00:00:49.980If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:55.400Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:04.060Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:04:06.520They work from home together, which I guess, depending on the vibe of your relationship and how your home is built,
00:04:12.680could either be the dream or a nightmare.
00:04:15.880But for them, for the Steiners, they make it work because they've built something together as pioneers of the early Internet.
00:04:26.280Starting way back when in 1999, which this is still very much the early days of the Internet, but especially for folks trying to build a real business online, they launched a newsletter to help people buy and sell things on eBay.
00:04:42.140If you weren't around in 1999, the idea that somebody would be making money or starting a business on the Internet in 1999 was still very novel, right?
00:05:03.000You know, we were all figuring out what it was even supposed to be.
00:05:06.000And so there were, I think there were a lot of people like this who, you know, just started a newsletter or a website or something because it was related to something that they were interested in and there just wasn't anybody else doing it.
00:05:27.680So their newsletter originally was called Auction Bytes, but eventually it became e-commerce bytes.
00:05:34.640And over the years, they're able to grow this into a real trade publication.
00:05:39.600It becomes kind of a trusted source for people who either build businesses selling things on eBay or have a passion for buying things on eBay.
00:05:48.360If you are a buyer or a seller or somebody who uses eBay in a real way, this is like a trade publication for you to understand eBay policies, what's going on with eBay.
00:05:59.040Ina is responsible for all of the reporting and David handles the business side.
00:06:02.920They cover marketplace news, policy changes, seller complaints, platform decisions for an audience of people whose actual livelihoods depend on knowing the ins and outs of how eBay works.
00:06:14.640So this is one of those stories where if I just stopped here, we just have a sweet story of a husband and wife duo working from home, running a business together in a charming New England town.
00:06:27.580Except for in the summer of 2019, one of the most powerful tech companies in the world decided that Ina Steiner needed to be, and I'm quoting directly from an executive text message here, quote, burned down.
00:06:45.020Burned down. That is some extreme language from a publicly traded company about an individual person.
00:06:52.580Yes. Get ready for some extreme language, put in text message and emails all over the story. Because what happened next is just one of the most unhinged, also just disproportionate and genuinely terrifying corporate scandals I have ever encountered. And I'm saying that as somebody who covers the dregs of technology for a living every week.
00:07:19.520Wow. All right. Buckle up, I guess. So where should we start? Who are these people?
00:07:24.920So the Steiners are just normal people. I cannot stress that enough. The Steiners are not1.00
00:07:31.000journalists at The New York Times, right? They don't have a team of lawyers. They don't really0.91
00:07:34.960have institutional backing. They just started their newsletter because they were eBay fans
00:07:40.360and early adopters of eBay. They're folks who just genuinely loved the platform of eBay and
00:07:45.920wanted to help other sellers navigate it effectively. So over time, e-commerce bites
00:07:52.040becomes one of the go-to resources for folks who sell stuff for a living on eBay. Small business
00:07:58.260owners, vintage resellers, collectors, and everyday folks trying to make ends meet. Ina is actually a
00:08:04.280member of the Online News Association, Me Too, and another organization for writers called
00:08:09.800Investigative Reporters and Editors. She even wrote a book about all of this called Turn eBay
00:08:14.560Data into Dollars, published by McGraw-Hill in 2006. She really built herself up into this
00:08:20.920trusted voice on e-commerce. She's been quoted in the New York Times, Fortune, the Wall Street
00:08:25.560Journal. And I feel like even that on its own is an impressive and interesting story like of its
00:08:32.620own right. It is. Yeah. You know, I mentioned earlier that a lot of people were doing similar
00:08:39.120stuff, like back in the early days of the
00:09:36.320Today would be a substack, which would be totally fine, but there is something cool about it still having that same DIY, early internet, early eBay feel, and to see it really succeeding today. It's cool.
00:09:52.820Yeah, I like that it still feels very Web 2.0.
00:09:56.440So you might think from where this story is going that her coverage of eBay was like some kind of an anti eBay crusade, because that would make more sense. Not just not to say that I would think that was OK, like an OK thing to do.
00:10:11.900But you might be thinking, oh, she's someone who is very anti-Ebay, and that's why eBay hated her so much.
00:11:02.100So as early as 2018, a full year before things got truly criminal, eBay's then-CEO, Devin Wenig, was complaining about e-commerce bites to his communications team.
00:11:12.980And we know all this because it's in court documents.
00:11:16.020His subordinates were promising to, quote, clap back at Ina and F with her.
00:11:23.700Yeah, I was going to say, this is one of those stories where so many things that should not be in writing are in writing.
00:11:29.500And it's probably one of the reasons why this story has captivated me so much, because you don't really need to guess when you put things in writing.
00:11:37.080So this guy, eBay's then-CEO, Devin Wenig, he is a central character to everything.
00:11:49.500During his tenure at eBay, he was named one of America's most 100 innovative leaders by Forbes, one of technology's highest-rated CEOs by Glassdoor.
00:11:59.240Bay Area's favorite CEO by the San Francisco Chronicle.
00:12:02.060And his bio kind of reads like a greatest hits of Silicon Valley prestige.
00:12:23.100Even though he was this big tech eBay bigwig,
00:12:26.680By the spring of 2019, eBay had hit kind of a rough patch.
00:12:31.940In January 2019, an activist hedge fund called Elliott Management bought a significant stake in eBay and sent a public letter to the board of directors.
00:12:40.800That letter said that eBay had, quote, underperformed both its peers and the market for a prolonged period of time and called for major changes within the company, which many inside eBay interpreted as a threat to the then CEO Wenig's job.
00:12:56.680Okay, I could see how that would create some pressure then for Wenig.
00:13:01.820Yeah, it sounds like he's on the chopping block.
00:13:05.620He's feeling that pressure because Elliott Management was essentially staging a corporate raid.
00:13:11.040And Devin Wenig, the Forbes-lauded, Glassdoor-celebrated CEO, now kind of has a target on his back from his own investors.
00:13:20.800So this is the atmosphere, an atmosphere of pressure and paranoia, when Ina Steiner publishes a story on her newsletter about how eBay CEO Devin Wennig, his compensation was 152 times that of a typical eBay employee's salary.
00:13:40.960I was really shocked when I read that number. Just for context, I was curious, is that typical for a CEO? And it turns out that that pay disparity of him making 152 times more than the average worker in his own company, that's actually smaller than the national average for companies, the S&P 500.
00:14:03.120because apparently they're all required
00:15:20.480So now you've got the CEO putting in writing, take her down, in direct response to his comms chief saying, we're going to crush this lady.
00:15:28.540Weiner takes that take-it-down text as a kind of mandate and escalates it directly to the head of eBay security division, a man named James Baugh.
00:15:39.760He's going to come up a ton more on this episode.
00:15:44.560So when Weimer, the comms chief, gets to James Baugh, the language they use to talk about this situation gets even uglier.0.82
00:15:52.740He calls Ina a, quote, biased troll who needs to get, all caps, burned down.0.95
00:17:35.260Honestly, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this story now is because you probably
00:17:39.460remember a few weeks ago, we did a story on the News Roundup about Madison Square Garden's head
00:17:46.940of security, based on some really deep reporting from Wired about how these big private companies
00:17:53.600are hiring people who formerly either worked with or had some ties to the government as CIA or FBI,
00:18:02.540and then they get hired on to be the head of security for these like big private companies.
00:18:08.560and more or less become personal mercenaries for these private companies
00:18:14.180where the guys who run the companies want to punish or spy on their perceived personal enemies.
00:18:22.960And then these heads of securities with these potential like CIA or FBI or government ties
00:18:28.540then do that on behalf of these executives.
00:18:32.240As they put it in that Wired article about Madison Square Garden,
00:18:35.440we're in the time of personal armies now.
00:18:38.560So scary. There's some humor to the absurdity of this giant corporation going after these two people. It's like a little mom and pop outlet. It is absurd and it's kind of funny in that regard. But like this idea about the rise of personal private armies surveilling and punishing the perceived enemies of the rich is like really scary stuff.
00:19:06.980I mean, it's exactly what President Trump is doing. The Wired article makes very clear that this is not an isolated thing, that this is becoming more and more the norm.
00:19:17.880So us regular folks who do not have, you know, personal goons on retainer or whatever should expect that this is going to become more and more commonplace.
00:19:30.100And you have no idea what the thing could be that gets you on the shit list of these incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful, incredibly well-connected people that have essentially their own personal goon who can do whatever, right?
00:19:44.840I'm sure the Steiners didn't think by just reporting publicly available information about compensation at eBay that they were going to then be the target of this very long, very intense harassment campaign that was illegal, right?0.85
00:20:01.560Like they in the Madison Square, we'll get into it soon, but in the Madison Square Garden article, ordinary people do small things that you would never expect would wind you on the enemies list of somebody rich and powerful.
00:20:14.520But that is what exactly what is happening.
00:20:16.480Yeah, that's such a good point. In both that Madison Square Garden story and also this one, it doesn't seem like these people became targeted because they had violated some sort of actual rule that the institution had.
00:20:34.700It wasn't about some kind of institutional transgression
00:21:00.680And going after e-commerce bites, it almost seems more like an outlet for rage than a strategic communications move.
00:21:13.440Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So much of this seems like built on personal hostilities, some paranoia, you know, just a real like taking out whatever feelings you might have or anxieties you might have on the job on these people who really didn't deserve it and really didn't do anything wrong.
00:21:36.600we probably all had the experience of working with like a co-worker or acquaintance or someone
00:21:41.980who maybe doesn't have the best emotional management and takes out their frustration
00:21:49.000and pettiness on other people around them and that's pretty annoying when it happens but it's
00:21:54.380probably like especially annoying and even dangerous when that person makes 150 to 300 times
00:22:31.720But that head of security for eBay, according to his own lawyers, said that he felt relentless pressure from Wenig, the CEO of eBay, and other executives to deal with the Steiner problem.
00:22:44.200And that he took that pressure very seriously in the way that a guy who has a background in covert intelligence operations takes pressure seriously.
00:22:55.480So he gathered his team and that team started to plan.
00:26:15.220one thing i haven't really gotten into yet is that the harassment of the steiners
00:26:21.920was not just about punishing ina for what she had written there was a second target an anonymous one
00:26:28.760because for months there was a commenter on the e-commerce bytes website that had been driving
00:26:34.820these ebay executives absolutely crazy this person posted under the handle fidomaster and
00:26:41.620then later changed it to unsuck ebay which i love again very early internet vibes yeah and this
00:26:50.520person would post critical commentary about ebay's layoffs their executive pay its management
00:26:56.880structure and shake-ups all over the steiner's website and across twitter ebay could not identify
00:27:03.580this poster they were unable to get twitter to kill the account probably because this account
00:27:09.220was not breaking any rules by just commenting about eBay.
00:27:12.940eBay's own lawyers told them that they did not have a legal case against this commenter
00:27:18.140and that basically there was nothing that they could do within the law, I mean,
00:27:23.080because luckily these are not people who feel they need to operate within the law.
00:27:28.200So Jim Baugh, eBay's senior director of safety and security, had a different idea.
00:27:33.320What if they could get the Steiners to out this anonymous commenter?
00:27:38.240So they put a plan in motion. This plan actually had a code name. They called it the White Knight Strategy. And here's how it worked. So Ba's team would harass the Steiners anonymously to scare them and to stabilize them and make them feel very unsafe in their own homes.0.68
00:27:56.660They would do this in their unofficial capacity, like off the books, on the hush.
00:28:01.900Then in their official capacity, eBay security would swoop in and offer to investigate the harassment.
00:28:09.600So they would kind of come to the rescue as a white knight, hence the name, earn the Steiners trust,
00:28:17.040and then use that trust to get the Steiners to cooperate in unmasking this commenter, Fidomaster.
00:28:24.660It is a kind of diabolical plan, I really have to say.0.88
00:28:28.140So their plan is to manufacture the threat, swoop in as the savior, and then extract the information that they want.
00:28:35.920That kind of dynamic, to me, really resembles the kind of tactic that you often see associated with intelligence operations,
00:28:43.560where you're lying, misleading, manufacturing fake threats, and then being like,
00:28:50.400oh, well, now you have to work with us because there's this threat that we actually manufactured.
00:28:56.040Yeah. Coercive, dishonest. Doesn't really sound super legal. Yikes. But I guess why else have
00:29:05.340hired goons, right? Goons gonna goon. Goons gonna goon. The U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case0.91
00:29:12.320called the White Knight strategy, specifically targeting an anonymous source through the
00:29:16.820journalist who was protecting them, quote, abhorrent to First Amendment values. And I
00:29:21.580absolutely agree. Yeah, right. That makes it even worse that they were doing all of this,
00:29:27.940not just to get the Steiners, but to uncover their anonymous journalistic source.
00:29:34.340So what else was part of this White Knight campaign? How did it all go down?
00:29:38.880So it started in June 2019. David Steiner, the husband of this husband-wife eBay newsletter, goes outside and he finds a word spray-painted in black across his brand new white fence. Fido master.
00:29:57.380Oh, man. It's such a dramatic visual. And then the reveal of the word is like, again, just like a little absurd.
00:30:05.420If you ran a newsletter and you came outside of your house and somebody had spray painted the name of a commenter on that newsletter on your fence, I would honestly just be so confused.
00:30:25.140Specifically, it was a senior eBay security manager named Brian Gilbert.
00:30:29.300He drove to Natick and defaced the Steiner's property.
00:30:32.780Afterward, Ba texted Weimer that his team had given the Steiners, quote, a tap on the shoulder.
00:30:39.740Weimer seemed to express approval and he did not ask questions.
00:30:44.200So I guess this is meant to be sort of the first tap of the harassment campaign.
00:30:49.820But then the digital component of it begins in earnest.
00:30:54.860Because the Steiners start getting bombarded with unwanted newsletter subscriptions.
00:31:00.400Things like subscriptions to the Sin City Fetish Night or the Satanic Temple or the Communist Party of the United States or the Irritable Bowel Syndrome Patient Support Group.1.00
00:31:11.220This was all coordinated. Someone at eBay was sitting at a computer signing Ina and David Steiner up for newsletters specifically designed to disturb and humiliate them.
00:31:22.500This feels like such a low effort, low tech method of harassment.
00:31:28.440Like I'm sure it was annoying and bad to endure, but I guess I would expect a crack team of ex-intelligence officers to have some like more sophisticated tricks than signing people up for unwanted newsletters.
00:31:46.620Their tactics do escalate, but the early tactics do sort of seem a little bit, what's the word I'm looking for?
00:31:55.500Yeah, the early tactics do seem a little bit low effort to me.
00:31:59.360But then come some DMs on Twitter, like threatening and explicit DMs, things like shut up or else.0.53
00:32:06.880The DMs were vulgar enough that when the Steiners were on 60 Minutes, they were talking about the harassment and they said that most of the DMs they were getting could not be shown on television.0.54
00:32:19.620So as if that's not bad enough, then it gets physical.0.60
00:32:23.400The Steiners get a voicemail from somebody saying that they could not fulfill an order for a wet specimen.
00:32:30.240David calls back and he's like, what is a wet specimen?
00:32:33.860A wet specimen, it turns out, is a preserved dead animal in formaldehyde.
00:33:11.280So they told 60 Minutes that they pretty understandably interpreted this as a death threat.
00:33:15.280And this sort of seems to start a death theme.
00:33:19.560They also get a funeral wreath delivered to their door.
00:33:23.020They get things like boxes of live spiders, boxes of live cockroaches.
00:33:28.820Then also pornographic magazines that are addressed to David,
00:33:33.420but delivered to their neighbor's houses specifically to humiliate him in front of people that he knew.
00:33:38.960Oh, okay. Yeah, so this is really escalating now from unwanted newsletter subscriptions to implicit death threats, boxes of live spiders, and borderline sexual harassment. I don't know if that counts as sexual harassment or not, but like sexual something really escalating.
00:33:59.080Yeah, it really escalates from here. Ina described opening a package to 60 Minutes. She opens the package and she said that it looked like it was full of hair and flesh. And this happened while a police officer who had come to take a report was standing right there.
00:34:16.040When she opened this package, she said that her immediate thought, even before she knew who was behind it or what was going on, was what are they going to do next?0.89
00:34:25.280So as this was all beginning, the Steiners start setting up security cameras all over their home, ring cameras and outdoor cameras.0.96
00:34:32.880The digital component of the harassment really kind of ramps up from here.0.90
00:34:37.420their home address gets posted online with fake announcements for things like yard sales and sex
00:34:43.420parties, basically inviting strangers to show up at their house. What strikes me about this is how
00:34:49.040eBay was kind of using the Steiner's own community against them. You know, this was harassment that
00:34:54.900was meant to humiliate them along often sexual lines in front of their neighbors and to stabilize
00:35:02.100whatever trust or like perception that their neighbors might have had of them and also
00:35:07.780destabilize whatever sense of privacy that they might have. Like this stuff happening at your
00:35:13.260house makes you feel like you have no safe space and no private life and no way out.
00:35:23.040Well, as if that's not bad enough, then comes the physical surveillance. So Ba, that head of
00:35:29.200eBay security, personally flew from California to Boston with two other eBay employees. They rent a
00:35:36.640van, and they registered for a fake software development conference as a cover story. They
00:35:43.000drive to Natick, and they follow the Steiners around their neighborhood. And again, this also1.00
00:35:48.360takes me back to the Madison Square Garden Wired piece. The level of surveillance that Madison
00:35:54.220Square Garden security team was expected to do on just regular people who attended events at the
00:36:00.620Garden is absurd to me. One of the anecdotes in the piece is that a former Knicks player
00:36:06.580went to a game at the Garden, and then Madison Square Garden security was meant to tail him
00:36:13.340and follow him, even as he traveled hundreds of miles from Madison Square Garden, which, again,
00:36:20.740I don't know, like, maybe I'm naive or I don't know how business works, but I simply cannot conceive of a world where this is a reasonable way to run a business.
00:36:31.340I simply do not understand, like, what is it getting them to send a team of goons cross-country to do physical surveillance and harassment of one couple running a newsletter?
00:36:42.840I simply cannot wrap my head around that.
00:36:45.120For me, I think it's one of those things where the explanation is that it's all about the psychological needs of the guy who happens to be in charge.
00:36:56.280Really nothing to do with the well-being of the company or approving the company's bottom line.
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00:38:34.740the veggies will the pesto survive the first bite will the lunchbox come home empty half full or
00:38:40.400come home at all and will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers
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00:39:27.340iheartadvertising.com. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.
00:39:35.280I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed
00:39:40.720them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low taunting
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00:40:29.560If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:40:35.480This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
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00:43:09.440So he gets out and he takes a picture of the license plate and calls the cops.
00:43:13.760The cops run the plate and they're able to trace those plates back to a rental car agency
00:43:18.780where a woman named Veronica Zay, an eBay intelligence analyst who was 25 years old at the time,
00:43:24.780had flown in from San Jose and signed for this vehicle.
00:43:29.200And the whole thing starts unraveling from there.
00:43:32.700That's really the detail that is the linchpin of them figuring out what was going on.
00:43:38.380I can only imagine how David Steiner felt when he learned
00:43:41.860that it was actually eBay employees who were behind all of this.
00:43:47.580I feel like if I'm David Steiner, in a million years, I would never...
00:43:51.860I'm probably thinking, did I cut somebody off in traffic?
00:43:56.080You know, of all the places my mind would go, I feel like eBay would be the last place.
00:44:03.900I mean, I'm thinking now, I mean, heaven forbid if I was at the center of this kind of harassment campaign, I guess I've made some enemies.
00:44:11.020Now that I'm speaking out loud, I guess I've made some enemies.
00:44:15.760We could just cross check against your enemies list, you know.
00:44:18.800You know who it probably would be, the Hello app or Mark Wahlberg or Chris Pratt.
00:44:29.580I could imagine that movie where, like, Mark Wahlberg and Chris Pratt are racing against each other to take you down first.
00:44:38.700Tell them to come and get me. I'm ready.
00:44:40.500Okay, so they were able to trace the van back to an analyst at eBay, and that started unraveling this whole thing. What else was revealed? How did it all come out?
00:44:56.800So let's talk about the people who actually carried out Operation White Knight, because there are some details about this whole operation that I think are important and that are kind of central to understanding how this operation was meant to work.
00:45:10.600So you might think that somebody like Ba, that head of security at eBay, would, you know, potentially having these like CIA government ties would amass a group of like hardened operatives.
00:45:26.580That's probably what you're thinking, right?
00:45:28.420Yeah, I'm picturing some like hard looking guys, like covered in tattoos, military experience, you know, grizzled look, stubble, smoking cigarettes. That's what I'm picturing in this movie. How accurate is that?
00:45:45.800Not accurate at all, because you're probably not picturing young women in their 20s, women like Veronica Zay, that eBay intelligence analyst.
00:45:55.280Those are the kinds of people that he amassed as his team, a team of mostly young women.
00:46:01.740So this guy, who has this CIA background, tasked with running a covert harassment campaign, specifically recruited young female analysts to do this work, and he calls them Jim's Angels.
00:46:17.380I guess it's like a play on Charlie's Angels, only instead of helping people out, they are harassing a married couple.
00:46:29.940This is just me extrapolating. Like, I obviously don't know these guys, but I bet he loved the idea of amassing a group of young women and then giving them this nickname, Jim's Angels, that frames them as his, like, personal accessories.
00:46:47.740And then, according to Veronica Zay's testimony at sentencing, breaking them down through coercive control.
00:46:54.880Because according to statements made during sentencing, some employees described an environment of sexual harassment, sleep deprivation, routine exposure to graphic and violent content.
00:47:06.320According to this testimony, this coercive control and harassment was key to, like, breaking these young women down and convincing them to do this kind of bidding.
00:47:16.840According to her testimony, Veronica Zay, who was 25 years old when she was working as an analyst at eBay,0.99
00:47:23.020was like, I don't know how I came to be using a prepaid card to avoid a paper trail while buying living insects and shipping them to this couple.
00:47:33.800I can see how in retrospect, as like, you know, a digital analyst looking back on those activities,
00:47:40.500she would have questions about like, you know, maybe I shouldn't have done that.
00:47:46.240So she's the one who's renting the van, flying to Boston.
00:47:49.860At her sentencing, she described a workplace culture so toxic and so deliberately destabilizing
00:47:56.460that she struggled to explain how she wound up doing any of it.
00:48:01.420So I do believe her here, that this guy probably was a, like, controlling creep who liked little mind games.
00:48:09.440But also, what a convenient thing for her to say at a sentencing hearing.
00:48:18.120So you've got this guy, this head of security at eBay, using young women basically as instruments of a campaign to make a couple, including another woman, feel unsafe in her own home.
00:48:30.260Like the women in this story are either the target or the weapon.
00:48:36.040That's a good and sad observation.0.81
00:48:39.080And it brings me no joy to report this, but while the women who carried out some of these actions either went to jail or house arrest or probation, the men who gave the orders walked away with tens of millions of dollars.