POTHEADS SHOW YOU'RE NOT ANONYMOUS ONLINE

GreenThum43215: Hey, are you the Phoenix guy?

LeifMWright: Yes. Who's this?

GreenThum43215: You interested in an internet story?

LeifMWright: I'm all ears.

GreenThum43215: Have you ever heard of overgrow.com?

That Internet chat began the weirdest column I've ever undertaken,
one full of international intrigue, secret marijuana gardens, the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, a
shady character with an Armenian name, a former movie actor turned
marijuana seed dealer and tens of thousands of freaked-out potheads
who started what I call the Marijuana Bean Field Wars.

Overgrow.com was the world's largest marijuana cultivation Web site,
and possibly the largest single marketplace of illegal ideas in the
history of the world. The site taught growers the ins and outs of the
plant and how to increase their yields and ostensibly increase the
THC content. THC is the chemical believed to cause the "high" of marijuana.

At its peak before Jan. 31, Overgrow.com had more than 100,000 active
members -- a massive amount for all but the largest web sites, and
certainly for one that exchanged information that is illegal in most places.

Jan. 31, the site disappeared. Poof. Up in smoke, you might say. It
had warned users a couple of days earlier that it would be undergoing
server upgrades, so expect some outages. So no one panicked.

A day later, the site was still gone. Potheads, who are notoriously
paranoid already, began to wig out.

What if the site had been busted? Would members be subject to
prosecution based on the information they had shared on the site? Had
authorities been watching the whole time, building up information so
they could attack?

The War Begins

GreenThum43215: A lot of people around here are freaking out.

Probably an understatement.

I started searching the Internet for information about Overgrow.com.
I found a slew of forums and dozens of sites repeating the same news:
Overgrow.com and its parent site, Heaven's Stairway, had been shut
down, their Canadian owner arrested, his house raided and his family jailed.

Heaven's Stairway was a seed distribution company. Marijuana growers
call the seeds "beans." Heaven's Stairway, according to Canadian pot
activist Marc Emery, had to be the largest seed merchant in North
America, selling cannabis seeds all across Canada and the United
States, and probably to other countries, too.

The stories on the Internet didn't answer some key questions. Were
the Web sites shut down by Canadian authorities, or were they, as
Emery's own bust nine months earlier, done in cooperation with the DEA?

Who was the mysterious owner of the sites, and what happened to him?
Was he in jail? Was he out? Was he even alive?

What happened to the records of his seed business and the logs on his
site that could possibly lead police to those who frequented the site?

Internet forums were atwitter with the details -- or lack of them.

It seems the sites were owned by a Richard Calrisian in Montreal. But
later, it seemed "Calrisian" had been an alias. His real name was
Richard Baghdadlian. And later, it seemed "Richard" was an alias,
too. His real name, they asserted, was Hratch Baghdadlian.

No one seemed to be able to find any official records of his arrest,
or even of an investigation.

That, the growers seemed unified in believing, was even more ominous.
If the cops had busted Baghdadlian but hadn't arrested him, it could
be that they were still investigating -- or worse, Baghdadlian was
cooperating with them, singing like a canary, selling out seed
customers, seed merchants and growers all over the continent.

I called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters in Ottawa.

"We don't confirm or deny if there is an ongoing investigation," said
Sgt. Nathalie Dechenes, spokesman for the RCMP. "So we wouldn't tell
you either way. I don't know if we even have authority to shut down Web sites."

So I called Emery, who was busted nine months ago and is facing
extradition to the United States on charges of selling marijuana
seeds in the U.S.

"I'm facing 31 years in a maximum security federal prison," Emery
said. "It seems to me if Baghdadlian was facing the same thing, he
might have started cooperating if they offered to drop the
investigation in the U.S. and keep him in Canada."

Emery had run a seed company in competition with Heaven's Stairway.
When he was busted, his computers were seized ("Nothing was on them,"
he said), and his clients in the United States started receiving blue
sheets of paper asking them to confirm orders they had placed with his company.

"It was essentially an effort to try to get them to incriminate
themselves," he said. "But most were smart enough to hit my Web site
and find out it was the DEA and not us sending those notices out."

Meanwhile, several cannabis-related sites were breaking out into full
civil war over the Overgrow debacle.

On one side was a fomer movie actor who had had a bit part in a
Jean-Claude VanDamme flick and now was calling himself "Gypsy
Nirvana." He claimed to have spoken with "RC," which was a pseudonym
for Baghdadlian (growers seem to be big on initials and acronyms).

RC, Nirvana assured everyone, had been arrested, but he was out on
bail and he had shut down the servers when he learned of the
impending raid -- everyone's information was safe.

Dissenters began to surface, however, saying Nirvana had a profit
motive in mind; he wanted Heaven's Stairway's seed business.

On the other side was someone calling himself "Plural of Mongoose,"
who apparently commanded great respect in the growing community. He
also claimed to have spoken with RC, who had told him several lies,
some of which, combined with a friend being busted, led him to
believe RC was cooperating with the authorities.

Caught in the middle was Emery, whose own case had generated a lot of
publicity, and who is loved by about half the growing community and
violently hated by the other half. Emery's initial statement on the
matter had been that Baghdadlian, tired of the seed business, had
decided it was time to bail, so he shut up shop and took off to
greener pastures, no pun intended.

The battle raged on in Internet boards with Nirvana accusing Emery of
being a jerk for revealing Baghdadlian's name and phone number on his own site.

Others said Baghdadlian was the jerk for leaving his business
partners high and dry, wondering if they could be busted at any time
based on information from his servers.

No Bust, No Investigation, Mom Says

I called a number given on one site for Baghdadlian. A woman answered
and gave her name as "Mrs. Baghdadlian."

She confirmed that Hratch is her son and that he was the proprietor
of Heaven's Stairway and Overgrow.com.

"Nothing has happened, there is nothing right now," she said in an
Armenian accent. "He has not been arrested. There is no investigation."

I asked her if Baghdadlian had shut the servers down himself. She
started stuttering.

"Um," she said. "I don't think I can say anything more than this."

I asked if she knew where I could reach him to talk to him. She said
she did not.

"Wow," Emery said when I told him about the conversation. "That sure
lends credence to the idea that he took the money and ran."

It's possible that Baghdadlian had noticed an increased amount of
government servers hitting his sites, saw the writing on the wall and
bailed. Emery agreed it was possible.

"Before I was raided, about six weeks before, there was a huge
Department of Justice focus on our Web site," he said. "Our server
logs revealed their IP addresses and we were able to do a whois on
them and find out where the hits were coming from."

Taking the money and running would explain Baghdadlian's silence --
and the silence of law enforcement, which had thrown a big media
party when they busted Emery, patting themselves very publicly on the
back for such a large takedown.

What Does It Mean to You?

The bottom line is those who were doing business with Baghdadlian and
Emery were breaking the law if they were doing it in the United
States -- they took a tremendous risk to break the law, and they are
likely wise to be worried.

Doing that business over the Internet may have given people a false
sense of security, since the Internet allows people to feel "anonymous."

In the marijuana growing community, the disappearance of Overgrow has
made them rudely aware that Internet anonymity is an illusion.

For law enforcement, if there was no bust, they may still benefit
from Baghdadlian's disappearance. Growers all over the Internet were
proclaiming that they were done -- they were shutting their
operations down for fear "LEO" would come get them based on
information obtained from Baghdadlian's debacle.

The net gain for law enforcement is a new paranoia in the
cannabis-growing world -- and fewer people growing, which means
shorter supply and less headache for "LEO."

The average, law-abiding citizen can take a good message away from
the mess, too, though. The message:

"You're never anonymous," Emery said. "It's impossible. Governments
are investing huge amounts of money to monitor what's going on on the
Internet. If they're interested in knowing something, they'll get it."

Protecting yourself over the Internet -- even in legitimate business
- -- should take top priority. You may never have thought about
breaking a law yourself, but your information is scattered all over
the Internet, and those with less scruples than you can easily gain
access to it and use it to defraud you.

Be careful. The Internet is still a rough new frontier, much like
Oklahoma was in the Land Run years. You may not be facing droughts
and maurading bandits, but you face less-than-honest people who will
take your information and use it to hurt you.

"Never do business with anyone who won't give you a real name," Emery said.

More importantly, never do online business with a company you haven't
thoroughly seen to be trustworthy. Even big companies suffer from
"phishing," where people will pretend to be the big companies and
request personal information from you, which is later used to defraud you.

For those doing illegal business over the Internet, my advice is
this: Just don't.