The History of the Formation of ECCTG and RDF.org

Back in 2009, the center of the traffic enforcement counter measure community was an Internet forum radardetector.net (RD.net). RD.net was founded by RadarRoy a retired law enforcement officer and certified LIDAR and RADAR instructor, who created an online radar detector and other traffic enforcement counter measure store named Radarbusters.com. RadarRoy sold Radarbusters.com and RD.net to Hayneedle a large Internet retailer, that RadarRoy has stated was his largest competitor. With RD.net being owned by a large online retailer, one of the rules of the forum was that members were not allowed to sell items nor allowed to link or mention any outside websites and competitors. Members of RD.net were routinely banned for mentioning or linking to competitors and outside websites. The forum’s staff consisted of some enthusiasts, employees of Hayneedle and representatives of radarbusters.com’s suppliers. The moderators who where employees of Hayneedle and some those who were suppliers to radarbusters.com would sometimes censor member’s posts for the benefit of their sales. Additionally, there were rumors that forum staff members of RD.net could read members private messages.

In 2010 Dragon Eye Technology (DET) released the Laser Ally which was marketed through Digital Ally. Two of the executives from DET joined RD.net, they took the names Dragon and LaserSnope. The Laser Ally was designed specifically to circumvent laser jammers. Almost all posts on RD.net were and currently are publically viewable with the exception of “The Lounge” which required 70 posts to access. A private group called the “Selected Few” was formed by some highly active members of RD.net. The most active and trusted members of RD.net and many moderators and administrators were invited and joined this private group. Although there was a variety of discussions in this group, discussion of the Laser Ally soon consumed this group. At that time, the Laser Ally was unobtainable by members of the forum. In the fall of 2010, a video was posted on YouTube by DET showing the Laser Ally being shot at a car equipped with Laser Interceptor laser jammer in a “third party test.” The Laser Interceptor did not alert to or jam the Laser Ally. What was interesting was that the other popular laser jammer, the Blinder Mx7 was not featured in the video. Shortly after the video was posted, LaserSnope posted on RD.net, “Interesting discussion in the Selected Few”, the security of the private invite only group was compromised, the group was deleted, and new group named “.” was created, to discuss the security breach and to continue some of the conversations that had occurred in the Selected Few. Because “.” was also deleted, I forget if we discussed who was the source of the betrayal to the Selected Few, or was the discussion just held in text messages, emails and private messages. At that time, rumors started that Blinder had worked in cooperation and met with Dragon and LaserSnope. StealthStalker, a super moderator on RD.net had proof that there was a meeting between LaserSnope, Dragon, BlinderGuy and BlinderDude. StealthStalker revealed that through IP address logs all four members were linked at the same time at the same IP address. In a thread on RD.net, an opportunity developed to question BlinderGuy about the meeting. BlinderGuy admitted to the meeting stating that he had provided a Laser Interceptor that he owned to Dragon in exchange for information about the Laser Ally. He stated that the meeting was not his idea and he attended because he was told to attend. At the meeting there were two other members of RD.net, Solion and The Chariot. According to BlinderDude, these members were there in an attempt to capture the characteristics of the Laser Ally’s pulse train to assist Blinder in developing an algorithm to jam the Laser Ally. They were not successful in capturing the pulse train. Rumor had it that in exchange for the Laser Interceptor, Dragon supplied Blinder with a Laser Ally. This was never proven or acknowledged, although on Blinder’s forum, one of the DET guys posted “Nice acquisition.” We are not sure if this post was placed to discredit Blinder or did Blinder obtain a Laser Ally from Dragon. BlinderDude stated to me that he never received a Laser Ally from Dragon.

From StealthStalker we learned that moderators and administrators had full access to the private groups on RD.net, this also meant that BlinderDude and BlinderGuy had access to all of the private groups. To prevent Blinder from leaking information we were learning about the Laser Ally, RadarRob started to avoid sensitive discussions on RD.net, opting to discuss these topics on the phone with RD.net members that he had met in person and trusted. These members were: Speedup, aa2033, MrKookm, Yellowcab, Riptide and XYD. We agreed that a private web forum outside and independent from RD.net was needed. On October 28, 2010, XYD with his computer knowledge created a new secure web forum. The original 6 founding members quickly added SnoopyC4 and CJR238 to this new forum. The eight of us, who became moderators of this new forum, discussed which RD.net members we would ask to join our new private forum. Our criteria was 1. No moderators or administrators from RD.net would be allowed; 2. No member who has any ties to Blinder such as listing BlinderDude or BlinderGuy as a friend on their RD.net profile, and no member who currently was using Blinder Laser Jammers was to be invited to the forum, 3. Active members of Blinder’s web forum were not to be welcomed. Because of the actions of BlinderDude and BlinderGuy, the founding members felt that Blinder and their users could not be trusted and would reveal our discussions to DET. 4. Manufacturers and vendors would not be allowed to join the forum. There were few rules to this forum, but one rule that was important to uphold was that anything discussed on the ECCTG forum would not be discussed outside of ECCTG.

The domain of the forum was one of the domains that XYD owned. Over time, members of the forum wanted to give this group of highly trusted members a name. We choose and voted on East Coast Countermeasure Testing Group (ECCCTG) since many of us resided on the east coast, even though members of the group lived across the U.S. and there was one member from AUS. One of the benefits of this forum, it that we had a classified section where members could sell their equipment. Additionally, RadarRob listed links to every radar and LIDAR gun listed on eBay. Members of ECCTG started to amass a large supply of testing equipment. The group having many active, knowledgeable, smart and highly interested members started to push beyond the envelope of knowledge that existed on RD.net. Discussions became theoretical, and was supported or refuted by designing and executing tests. Within a few months, understanding on how countermeasure equipment and speed enforcement equipment operated grew exponentially. The discussions that were concurrently occurring on RD.net weren’t providing new information to us, and many of us started to visit and post on RD.net less and less. As time progressed and ECCTG membership plateaued, it became evident to me that if ECCTG didn’t get to know new members of the community and recruit new members, the discussions and ideas on our private forum would become stale. At one time all members of ECCTG were newbies. My philosophy was today’s newbie, could be tomorrow’s expert. I started talking to RadarRob about creating a new public countermeasure forum. Our other thought was that many threads and posts on RD.net helped to educate those involved in traffic enforcement and compromised the effectiveness of our countermeasures. So I had an idea to create a new public Internet countermeasure forum where there would be public areas that everyone would have access to. Other areas of the forum would have restricted access to those who had joined the forum, and there were other areas reserved for known and trusted members of the community. Because of RadarRob’s and my lack of computer knowledge and experience we needed XYD to administrate the forum. Initially when I proposed the idea that developed into RDF.org, XYD did not want to do it. It took a two hour conversation to get him on board. With XYD on board, we proposed the idea to the other ECCTG leaders: Speedup, aa2033, Riptide, MrKookm, SnoopyC4 and CJR238. All of us discussed the various aspects of the proposed forum including domain names. We wanted the new forum to be quite different from RD.net. We wanted a forum where all members would be able to express their ideas and opinions uncensored with the exception that certain topics should only be discussed in certain secure areas. We wanted a classified section, so members could sell their equipment and it could stay in the community. We wanted the forum’s staff to act with respect towards the members. We wanted members who were truly interested in the hobby, and acted responsibly. We discussed rules that protect the community such as not Jamming to Gun or testing with LE. After significant conversations we moved forward purchasing domains and forum software. XYD set up the server and started setting up the forum. He taught me how to do some of the forum setup to lower the burden on him. After the forum was set up we invited the ECCTG leaders over and started testing the forum’s security. After we were satisfied, we announced the formation of RDF.org to the rest of ECCTG and invited them over to continue testing and create content for the site. Soon after, without any promotion our first uninvited member Weeth, found us, a day later Lugnuts discovered the site. Soon after we did some laser jammer testing and posted it on the new forum. We posted links on RD.net to the testing as well as placing links to RDF in our signatures. RD.net’s forum staff removed our links, threatened to ban us and did ban some of our members. StealthStalker and I communicating through email agreed that we would not be allowed to post links to the new forum on RD.net, but we would be able to publicize our new forum through PMs to individual members. RDF’s membership quickly grew and soon we had more active members and more posts per day than RD.net.