May 26, 2026 | [EDITORIAL] The 3301 Files: How Richard Todd Miller Confused Access with Authorship

The story of Pi Mobi is not the sanitized fairy tale later opportunists tried to sell.

And the true story about Richard Todd Miller exposes him and his devious actions within, but not limited to, the internet collective known as Cicada 3301.

It is not a story about a loose collective where everybody did a little bit of everything and deserves an equal line in the credits.

It is a story about creation, access, manipulation, and then, as so often happens in fringe online circles like Cicada 3301, a long ugly scramble by outside players to steal authorship of what they did not originate.

The core of the Pi Mobi puzzles in 2016 was Thomas Schoenberger, Iona Miller, Michael Levine, and Richard Lech.

Two other people were involved in the background, but they are not part of this story.

Those were the people building the thing.

Everything that came later only makes sense if you start there, and everything that comes before it is a story of its own which has been exhausted online already.

For the January 2017 "Apocalypse" puzzle, the creative center still revolved around Schoenberger and Levine, especially on the music side.

Richard Lech was there.

Iona was there.

Thomas was there.

Michael was there.

And as I said, two other unnamed people were also involved.

Whatever later mythology got layered onto these projects, the basic point remains: this was not a random group of internet personalities spontaneously generating cryptic brilliance in the form of puzzles.

There was actual authorship, strategic planning, labor, and real intellectual contributions coming from a specific group.

Then came March 2017, and with it Richard Todd Miller.

Everything before that date is context.

Everything after it is consequence.

Miller entered the puzzle world in an encryption role.

His job, as it was understood by the existing creators, was not to invent the intellectual property but to provide encryption services around material created by Thomas Schoenberger, Iona Miller, Michael Levine, and Richard Lech.

That distinction matters, and it matters a lot.

Because one of the recurring themes in this entire saga is the effort by commissioned contributors, internet personalities, hangers-on, and later revisionists to confuse their limited access with authorship.

Wrapping something in a container is not the same as creating what is inside it.

Around March 21–28, 2017, alarm bells started going off and concerns were raised about the odd behavior of Richard Miller.

According to this account, Richard Miller reached out to Iona Miller, asking to see her personal blogs, and said a lot of things that did not add up.

Iona saw enough to become concerned enough she felt the need to warn Thomas.

That was an early test of judgment.

Thomas then spoke with Michael Levine, and despite the concerning behavior of Richard Miller, the decision was made to continue working with him anyway.

Iona stepped away from the puzzle itself, though she continued to remain close with Thomas personally.

That moment looks incredibly more significant in hindsight than it may have seemed at the time.

From a certain perspective it indicated an early fracture point: one person saw trouble coming, sounded the alarm, and the project moved ahead anyway.

By December 2017, Iona was still perceptive enough to understand what was happening around the edges.

She proposed that the people Thomas and Michael were working with could all collaborate on a puzzle collectively, while invoking Warren Buffett's famous line: "You can tell who's got their bathing trunks on when the tide goes out."

It seemed a fitting quote.

The tide eventually did go out.

And when it did, a lot of people who had posed as creatives were exposed as something else entirely.

On March 14, 2018, yet another puzzle effort was assembled, this time involving Thomas, Richard Lech, Richard Miller, Defango, Arturo Tafoya, Hamilton, and DJ Genki.

If that sounds less like a disciplined creative team and more like a collision of talent, ego, and chaos, that is because it was.

Within 24 hours, Manuel Chavez - better known by his online persona of Defango - was publicly "solving" the puzzle on his Merlin Defango YouTube account, with all the theatrics of someone pretending to discover answers he already knew.

The ‘wink-wink' routine was obvious.

It was not genuine solving.

Defango was giving a performance.

Defango had already failed an initiation test and had been declined ongoing access in 3301.

Whether one sees him as a saboteur, a selfish self-promoter, or simply an opportunist, his role in this period helped turn a serious project into a public sideshow.

You may argue that perhaps Defango considered it would be good for the publicity of 3301.

If so, that would have contributed to his ultimate demise within the organization as publicity through fake YouTube theater isn't what the collective was about.

The only publicity Defango wanted would be for himself, to attempt to foster his own standing.

And Richard Todd Miller, who would later defend Chavez directly, either could not see that or chose not to.

Miller is well known to have been in communication with Defango, perhaps more closely than most had knew or suspected.

Miller was not the only one circling the edges of what others had built.

And then there was the infamous trademark fight, where the opportunism became concrete.

Beth Bogaerts, who was never a creator of anything inside Cicada 3301, but an observer, is accused of taking Thomas' side of the trademark and handing it over to Marcus Wanner.

Public records do show the trademark history changing hands, and that part matters because it marks the shift from authorship and creative conflict to an administrative disagreement.

Marcus Wanner was known as a Cicada solver and later became associated with the corporate entity tied to the trademark.

But solving a puzzle is not the same as building one, just as custody papers are not the same as authorship.

The paper trail may record a transfer but it does not settle the deeper argument about where the ideas actually came from, and that is provable by those that matter.

By April 2018, the relationship between Thomas and Richard Miller had collapsed.

This break came after Miller defended Manuel Chavez (Defango) and revealed enough in a phone conversation to make clear that he could no longer be trusted.

From there, Miller was out of 3301.

What followed was not a minor disagreement or a quiet parting of ways.

It was the beginning of a years-long antagonism in which, according to Thomas Schoenberger and his colleagues, Richard Miller has repeatedly attempted to discredit, defame, and damage Thomas' reputation and misappropriate Miller's own involvement with the puzzle.

The antagonism was not limited to narrative warfare.

It had much harder edges.

Richard Miller's associations extended to convincted pedophile Dustin Ready, and through Ready, to the network surrounding Esteban Trujillo de Gutierrez - a persistent, at times manacing, critic of Cicada 3301 who has worked in the shadows to reinforce false narratives about the organization and to undermine Thomas Schoenberger's standing as its original creator.

When Dustin Ready threatened Thomas - something that occurred on multiple occasions, and often in the public domain, Thomas would laugh in his face.

Thomas Schoenberger was no stranger to threats and was unmoved.

Ready had claimed Esteban sent him.

He also claimed Richard Miller was part of GhostSec.

GhostSec is not a minor footnote.

Michael Errington, aka Sebastian Dante Alexander, is a claimed "former leader" of GhostSec.

Whether Miller's ties to GhostSec predate his entry into the puzzle world in March 2017 has not been proven.

But the connection between Miller, Ready, and the broader network orbiting Esteban is not nothing.

Enter SilentWarRoom.

The group is comprised of convicted pedophiles and persons charged with sexual crimes, and persons who have openly defended the actions of those convicted of their crimes.

Some of these crimes are too graphic to mention here.

But it's alarming that Richard Todd Miller would be tied to a number of these individuals, and concerning he would express his displeasure about his ties becoming public knowledge.

Was Richard Todd Miller a plant, or under secretive orders to infiltrate Cicada 3301?

It's a big claim.

But the attacks against Cicada 3301 are sophisticated and orchestrated, therefore it is not impossible.

Let's just say that the skills of Miller would not go unnoticed by powerful figures.

The threats against Thomas Schoenberger have been ongoing since at least 2016, and the web of people either making those threats or enabling the conditions for them keeps circling back to the same names.

That is not coincidence.

That is a pattern.

I have continued to point out the pattern repetition.

As late as 2023, not too long after I became involved with Cicada 3301, Richard Miller would seemingly attempt to rebuild trust among a few of us only to unapologetically steal funds under the guise of "donations" for a new business idea he was selling.

At that point I had only briefly exchanged messages with Richard Miller, or "Z" as I knew him at the time.

I was immediately skeptical and expressed my concerns to Thomas and others.

However, generous donations were made to Miller by multiple individuals before it was realized his business idea would never eventuate and was likely just a vehicle to generate some quick cash from the few willing to give him another chance.

Time heals, so they say, but often it doesn't change a man.

In the case of Richard Todd Miller, it was all too evident that nothing had changed and he again proved himself to be devious and untrustworthy.

This is where the pattern becomes hard to ignore.

First comes access.

Then proximity.

Then the inflation of one's own role.

Then the attempt to rewrite authorship.

Then, when challenged, a campaign of narrative warfare engulfed everything creative.

In internet subcultures built on secrecy, mystique, and partial documentation, this tactic works more often than it should.

Once records are fragmented and participants engage in public feuds, the archive itself becomes a battleground.

That is why a later conversation matters.

On December 24, 2020, according to Thomas, he and Iona Miller had a two-hour "Christmas Eve call".

According to this account, Thomas admitted that Iona had been right about Richard Todd Miller from the very start and Thomas unfortunately was too naive at the time to see it for what it was.

Iona's reported reply was acid-dry and memorable, referring to Miller: "We don't even know if that dude is a male."

Whether one reads that as ridicule, exhaustion, or both, the point is clear enough if you read between the lines.

By then, whatever credibility Richard Todd Miller may once have had inside that world had badly eroded among people who had known him up close.

By 2022, the same font line was still visible.

Marcia Stockton reportedly identified further falsehoods by Richard Miller, including his taking credit for encrypting Thomas' ideas in a way that blurred the line between service and authorship.

Her remark cuts straight to the heart of the dispute: "Just because you create the envelope [encryption] for an idea, it doesn't mean that you own the content [data payload]."

Exactly.

That may be the single clearest sentence anyone has ever produced about the mess.

And that, ultimately, is Richard Miller's place in this history: not as the architect or builder of the Pi Mobi puzzle or 3301 world, but as one of several figures whose later claims and actions became inseparable from questions of exaggerated conflation, misappropriation, and above all else, trust.

That Richard Miller has brilliant technical understanding and capability with encryption isn't what is disputed.

Even people willing to credit his technical abilities are left with the more basic problem Thomas keeps returning to: "If the man is not trustworthy, then what exactly is the value of the rest?"

The Pi Mobi story began with creators.

It degenerated into a swarm of interpreters, meddlers, claimants, bureaucratic inheritors, and plain scammers.

That is what happens when a project with genuine imagination gets too close to people who mistake adjacency for authorship.

The result is not just internal conflict bleeding into the public domain, instead it becomes historical vandalism.

And in a world where the internet remembers everything, the vandalism caused by Richard Todd Miller is incredibly difficult to paint over.

Freedom Publishers Union

Written by Chris McGimpsey-Jones.