Dear Toxic Faith Blog Hackers – Part 2
[As a disclaimer, I will say that the following is a rant, and I could be completely wrong. But based on the sequence of events that have occurred, it is my opinion that most of what I've written below is probably very similar to the true accounts behind the hacking and deletion of 1vois' Toxic Faith Gracepoint blog]
Dear Toxic Faith Gracepoint Blog hackers – Congratulations!
You have successfully removed a high-ranking blog about the true stories of Gracepoint Berkeley Church byILLEGALLY hacking into 1vois’ gmail account and deleting it. Not only did you do so, you DECEITFULLY tried to present another blog [gracepointhorrorstories1.blogspot.com] as a backup site for our “benefit”. You obviously wanted the readers to go to your site, and build up trust, and gather email addresses and ip addresses to try to identify who the main readers/contributors must be.
Well – You succeeded in the hacking part, but you failed in trying to deceive us.
At first, I wanted to blow off the whole situation, that it’s only some mere coincidence, or that 1vois temporarily forgot his/her password. But then I thought again and I realized what was going on. I’m sure I won’t get this 100% correct, but I’m fairly certain that the following is what must have occurred:
Gracepoint Berkeley is trying to plant new churches in different cities as commenters have mentioned. And GP wants to keep the Gracepoint name, so you can have Gracepoint San Diego, Minneapolis, etc.
However, GP hit a snag, a big one. When you google “Gracepoint Berkeley”, The Toxic Faith Gracepoint site comes up. And on that site, there are many stories that shed your church in a “negative” light with its true stories. What a problem that would be in trying to establish new churches under that name.
So most likely, Kelly Kang was bothered, and she discussed it with her husband Pastor Ed, who then probably called a meeting of some of the nerdiest staff members among you – that being you. With a deep frown and a concerned look, he probably presented the situation to you, and probably presented it as a challenge. Most likely, Ed Kang didn’t tell you directly to hack it and to delete it, but he probably told you to resolve it somehow.
Pastor Ed Kang, being the lawyer that he is, probably at one point considered filing some kind of lawsuit against any of us bloggers for slander or libel or whatever. But oh, the unwanted attention that would being to the Christian network that he’s tied to. And the possibility that so many witnesses might show up and the days of trials and written testimonies that would generate. So of course, he called upon your tech-savvy wizardry.
Obviously, it wasn’t a one person job. A few of you probably saw this as a way to prove your loyalty and to “fight the good fight”. Maybe if you are single, you could earn some brownie points for yourself and get higher on that marriage candidate list that your leaders have in mind, since your leaders are the ones that recommend your name to the ladies.
You probably got together some chips and packs of Red Bull, and stayed up several late nights. You fancied yourselves as some kind of ”ethical hackers” out to do something grand and noble for Pastor Ed and Kelly Kang, since to you, serving them is serving Gracepoint, and serving Gracepoint is serving God. You probably considered it a bonding time. Maybe you felt cool like Neo from Matrix. Did you have your sunglasses and leather jacket on while hacking away?
You must have checked out your brain and conscience at the door however, because it must not have hit you that what you were doing is AGAINST THE LAW. Or maybe you thought it was a necessary evil. Or maybe you figured that you would not get caught at all. You definitely were concerned about getting caught, which is why you leveraged a domain in Singapore to do this. The truth always has a way of surfacing to the top, as I’m sure in this case it did.
You didn’t just want to take the blog down. You also wanted to find out who was behind it all. So you tried to go the extra mile perhaps. You exported the contents of the Toxic Faith Gracepoint blog and then imported it back in to a new url that you Gracepoint staff members would own. It doesn’t take rocket science to know this. If you have a blog, that’s just a built in feature.
So you took down the blog, and then tried to present yourself as an anonymous “helper” who just “happened” to immediately in the span of less than one day create a clone of the original blog to a new url.
Then you as an anonymous commenter, left numerous links to your new url. Here’s where you failed. You probably couldn’t get yourself to lie, being the Christian that you are. You couldn’t tell a story about how you backed up that information and you couldn’t say that you were trying to help out. Rather you just posted the link. Maybe you felt guilty? Maybe your conscience was trying to work? Or maybe you’re such a techy nerd guy with low EQ that you didn’t know what story to make up. So you just posted numerous links as comments. Secondly, the ip address was clearly from Alameda [again, just a feature in wordpress, you don't have to be a tech whiz]. I doubt there are many leavers that still live in Alameda or work there. And these comments were left during the day time. So perhaps you are an unemployed technonerd who did this from your new building in Alameda. Or *gasp* – did you take the day off to devote yourself to this? Or maybe you are a “director” level staff who doesn’t work and is a full time staff hanging around in the church building in Alameda?
In any case, your intent was to DECEIVE and to lead people into going to the new site so that you can gather ip addresses and email addresses.
In addition, you know what else you did that was suspicious, you Gracepoint staff member technonerd? You created some additional urls very similar to the original one. You created “gracepointhorrorstories2″ which was a clone of the other blog by 1vois about commenting honestly on Kelly Kang’s blog posts. You also for some reason, created “gracepointhorrorstories3″ which is entitled “BITTERATCHRISTIANS”. Now why would you create a blog like that? I have no idea. Maybe you just wanted to reserve that spot, and in the meantime, you named it something funny, some thought you had about 1vois and the commenters on that blog.
The story doesn’t end there.
What you did first was that you created the copy of my blog in wordpress under “gracepointhorrorstories.wordpress.com”, maybe in preparation to hack my site and then back it up to that wordpress.com site like you did for 1vois’ blogspot site.
But you probably didn’t know the wordpress functionality enough to know that it would generate a link in my comments section – lots of them. Then when I grew suspicious from these many linkbacks [or whatever they are called] you changed the website and wrote a story to try to convince me that you were on “our side” and that you did it so that the truth can be exposed. But the fact that the url shares the same name “gracepointhorrorstories” makes those wordpress sites very clearly tied to the same person(s) who created the ones for blogger.
And again, to me, the silver bullet is that the Toxic Faith Gracepoint Blog’s content was somehow fully exported and imported into a new url in such a short span of time, with just numerous comments with just the url. Maybe you were busy at work and just did quick copy and pastes?
I don’t think Pastor Ed and Kelly Kang will be happy with how you carried out your “Christian duty” for them. Now it’s all out in the open. I wonder if you were involved in the flooding of the web with all these identities for Kelly Kang in social sites. Because that person wrote “Kelly Kang” almost every other word, clearly revealing the intent behind the setup of those sites.
Now you have a choice. You can all repent and confess the truth, or you can go back to your Gracepoint bubble where they define for you what truth is. And that truth isn’t Jesus. It’s just “Gracepoint-convenient truth”.
2 Tim 2
2Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. 3For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
If you aren’t going to repent, I suppose I can expect you to keep hacking away. Just know that I’ve backed up this whole site, and that if you do succeed in hacking this wordpress account [which you most likely will], it will only further validate the truth of my rant.
Even if you can hide the truth or deny it, God knows, and that’s what matters. He is the All-Knowing Judge.
I have one request to make to any current Gracepoint members out there who have any kind of spine left. I challenge you to ask Pastor Ed Kang, or any of the tech-savvy older staff members if they know ANYTHING about this event, and if any Gracepointer, or Gracepoint-hired help has done this.
If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But I have a sneaky suspicion that I’m not.
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