In early January, Ars Technica reported on a swatting attempt on an Oregon home—notable in particular because the intended target no longer lived at the address in question. In the 24 hours after publication of that piece, an Ars staffer became the target of an online harassment campaign which began with the posting of private, personal information, a practice known as doxing. That doxing, just like the failed swatting attempt, originated with posts on the imageboard known as 8chan. (Users disagreed with use of "8chan" rather than spelling out "8chan users" in the headline.)

The site, created as a reaction to similar site 4chan (and its changing rules and policies over admissible content), was founded in 2013 by New York native Fredrick Brennan. The 21-year-old had previously been in the news due to a rare medical condition known as brittle bone disease. By the end of 2014, though, his name was in headlines again because of his site's association with the GamerGate hashtag—specifically, with its most mean-spirited followers—and because a small subset of 8chan users openly doxed and harassed people.

8chan commenters remain largely anonymous. The only confirmed name on the site, really, is that of its vocal creator, who agreed to an interview with Ars Technica late last month.

We wanted to understand what made him build—and subsequently defend—a site like 8chan, and what drives his passion for anonymous online speech.

Editor's note: The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length. A complete 8,000 word transcript of our discussion is available here.

Ars: When people say the site name out loud, do you prefer “eight chan or “infinite chan”?

Brennan: When I first made the site, I put in the infinity logo, but nobody really respected that. I call it eight-chan just because that’s what everybody else calls it.

How did you get started with 8chan?

I was born in 1994 in Albany, New York. I lived with my parents in Prairieville, New York until I was five. They divorced, and I lived with my dad until I was 14. He had an aide through the state, basically a nanny. He became very attached to the nanny. The state decided it looked like a long abuse case; they were just going to replace her. Because my dad was having relations with her, he decided, no, he’d rather sleep with her instead. He put me and my brother into the foster care system. My mother was informed that we were in the foster care system, and she started the legal process to get us out, which went on for two years. When I was 16, I moved to Atlantic City to live with her until I was 18.

I graduated high school and started doing freelance work immediately. I didn’t feel like going to college. The first freelance-type work I did was for Mechanical Turk, which was very annoying—that’s Amazon’s crowdsourcing service. I made $5,000 on that in 2012. I eventually became a Mechanical Turk requester, which allowed me to live in Brooklyn for a year. After that, in September of 2014, this little 8chan thing happened, so I moved to Southeast Asia. That’s my story, I guess. I live in the Philippines.

Why the Philippines?

In September 2014, 8chan went from around 100 posts per hour to over 4,000 posts per hour, so I began working on it full time. So, the arrangement I had at the time, to work for a Brooklyn company in exchange for rent, was no longer possible and I needed to find a new situation.

In October I was approached by 2ch [a similar Japanese imageboard site], whose owner lives in the Philippines. We partnered the sites and then I moved because I had no other place to live and it was the best option at the time. The Philippines has an extradition treaty with the USA—I'm not here for any legal reason.

Also, the US is actually not very friendly towards disabled adults. There is tons of red tape to getting visiting aides, for example, some of which was shown in the Al Jazeera documentary. In Philippines the cost of labor is low enough to where I can afford to pay for it myself. I pay my 24/7 caregiver 10,000 pesos per month, which comes to $225 USD.

Also, the weather is great. I love it here.

How has your medical condition figured into your life?

I have osteogenesis imperfecta—either type 3 or 4, I’ve never been genetically typed. In some cases, which are kind of rare, but they can happen, it can pass from the mother to the child, which is what happened to me. My mother was also affected. It starts at birth, and there’s no cure for it.

The treatments for it are not very effective. There’s drug treatment, which you have to get when you’re a certain age, and it wasn’t available when I was a kid; it’s supposed to make your bones stronger. There’s also surgery, which takes the bones that are bent, straightens them, and puts titanium rods next to them. That’s just for aesthetics. The bone is still really weak; [the surgery] doesn’t actually do anything other than make it not look so crooked.

As far as using computers goes, it’s pretty much how I’ve spent most of my waking hours. There’s not really a whole lot of opportunity for me to do much else.

Tell me about your computer education.

It was a lot of trial and error, because I used the computer a lot all day. The very first computer I had at six, I broke. It was a Windows 3.1 machine, I think, and it wasn’t even my computer; it was one that had been given to my dad. He let me use it. Within a few days, I’d already overwritten a lot of stuff in the registry. He had to reinstall Windows and I didn’t get it back for a couple of years.

When I was eight, I had a Windows 98 PC. I had that one for a really long time, until I was 10 or 11. We had dial-up and such. At that time, I just used the computer to play games—Neopets, things like that.

It’s when I got my first laptop at the age of 11 that I started taking it more seriously. The first language I learned was Python 2. When I was 11, I started… [phone rings] agh. Sorry, I actually can’t get to that phone, and my housekeeper isn’t here, either. It’s just gonna have to ring. My housekeeper does yoga every day, so she comes by around 10. Anyway, where was I?

You were talking about Python.

It actually took me a long time to figure out because, being a kid, you have school and stuff like that. I would say my first actual computer program that did something more than print “Hello world” was when I was 13. It was an IRC robot program. Like, you’d talk to it [in IRC] and it would reply back.

When did you start visiting imageboard sites?

When I was around 12, I had a Sonic game called Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. In the game, there was a place you could go, you could load a help menu in the Chao Kingdom, where you had virtual pets. There was a forum advertised in the game for kids to go to. You had to type out the exact Web address into a computer. I was using the BBS site—Chao BBS—and it was very similar to how 2ch works, thinking back. There was registration, but you could easily make a ton of accounts and nobody checked, other than [asking], “Are you older than 13?” Of course I lied and said, “I was born in 1980! Let me in!” That board was heavily moderated by Sega, I assume, and posts were always getting deleted.

One time, I dunno how it happened, but 4chan’s /b/ board got wind that this new game that was released had this open BBS you could go to that‘s a lot like 4chan. They immediately raided it and forced all of the topics off the page. All the 4chan users came over and started creating new threads and pushed all game-related threads off. They weren’t very good keeping a secret of where they were from.

Sega cleaned it up in a few hours, but by then, the damage had been done. I’d seen the link and where to go. I saw 4chan’s unmoderated, anonymous forum was a lot better than the one Sega of America was running.

Did you make friends there?

As far as directly making friends over 4chan goes, it’s pretty impossible. People are very hesitant on an anonymous board to post a way to contact them. When you’re just a user, people don’t really wanna share their e-mail [addresses] and stuff, which makes sense. You don’t want people to track you down. Because, you know, if you make a post with something that can identify you, you never know who’s gonna do a quick Google search and see if there’s anything funny about you out there.

The main way people come to make friends is through IRC channels and video game servers—everything that grows up around 4chan. There was a 4chan Minecraft server we had once on the tech board... the IRC channel for that was where I made a lot of friends. I was doxed there, so I left and changed my name.

How old were you when you were doxed?

The first time?

Yeah.

I was gonna say 15. It’s happened three times. [laughs]