Until last year, the closest Messner had come to online warfare involved a cease-and-desist order from the drug maker Pfizer, which was incensed that he had registered a domain name with the word Viagra in it. Back then, Messner and his wife, Cherie, were quietly going about the business of making a small fortune in Internet porn. Their Web site Wetlands.net ("Where wives get naked") had become "one of the largest adult communities on the net." Though Messner had to make peace with the fact that hundreds of men were ogling his naked wife every day ("Cbaby on the boat"; "Cbaby at the office"), it was a pretty good life.

Then came September 11.

"My wife and I witnessed the events of 9/11 live on our television screen," Messner recalls. "I was totally blindsided. I was truly at a loss as to why we, as citizens of this country, were attacked." While most Americans attempted somehow to absorb these feelings of shock and confusion and move on, Messner felt he had to do something. For him, this was personal. The day after the attacks, he set up an Internet message board, in order to, as he puts it, "attract the enemy long enough that I might actually ask them exactly where in the hell they were coming from." To do this, Messner registered hundreds of September 11–related domain names — al-qaeda.com, islamic-jihad.org, land-of-the-free.org, binladenmustdie.com, suitcasenukes.com, and so on. "My theory was to point all these Web addresses to one centralized board," he explains. "Because these domains had such a broad interest base, I felt I could get a diverse representation posting to the board." The experiment worked. Within days, ItsHappening had received thousands of postings, representing "wide and often antagonistic views."

By monitoring the discussions on his board, Messner continues, he "began to grasp the intensity [with] which the Muslim community hated our culture." But he still wasn’t satisfied. "I decided to monitor the communications among hostile radicals on the net. [I] was able to link back to Islamic message boards and see what they were saying. It wasn’t good." The site that really caught Messner’s eye was one called Alneda.com, which, he says, "was pretty much regarded as the official Al Qaeda Web site."

Infuriated by what he saw on Alneda, Messner went to work. At first, he figured he would simply redirect the site’s traffic to his own board — a fairly mild up-yours. Then, he says, "My wheels started turning." By using a complex (and legal, he insists) process of Internet manipulation, Messner "hijacked" the Alneda site, set up a decoy of it on his own server, and started tracking everyone who logged on to the site. Messner had, through a combination of ingenuity and guts, set up an elaborate and effective electronic sting. He decided he would share the intelligence he had gathered with the FBI — an experience he now likens to "dealing with the Motor Vehicle Administration."

"I don’t want to come off as bashing law enforcement," Messner writes. "But the agency is ... a big cumbersome bureaucracy, and as such things happen at a snail’s pace. When I hijacked the Alneda site, it took me a full five days to be able to dialogue with anyone within the Bureau who had even a rudimentary understanding of the Internet. I had an agent sit on my couch and tell me, ‘Jon, when it comes to kidnappings and bank robberies we are really on top of our game, but with this Internet stuff we’re pretty much lost.’ " He adds, "Our local FBI office doesn’t even have e-mail!"

By the time the FBI had gotten its act together, the radicals Messner had been tracking had gotten wind of his ploy. "The person who maintains the real Alneda Web site posted on a board at Muslim.net that the infidels had set a trap," he writes. Even so, the damage had already been done — Alneda’s cloak of secrecy had been breached. "I don’t want to be too specific, but I will say that more than a few individuals have had a knock on the door."

Today, this "Web warrior" spirit endures on ItsHappening. The site serves, for instance, as a sort of war room for groups of hackers who track and hack pro-terrorism sites on the Internet. The following "damage assessment" was recently posted by one of ItsHappening’s more high-profile hackers, who goes by the name Hoodwinker:

83 Webservers hit with Trojan horses.

67 websites permanently destroyed.

22 websites defaced.

3 websites servers taken offline.

2494 Email accounts flooded and rendered useless.

457 Email accounts traffic diverted to various intelligence agencies.

3 Islamic forum sites flooded to the extent that their content was erased.

Not bad for 2 days of work. But our finest hour is yet to come.

Messner, for his part, says he suffers persistent retaliatory assaults. His network has been crippled by "denial of service" attacks. Mass anti-Jewish emails have been sent out with Messner’s name on them ("I get a lot of hate mail from Jews"). But it’s not only electronic attacks that trouble Messner. "I’ve taken measures," he says, "to beef up security where I live."

Despite the seething hatred directed at him, Messner insists that "hostile radicals" still frequent his board. For one thing, he says, when the real Alneda site finally went back up, its operators announced the fact on ItsHappening. "I have been talking to another reporter who found our site through the ‘Favorites’ on a laptop he recovered from a cave in Tora Bora. How’s that for knowing the enemy is here." Meanwhile, Messner continues, US intelligence agencies stick around to keep an eye on the radicals. "I know some of the ‘regulars’ are here in part because they are required to monitor the board. I have been contacted by the FBI, US Marshals, the Secret Service."

And this is all part of the allure of the site. ItsHappening doesn’t only offer us a chance to comment on the war on terror, it allows us to feel as though we are somehow involved in it — albeit from a safe distance. There is something of a prewar-Vienna, Third Man–type feel to the site — a sense of shadowy intrigue, of half-hidden strangers and creeping, undefined menace. The boards seethe with rumors, including one — described by Messner as "not so nutty" — that Stupid Guy, one of the site’s regulars, is Zacarias Moussaoui, composing anti-American diatribes from his prison cell.

Of course, there’s really no way of verifying that Stupid Guy is Moussaoui, or even that he is a guy. CentaurMyst, an early-middle-aged mother who claims to have "awesome tits," could just as easily be a terrorist in disguise. USMC Retired, who claims to have helped train the Saudi army in 1976, could very well be an early-middle-aged mother with awesome tits. Stupid Guy may be less interested in fighting jihad than he is in fighting his raging acne. There’s simply no way to know. As Messner puts it, "We have had our share of high-school kids coming in and talking shit."

As if to drive home the point, a regular named Winter recently speculated that ItsHappening may be nothing more than an elaborate performance piece. "Is everyone," she asked, "going to come out and [take a] bow?"

One of the most enigmatic regulars on ItsHappening, Old Dutch, is also one of its most popular. "It’s impossible to beat Ol’ Dutch," writes one regular. "The more you engage him, the more he’ll drag your religion through the mud." In the battles that take place on the site every day, Dutch is viewed by many as one of the biggest guns. But it’s Dutch’s delivery, not his ideas, that garner him so much attention. Indeed, while you may not like what Dutch has to say, it’s hard not to be mesmerized by the way he says it:

Old Dutch has only been laughing, with his feet cycling up in the air, when watching you nutty hotheaded bozos on telly. And I find it particularly funny when you pack of idiots start running through the streets with bouncing coffins, doing the ape-men’s coffin dance as you go at flying speed. It looks too ridiculous to be true to me....

Fancy running fast with a bloody coffin on your head. What dumb purpose does that have? Those dumb sandbrains really believe that this impresses the Western World, because their own dumb tribe is impressed by it. And who the fuck is impressed by a dumb screaming mob carrying framed photographs of martyrs around, once again running and screaming while doing so. Good riddance to the stupid bastards. They may all run through a mine field, as far as I’m concerned.

One day during the Iran-Iraq War, I saw those young slim and fit wrapped up antheaps (those ladies wrapped in black) run through a minefield, carrying little baskets whatever for. I nearly choked drowning in my tears laughing. "Alahu-Ackbar" (Allah is Great) they screamed in a high pitch, while running through the fields like upright black umbrellas, with legs borrowed from the Flintstones. A few of them vapourised in a "huff and a puff." Nothing left but a puff of smoke, squirting human tissue all over the field. Those were damn good mines, perhaps made in the USA, leaving nothing but a bloody puff of human tissue rain. God damn it, did I laugh.

Should I cry? ... She deserves to go up in smoke doesn’t she?