Prosecutors in the case against accused potential terrorist Craig Jungwirth are dropping charges claiming they have a “weak case”. Jungwirth is the man who initially scammed multiple LGBTQ community members after acquiring access to the Beach Bear Weekend event in Florida. He subsequently issued a threat (on one of his countless fake Facebook profiles) to engage in an Pulse Orlando-style terrorist attack on the LGBTQ community and was arrested late last year.

The Sun-Sentinel initially reported on the news:

Federal prosecutors are dropping the criminal case against a man accused of issuing a Facebook threat to “exterminate” gay people in South Florida, according to a court document filed Tuesday. The decision to drop the case against Craig Jungwirth comes about six weeks after prosecutors publicly acknowledged in court that the evidence against him was “weak.”

In his original Facebook post, Jungwirth said,

You can’t never catch a genius from MIT and since you faggots aren’t dying from AIDS anymore, I have a better solution to exterminate you losers. [SNIP] I’m gonna be killing you fags faster than the cops kill niggers. It’s time to clean up Wilton Manors from all you AIDS infested losers.

The Sun-Sentinel added:

Prosecutor Marc Anton filed a one-paragraph document Tuesday, announcing that prosecutors are dismissing the indictment, which was issued by a grand jury in late September. Prosecutors did not elaborate on the reasons for the decision in court records. Prosecutors are legally barred from pushing ahead with a case if they don’t believe they would be able to prove their allegations in court. FBI spokesman Michael Leverock referred questions to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Sarah Schall, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, declined to comment late Tuesday.

Local news affiliate WRAL added:

The case was based in part on a tipster’s screenshot of the Facebook post. But at a Nov. 15 federal court hearing, prosecutor Marc Anton told a judge that the evidence against Jungwirth was “weak” and circumstantial because investigators had been unable to definitively link the threat to him, even though the affidavit said the FBI was able to show that multiple threats were posted from his mother’s computer.

As is the case with most cyber terrorists, Jungwirth was careful to keep evidence of his activities hidden through proxies and virtual servers located off his mother’s property.

At the heart of the current news is the fact that the Florida-based FBI office could not link Jungwirth directly with the Facebook posting. While the FBI claims to have found at least 59 fake Facebook profiles they subpoenaed for access to verify the threat, multiple sources with direct knowledge of Jungwirth’s attacks confirm he had substantially more accounts than that and used his advanced technical skills not only to keep evidence of his activities secret but to continue his operations even from behind bars.

Moreover, the local Florida FBI office in charge of the Jungwirth investigation appears to have neglected to contact key witnesses in the investigation. We spoke to three witnesses with direct, tangible evidence who contacted the FBI; no one would return their phone calls.

We additionally contacted that same office to offer the voice mail he left threatening to go after us for reporting on his scam(s) and terrorist threat. No one returned our call.

According to Phil Earley, a software engineer who can speak to Jungwirth’s technical acumen, Jungwirth left a trail of evidence the FBI could have used in their case. As one of Jungwirth’s targets, Earley had firsthand knowledge of this and offered his documentation to the FBI.

Speaking to his skill set, Earley told us:

I’m a software engineer, versed in development of user interfaces (think the applications on your phone, websites you use, and applications on your computer); mainly focused on front-end development. Front-end development means a focus on the client-side layer of applications or web sites–the ones that people see and use. I’ve worked with companies as large as Apple, and as small as local startups–and have a solid technical understanding of developing software for end users that is secure, engaging, and immersive.

Speaking on Jungwirth specifically, Earley said:

The reality of the tech is that there were so many clues left behind, months before Jungwirth’s arrest that nobody paid attention to; and that which I documented for the FBI. The start of everything was Jungwirth’s websites beachbearweekend.com and fortlauderdalebearweek.com — being hosted on GoDaddy, and the sideloading assets on a private server. The technical issue with the second site was that the server was running ‘X-XSS-PROTECTION:0’. XSS, is known as Cross-Site Scripting; which allows a domain such as google.com to transfer data to another domain such as yahoo.com by means of JavaScript. Normally, this is handled through the use of a technology known as AJAX — with proper authentication methods such as OAUTH (think of how you sign into a variety of services using your google account). The inherent problem with a site that’s running ‘X-XSS-PROTECTION:0’ means that the site can pass data to literally any and all sites it wishes. Almost ZERO sites run in this mode, because using secure authentication methods is the preferred format and helps keeps your users secure. The particular setup Jungwirth deployed used a variety of techniques to gain information on his users — usernames, passwords, accounts; pretty much anything that was stored in the browser. His deployment of malicious JavaScript would sit silently in your browser and sniff out your passwords, and phone home when you submitted them. I’ve documented these techniques to the FBI, and they’re well known in the world of web development.

We asked Earley how he came into contact with Jungwirth and what happened thereafter. Here’s what he told us:

As soon as things started smelling fishy regarding his websites; I (with an acquaintance of mine) started inquiring the various venues Jungwirth was marketing.. And to no one’s surprise, not a single venue had any knowledge of the event known as BeachBearWeekend. I’m not from Florida, nor did I know any of the individuals who had been harassed by Jungwirth for years. My acquaintance and I concluded that what Jungwirth was trying to set up was a scam to steal people’s money — so I warned people by way of Instagram, where I have a fairly decent following. (Note, the last user account comment by @atlassmann is actually one of Jungwirth’s profiles). I was then contacted by people in Ft. Lauderdale who had knowledge of Jungwirth, and starting learning about the various crimes he had committed Soon after that, I immediately became the ire of Jungwirth; merely because I knew what he thought no one else would figure out. Even an associate he hired backed away when he knew what Jungwirth’s intent was. What Jungwirth did was social engineer his way into finding my real phone number by using public records like voter registration — note both phone numbers used above are burners, which are disposable phone numbers that you can use to hide your true identity.

Earley contacted the FBI to offer both his expertise as well as his firsthand evidence in dealing with Jungwirth including the cyber intrusion Jungwirth carried out personally against him for his attempts to expose the Beach Bear scam. Earley commented:

After being told to ‘just move on’ by my local police department, yet having gone through over 10 MacBook pros, 3 Windows machines, and 5-6 iPhones — I saw the news article that spoke towards weak FBI intelligence regarding Jungwirth, which incented me to not give up. I couldn’t maintain any of my accounts, cellular lines, nor computers after Jungwirth hacked his way through me; so the day after my birthday–I walked into my local Denver FBI offices to try and give them any knowledge that I had (whether it was all correct or not). I was contacted by a network intrusion specialist, and one of the first things I was asked is if I knew “David Herbert”. The BIGGEST problem with their entire case was that not a single person knew who Herbert was, nor where the screenshot came from. It simply went viral by way of the Pulse shootings in Orlando, FL. From this point, knowing Jungwirth had over 59+ Facebook profiles, things started to make sense. And my FBI contact informed me that there was not a single machine running malevolent code at his home. Why would someone who hacked his way across multiple victims be running anything from his home? If you’re running these elaborate hacks on people, you’d most likely use a disposable operating system such as Tails; on a USB stick that you could ditch all evidence of. We have known for a very long time that Jungwirth had capabilities greater than he lead others to believe, such as hacking his way through Bob Young’s email, business, and domain: In the above screenshots [click to enlarge], Jungwirth was using his MIT email address, personal Gmail, and deploying Man in the Middle Attacks against Bob Young; as a means to intimidate and quite literally know everything about Bob’s daily doings. He later bragged to Bob about how easy he was to ‘get into’.

When asked about his lack of interactions with the FBI and their ongoing refusal to contact any of the witnesses and victims Jungwirth interacted with, Earley added:

This sort of lies at the heart of everyone’s issue. I’d say with three sources with documentation, knowledge, and experience (not to mention financial losses) at the hands of Jungwirth; we’re all a bit amiss that this level of intelligence is weak? Bob Young–when bringing his MacBook Air to be looked at (while Jungwirth was hacking his way through him), and quoting Bob’s experience; Apple technicians walked away from his machine like they were watching the DaVinci code or something. They later instructed Bob to get in contact with the authorities, as the individual at the root of the problem was [click to enlarge]: My personal experiences have been very similar to Bob, which have lead me to failed logic boards, ruined windows machines, and iPhones with a 24 million minute lockout? The amount of effort it takes to just get back up has been mind boggling:

He added:

My personal fear is more so for the people who live in the Ft. Lauderdale area, but another fear is that the court system is going to send him home with no access to computers? Quite honestly, it all sounds so 1990’s Kevin Mitnick that it’s really disturbing. Are his websites still up? Yes. And knowing that, what other virtual environments exist that we don’t know about. Barring that — why do all of my accounts, to this day, receive their recovery codes from landline devices in Broward County? It’s beyond frustrating, and I’ve been through multiple different phone numbers, to no avail. Beyond that, my cellular account started getting blocked from sites like the Denver FBI and peacock-panache.com:

Perhaps the most frightening prospect – one proposed by Earley and other targets Jungwirth caused tangible damage to whether in reputation or technology – is that Jungwirth may have engineered the entire threat as a ‘false flag’ to exonerate himself from all the other crimes he’s carried out in recent history. Earley proposed the idea a few weeks back when we spoke arguing Jungwirth may have “actually made the dialogue regarding Pulse himself; in order to ‘appear’ innocent and clean.”

The “weak case” against him and subsequent dropping of charges appear to correlate with that hypothesis though no other evidence exists other than the inability to locate the original “David Herbert” in the conversation that went viral. Had Jungwirth created the exchange (and invented a person who the FBI would never be able to find), he could simultaneously threaten an act of terrorism against the LGBTQ community while evading any sort of punishment from the criminal justice system.

While local reporters are already acknowledging this is most likely the case (including a source we have at a local NBC affiliate), local coverage this evening will be focused on the Fort Lauderdale / Wilton Manors / Orlando LGBTQ communities and their ongoing fear of what Jungwirth will do once he’s released.

This inability to prosecute is unfortunately not unexpected given the federal government’s ongoing failure to recognize online harassment and threats of violence as legitimate. The Supreme Court ruled recently that unless an internet threat can be linked to an immediate, credible threat of violence it is not only allowed, but legal free speech. Moreover, cyber-stalking and harassment laws are so weak nationally that the campaign of terrorism Jungwirth unleashed on countless LGBTQ people is nearly impossible to prosecute in the criminal justice system even with the blessing of a grand jury (as is what happened in this case).

Despite having the current charges against him dropped, Jungwith will remain in custody for the time being to answer for other (lesser) charges including failure to pay for a meal (dine and dash) and vandalism of Rumors Bar & Grill (a LGBTQ bar in Wilton Manors).

Short of that it appears the available evidence showing he scammed LGBTQ people, stole their money via the Beach Bear scam, hacked computers causing literally thousands of dollars in damage, harassed multiple people via phone calls, voice mails, text messages (and more) wasn’t enough for federal prosecutors to build even a moderate case against Craig Jungwirth.

Though they’ve dismissed the charges, prosecutors can bring charges against him again in the future should they obtain additional evidence. This provides little comfort to those in the LGBTQ community Jungwirth has already harmed who don’t feel law enforcement took them seriously in their reports of harassment, fraud, and more.

Previously:

Peacock Panache readers:

Tim Peacock is the Managing Editor and founder of Peacock Panache and has worked as a civil rights advocate for over twenty years. During that time he’s worn several hats including leading on campus LGBTQ advocacy in the University of Missouri campus system, interning with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, and volunteering at advocacy organizations. You can learn more about him at his personal website.

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