Archives document Jim Watkins’ links to domains suggestive of underage sexual material. One dark irony of QAnon has always been that the conspiracy theory, which holds that President Trump is waging a war on a cabal of elite liberal pedophiles, rose to prominence on 8chan, an imageboard where users swapped child pornography. But that irony may have a darker, deeper layer: Mother Jones has uncovered that Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan and its successor site, 8kun, controls a company that hosted scores of domains whose names suggest they are connected to child pornography. While Mother Jones did not visit the domains because of strict laws related to viewing child sex abuse material, internet registration and hosting data suggest at a minimum that Watkins profited from domains with names explicitly related to pedophilia—the very thing that QAnon followers say that they’re motivated to end. The domains’ names include terms such as “preteen,” “schoolgirl,” and “child” alongside graphic terms for genitalia and words like “rape” and “love.” It’s unclear what, if anything, is currently being served at the domains. However, an analysis of metadata collected years ago from one by archive.org shows dozens of filenames and links containing highly suggestive terms, including “xxxpreteen,” “children,” and sexual references to girls aged 12 to 15. Some of the domains date back to the late 1990s and may no longer be active, while others currently resolve to IP addresses controlled by Watkins’ company, N.T. Technology, according to records compiled by Farsight Security, a cybersecurity company that archives historical routing data detailing relationships among domain names, IP addresses, name servers, and other digital assets. (…) The now 56-year-old Watkins has a long connection to pornography stretching back to a site he founded in the mid 90s as the industry was transitioning online. By 2001, Watkins’s work as a US Army helicopter repairman took him to the Philippines, where he expanded from porn sites into web services, hosting adult sites targeting consumers evading Japanese obscenity laws, according to a 2016 Splinter story. He has said he chose N.T. Technology’s innocuous name to provide cover for credit card charges that might be questioned by his customers’ wives.
via mother jones: QAnon Is Supposed to Be All About Protecting Kids. Its Primary Enabler Appears to Have Hosted Child Porn Domains.