Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy
Page 11
[…]
Disagreement over targets grew, and someone pointed out that the financial hit against MPAA was negligible since the organization paid a lump sum for its DDoS protection. Eventually, people agreed to stop hammering the MPAA and shift targets. Someone highlighted the nature of this endeavor: “but consider it an experiment either way. Prove me wrong.” Just when participants thought they reached a consensus, someone yelped and insisted on a vote; as is often the case with any IRC-based meeting (only magnified with a group like Anonymous), conversation became even more tangled:
[…]
As some voted, others continued to broadly debate the choice of targets, arguing, “Attacking anti-piracy agencies at random isn’t helping our cause.” This prompted another long, tedious round of voting. Finally, two hours later, they seemed to have inched closer to an agreement, but in the middle of debating, guess what happened?
[…]
Someone must have felt that there was enough of a consensus to move forward and fired up the botnets.
Two hours of planning, two minutes of DDoS’ing, and not long after the firm closed. A little over a year after Anonymous’s email leak, Crossley—who had been more worried about queuing for a coffee—was tried in the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for an array of charges. He conceded to six of the seven allegations, including the following two: “acting in a way that was likely to diminish the trust the public places in him or in the legal profession” and “using his position as a solicitor to take unfair advantage of the recipients of the letters for his own benefit.”24 He was ordered to pay £76,000 in fines and had his license suspended for two years. Even though he challenged the claim that he had not taken proper measures to protect client data, he was found guilty as charged and the Information Commissioner’s Office also fined him for the data breach.25
Although many of Anonymous’s actions seek simply to attract media attention for the sake of airing an issue, sometimes fate gave them more than they bargain for—like an incidental opportunity to curb corruption.
Weapons of the Geek (Rarely Agree)
By the end of fall 2010, with the constant deployment of digital direct action techniques, AnonOps had breathed new life into the still nascent idea that Anonymous could be a banner for activism; the name, once exclusively tied to the most abject forms of trolling, was slowly, but steadily, becoming associated with an irreverent brand of dissent. Regardless, those behind the September and October campaigns, like golum and the numbered Anons above, did not expect to exist as a team, much less as a network, for more than a few weeks. But, in a mirroring of the events that aggregated Chanology into a discrete entity, media validation helped solidify this new team as well. In a rare interview with TorrentFreak, one core organizer explained why:
The operation’s command was “pleasantly” surprised by the overwhelming media coverage and attention, but wondered where to go from there. They became the center of attention but really had no plan going forward. Eventually they decided to continue down the road that brought them there in the first place—more DDoS attacks … The media attention was indeed part of what fuelled the operation to go forward.26
With AnonOps here to stay, there were also clear signs of a cleavage emerging between different nodes within the activist branches of Anonymous. Chanology and AnonOps, the two most active wings, could not be more different in terms of tactics. One usually stayed within the bounds of the law and the other avidly, and enthusiastically, experimented with law breaking. By way of acknowledging these internal feuds and sectarian impulses, Anonymous would eventually adopt the refrain “Anonymous is not unanimous.”27
It was around this time that I started to grasp the overarching significance of these disparate and divergent geeks and hackers—Anonymous (Chanology vs. AnonOps), Assange, Manning, the Pirate Bay, and others—all entering the political arena and in much greater numbers than ever before. In orchestrating protests across a range of issues—in particular civil liberties—they transformed policy, law, media representations, and public opinion. While certainly unique in its bombast and capriciousness, Anonymous was clearly part of a wellspring of hackers and geeks who were taking political matters into their own hands and making their voices heard.
Anonymous signaled the growing importance of what I call “weapons of the geek,” in contrast to “weapons of the weak,” a term anthropologist James Scott used in his 1985 book of the same name to capture the unique clandestine nature of peasant politics. While Weapons of the Weak describes the tactics of economically marginalized populations who engage in small-scale illicit acts—such as foot dragging and vandalism—that don’t appear on their surface to be political, weapons of the geek is a modality of politics exercised by a class of privileged and visible actors who often lie at the center of economic life.
Technology does not simplistically determine the politics of hacking, even if technological experiences usually inform its expression. Just as there are many ways to hack, there are many ways for hackers to enter the political arena. From policy making to engagements with Pirate Parties, from reinventing the law through free software to performing risky acts of civil disobedience, the geek and hacker are not bound to a single political sentiment, such as libertarianism, and they certainly don’t agree on how social change should proceed.
What they all have in common is that their political tools, and to a lesser degree their political sensibilities, emerge from the concrete experiences of their craft, like administering a server or editing videos. Often, these skills are channeled into activities in order to bolster civil liberties, such as privacy. Unlike peasants who seek to remain inconspicuous and anonymous even as a group, geeks and hacker
s—even the anonymous Anonymous—explicitly call attention to themselves via their volatile, usually controversial, political acts. By fall 2010, AnonOps was at the forefront of the tests and experiments that sought to probe the new possibilities and legal limitations of digital civil disobedience.
And while some would count these experiments as a success, others—even those aligned on the same side of the struggle for civil liberties—were wary of the tactics employed. The Pirate Party in particular was less than enthused about the political use of DDoS. The Pirate Party is a political party which has made inroads in both Europe and Australia (and claims a very weak base in North America). Swedish free-culture advocate Rickard Falkvinge first chartered it in 2006, and now its platform is built on copyright reform, demands for Internet freedoms and civil liberties, and the building of tools to support direct democracy. The Pirate Parties in the UK and US wrote a letter to AnonOps requesting an immediate cessation of DDoS activity. (It should be noted that the letter prompted not only a vigorous debate among AnonOps participants—but also among Pirate Party members themselves):28
Operation: Payback needs to end. While it is certainly an indication that an increasing number of people are becoming frustrated with the way laws are being constantly re-written to kill our creative culture in the name of preserving profitability, its methods do more harm than good to the global effort.
By continuing Operation: Payback attacks, you will hamper those who promote copyright reform and curtailment of abuses of copyright, but who do so within the bounds of the law. Instead of being able to argue for legislative reform of copyright on its own merits, they will be accused of defending criminals and promoting lawlessness. It will be easier for legislators and the media to ignore the clear benefits of fair copyrights and free speech, in favor of clamoring for harsher legislation to “stop those pirates and hackers.”29
Perhaps surprisingly, those Operation Payback participants sitting in #command, for a very brief period of time, took the Pirate Party’s call to heart and considered aborting the use of illegal tactics in favor of a more moderate, reformist style: the advancing of a list of demands. The Torrent Freak interview revealed, publicly, the existence of the secret #command channel, and affirmed participants’ new embrace of law-abiding tactics. Below are some key excerpts from the interview:
The core group is the #command channel on IRC. This core group does nothing more than being some sort of intermediary between the people in that IRC channel and the actual attack. Another group of people on IRC (the main channel called #operationpayback) are just there to fire on targets …
Last week command decided to slow the DDoS attacks down and choose another strategy, mainly to regain the focus of attention. It was decided that they would make a list of demands for governments worldwide. In a move opposed to the desires of the anarchic influences, command decided to get involved in the political discussion.30
This dual news—that there was a secret channel, and that its members wanted to go “legit”—was received extremely poorly by the public-facing channel #operationpayback on AnonOps. The result was, in essence, a mutiny. “Gobo” (not his real pseudonym), one core participant active on the public channel—who would later become a member of another separate, secretive channel recatalyzed by the revelation—explained:
That article seriously pissed a lot of people in the main channel off. A huge amount of arguing broke out over Anonymous being leaderless and “who the fuck do they think they are.” Somehow #command didn’t really perceive how much controversy they were generating by overstepping the limits of their purpose (as defined by the main chan’s participant).31
Little did the Anons crying foul know there was also another, even more secretive channel by the name #internetfeds. Originally chartered for the purposes of executing ops—especially covert hacking—it had gone idle for a period. One of its members reached out to Gobo and invited him to join #internetfeds with a scheme to revive it; the public commitment to a cessation of DDoSing suddenly looked very dubious indeed:
Essentially the ethos was as follows: Operation Payback would publicly “stop all illegal activity” as per the letter to the pirate party. #internetfeds would carry on these activities privately and in the name of “Anonymous” but *not* in the name of Operation Payback, and its existence was to be kept sacredly secret so as not to jeopardize the new “legitimate protest” image #command wanted to cultivate for Operation Payback.32
So, a small crew in a small cabal was planning to rekindle another, even smaller, and more secretive cabal—committed only loosely to the guiding principle of, like Fight Club, keeping mum about its existence (the group may have operated in secret, but each of its defacements came with a logo that included its name: “Pwned by #internetfeds”).33 As it turned out, #internetfeds never had to carry out this proposed “sacredly secret” mission because participants in the main channel essentially told #command to bugger off—affirming their intention to continue to DDoS with or without them: “civil war” broke out on the public channel where, according to Gobo, most people
roundly condemned not just the idea of going legit, but specifically the fact that #command had so massively leader-fagged by agreeing to all this without even mentioning it to the main channel. There was an extremely bitter argument and following that, someone simply told people to forget about the #loic hive and hit the next target manually, with or without the support of #command.34
Those in #command listened to the angry IRC masses and “almost immediately backpedaled on the pledge to make the op go legitimate,” explained Gobo. Although #internetfeds was no longer technically needed for this particular DDoS (since #command was put back on the DDoSing track thanks to pressure exerted by those on the public channel), it persisted anyway, ultimately becoming “an extremely militant defacement and leaking channel,” as Gobo described it, which would really shine in the coming months. Peace had been restored, but barely.
Legitimacy vs. Legality
In September 2010, when a new Anonymous node arose out of the righteous anger borne from the double dealing of the copyright industry, it seemed always on the brink of disorder. Action was often heated, messy, soulful, and spontaneous, compounding the thrills experienced by all. Increasingly, AnonOps, had become more deliberate in its decision-making process—the direct result of collective thinking on the subject of collectivity itself. Undoubtedly, the topic of organization was highlighted by many participants upset at the double standards in operation during the initial campaigns. One of the core hackers explained to me why he felt justified in forging forward with these illegal tactics, a sentiment that seemed to capture the collective mood of the time: “I saw it as a form of poetic justice in response to Aiplex DDoSing the Pirate Bay.” Gobo who had worked closely with golum highlighted how he always
spoke very passionately about the fact that people he’d known from Anonymous [had been arrested for taking part in trolling-based DDoS attacks] and yet here were major corporate people boasting about it and everyone knew 100 percent that no one would ever prosecute them. golum has a very strong ideological belief in the idea that there should be no double standards in politics, and so for him it was the “corporations getting away with crimes” ordinary people don’t get away with.35
By November, individual sentiments such as these were transformed into a collective political statement. Soon after AnonOps retracted its commitment to going legit, the group published a letter to the Pirate Party. It included a sophisticated justification for DDoS that focused on legitimacy over legality. Here is an excerpt:
Anonymous and Operation Payback share values and goals—i.e. freedom of information, expression, and sharing—with the Pirate Parties, but we are absolutely independent entities.
We are not concerned with legality, but with legitimacy. Those who decide our laws are the same people who decided that public copyright harassment, erosion of civil liberties and abominations of censorship such as COICA, ACTA, and the DEAct, a
re good and just things to enforce upon the populace. They do this whilst selectively enforcing their own laws when it comes to “official” organizations that take actions such as running a mass racketeering operation (knowingly suing thousands of individuals for infringement on bad evidence) or DDoSing sites that are contrary to their interests (AiPlex). We do not recognize their “authority” due to this rank hypocrisy.
Finally, we recognize and respect the work of Pirate Parties and wish them luck. We hope that you all continue your fight as we are continuing ours.36
As this letter signals, AnonOps became reflexive and unabashedly comfortable about stylizing its activities as civil disobedience. Soon after reaching an ethical consensus on DDoSing in November, the numbers on their IRC server dwindled precipitously. Only a smattering of secret cabals remained, tied up in their separate, clandestine channels. It was impossible to forecast that, just three weeks later, they would launch the largest DDoS civil disobedience campaign the world had ever witnessed.
CHAPTER 4
The Shot Heard Round the World
I’ve only just a minute,
Only sixty seconds in it.
Forced upon me, can’t refuse it,
Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it,
But it’s up to me to use it.
I must suffer if I lose it,
Give an account if I abuse it
Just a tiny little minute,
But eternity is in it.
—Benjamin Elijah Mays,
American educator and president
of Morehouse College
Commentators often cast Anonymous as an amorphous and formless entity existing in some mythical and primordial jelly-like state of non-being, only solidifying into existence when an outside agent utters its name. Buying into this logic, some writers suggest that Anonymous and its interventions suffer from an inherent lack of cohesion. “The group’s hazy message, with no spokesmen, leaders, or firm political plans to provide steady direction,” Art Keller wrote for Newsweek, “isn’t helped by an ideology that veers between extreme left, extreme right and mainstream concerns.”1 A more prosaic example comes from an Anon himself who relayed the following to me during a personal chat conversation: “I spoke to a real life friend today about Anonymous and he seemed to have some vision of disembodied brains held in suspension orbiting the earth in battle satellites or something, the idea that actual people were involved seemed to flummox him.”