How authorities could track down sender of racist ‘cotton-picking’ texts

One week after some Dauphin County residents received personalized racist text messages as part of an orchestrated campaign in the region, police continue to investigate the source.

But detectives will have their work cut out for them, as cybercrimes can be among the hardest to solve.

One day after the election of former President Donald Trump to the White House, dozens of Black Americans across the east coast and in the deep south reported receiving text messages addressed to them by name telling them they had been "selected to pick cotton" and that a van driven by "executive slaves" was on its way to pick them up .

William Hines, a former coach at Central Dauphin East High School, who received one such text, said he is waiting for updates from law enforcement. Several others from the Central Dauphin School District were targeted.

The district's police department sent a report to the Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center, a department within the Pennsylvania State Police that provides law enforcement agencies with intelligence information, investigative data and public source information 24/7, according to state police's website.

"I thought we passed a lot of these issues in our country that we faced... Divisions, skin color and race," Hines told PennLive last week. "Even your views on politics — it's a big, huge division. It's really sad."

PennLive spoke with a cybersecurity attorney who laid out what potential investigations into these text messages could yield.

John Bandler, an adjunct associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice , wrote his own textbook on cybercrimes and cybersecurity based on two decades of experience as a state trooper and more than a decade of prosecuting cases at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

Bandler said the majority of cybercrimes go unsolved, and that different statutes may apply per state. Each statute might not directly encompass the behavior on a national scale. He said the First Amendment also gives a large degree of protection from criminal prosecution and lawsuits for spoken and written comments.

Under Pennsylvania law the crime of harassment requires someone with intent to harass, annoy or alarm another person, among other things, communicate to or about another person any lewd, lascivious, threatening or obscene words.

A harassment charge could be accompanied by ethnic intimidation, a criminal charge that elevates crimes motivated by hatred or ill-will toward a victim's race, color, religion and national origin.

"Cybercriminals send out millions of text messages to trick people into replying or clicking on a link, but here we have someone doing it not for profit, but to harass someone, annoy them or alarm them," Bandler said. "I would think prosecutors would be able to bring appropriate charges here if they can figure out who did it."

Whereas investigators into a physical crimes, like bank robberies or murders, usually need one or two "chains" of evidence tying a suspect to a crime, Bandler said cyber crimes require a whole "web" of chains.

That's because it is easy for cybercriminals to obfuscate their identities, and for defense attorneys to break those links in court.

News reports from last week indicated some of the hateful text messages originated from the app TextNow, a messaging app through which users can send messages from randomly assigned phone numbers. When PennLive called the number used to text Hines, it landed on a voicemail message that indicated the line had been disconnected.

Authorities likely will try to subpoena TextNow and other texting apps for records that could indicate which TextNow accounts sent those messages, Bandler said. Those accounts should have email addresses affiliated with them, which investigators can then subpoena to find backup phone numbers and other identifiers — such as an internet protocol (IP) address.

IP addresses are unique sets of numbers required to use to access the internet, and are usually assigned for every internet service provider — although some new computers have separate IPs, too, according to Bandler.

"It's a helpful start, but not the end of the story," Bandler said. "Cybercriminals know their IP can be traced, so they're going to take steps to hide it."

Just like some criminals wear masks and gloves to obscure their faces and avoid leaving fingerprints, Bandler writes in his book, cybercriminals can use proxies and VPNs to act as "middle-men" to route their access to the internet through fake IP addresses.

It means someone in Harrisburg can present a breadcrumb trail that makes it appear like they're actually accessing the internet from Malaysia.

An uncanny portion of these text messages, however, were well-tailored to specific individuals. William Hines was addressed by name, and students in southern states who received text messages were also sent their own names in the targeted text messages.

"That information on people is available for sale. Businesses sell it for advertising, and political campaigns buy it to target their messaging," Bandler said. "It is enough for us to wonder: How much of our information is available for people to target for us?"

Hines said he was in contact with the Lancaster chapter of the NAACP but has not heard any updates.

Hines, his mother, his wife and his school-aged daughter all received these text messages. He is still aghast, he told PennLive.

"I can't explain it (How I feel). It's unbelievable," Hines said.

This isn't Hines' daughter's first time being targeted for the color of her skin. She was called a slur during a middle school field hockey game by a student from Cedar Cliff Middle School in October of 2021 in an incident that generated news reports.

"She pushed past my daughter and said 'move out of the way 'N-word,'" Hines told PennLive in 2021.

Last Friday, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission condemned the racist text messages sent to students and others in the state and encouraged the schools to "stress the inappropriate nature" of the messages.