: good stuff. i’d do s/people/citizens/
: sounds more … profound
rubik continued to act as gopher between the two channels. With work done for now, he gave props to one of the team members (not Sabu, by the way). Another Anon quickly berated this individual praise on ethical grounds, and K-rad himself played the accomplishment down—a clear example of the self-effacing values at work in Anonymous:
: dont forget gibnut
: and whoever else worked in the background (=
: well, ofc [of fucking course]
: but in here .. ppl who are in here..
: is still ok. i guess (=
: we were just giving kudos
: internally :)
So there you have it: hackers at work. It is mundane, quintessential teamwork, but also awesome and hilarious, at least for those involved. I only quoted from two channels, but the work transpired across four different groups—maybe even more, and also likely on a collaborative writing pad where the press releases were written. And keep in mind that the public OpTunisia channels, #propaganda and #command, were doing something, whatever that might have been, at the same time. Many Anons were corodinating through private messaging as well.
In short, there were so many tentacles that the idea of a leader calling the shots is laughable: not a hive (as Anonymous sometimes calls itself), not a structureless mass, nor a structured hierarchy either—but some modality of all the above.
“Don’t worry, I’m anonymous too”
As we have seen clearly, individuals can stand out among the rest for their abilities in any particular situation. In OpTunisia, K-rad was one of these standouts. But over time, individual contributions bleed into each other, and the individual is submerged. However, keeping this in mind, we can nonetheless see the value of viewing Anonymous from the opposite perspective: singling out a participant, and his or her important hack, for the purposes of upending another persistent misconception. By showcasing tflow’s work on OpTunisia, and considering it alongside that of Adnon and Amamou, it will become apparent that the stereotype of the typical Anonymous participant—white, middle class, libertarian, and politically naive—is nowhere close to reality.
tflow (featured above under a different pseudonym) is a talented programmer who joined Anonymous in the fall of 2010 and founded #internetfeds as the secret hacking wing of AnonOps. For much of the autumn, tflow was #internetfeds’ keymaster, testing and vetting invited hackers with three technical questions. One of AnonOps’ more prolific technical contributors, tflow had the clever idea to write an anti-phishing script during OpTunisia. Phishing is essentially any method that is used to acquire personal and private details—usually login and password combinations or credit card information—by pretending to be something or someone trustworthy. A common technique is to send forged emails that appear to be coming from the targets’ email provider’s help desk, or from their bank, urgently asking you to reply with your username and password before your account is closed. A more sophisticated version contains a link which, when clicked, installs a keylogger or other type of malware. People fall for phishing attacks at an alarming rate—making it a particularly lucrative technique. One computer science study of the technique concluded: “Experiments show a success rate of over 70 percent for phishing attacks on social networks.”19 So it is unsurprising that the Ben Ali regime was using a phishing scam, involving a malicious script, to plunder the usernames and passwords to the social media accounts of Tunisian activists. tflow’s idea was to come up with an antidote, a “remove Tunisian government phishing script.”
tflow’s script is a quintessential example of an “artful hack”—given an elegant definition by Jude Milhon, better known by her handle, St. Jude, she once said: “Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality.”20 tflow’s hack was not technically sophisticated; he wrote the code in less than ten minutes and could have done so in thirty seconds had he been more familiar with the underlying technology. It was clever simply because it identified a need and it worked.
Before he could even whip up the short program, he first had to get his hands on the offending script. To do so, he had to find a Tunisian willing to give him remote computer access using a piece of software called TeamViewer. In early January, he reached out to a Tunisian activist (with the exception of tflow, everyone’s pseudonym has been changed):
Of course, anontunisia asked the obvious question:
Since trust is really often just a matter of faith, tflow offered the soundest advice (and one person resorted to a dumb and offensive “joke”):
anont responded:
tflow was now able to write the script. It, quite
simply, changed the functions in the government script so that they did nothing. A day later, after the script had been written, thrown online, and was in the process of being downloaded by the thousands, tflow and anont convened again in private:
[…]
[…]
anont, a journalist, remains anonymous, but I had the fortune of eventually meeting tflow in London during July of 2013, two years after, nearly to the day, his arrest by the British Metropolitan Police. tflow pled guilty to one count of computer misuse, admitting to conspiring to hack numerous British and international organizations, including the Serious Organised Crime Agency, 20th Century Fox, and News International. Since he was a minor when caught, he got off with a light sentence of community service. It consisted, as he told me in an interview, of “tagging clothes that people donated with price tags, putting them out on the shopfloor, and redesigning the shop window displays.”
I had not spent a whole lot of time talking to tflow, certainly not privately. His name was a constant fixture on my screen and on occasion we chatted, usually as part of a group conversation. Usually engaged in a mix of technical or philosophical conversations, he was eloquent and sharp as a tack. He could be a smart-ass, but not in a cruel way, and it was often in the service of a broader insight. Take, for instance, the following conversation from March 2011, on an IRC channel for journalists called “#reporter.” A journalist had just logged in for the first time and asked:
[…]
[she sends it]
Though he was often around, it was difficult to geographically place him. He was obviously a native English speaker, but that didn’t narrow things down much. It never crossed my mind that he, like Adnon, might be a teenager. When he was arrested on July 19, 2011, and revealed to be a sixteen-year-old, shock rippled through AnonOps. People were surprised because his fellow hackers considered him to be one of the smartest of the crew; teamwork does not preclude the assessment of capacities and skills.
Since tflow was a minor at the time of his arrest, authorities could not release his name, only his age. I am ashamed to admit that when I found out he was British and sixteen, a picture immediately popped into my mind. It was not as off as the “nihilists, anarchists, activists, LulzSec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years,” described by Michael Haydn, the ex-director of the CIA and NSA, in reference to those who would come to support Edward Snowden.21 What did come to mind was a pale waif whose wealthy parents thoughtlessly shipped him off to boarding school at a tender age.
As it turned out, once he was eighteen, tflow was revealed to be Mustafa Al-Bassam, and pictures confirmed that he was not pasty white. He moved to London from Iraq with his family when he was six years old, fleeing Saddam Hussein. His father is a doctor—a general practitioner—so they are financially middle class. But they live in a poor, immigrant-heavy neighborhood in South London, and have more of a working-class lifestyle; his parents, like many immigrant families, save instead of spend. When I prodded him about his background, he explained, somewhat uncomfortably: “We live in the bottom 1 percent areas in the UK, economically and socially.”
My first meeting with him, in London, was—unlike my first meeting with Adnon—tense and awkward, since we did not have hundreds of hours of chatting to connect us. The disconnect was likely magnified by the fact he had been out of the scene for a while—he had been banned from the Internet for two years. Thankfully, the sun streaming in through the skylight—the UK was undergoing a rare sunny spell—helped soften the mood.
We continued our conversation online. A recurring topic was the morality of the law, unsurprising given his personal experiences with the justice system. One day we discussed another young hacker, Aaron Swartz, ensnared by the American legal system. (Swartz was a cofounder of reddit, one of the most popular sites online.) Swartz, at the age of twenty-five, was facing decades in prison—thirty-five years—and up to $1 million in fines for downloading a cache of academic journal articles from JSTOR, the scholarly archive available to anybody on MIT’s network.
Had he been found guilty, it is unlikely he would have been jailed for that long. But the number of charges and the potential years in jail were used by prosecutors to leverage him into a plea bargain and accept a felony charge. What is even more remarkable is that he did not “hack” JSTOR’s website at all; nor was JSTOR even pursuing charges. Sure, MIT had to expend some resources over the affair, but it was not in any way seriously harmed. The main prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, nevertheless had the audacity to compare “the Internet pioneer to a rapist and suggested he had ‘systematically revictimized’ MIT by not taking a plea bargain,” as Ryan Reily of the Huffington Post put it.22
Perhaps he could have been found guilty of trespassing—he stashed a computer in a closet on campus and connected it directly to the MIT system. On a few occasions, the MIT network administrators had booted him from the network, certainly trying to prevent him from downloading more than a certain number of articles. But even if some of his actions were illegal or broke rules, from a moral standpoint one could say that the downloading of academic articles, many of them researched and written using tax dollars, was wholly undeserving of a thirty-five-year sentence and a felony charge—not to mention an expensive trial also paid for by taxpayers. Swartz, forlorn and overwhelmed by the prosecution, ended his life on January 6, 2013.
One day, while chatting to Al-Bassam about the case, I mentioned an article written by a professor, Hal Abelson, who had chaired a committee investigating MIT’s role in the affair. Abelson absolved MIT and described Swartz as “dangerously naive about the reality of exercising [his
technical] power, to the extent that he destroyed himself.”23 Appalled, I responded on a popular techblog: “The true naivety here was Abelson’s. His failure to attribute any blame to the unfair, aggressive and excessive federal prosecution, instead characterizing it merely as ‘vigorous,’ was as appalling as using a descriptive word that one should reserve for a workout.”24 Al-Bassam replied: “‘Dangerously naive about the reality of exercising power, to the extent that he destroyed himself’ is a statement that should be applied to the prosecution, not Aaron Swartz.”
Al-Bassam—tflow—had experienced firsthand the force of the law knocking at his door, and did so after months of engagement in direct action for causes he believed in. It is not surprising that youthful sensibilities are the source of so much creative political energy. Such energy can be harder to sustain as one’s idealism bumps up against the horrific realities of the problems plaguing our world, coinciding with the saddling of more and more day-to-day responsibilities. But if youthful idealism makes someone proceed in attempts to tackle the enormity of our problems, then we need more, not less, youthful “naïveté.”
Smashing Stereotypes
Adnon, tflow, and Slim are three Anonymous activists. Anonymous is not the white, middle-class, American boys’ club of everyone’s default imagination. Hard numbers are impossible to come by, but those Anons I have met and those unmasked by arrests are a motley bunch (incidentally, motley refers to trickster clothing, the court jester’s multicolored smock). If, in addition to these three men, we consider the cohort of hackers Al-Bassam worked with in #internefeds (and later, LulzSec) now known due to arrests, the heterogeneity becomes more pronounced. Among their ranks was a Puerto Rican living in towering public housing project of New York (he was also an occasional drug dealer and a foster father to his nieces); two Irish chemistry students, one whose radical political views were influenced by a father who was a member of the Irish Republican Army who had been jailed for six years; a Scotsman, who for much of his time in Anonymous lived on the remote Isle of Yell; and a twenty-five-year-old man, Kayla, who served in the British military in Iraq and performed a female gender online.
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy Page 17
