed to everything it stands for. I have no idea where this information came from, but wherever it came from, it is wrong," Gray said.
The methodology used by the leakers, representing themselves as part of the Anonymous internet collective, seems almost comically unreliable: the presence of contact information in hacked databases. More than fifty phone numbers and twenty email addresses are contained in the dox.
Among those accused are U.S. Senator Dan Coats, who was quick to mock the dump. Moreover, the twitter account of Operation KKK, established to coordinate the release of information on the hate group's members, immediately distanced itself from the dox.
Gawker's Kate Knibbs interviewed one of the people implicated in the info dump, whose case seems illustrative of how easy it is to get put on a KKK mailing list by someone who does not like you.
"This was done by a high-ranking employee at a jail to harass a union member," Aiken told me. That employee, Aiken alleges, is Kirk Eady, the former Deputy Director of the Hudson County Correctional Center. Eady is currently on the other side of the bars. He was convicted for wiretapping Aiken… In the sentencing transcript, the prosecutor links Eady to the KKK prank on Murray: "There was the testimony about Mr. Murray being signed up for the KKK, and how Mr. Murray didn't sign up for the KKK, and there was evidence put forth that suggested that was Mr. Eady."
