Ten-year hactivist fugitive Commander X arrested in MexicoA decade after Chris "Commander X" Doyon skipped out on a federal hacking charge and fled the country, the long arm of US law enforcement this week stretched out its hand and plucked him from Mexico City, where he had claimed political asylum. Doyon now faces all of the original charges for coordinating a 2010 High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) DDoS attack on servers belonging to Santa Cruz, California, plus a serious new charge for jumping bail.
This has been a surprising turn of events for the homeless hacktivist, who spent his years first in Canada and then in Mexico issuing press releases, hanging out on Twitter, writing a self-published memoir, appearing in documentaries, and meeting up with journalists like me—all without apparent response from the US government.
All that changed on June 11, when Doyon was arrested by Mexican police. This was confirmed by a press release from the US Attorney for the Northern District of California, where Santa Cruz is located, though no details were provided.
But Doyon's Mexican friends (and a filmmaker who has profiled him) offered their own account in an email to journalists:
"Chris lives in a gated community in Mexico City, and on the afternoon of Friday 11th June, several armed, uniformed, Mexican men identifying themselves as DEA agents attempted to gain entry to the community but were turned away. They returned dressed as civilians, with representatives from the US embassy, scaled the walls of the compound and took Chris away in the early evening."