conclusions after visiting the Australian joke country,” he wrote in November 1995, listing his location as Sydney. “The Australian race has not progressed at all.”

“All of Australia could disappear into the Pacific and the only difference it would make to the World is the Americans would have one less pussy country to protect.”

“People like you should be rounded up, castrated, then shot,” he wrote in response to someone who accused him of racism—for asserting that Asians should be “screened out” of Australia “for DNA defects.” “Whats more your sperm could be used to create the ultimate germ weapon. Simply impregnate a countries woman, and within 20 years, you will have a race of ‘people’, which by all accounts, are capable only of collecting the dole.” Le Roux seemed to relish his notoriety. His posts so outraged the message boards that one correspondent changed their online handle to simply “[email protected].” “What kind of a dickhead are you?” another asked.

In a coup de grâce, Le Roux penned a thirty-eight-part post on a forum called aus.general in which he laid out the “Advantages” and “Disadvantages” of Australia as a nation. He made it a point to note that “I am ZIMBABWEAN. I left Zimbabwe in 1984, and have since lived in several countries including the U.S & U.K.” The “Disadvantages” column included “Internet access is far to expen- sive, pornography laws in Australia are backward, banks report on everything you do, and movies are about 6 months behind the U.S.”

“Drug laws are primitive compared with Europe,” he wrote in closing. “The way to combat drugs is in fact to legalise them.”

A different Le Roux personality could be found in another set of online forums, with names like alt.security.scramdisk, alt.security .pgp, and sci.crypt—encryption groups where posters engaged in highly technical discussions of the latest software for securing dig- ital files. There, Le Roux described his passion: an encryption pro-