Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy
Page 19
AnonSnapple, who lives near Bethesda with his mother, a housewife, and father, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, worries that investigators might link him to last month’s DDOS attacks launched by some Anonymous members against MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, which had stopped processing payments to WikiLeaks. “A while ago, the FBI did some raids on servers from Anons that were involved in the attacks,” he said. “Even though I don’t do them, I am still a part of them. I am still active on the same chat rooms as people that [did] the DDOS [attacks] … I can be easily linked to them.”3
On January 25, 2011, a few days after the article was published, I linked to it on #reporter. Before I did, it was business as usual on the channel, busy with chatter. In minutes, they devoured the piece. Then all hell broke loose. It went on for about an hour on various different IRC channels, notably #reporter and #lounge:
: :/
Watching the conversation cascading down my screen, I could feel the seething contempt emanating from the words. It stung. Although I understood the source of their anger, by then I had worked with enough journalists to offer the following cautionary advice:
: he must have twisted the whole thing
: and i dont think ian would do that
: he is a serious journalist
Although Anons at times worked earnestly with reports, they also often tore or trolled journalists to pieces (yes, even “serious journalists”). But this was not one such occasion. What pissed people off most was how AnonSnapple who had incurred no personal risk during any op was speaking on behalf of those who had:
And strangling him was pretty much what happened next. They summoned AnonSnapple to the channel:
: now its on the floor.
shitstorm grabs the shotgun
MTBC steals the shotgun and shoots himself in the face
Snapple left the room (quit: Z:lined (dumbass)).
The rage against AnonSnapple ran so deep and so strong that even the banning—usually an effective release mechanism—did little to blow the dark clouds away. The Anons were still fuming, expressing a deluge of insults—owen, for instance, proclaimed that “in the meantime, snapple can concentrate on his schoolwork instead of IRC tonight.” After I informed them that I knew the reporter, I got put to work:
: it was in reporter
: biella, could you help us out here?
Finally, on another channel, owen added some concluding remarks:
Insulting the Meat
I was dumbfounded. Sure, I was familiar with the prohibition against “namefagging”—attaching your identity to your actions. The norm was so well established in Anonymous, stretching back even to its pre-activist days, that it was rarely broken, at least back then (though Barrett Brown would soon be accused of similar behavior). So I had never seen the repercussions in real time. What made this all the more captivating was that I finally got to witness a phenomenon I had only previously read about in ethnographic accounts. Tactics for enforcing the ideal of egalitarianism are common but vary in morality across many cultures. They range from the life ruining (such as being found to be a witch), to the relatively mundane, but all are quite effective. One of my favorite examples comes from the !Kung people in Africa’s Kalahari Desert. Among the !Kung, when hunters return to the village with an enormous slab of meat they are not showered with praise, as you might expect among a meat-loving tribe, but instead with a slab of insults. The teasing helps keep egos in check:
“Say there is a bushman man who has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggard, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I s
aw nothing at all [pause] just a little tiny tone.’ Then I smile to myself,” gaugo continued, “because I know he has killed something big.
“In the morning we make up a party of four or five people to cut up and carry the meat back to the camp. When we arrive at the kill we examine it and cry out, ‘You mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here to make us cart home your pile of bones? Oh, if I had known it was this thin I wouldn’t have come.’ Another one pipes up, ‘People, to think I gave up a nice day in the shade for this. At home we may be hungry, but at least we have cool water to drink.’”4
Moral leveling of this kind does not extinguish power relations, much less differences in abilities. Some individuals are just better hunters than others. On IRC there are those, like owen and shitstorm, who run the network and unmistakably command the authority to enforce norms by appeal to technical power. Banning individuals on IRC after profusely insulting them doesn’t engender a strict egalitarianism. It simply functions to downplay and modulate power differentials. While among Anons it is acceptable to shower some degree of praise, any perceived attempt at converting internal status into external status is deemed unacceptable. The public, individual persona must be kept out of the equation, in the interest of collective fame.
Had AnonSnapple accomplished more—especially the risky work of civil disobedience—I suspect he would have been reprimanded without banishment. By claiming enough responsibility to be profiled while simultaneously insulting the risky tactics employed by others, AnonSnapple’s aggrandizing was received as an affront of the highest order. By this time, people were hyperaware of the legal risks (and only two days later, arrests were made in the UK and warrants were issued in the US in response to a recent DDoS campaign). AnonSnapple was judged to have acted out of an improper self-interest, and the dozens of individuals logged onto #lounge watched the extermination with popcorn in hand. But this wasn’t mere entertainment. The drubbing served as a clear moral lesson for the wider audience, one that they tacitly endorsed in their silence or eventual agreement.
“The nerd scare”
Beginning the very day of Snapple’s banishment, my old vertigo returned due to a remarkable flood of events pouring in and out of AnonOps. For the next two weeks I was online during every waking moment, watching Anonymous engage in a historic revolution. In coming to terms with the first wave of arrests to hit their network, they planned and executed Anonymous’s most extraordinary act of revenge yet.
The day AnonSnapple had been unceremoniously summoned to Mount Olympus and ritually tossed away, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a response to the mounting populist upheaval in Egypt: “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”5 Piggybacking on revolutionary ferment in Tunisia, Egyptians rallied for most of January to demand Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak, the dictator in power for three decades, step down. Egyptian organizers had called for a day of rage on the 25th, and throngs of protesters obliged. As the events unfolded, the recently christened #OpEgypt public channel was awash in excitement and horror (pseudonyms have been changed):
<0n>: cell phones too
<0n>: PANIC TIME
[…]
Gov blocked the cell phones
: Spread that POSTER to RECRUIT more people: http://i.imgur.com/LfLhN.png
What had at first been a sporadic flicker of government-initiated communication disruptions became wholesale on January 28. The Egyptian government shut the whole damn Internet off.
In order to reestablish some connectivity, Anonymous teamed up with another hacktivist crew, Telecomix. AnonOps and Telecomix had demonstrated differences in the past. Telecomix, opposed to DDoS tactics, would try to keep sites up as Anonymous gummed up access. But if there is an urgent or interesting enough problem to solve—like getting communications access to people in need—hackers can put aside major differences to work together. A number of Anons contributed to the Telecomix-led effort to figure out how old modems, faxes, and phones could be used to connect circuitously to the Internet. At the same time, Anonymous’s small technical elite, which had coalesced during OpTunisia and formed a persistent IRC channel, continued in their hackscapades in support of the Arab Spring.
As OpEgypt gained momentum against Mubarak’s government, Anonymous themselves came under threat. Two days after Snapple’s banning and the historic day of Egyptian rage, the following warning flashed on #reporter in big red letters:
On January 27, 2011, authorities rounded up and arrested alleged participants in the UK, while in the US three FBI agents issued forty warrants in connection with the December 2010 DDoS Operation Payback campaign (and eventually arrested a batch of fourteen Anons in connection with the attacks):
Anonymous9 critically assessed the first major state crackdowns against Anonymous with an incisive and soulful lament about the hypocrisy of state power. Since that first shoe dropped, over one hundred people have been arrested across the globe, from Indonesia to the Dominican Republic and from Cambodia to the United States. These arrests are historically exceptional—a high-water mark in the history of hacking. Never before have so many hackers and geeks been rounded up around the globe for their political ideas and actions in one cohesive push. Over the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, scores of hackers were arrested, but raids were more sporadic and usually took one of two distinct forms (I am excluding hackers arrested for purely criminal operations like carding).6 Either law enforcement sought out single hackers, like Kevin Mitnick or Gary McKinnon, who were not hacking for social change but for their own enjoyment, or authorities raided underground hacker groups to shut them down and close their meeting spots, such as bulletin board systems. The most famous and largest of these raids was Operation Sundevil, carried out across fourte
en American cities on May 8, 1990, when twenty-seven search warrants were executed and four arrests made.7 On occasion, as was the case with the young Julian Assange, hackers wielding skills for broader political goals faced criminal charges, but this style of intervention was less common and arrests on these grounds were even more rare.
With Anonymous came the first large-scale hacktivist movement that spurred a multi-state coordinated and extensive crackdown. It qualifies as what Graínne O’Neill, at the time a National Lawyers Guild representative for many of those arrested, aptly described as “the nerd scare.”
Want to Take a Seat?
Having since met and interviewed individuals targeted in the “nerd scare,” the version of events given by one particular person, Mercedes Haefer, sticks in my mind. Haefer joined the AnonOps network in November 2010, when she was nineteen, and quickly rose to prominence due to her tart wit and intellect. Haefer is and was a linguistic force of nature—her mouth can run circles around a drunken sailor looking for a fight. I sat with her on a panel at the 2012 edition of DEF CON, the largest hacker conference in the world. Before delving into a serious and impassioned description of her involvement in Anonymous, she demanded that the audience—composed roughly of 99 percent males—show their tits or get the fuck out (“Tits or gtfo” is a disparaging comment which, in some online communities, follows any user’s self-identification as female).
DEF CON is held in Las Vegas, where Haefer happens to live. However, her apartment was far from the conference, so I suggested that she crash in my hotel room, on one condition: that inimitable troll, the troll’s troll, weev, was not allowed anywhere near the room. He had made some flirtatious overtures to her on Twitter and had been spotted at the conference—and while I was happy to spend time with him, and in no way opposed to their pursuit of any mutual affections, I could not bear the thought that a hideous troll love child could be yanked out of the depths of hell due to an unholy carnal meeting in my hotel room (too much responsibility and not enough connections with exorcists).