Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

by Gabriella Coleman

  In contrast to other hacker and geek endeavors—like Debian, the largest free software project in the world—Anonymous has no established methodology through which to encode itself as an institution. Only limited—and provisional—protocols exist to perform the roles of adjudication, social reproduction, and mentoring. For instance, IRC channels like #opnewblood, as its name suggests, serve primarily pedagogical purposes. It is a space where newcomers learn the technical and cultural ropes. Certain Twitter accounts, like @YourAnonNews—which at one time boasted over twenty-five contributors who were required to follow a style guide—are a mini-media institution (@YourAnonNews has been criticized by some Anons as micro-imperialist).

  Taking stock of the broader Anonymous constellation of practices, we can derive a few fast and loose generalities. Anons tend to forgo rigid regulatory codes in favor of ad hoc, timely, and event-based responses. They even struggle with institutional memory, even when Anons or the media memorialize the ops. To be sure, Anonymous exhibits significant cultural cohesiveness, secured through all the videos, memes, and other cultural lore the group produces; but at the same time, Anonymous either shuns or never implements transposable policies and mechanisms for handling operations. It is not simply that Anons are allergic to formalization. Given that each operation is so distinct, it may prove very difficult to implement best practices in this dynamic milieu, even as we can say that Anonymous does indeed learn from the past.

  Of course, if all activist endeavors shunned institutionalization, many broader political goals would suffer. But feminist scholar Larisa Mann identifies the strengths of flexible ad-hoc political endeavors, arguing during an interview, “Anonymous might be ahead of mainstream feminists in fighting small-town rape culture.”54 She elaborated: in contrast to institutionalized actors, Anonymous (along with other fleeting forms of disruptive activism) is free from the shackles of “self-promotion and funding,” which are almost universally required for institutional endeavors. These requirements can prevent the sort of nimble and swift response that Anonymous has elevated to a high art.

  If there is one conclusion to draw from a cursory review of these cases, it is this: the work of politics and social transformation requires, and can bear, a diverse toolkit—from fine-tuned government interventions to rowdy subversive tactics. We should be wary of christening any particular approach as a magic bullet. If forced to pick between an NGO that works for women’s rights and Anonymous’s rough-and-tumble, problematic intervention, I would likely pick the former. But this dichotomy is a strawman. The urgent question is how to promote cross-pollination. It becomes prudent for those committed to these political goals to ask how alliances can be fostered, rather than leveling critiques based on tactical differences.

  We need compelling stories that dramatize neglected issues, as media scholar and long-time activist Stephen Duncombe has argued; he strongly supports the sort of spectacle provided by Anonymous and so casually dismissed as a juvenile male fantasy by journalists like Levy.55 Well-funded groups with dedicated teams of lawyers, advocates, and policy strategists, which command the resources for more long-term strategic and sustainable interventions, are sorely needed. We also need (well-paid) investigative journalists who dedicate years to tracking down sources and putting the pieces of difficult puzzles together. But, as we saw in the Maryville case, these strategies, when taken alone and lacking a stirred-up pot of drama, sometimes sadly fail. They simply cannot drum up the sort of attention or collective will necessary to break ingrained attitudes and practices. The real problem lies elsewhere: many people either lack the will or are too cynical to enter the political arena and put up a fight in the first place.

  Conclusion: Daybreak

  On June 6, 2013, I sat in a frigid New York University auditorium, waiting for my turn to speak at the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), a yearly event showcasing the Internet’s role in nourishing democratic life. I felt myself falling into a vortex of negativity. Writing about those who tunnel and undermine, who desire to be incomprehensible, concealed, and enigmatic (to slightly rephrase Friedrich Nietzsche’s opening lines in Daybreak), was beginning to seem like an exercise in doom and gloom. Anonymous was still ruffling feathers with political operations, but Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond, and numerous others, now sat in prison cells. The Internet had become a giant, sophisticated tracking machine. Private defense firms, corporations like Facebook, and American three letter agencies (alongside their equivalents in other Five Eyes countries) had sunk their claws in deep: collecting our every trace, predicting our every move. Even if each organization and country did so for different purposes and utilized distinct techniques, the net effect was a troubling and pervasive curtailment of rights. Anonymous, I was planning to suggest in my talk, had been “the raucous party at the funeral of online freedom and privacy.”

  I was not alone in holding this bleak assessment. As one Anon, m0rpeth, had put it to me: “We will be small scattered darknets on the fringes of the Internet after all is lost.” Even the organizers of PDF, normally cheery about the power of the Internet to tilt the balance of power in favor of freedom and justice, had admitted at a dinner the evening before that “things have not turned out as we had hoped.”

  And then, right before being called onto the stage, PDF’s co-organizer, Micah Sifry, suddenly and unexpectedly proffered a lifeline. He leaned over, handed his phone to me, and whispered, “There has been a major leak about government surveillance.” I skimmed an article on the phone. Written by journalist Glenn Greenwald, it divulged the dragnet collection of metadata phone records by Verizon, on behalf of the NSA. In a few days, Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who had provided the information behind the story, would become a household name. Sifry walked up to the stage to introduce me. Before he did, he broke the news to the audience, and I modified my talk on Anonymous to include this hopeful turn of events.

  Snowden’s decision to blow the top off the NSA (and, by extension, its British counterpart, the GCHQ) was a risky but carefully plotted act. It substantiated what privacy activists had been warning about for years, providing them with far more solid and extensive facts upon which to base their claims. Laura Poitras, one of the first three journalists to receive the trove of NSA documents, remarked on the novelty of this situation: “The disclosures made by Snowden have lifted a curtain and revealed a vast hidden world where decisions are made and power operates in secret outside of any public oversight or consent. So my vision hasn’t really changed, but what I’m able to see has vastly increased.”1 Here is but a fraction of what we we can now see thanks to the mega-leak: the NSA spied upon or directly surveilled thirty-eight embassies and missions; until 2011, the NSA harvested and stored vast swaths of American emails and metadata under a program called Stellar Wind; the NSA compelled tech giants to hand over data using FISA court warrants—while also covertly tapping into fiber-optic cables, like those owned by Google, to secretly siphon even more data; the NSA hacked into Al Jazeera’s internal communications systems; the GCHQ led a DDoS attack against Anonymous and hacked Belgacom, a partly state-owned Belgian telecommunications company; and under a program fittingly called Optic Nerve, the GCHQ intercepted and stored webcam images from millions of Yahoo! users. And there was more: a four-month investigation by Barton Gellman and Julie Tate demonstrated that “ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency.”2

  Astonishingly, a 2012 NSA report, also included in the leaks, revealed the spy agency’s dissatisfaction with all of these accomplishments. The NSA sought to broaden its reach further by deploying an even more aggressive cyberoffensive strategy, allowing them to gather data from “anyone, anytime, anywhere,” as reported by Laura Poitras and James Risen for the New York Times.3

  Such aggressive and wide-ranging forms of surveillance preemptively decimate the possibility of a “right to be let alone,” to use the famous 1890 phrasing of
Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, who were among the first to consider the legal basis of privacy.4 And the style of surveillance employed today strikes not only at the personal, exploratory private sphere deemed valuable in liberal subject formation—it also preempts many forms of association that are essential to democratic life. The radical technology collective and Internet service provider Riseup sums it up well:

  What surveillance really is, at its root, is a highly effective form of social control. The knowledge of always being watched changes our behavior and stifles dissent. The inability to associate secretly means there is no longer any possibility for free association. The inability to whisper means there is no longer any speech that is truly free of coercion, real or implied. Most profoundly, pervasive surveillance threatens to eliminate the most vital element of both democracy and social movements: the mental space for people to form dissenting and unpopular views.5

  Intelligence agencies naturally require some secrecy to function effectively in the public interest. But when secrecy is left entirely unchecked—especially when granted to those already afforded extraordinary amounts of power and resources—it becomes a breeding ground for the sorts of abuse we saw emerge under J. Edgar Hoover’s helm at the FBI, such as COINTELPRO.

  The surveillance apparatus exposed by Snowden is also technologically, and thus historically, distinctive. With enough computer power it becomes frighteningly easy to gather data, especially through complete automation. And as civil liberties lawyer Jennifer Granick points out, “Once you build the mousetrap of surveillance infrastructure, they will come for the data.”6

  The state leans with particular force on collected data and informant reports to actively target niche groups—currently the US and UK spy disproportionately on Muslims, environmental activists, and, increasingly, hacktivists.7 This is the conclusion reached in Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims, an investigative report about NYPD’s tellingly named “Demographics Unit” issued by a trio of nonprofits.8 Established by a former CIA official soon after 9/11, the program proved so controversial and so ineffective—no actionable intelligence emerged from the collected data—that it was dismantled in April 2014, but only after disrupting and distorting the social fabric of targeted Muslim communities for more than a decade.9 The program included the use of 15,000 informants and the building of a large dossier through extensive video and photographic surveillance. A Muslim college student featured in the report, Sari, captured the invasiveness in a single sentence: “It’s as if the law says: the more Muslim you are, the more trouble you can be, so decrease your Islam.”10 The leaks also confirmed that the NSA monitors “prominent Muslim-Americans,” including lawyers, professors, and other professionals even when they have no links to terrorist or criminal activity. After three months of investigative research and extensive interviews with five targets, “all vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press.”11

  In the United States, Muslim Americans endure the brunt of what the ACLU describes as “suspicionless surveillance.”12 But ubiquitous monitoring has consequences throughout society. As journalist Laurie Penny has persuasively argued, “If you live in a surveillance state for long enough, you create a censor in your head.”13 When video cameras are routine fixtures in urban landscapes; when corporate Internet giants store records of online navigation and communication (and make them frighteningly easy for the NSA to access); and when managers and bosses maintain capabilities to “measure and monitor employees as never before,” as reporter Steve Lohr has put it, society at large pays the price.14 These different vectors of surveillance aggregate, exerting a pressure for us to blend in, to think twice before speaking out, to, in essence, follow a narrow set of prescribed norms. Social conformity encourages quiet resignation and discourages the experimental—and necessarily risky—acts of speaking, thinking, and doing required for healthy democratic dissent.

  Will we, with the help of people like the ex-NSA contractor who bore enormous risk in speaking out, manage to compel our governments to curb such abuses and, in so doing, restore our right to associate free of undue surveillance? The hurdles are gargantuan; the sanctioned channels for political change in the United States are frighteningly narrow.15 The technical architecture of the Internet—wherein centralized, corporate-controlled servers house most of our data—makes capture both trivially easy and ubiquitous; this technical scenario has been described by civil liberties lawyer Eben Moglen as a “recipe for disaster,” prompting him and other Internet technologists, like security expert Bruce Schneier, to declare, “We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying.”16 Finally, as ACLU staff technologist Chris Soghoian argues, so long as Internet firms continue to “monetize their users’ private data,” they can never adopt a truly “pro-user” privacy policy.17

  And yet, a field which had seemed hopelessly desolate now resembles fertile terrain. The politically engaged geek family continues to grow—in size and political significance. It is constituted by various organizations and activists working with politicians, lawyers, journalists, and artists. Many emerged from the geeky quarters of the Internet. There is Julian Assange, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Chelsea Manning, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sarah Harrison, the Tor developers, Anonymous, Riseup, Edward Snowden, and many more. The last two years have been singular—never before have so many geeks and hackers wielded their keyboards for the sake of political expression, dissent, and direct action.18

  Increasingly, thanks to their combined actions, we recognize that we stand at a crossroads. Snowden ignited a fiery national conversation over privacy that has continued for over a year—a minor miracle in a mass mediascape that lionizes novelty and eschews long-term, sustained deliberation. There are promising signs of legislative change. In what free speech advocate Trevor Timm described as “a surprising rebuke to the NSA’s lawyers and the White House,” the US House of Representatives passed a sweeping bill in June 2014 prohibiting warrantless access to Americans’ emails and banning intelligence agencies from installing back doors in commercial hardware, with or without vendor complicity.19 The effects of the leak have in turn reverberated far beyond national borders, as Glenn Greenwald attests:

  [Snowden’s leak] changed the way people around the world viewed the reliability of any statements made by US officials and transformed relations between countries. It radically altered views about the proper role of journalism in relation to government power. And within the United States, it gave rise to an ideologically diverse, trans-partisan coalition pushing for meaningful reform of the surveillance state.20

  All this seems even more remarkable when one considers the viciousness with which many government officials, especially within the intelligence community, have reacted to Snowden. One anecdote is emblematic of the attitude: during the 2014 Ottawa Conference on Defense and Security, Melissa Hathaway, former director of the US Joint Interagency Cyber Task Force in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, recounted to her audience that she learned of Snowden’s flight to Russia (to seek political asylum) while in Tel Aviv. “I have to tell you the Israelis have a point of view that I do too. That he should have never been allowed to get on that plane—and then they [the Israelis] took it a little bit further: that the plane would have never landed.” As the uproarious laughter died down, Hathaway punctuated the sentiment with a one-liner: “I still might subscribe to their point of view.”21 Yet, even as the American state diminishes Snowden by calling him a mere criminal, his political claims are becoming more salient every day. Hathaway herself acknowledged this in the statement that catalyzed the above anecdote. “Our allies feel betrayed. Their citizens believe that Edward Snowden is a hero.”

  Snowden has fueled a nascent movement composed of technology collectives, lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, poli
ticians, and NGOs of varying stripes. This movement has lent its voice to the preexisting struggles of groups like the nonprofits Fight for the Future and the Open Technology Institute. The result has been a range of targeted policy and technological campaigns, such as Reset the Net, a grassroots effort to “to spread NSA-resistant privacy tools” so that they might become default features of the Internet.22 Technologies like The Amnesic Incognito Live System (also known as Tails, an operating system built for anonymity), Open Whisper Systems (an open-source endeavor to develop encryption software for mobile phones), and LEAP (a recursive acronym for the LEAP Encryption Access Project, which modifies existing encryption tools to make them user friendly) are being funded by citizens and organizations like Freedom of the Press Foundation. Snowden himself has endorsed encryption projects as both effective and necessary: “The bottom line is that encryption does work,” he told a packed room at South by Southwest in March 2014.23 These technologies are poised to facilitate some semblance of privacy for future generations of Internet users.

  Old World vs. New World

  Soon after the first batch of NSA revelations, Ireland saw its first hacking court case. Two members of LulzSec and Anonymous, Donncha O’Cearbhaill and Darren Martyn, were tried in July 2013 for the 2011 defacement of the website of Irish political party Fine Gael. En route to the courthouse in Dublin, I got lost and ended up arriving late. Because I own no personal tracking device (or cell phone, as you will), I did what people have done for centuries: I consulted a paper map and confused myself. It took me another forty-five minutes to reach the correct court, housed in a modern circular glass building. I was sure I had missed the proceedings.