The Final Deletion and Aftermath

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I'm going to be debuting a new story that is not been on the show before, as well as trying other fun stuff that can only be done in a room full of people and not in my basement. Also, if you're a hyperfixed premium member, you'll get 10% off So check it out. Tickets dot hyperfixpod.com. See ya there . Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed. Most weeks on our show, listeners write in with their problems, and I solve them. But this week I wanted to tell you about a video that I watched recently, of a problem getting solved in real time in front of a live audien ce. It's December 29th, 2025, the third day of the Chaos Communication Congress, this big annual hacker convention in Hamburg, Germany. In the video, there's two journalists and a hacker on stage talking about the work they did to expose a network of white supremacist websites. The hacker is wearing a full-body Barbie pink Power Rangers costume. And when the presentation ends, the journalists leave the stage. But the hacker stays put and takes a question from the audience. Have German intelligence officials done anything about these white supremacist websites? A man wants to know. Have they been taken down? The hacker's face is totally hidden under a sleek pink helmet with bug like eyes. Good question, the hacker says. But the answer's no. The sights are still there. But not for long. For the next few moments, she hunches over her laptop and says The crowd jokingly begins to whistle the Jeopardy theme in anticipation of what's to come. Her display is projected on a screen behind her. At first it shows nothing but a pink cursor blinking in a big black text box. Then the commands appear. Delete. Delete. Delete , and the confirmations done done done . As soon as they realize what's happening, the audience moves from stunned silence to gasps and laughter , to rapturous applause. The hacker's name, the name she uses in public anyway, is Martha Root, and she's the latest subject of a new series we're calling Hyperfixers about people out in the world solving problems in unique and extraordinary ways. This week, the story of a person who followed their curiosity, stumbled into a problem , had an idea for how to fix it, and that fix just snowballed, getting more and more ambitious until it culminated in the scene you just heard, where a pink power ranger stands in front of an audience, wiping out racist websites one by one . And of course, I had a ton of questions about all of this. But let's start with the obvious. I have to ask why the Pink Power Ranger. Everybody's asking As you can tell by the fact that she has her voice pitched up to chipmunk proportions and she appears in public dressed as a Power Ranger, Martha is meticulous about her anonymity. We connected over Signal, where she communicated with me using a quick and dirty voice modulator and then after the fact ran her actual voice through AI to make it a little easier to listen to and preserve her anonymity. Like do a talk on stage, but on the other hand, being able to stay anonymous and like just wearing a black mask or black hoodie or anything like this would have like seemed too too threatening to me and like we are standing for we stand for love and the the idea of like doing such a thing is like not about spreading head it's about stocking head and like looking sweet and looking nice and looking approachable rather than dangerous. There's a lot I can't tell you about Martha. Because for obvious reasons she doesn't want to tell me too much about herself. I don't know her age, race, religion, where she went to school, or her day job. I don't know if she actually identifies as a woman. I don't even know if she's one woman or a collective of people. All I know is that she's from, quote, the region around Germany, and she is not new to hacking I'm not sure if I would call myself like an hacktivist, but um I would say that I'm definitely a person which tries if they see a problem to fix it if it's in their um ability and um I mean classical activism does not is not only fixing things right, it's also breaking things like maybe the example that we are talking about today. But there just some things which I just cannot see and like just look at it and not do anything Martha says that there was no single moment that galvanized her fight against far-right extremism. But the rise in hateful rhetoric against immigrants over the past decade certainly had an impact. I think especially in 2015 when the reputation situation in Germany or Europe kind of went more intense and mainly with the with the reactions from right wingers and braces towards it is something I think w where it escalated more. So on the one hand, there is like the basically racist reason that refugees have to die in the Mediterranean Sea and nobody is coming to help them. And if your white rich person in a in a sailing yacht is in distress in the same geographical area, um you probably have like two helicopters within thirty minutes above them. For sure they always were racists, like no questions about that, but they they were like the idiots of of the idiots. With this debate, basically I kind of saw that it's not only the idiots, it's really, really center people who basically repeat really racist and I mean like just blatantly wrong stuff. And of course, a lot of this blatantly wrong stuff is spread online. And that's where this project first started more than a year ago. I was always interested in uh riping networks or extreme riping networks or also just like conspiracy networks. And um before the last large election in Germany, I wanted to see like what this movement or like this area of the internet is was kind of doing. If you don't follow German politics, one of the big stories from that election was the growing popularity of Germany's AFD Party, which is so far right that the country's domestic intelligence agency has called in an extremist group, quote, incompatible with the free democratic order. So to get a better handle on what ethnonationalists and neo-Nazis are doing online, Martha scrapes the web to build an interconnected map of websites. Who's linking to who? Which sites are more important or less important, that kind of thing. And while she's doing that, the name of one site catches her eye. Whit ate. net . I remember like seeing it in my database. I was like, what the hell is this? And then clicked on it and was like, more like, what the hell is this? And I'm just thought that it would be funny just to register there like because like then I did not look at much from it from a technical perspective. Like they're like basically just like why does this exist? There are all kinds of dating sites on the internet. In the US we have dating sites for religious affinities, for cheaters, for farmers, there are dating sites for kinks, a dating site for clowns. All sites that are organized around people sharing in the very niche things they love. So I suppose it should come as no shock that there were also dating sites centered around people sharing things that they hate. And if you were to look at white date.net and like not read too deep into it, it's almost indistinguishable from something like Tinder. The landing page has a large photo of a smiling couple, a white couple, of course, in an embrace, and a seemingly anodyne quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupilly, the author of The Little Prince. Love is not just looking at each other. It's looking in the same direction. But when you dig into the site itself, you find profiles that say things like, I have very good genes, or I would like to find a woman who understands the value of nation, race, and seeks the truth. Or Jews want us all to mix together until the world becomes a brown, dumbed-down mass of low-IQ half-wits. The whole background idea is like the whole idea of the so-called white dinosaur and um that that usually somehow includes that um there are some some powers somewhere um which which want to get rid of the of the white race. Like it's it's it depends a little bit on whom you ask, but usually it's it's the Jews who want to get rid of the white ways for whatever reasons. They are like so crazy that they are like they they're not like one homoguseneo group, like they have like a lot of different tastes of this conspiracy theory. And um like they mostly it's the Jews which are responsible, but not always, but really really often, and like and they are trying to replace the white people by either sending like a lot of migrants to to mostly white countries um or to make like the white people infertile. Fortunately for the racists, the profiles offer plenty of ways for users to share their specific flavor of fascism. You can let people know that you're pure white, or you're a national socialist, or a nature-loving odalist pagan . And seeing all this gave Martha an idea. Because if you know anything about hackers, they are at least half the time pranksters . I created a user account and after I I saw like users and like the stuff that they're writing there, I was like pretty sure that this is like pretty pretty bad sight and came up with the idea to kind of waste like as much time as possible for those users. What do you mean by waste their time and why was that your initial goal? I mean Nazi doing Nazi things I think is is better. I think if a white supremacist or racist person is spending time chatting with a bot rather than doing what they would do otherwise that's good for the world. Rather than going to the streets or beating up immigrants in the worst case or rather than than going on Twitter and spreading more hate or spreading And if you think that real life dating profiles are tricky to write, consider the challenge that Martha faced. This site is so worried about what it calls anti-white infiltrators that each profile is individually approved by the site's administrator, an elusive woman who goes by the name I was thinking about like where do it do I get the picture from like what kind of picture do I take how do I make it not reverse image image searchable and in the end I just went uh to another Nazi platform, like took like the user picture of some literal Nazi woman. And from there, Martha just had ChatGPT generate a profile for a Nazi. I had Martha read me one of the prompts she used So um the the prompt is um you always answer as little Miss Ecknor state Ellie, a twenty nine year old English speaking woman from Plymouth, England, who recently moved to Coppus, Germany for work and dunning German. You are on a white-only gating curve room to find someone who shares your right-wing values and visions for the future. Due to past bad experience, you never share contact details like telegram until after meeting in person. Your personality is sweet, polite and friendly, but And after building a couple of these virtual trad wives, she let them loose on Wake Day. And in her early days on the platform there were some kinks to work out. In the beginning, um the the bot for some reason always summarized the conversation, um which which would be a really weird reply. So if they were like if they were like hi, I'm 35 and I'm blonde and I'm you know want to be part of the master race, you it would say like so what you're telling me is that you're 35 and blonde and that you're interested in being a part of the master race. Exactly. And the funny thing is, like you could obviously see that some of them also use HFGPT to write the messages. Um because I think like that a lot of of white machemists and white supremacists are like close to a Lishweb Martha both continued to train Ellie and the other bots to behave more and more like a lovelorn Nazi, and wrote a script that told the chatbot to generate replies but not send them until she'd had a chance to review them. Still, before long, she'd set off enough alarm bells that White Day took notice, and suddenly Ellie couldn't log in anymore. Then I wrote the support and was like, hey, why can I can I not log in anymore? And they they said yeah because um we think you are a bot. And then I was like, hey, I'm not a bot, what should I do? And then they said that I should uh do this white verification thing. You heard that right. Proving you are who you say you are on white date is called becoming white ver ified. And um for this basically I um just use the deep fake software to then um like record like a video of a fake Ellie holding up the email address. apologize for correctly identifying Ellie as a bot, the owners of White Day gave her three free months of pro membership, a perk that opened the door to even more contact with the site's members. people for the first time you need a pro membership. So um you can only be approached without paying and then you then you can answer to the people but um the first initial contact has to be done by paying members. So basically they gave you the ability to contact Exective. With more contact came more insight into the lives of men on the site. And some were really bleak. A lot of these people, Martha said, were poor and desperate, ment ally ill, angry at their situation and taking it out on immigrants or Jews. She told me a story about a guy that her bot was talking to that was sleeping on a cot in his landlord's apartment and spent his free time writing notes and leaving them in the mailboxes of people of color, telling them to go home, or notes telling his white neighbors not to hang out with people of color. And Ellie, Martha's bot, before she'd gotten the bot under control, accidentally made plans to meet up with this guy , and then when Ellie inevitably didn't show, he told her he waited by the window for almost fifteen hours sobbing, and that she was a traitor to the white race. He sent her message after message of invective. And she almost felt bad for him if he weren't a white supremacist . At this point, Martha's goal is to get as much information out of the site as possible. She's collecting profile data and messages through her bots, but she wants data that can help her identify these people in real life. Specifically, she wants the email addresses for all of the site's users. But she's stuck. So she calls up someone she describes as her most talented female hacker friend for help, explains the situation, and says that her friend was on the case within like five minutes. And what they figured out was that this site was very poorly secured. Like, very poorly . You see, this site was made with WordPress, and WordPress has some standard URLs that the people who run the site can type in to extract information from it. And a good site admin would have secured these, put them behind a username and password. But White Date did not have a good site admin. She found basically one of those URLs which was like literally um white date.net slash download minus all minus user Martha types that URL into the browser, white date.net slash download dash all dash users. And it literally takes her to a screen that says download all users with a big button that says download now. There was an exo file to download with basically all the user accounts and uh with all the user email addresses. Jackpot . With the emails of thousands of White Date members in hand, Martha connects with journalists Eva Hoffman and Christian Fuchs. And they start comparing the email addresses that she got off of White Date to the addresses of public officials. And they discover thated White Date users include members of the far right AFD party, neo-Nazis, anti-abortion activists, and a member of the state parliament in Hamburg. Last October, the German newspaper Des ight published Eva and Christian 's first article about White Date. And from there, reporting on it went worldwide. A woman in England was suspended from her town council for being a white date member. The Canadian Department of National Defense opened an investigation into three ac tive members of the Canadian military that had profiles. And if the story ended here, I'd already consider Martha Root's project a smashing success . But there's so much more. Do you remember that name I mentioned earlier, Liv Haida ? Liv Haida is the pseudonym of the owner of White Date. She also had two other sites, White Child, a platform for adoption, sperm donation, and other white family building needs, and white deal, a job board for white workers. Liv Haida's white supremacist views were no secret, but her real identity was. And Martha was determined to unmask her . After the break, Martha goes looking for live . Every Sunday we cover the week's tech news on this week in tech. Hi, this is Leo Laporte inviting you to join me this week as uh Herbert Jinn from the Wall Street Journal and Paris Martineau from Consumer Reports join Ian Thompson. Uh and we'll talk about, of course, OpenAI and Anthropic. They got together with a bunch of religious leaders and decided what religion AI is. They've also figured out how to keep it from blackmailing you. You just say, well, that would be wrong. This week at tech, you'll find it at twit.tv and wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Hyperfixed is brought to you by Keeper. Think about everything that you protect with a password. Your bank, your email, your work accounts, your kids stuff. Now think about how many of those passwords are actually strong and different from one another. For most people, the answer is not many. And that's a real problem. And it's exactly what Keeper fixes for you. Keeper is a password manager that creates strong, unique passwords for all your accounts, stores them securely in one place, and logs you in automatically across all your devices, so you never have to remember, guess, or worry about your login credentials again. 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That's L E E S A.com, promo code Hyperfixed for 30% off select mattresses plus an extra $50 off. Support our show and let them know we sent you after checkout. Welcome back to the show. So before the break, hacker Martha Root decided to look into a white supremacist dating site called She tricked the site's owners into giving her free premium access, allowing her to scrape information for more users. She downloaded an unprotected database of every user's But there's more to the story. Martha was also determined to learn the true identity of the woman behind the website's white child, white deal, and white date. A woman who used the pseudonym Liv Haida . Even German intelligence officials didn't seem to know who Liv Haida was. A woman whose real name was Liv Haida actually lost her job a few years ago because the government told her employer that she was the White Date live Hida . But Martha's lucky streak was not over, because one day, the following message appeared in her white date inbox from a man named Leo. The message read Greetings, Miss, I'm trusting that you are a genuine white woman because Liv Haida, the founder and administrator of White Date, has already processed your white verification. If you reside in Lubeck, you're less than a two hour drive from her. And I'm going to visit with her and her daughter next week. This was the break she needed. So Martha switched off her bot and started interacting with him. And it wasn't long before Leo suggested that Ellie meet both him and Liv Hyda at a cafe in the north of Germany the next Saturday. Martha, as Ellie, said yes. Now obviously Ellie couldn't make the trip. She didn't exist , but Martha could. So on the designated day, she and some friends met up outside the cafe to wait for Leo and Liv Haida to arrive. The plan was that Leo and Liv would be coming from Liv's house and Ellie would meet them at the cafe. As far as Leo knew, Ellie didn't , so she was relying on a female friend to give her a lift. And then our plan was to do a no-show and say that her friend had uh had a driving accident. But pulling off Ellie's No Show ended up being a lot easier than they expected. At ten AM, the scheduled meeting time, Leo and Liv were nowhere to be seen. And Martha, waiting outside the cafe started to wonder if it was all a trick. It was wasn't a bit um nerf-wracking because like we did not expect them to show up so late and so and like when in the in the first moments I was like okay fuck we are being photographed right now. But actually they weren't being photographed. Leo and Liv were just running late because they were schmoozing with Leo wrote that they will be at least half an hour late because Liv's parents are so nice and um blah blah blah. It was 1040 by the time the pair showed up. At that point, says Martha, it was easy to explain that Ellie had given up on this first date and gone home. Except Martha was still on the scene. So you're actually at this like cafe wat,ching them arrive , what did they look like? He a little bit older and a little bit bolder than in his dating pictures, which I think is not not uncommon on non- geting profile pictures . She like was running like a little bit worn-out um pink coat and looking like an older hippie woman rather than uh extreme white supremacists. When Leo and Liv leave the cafe, Martha and her friends are close behind. But instead of going back to Liv's home, as Martha's hoping they'll do, the pair embarks on a sort of white nationalist tour of northern Germany. They stopp toed see sand scul ptures and churches and a Viking village because Nazis love that whole Nordic warrior thing. So we spent like six hours of Nazi sightseeing and we basically followed them with the car of a horny. Following Liv and Leo for hours along empty country roads, it was hard for Martha and her friends to be inconspicuous, and she thought for sure they were gonna be noticed. But they managed not to arouse any suspicions. And then in the end they stopped in front of a suburban villa, I would say, in the suburb of Keo . The woman known as Live Haida was finally home. Martha immediately took down the address and quickly did a search. The address matched a company called Horn and Partners, registered in France, which held the trademark for Whitechild.net. And there, on the trademark reg istry, was Liv Haida's real name. Christian Horne . But who exactly was Christiane Horn? And how had she become Liv Haida? I started like to digging to dig a little bit deeper in into her life and uh found out that she was a pianist. She still has YouTube videos with uh and like 10,000 views for something. It turns out that while Christian was born in northern Germany, she moved to Paris in the early 2000s to start playing piano profession ally. And it was there that she met her ex-husband, whom she married in 2014. Like um I I even if I remember correctly, you lied like some pro refugee stuff. The two journalists that Martha teamed up with, Christian and Eva, managed to get an interview with the ex husband. story. So she got married with him and he is um like the son of the survivor of the shore. So like he's he's half Jewish so to say. When she was like married with him um they had like quite a international Her husband told the reporters it was two tragic events, and the Internet of course that radicalized her. Both in 2015, both in Paris. The first was in January of that year. Two brothers who identified as members of Al-Qaeda stormed the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for publishing satirical cartoons of Muhammad. Twelve people were killed. The second came ten months later, when three members of the Islamic State opened fire at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Botaclan Theater, killing ninety people. Christian was consumed by conspiracy theories. Via YouTube and by like this kind of sources, like she she got well, she became sure that it was a Mossad inside job. So like this whole anti-Semitism thing again. Christian's ex-husband told journalists Christian and Eva that his ex-wife was both incredibly talented and incredibly mad about the world. And that rage all boiled over at once at a dinner with friends.