Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

by Gabriella Coleman

  With the ascendancy of militant tactics among a new group of Anons, the stakes had changed by the summer of 2011. Anonymous began targeting Fortune 500 corporations and military defense contractors. Mercenary hackers doxed Anons, revealing their identities to law enforcement by publishing their legal names, personal photos, and addresses. Anons started to leak sensitive, classified, or humiliating information. At this juncture, the FBI got involved. And no matter how much Anonymous injected lulz into an op, humor could not stop the spread of a gut-wrenching unease among participants and observers of the group. So even if researching Anonymous was often a thrill, and certainly always an adventure, it ultimately made me paranoid.

  This was a deep paranoia that hovered over everything like a barometric disturbance before a tornado. It felt justified, but that might be just the paranoia talking. While researching Anonymous, it was imperative that I keep law enforcement away from me, and from my data. Crossing a border meant days of preparation to secure my notes and put together a safe travel computer. Questioning by authorities always felt imminent; it wasn’t a question of if the G-men would visit, but when. Vigilance was necessary to protect my sources. I reminded Anonymous participants that they needed to be careful what they told me. I never sat in on their private channels as they were planning illegal operations.

  As for the government, I was hiding in plain sight. By no means was I anonymous. That was the irony: I gave talks about Anonymous, I was interviewed by over 150 reporters, and I routinely discussed Anonymous on radio and television. As a scholar teaching at a prominent university, I was easy to find. On occasion, high-level corporate executives from some of the world’s most powerful companies even reached out, calling me personally in the hope that I could offer some nugget of insight about an entity many of them had grown to fear.

  A recurring nightmare haunted me for years. Intelligence agents hammered on my door. I would jolt upright in bed, my heart pounding: “They’re here.” It was just like Poltergeist, except the bed wasn’t shaking and the demonic possession left as soon as I sat up.

  One day in 2012, I washed away the remaining threads of my turbulent slumber with a strong cup of coffee, putting the nightmare in the background for another day. With my brain fully booted, I realized that today, April 19, the roles would be reversed: today I would be knocking on the doors of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Canadian equivalent of the CIA. With a mixture of trepidation, ambivalence, and especially curiosity, I had accepted CSIS’s invitation to give a lecture about Anonymous. I went to discover what CSIS thought about Anonymous—did they view them as a terrorist threat, a band of rambunctious/rabid activists, or something else entirely? My secret agenda was to test their reaction to the lulz: could an agency that manages matters of national security bring itself to see the humor in Anonymous? To find out, I concocted a simple lulz litmus test.

  CSIS is headquartered in the outskirts of Canada’s capital, Ottawa, in a large anodyne cream-colored building with teal accents. I arrived alone by taxi, awash in thoughts of Orwell, Brazil, Huxley, Kafka, and Bush/Obama’s total surveillance. I asked myself, What am I doing here? What lies in the shadows behind the walls of Canada’s spy agency? Could it be as bad as I am imagining? Do they have high-tech surveillance rooms like in Minority Report? Do they conduct psychological experiments in sterile, steel-lined interrogation rooms?

  Adjusting my ill-fitting business suit, I forced myself to think that inside were boring office cubicles with people pushing paper and scheduling meetings destined for drab conference rooms with a speaker phones in the middle of their tables. Maybe there was a passive aggressive note taped to the refrigerator in the break room because someone ate all of the Tim Horton’s sugary Timbits that were for the going-away party later that day. A water-stained note over the sink with the words, Your mother doesn’t work here, you will have to clean up after yourself! It will be fine, I told myself.

  To minimize my angst, I had promised myself I would offer nothing new or secret, sticking to what was already public and donating my modest honorarium to a civil liberties organization. But despite having given this same lecture dozens of times, I walked through the front door feeling more diminutive than my five-foot self. A woman with a suit greeted me. Everything felt unremarkable; there was nothing ominous in sight, just bland office plants.

  I was brought to a room with a small stage. The atmosphere was tense. I couldn’t discern the expression on anyone’s face. I was nearly paralyzed with dread. Then, I worried that my nervousness was going to make me say something I shouldn’t. These agents, after all, were exceedingly well trained in the art of information extraction; they would take advantage of any weakness or opportunity to gain an advantage. With over forty people staring at me, the atmosphere of seriousness felt like it was burning right through my suit. Nevertheless, I’d done this so many times that I was on autopilot, and it wasn’t until ten minutes into my talk that I noticed my hands shaking slightly as I attempted to click the play button on my computer, in order to fire up my lulz litmus test: the famous viral video made by Anonymous that had ignited their revolutionary spirit. Every single time I had shown this clip in the past, three sentences in particular had without fail provoked laughter. Would CSIS employees lol at the lulz? In the video, as clouds move quickly over a large, indistinct, glass corporate building, a dramatic voice intones:

  Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment. We shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form.

  The room erupted in laughter. Mission accomplished; there was no better proof of the infectious spirit of the lulz than this moment. Intelligence agents were laughing at the lulzy video made by Anonymous trolls that gave birth to the “threat” they were tasked with assessing. I will get out of here alive after all, I silently sighed.

  After my lecture, a smaller group of us relocated to a cramped and dingy conference room with no windows to eat bland sandwiches and cookies under the glare of fluorescent lights. I secretly wondered if there was a nicer conference room with skylights reserved for the political scientists or economists and other more highly esteemed guests. We sat down in the office chairs and went around the room introducing ourselves. I was still too out of sorts to remember particular roles or titles, much less names. I was certainly not taking notes or secretly recording the conversation. I suspect they were. For all I knew, I could be talking to janitors, or to employees with the highest level of security clearance. One title did stick out, though—that of the other anthropologist in the room. When introduced, he nodded and smiled at me. I, meanwhile, tried hard to keep my poker face intact. All sorts of questions sprung to mind: Is he actually trained as an anthropologist? Where did he go to school? Who was his PhD advisor? When and why did he decide to work for the CSIS? Do they pay better than academia? But I kept my queries to myself. I was worried he would misconstrue my curiosity as interest in working for CSIS, and I wanted to avoid any recruitment overtures.

  During the course of what at first felt like a meandering conversation, it eventually became apparent why I had been invited. They wanted to know one thing: whether I thought Anonymous had set their sights on taking down the power grid. The timing was not accidental. Just a month earlier, the NSA had stated that Anonymous was an imminent threat to national security, and I suppose Canada was feeling a bit of international pressure to monitor the shadowy group.

  I answered honestly. For all its legal and illegal tactics to date, I explained, Anonymous had never publicly called for such an attack. There was no evidence at the time to suggest that the group would so much as consider doing such a thing. I did not feel like I was divulging anything secret, as I had commented to the press about this very subject. In fact, I felt like I was doing Anonymous a favor.

  Of course, as a busy professor I could not spend all of my
time on the many channels of the various IRC networks, much less monitor every single chat room where such a conversation could take place. There were also private conversations and invite-only channels I never actually entered. “Their sociology is labyrinthine,” I explained with deliberation, likely exhibiting my own frustrations with navigating and researching Anonymous. I had probably spent more hours staring at my computer and chatting with Anonymous participants than any non-Anon, with the possible exception of informants, who were forced to be online nearly full-time. I explained that I had never seen even a hint of such a plan. Indeed, every radical action, even the doxing of belligerent police officers, provoked contentious debate about its moral appropriateness. “While Anonymous is often duplicitous and devilishly confusing,” I explained, “Anons are certainly not seeking to kill anyone. They organize at home, possibly in their underwear, typing away madly at the computer. The only ‘violence’ some participants engage in is likely of the virtual type, during their World of Warcraft video game battles that some percentage of them surely must play.” To hammer my point home, I offered a bit of humor, paraphrasing one Anon who had cracked the following joke soon after the NSA claimed that Anonymous was indeed capable of targeting the grid: “That’s right, we’re definitely taking down the power grid. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when all the equipment we use to mount our campaign is rendered completely useless.”

  Postures loosened. Laughter again reverberated among the G-men (and women—this was 2012 after all). And as far as I could tell, everyone seemed genuinely relieved by my assessment. They could go back to focusing on more pressing matters.

  The joke opened the door to further conversation concerning the media’s central role in amplifying the power of Anonymous. One CSIS agent shared his anger at the media for making this collective of collectives more powerful than they ought to have been. I was, I have to admit, relishing the fact that the G-men and Anons, mutually opposed at one level, were nevertheless (very loosely) allied in holding an ambivalent attitude toward the mass media. We all agreed that the media had helped to make Anonymous what it was today.

  Then the resident CSIS anthropologist, whose specialty was Middle East terrorism, made an offhand comment that shocked even me: jihadists, he explained, were impressed by the level of media attention Anonymous attained. Did I hear that correctly, I wondered? I just could not fathom Al Qaeda operatives watching Anonymous videos, much less grasping the nature of their culture or politics, and especially not the lulz. I imagined that jihadists would be rather repelled by Anonymous’s secular, infidel, offensive practices. Laughing heartily together, we all agreed that those jihadist terrorists likely did not celebrate the lulz (or were utterly devoid of them). The conversation reminded me of something one Anon had told me during an informal online chat:

  : yeah, it’s that idea of humor and irreverence which is at the heart of this [Anonymous]

  : it’s what will stop it ever being able to be labeled terrorist

  Despite the laughter, I still felt rather uncomfortable and hyper-aware of my mask of scholarly detachment. Appearing cool and composed on the outside, on the inside I was thinking to myself, I can’t believe I am joking about jihadists, Anonymous, and the lulz with CSIS! I wanted nothing more than to leave—which I finally did at the conclusion of lunch. I was relieved to return to my hotel. I tried to push away the creeping thought that my room at the Lord Elgin Hotel in downtown Ottawa, booked by CSIS, was bugged.

  Even today, I am not sure how I feel about my decision to visit CSIS; in those situations, one can divulge, quite unwillingly, important information, even when officials are not expressly seeking or asking for anything particular. Maybe there is something unethical, too, about disclosing how important the media is in amplifying Anonymous’s power—a bit like drawing open a curtain to reveal that the Wizard is a little old man pulling at the levers of a machine. On the other hand, the media’s power is an open secret within Anonymous, a topic routinely discussed by the activists themselves.

  In hindsight, and for better or worse, I believe some element of the trickster spirit nudged me to accept CSIS’s invitation. Tricksters, like the Norse god Loki, have poor impulse control. They are driven by lust or curiosity. Intrigue propelled me to visit CSIS, despite my anxiety and reservations. I had a burning question that I needed answered: would they laugh at the lulz? So I guess, like trolls, “I did it for the lulz.” Thanks to my glimpse inside Canada’s spy agency, I got my answer: the lulz can be (nearly) universally appreciated. But I learned even more than that, thanks to the other anthropologist in the room. That final joke about the jihadists and the lulz taught me another lesson about Anonymous, which is important to convey as we start this adventure.

  No single group or individual can claim legal ownership of the name “Anonymous,” much less its icons and imagery. Naturally, this has helped Anonymous spread across the globe. It has now become the quintessential anti-brand brand, assuming various configurations and meanings, even as it has also become the popular face of unrest around the globe. Even if the name “Anonymous” is free to take—as Topiary, an Anonymous activist, put it before he was arrested, “You cannot arrest an idea”—the jihadist example is a powerful reminder that its radical openness does not mean everyone can or even wants to embrace the name or its attendant imagery. Culture has a funny way of asserting itself, even among a group of activists who seek to defy boundaries and who have erected one of the most accessible, resilient, and open domains of activism today.

  Indeed, by the time I visited CSIS in 2012, Anonymous had become multitudinous, prolific, and unpredictable. Of course, since the collective is a by-product of the Internet, it is unsurprising that Anonymous rises up most forcefully and shores up most support when defending values associated with this global communication platform, like free speech. As one participant once put it, “Free speech is non-negotiable.” But what they have demonstrated time and again is they are not restricted to a concern with civil liberties. Over the last five years, activists have contributed to an astonishing array of causes, from publicizing rape cases (as they did in Halifax, Canada, and Steubenville, Ohio) to assisting in the Arab and African Spring of 2011.

  Various factors conspire to secure the group’s flexibility. There are no agreed-upon mandates to uphold. Participants associated with Anonymous steadfastly resist institutionalization. Its reputation is difficult to sully. You don’t even need to be a hacker (no, really) to participate in Anonymous operations. The group’s bold, Hollywood-style aesthetics strike a familiar chord in the society of the spectacle. And when Anonymous reacts to world events, it engages in a broad range of activities, with leaking and exposing security vulnerabilities acting as two of its signal interventions.

  All these elements—which also come together in different proportions and configurations—make it almost impossible to know when or why Anonymous will strike, when a new node will appear, whether a campaign will be successful, and how the group might change direction or tactics during the course of an operation. Its unpredictability may be what makes Anonymous so frightening to governments and corporations across the world.

  Although devilishly hard to study, Anonymous is neither wholly random nor simply chaotic. To be Anonymous means to follow a series of related principles. Anonymous follows a spirit of humorous deviance, works though diverse technical bodies (such as IRC), is built on an anti-celebrity ethic, and intervenes politically in astoundingly rich and varied ways. This book will seek to unravel some of the complexities and paradoxes inherent to a politically engaged Anonymous—but before we turn to its activist interventions, let’s take a close look at the grisly underworld of trolling from which Anonymous hatched.

  CHAPTER 1

  On Trolls, Tricksters, and the Lulz

  Prior to 2008, when Anonymous unexpectedly sprouted an activist sensibility, the brand had been used exclusively for what, in Internet parlance, is known as “trolling”: the targeting of people and organization
s, the desecration of reputations, and the spreading of humiliating information. Despite the fame Anonymous accrued in its mass trolling campaigns, it was certainly not the only player in the game; the trolling pantheon was then, and remains today, both large and diverse. Trolling is a multifarious activity that flourishes online and boasts a range of tight-knit associations (such as the Patriotic Nigras, Bantown, Team Roomba, Rustle League), a variety of genres (differentiated mostly by target—for example, griefers target gamers, RIP trolls target the families and friends of the recently deceased), and a small pantheon of famed individuals (Violentacrez, Jameth). Its originary point extends far before the alpha of the Internet, taking root in the vagaries of myth and oral culture. Despite this diversity, contemporary Internet trolls are united in an almost universal claiming of lulz as the causal force and desired effect of their endeavors. Our story can begin with one of the most notorious pursuants.

  One day, completely out of the blue, I received a phone call from one of the most famous trolls of all time: Andrew Auernheimer, known to most simply as “weev.” He reached out to me on August 28, 2010, in a sixty-second phone message:

  Yes, Ms. Coleman. This is weev. That is W-E-E-V and you might be familiar with my work. I see that you are giving a presentation on hackers, trolls, and the politics of spectacle. And I just want say that I am the master of the spectacle. This is my art, ma’am. And also you have given some sort of presentation on the lulz and I was in the room when the lulz was first said. So I want to make sure that you’re interpreting and representing my culture, and my people, correctly. I don’t want some charlatan that is telling lies about my history and my culture. So I would like to talk with you some and understand what you are doing to make sure that you not just another bullshit academic. So hit me up, my email is gluttony@XXX.com. That is G-L-U-T-T-O-N-Y at XXX dot com. I expect a response, Ms. Coleman. It is extremely important.