Aubrey Cottle aka Kirtaner – Bowmanville Ontario Canada

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Update: This article was updated on 10/14/2021 at 11:54am PT due to relevant, continued encouragement to his Twitter audience to SWAT an activist who is currently seeking asylum. ([18] & [19] below), again at 12:24pm PT [20]. Updated on 10/24/2021 with links to a few references. Updated on 10/27/2021 to enhance image resolution.

Summary

Aubrey Cottle has at minimum, a six-year history of stating he has cooperated with, or worked for multiple different Law Enforcement organizations, including Interpol, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In addition, Cottle has talked extensively about running honeypots for child sexual abuse material (child pornography), involving multiple different sites.

Cottle’s outright admissions to working with state intelligence agencies are not just past or present, but over time. In addition, he has outright encouraged his audience on Twitter to contact UK authorities to have a longtime journalist and activist “forced to seek help” [SWATting & Welfare Checks 15-20].

In addition to his statements about law enforcement, Cottle has a long history of making racist and antisemitic remarks, including posting pictures of swastikas, pro-Hitler, anti-Black racial slurs and posts with statements advocating death of Black and Jewish people [Racism & Antisemitism 1-10].

Cottle has worked to have himself named “Founder of Anonymous“, which was published in The Atlantic, in August 2020. The author admits in public posts that this entire claim is purely of Cottle’s own mind. They have yet to issue a correction or footnote to the article.

Under the screen names Kirtaner, RealOGAnonymous, ThatOGAnonymous renatriK, Klrtaner, TerrakinX and ThatNotoriousK on Twitter, Aubrey has been quite vocal about hacks surrounding Parler, Gab and Epik. His statements are clearly the work of someone who would like quite a lot of attention for themselves and those around them. His behavior and statements appear very similar in nature to Sabu‘s, after being arrested, agreeing to become a CI for the FBI in less than 24 hours, forming Antisec in less than a month, and coordinating the hack of Stratfor, released on Christmas Eve of that year. His cooperation with the FBI led to the imprisonment of other activists, and harassment/arrests of their families and loved ones.

“i’ve done work for the fbi before and i give zero fucks”
~Aubrey Cottle aka Kirtaner via Twitter
January 20th, 2017

Federal Law Enforcement Cooperation & Public Statements
[1] i’ve done work for the fbi before and i give zero fucks
it was a decade ago and involved rcmp/fbi, my web communities have made fox news, “hackers on steroids”, i
really do not care
considering i had to run fucking child porn honeypot operations for the feds and it still gives me nightmares
idgaf what they do
January 20th, 2017

[2] One of these days I should FOIA my FBI file just to see what the hell is in there
for real though i’m curious as to just how many pages it is considering just how often i dealt with feds
October 15th, 2019

[3] long story short is i helped RCMP + INTERPOL shut down 12chan after a bunch of social engineering
September 24th, 2015
[4] Did you know I helped INTERPOL shut 12chan down? I run 420 not 12 you dumbfucks
September 19th, 2015

[5] If proof was that easy to find I’d probably be on the sex offender’s registry, not like I didn’t have regular
communication with law enforcement!
September 20th, 2019

[6] They’re gonna dig up the honeypot fakelink (that Spar even knew about) that was used to drop malware
on 12chan admins and I forwarded info to French authorities, we were notified of the datacenter raid.
Gosh it’s like I’m not on the sex offenders registry!
September 10th, 2021

[7] Aubrey Cottle’s current Twitter Cover Photo (Canadian Security Intelligence Service Investigational Records
as of July 22nd, 2021):

[8] We taunted 12chan staff a lot, gave them bad sysadmin advice on purpose, laughed and called them dirty
pedos in irc when French feds were actively seizing their servers which they didn’t want to believe was real but
we were privy to the seizure, etc. Nothing but disdain for them.
September 25th, 2019

[9] Aubrey Cottle is a regular on Gregg Housh’s podcast, and was platformed to a more mainstream audience by Gregg. Cottle was made very aware of Gregg’s history of cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

[10] Cottle: “4chan never did anything noteworthy and 12 years later I’m hard pressed to find anything different”
Response: “I mean, they took the heat off you, for the most part.

If you ignore those time the FBI came over to have a chat.”

Cottle: “Y’all got no idea”
June 5th, 2020

[11] boy oh boy i could tell you so many things
about very specific federal involvement and recruitment, to boot
i have so many stories
September 18th, 2019

[12] CSIS offered me a job one time big deal
Most talented younger hackers are approached by IC when identified. It’s more common than anyone admits.
Good talent is hard to find. Whatever.
I “got caught” because I had balls and doxxed myself to every target we had.
October 8th, 2021

[13] “i was the lucky one to have the blessing of alphabet agencies to weaponize anonymous (as an antiterrorism thing, to boot), those that came after me, not so much
i’m canadian too so that changes the calculus”
June 6th, 2020
[14] Aubrey Cottle discussing his wife, Spardot and Libby on 7chan

SWATting & Welfare Checks

[15] Retweeted by Aubrey Cottle under @RealOGAnonymous: “The man was suicidal. Police shot him.”
(Regarding a news account of cops performing a “welfare check”)
March 19th, 2021

[16] “Welfare checks as SWATs” ~LibbyInPhilly w/ Cottle in the comments
October 1st, 2021

[17] I hope someone has appraised the UK Home Office as to Barrett’s unhinged slander and defamation. If not, I highly encourage it at this point.
I also encourage reporting most of his Twitter account for targeted harassment. Make sure you archive it first, courts will want to see his baseless claims as we will be seeking compensation.
Anyone that can force him to seek help, do so. Sooner than later.
October 9th, 2021

[18] Someone called a welfare check on me in August. The police were not amused.

Barrett on the other hand, is in desperate need of psychiatric intervention.

October 9th, 2021

[19] Reminder that Barrett Brown needs psychiatric intervention and whoever can force him to seek it is doing him and the world a favor.

October 14th, 2021

[20] Cottle: “Barrett isn’t even a hacktivist, he didn’t know how to use a VPN when talking to him last year “

Response: “He’s a ‘journalist’.”

Cottle: “He needs to be hospitalized”

October 14th, 2021

Racism & Antisemitism
[1] What Wolfenstein is teaching me: Jews are technology-hogging jerks that prevent us from colonizing space
several centuries ago. Assholes. – June 11th, 2014

[2] “Kill civilians, commit war crimes, cry about the holocaust” – July 23rd, 2014 (Pictured is a book titled “A Jew and his duties”)

[3] Hulk Hogan’s HH tweet signatures actually stand for Heil Hitler – April 21st, 2016

[4] heil @HulkHogan – August 18th, 2016 (Included in this tweet was a GIF, depicting swastikas, Adolph Hitler,
and a scene from American History X of a neo-Nazi curb stomping a Black man) CONTENT WARNING

[5] multiple HH (Heil Hitler) references in a three tweet thread about concert tickets – March 14th, 2017

[6] Hitler was a wonderful leader and adored globally! –March 25th, 2015

[7] A picture of Don Lemon holding up a sign edited/captioned with an anti-Black racial slur –August 3rd, 2016

[8] Post of a pretzel swastika – June 9th, 2016

[9] Post captioned “one of these things is not like the other”, with a picture of several wi-fi networks. The one in all caps contains the text “KILL NI**ERS AND KI*ES” – September 29th, 2015

[10] NUKE ISRAEL – August 12th, 2014