Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

by Gabriella Coleman

  As it turned out, the two cases were sandwiched between more than a dozen petty criminal hearings; it would be another hour before O’Cearbhaill and Martyn stood before the judge. As I waited, sitting next to a local Anon nicknamed Firefly, we had a grand time watching the judge—a sensible and matronly woman in her fifties—gently, but firmly, scold the dozen other defendants. Most of them had been involved in youthful mischief and disorderly conduct. In one case, a twenty-something young lady with stunningly long black hair, an indignant scowl, crossed arms, and an immodest wardrobe was found guilty of beating up a member of the Garda—the local police—while thoroughly inebriated.

  The two Anonymous cases clearly stood out from the lineup of brawls and drunken mischief. After hearing both sides in two defacement cases, the judge expressed skepticism about the prosecution’s claim that restoring the Fine Gael website was expensive. How, she asked, could it possibly have cost ten thousand euros if nothing was damaged? The prosecution had no answer. The judge concluded that this hack was a “stunt to embarrass a political party rather than to disclose data to the public at large.” She did not want to see O’Cearbhaill and Martyn go to jail for the digital equivalent of graffiti. Nor did she think that their acts were laudable. Instead, she admonished both, calling their hack “a terrible abuse of talent.” Then she fined them each five thousand euros—payable by October (and with half going to charity)—and ordered them to enroll in a restorative justice program. She did not see what they did as political—had she, the humane punishment might have been even more lenient.

  After the case adjourned, O’Cearbhaill and Martyn slipped out with their families. Firefly and I headed out toward the center of town, strolling along Dublin’s main canal under the sun—Ireland was experiencing a miraculous two-week heatwave. Together, we did a postmortem of the trial. We agreed that O’Cearbhaill and Martyn got off very light; compared to the Anons tried in the United States, the Irish and British cases were remarkably mild. While the act of defacing a website does not compare to Hammond’s actions, the long string of hacks that Ryan “Kayla” Ackroyd, a British national, carried out with LulzSec came a bit closer. In May 2013, after he pled guilty to one charge of hacking the Pentagon and conspiring to hack Sony, Britain’s National Health Service, and Rupert Murdoch’s News International, the British state sentenced Ackroyd to thirty months in jail, of which he served ten; notably, he received no fine. In the US cases, even when the prison sentences are relatively short, the fines added on top virtually guarantee years of indentured servitude. At the age of twenty-two, John Anthony Borell III, aka Kahuna of the CabinCr3w, was sentenced to thirty-six months in prison for hacking into multiple police websites and dumping personal data. After serving his time, he will then still have to pay nearly $230,000 in damages.

  In addition, many of the charges leveled against hackers in the United States have seemed to come out of left field, as illustrated by the ordeal of Barrett Brown. On March 6, 2012, the same day Fox News outed Sabu and the FBI arrested Hammond, the G-men executed a search warrant for Barrett Brown’s residence. Among other things, authorities sought to locate “records relating to HBGary, Infragard, Endgame Systems, Anonymous, LulzSec, IRC Chats, Twitter, wiki.echelon2.org, and pastebin.com.”24 Six months later, in September, the FBI arrested Brown (live on video chat, fittingly) after he—to be entirely frank—set himself up for a raid. He had posted a video online entitled “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith Part Three Revenge of the Lithe,” which featured a hyperbolic tirade against a federal agent who had questioned his mother.25 As expected, he was then arrested for threatening an FBI agent. An excerpt from Brown’s rant might demonstrate more clearly why he was so full of fury—and why the FBI, in turn, was compelled to raid him (rather than simply writing the video off as a piece of performance art):

  Guess what’s on my fucking search warrant: fraud! I bring in no money … a fucking fraud charge for a fucking writer activist, who has no money, who has spent all his money on fucking lawyers for himself and his fucking mother … Agent Smith posted addresses of [my house and my mother’s house] … He is a criminal, involved in a criminal conspiracy … Anyway, that’s why Smith’s life is over. When I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to go kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids … How do you like them apples? As Smith has noted, I’m in danger from the Zetas … Thanks to that fella [for putting up my address] … I will assume that since the Zetas often take the guise of Mexican security personnel [and often are] government officials, I’m concerned that the same trick may be played here … Particularly the FBI … will be regarded as potential Zeta assassin squads, and as the FBI [knows] … they know that I’m armed, that I come from a military family, that I was taught to shoot by a Vietnam vet … and I will shoot all of them and kill them if they come and do anything because they are engaged in a criminal conspiracy and I have reason to fear for my life not just from the Zetas, but the US governments [sic] … I have no choice left but to defend myself, my family … and frankly, you know, it was pretty obvious I was going to be dead before I was forty, so I wouldn’t mind going out with two FBI sidearms like a fucking Egyptian pharaoh. Adios

  Alongside charges for these threats, Brown also faced charges related to the Stratfor hack. In his Project PM chat room, he had shared a web link to an externally hosted file containing the leaked Stratfor credit card data. For doing so, he was charged with ten counts of aggravated identify theft and two counts relating to credit card fraud, with a combined total possible sentence of forty-five years (plus the sixty-some years for the other charges). Many other people who had also publicly circulated the link were not charged. Journalist Adrian Chen, who tended to be critical of Anonymous, wrote: “As a journalist who covers hackers and has ‘transferred and posted’ many links to data stolen by hackers—in order to put them in stories about the hacks—this indictment is frightening because it seems to criminalize linking.”26

  Because Brown was Anonymous’s ethical foil, flaunting himself as the face of a collective seeking to be faceless, he was a divisive figure. Nevertheless, Anons concurred with Kevin Gallagher, the system administrator running Brown’s support campaign, when he argued that “it was this journalistic work of digging into areas that powerful people would rather keep in the dark that made him a target.”27 Brown’s supporters raised funds, helped secure top-notch lawyers, and worked to publicize his charges.

  In a surprising plot twist, the government dropped the linking charges just two days after the defense filed its motion to dismiss. (Dropping the charges avoids bad precedent and allows the government to continue pursuing investigations of the same ilk.) Still facing an extraordinary 105 years in prison, gagged against speaking to the media, and having already spent over a year and a half in custody, Brown accepted a plea bargain. At the time of writing, it remains unclear what the plea bargain will mean for the charges relating to threatening a federal officer.

  The takeaway is this: whether one seeks to hack with impunity and anonymity—whether politically motivated or not—or to simply attain the status of a witty and sprightly rabble-rouser, it is best to do so on the European side of the Atlantic (where Anonymous and other forms of geek activism are more common).

  Later that evening in Ireland, I was keen to ask O’Cearbhaill his thoughts about the case, but he was nowhere to be found. As it turns out, the Garda had been waiting for him outside of the courthouse, where they again arrested him—not for hacking this time. O’Cearbhaill, a chemistry student, maintained a laboratory at his parent’s home. Some of the chemicals could (in theory) be used to make explosives. Although there was not an iota of evidence that he was using, or intended to use, the chemicals for such purposes, he was arrested under Irish antiterrorism legislation.

  While the prosecutor later determined that there was insufficient evidence to bring a case, some Anons floated a hypothesis that the Garda was attempting to intimidate O’Cearbhaill into f
essing up to his alleged involvement in what had become a legendary hack. Back in early February 2012, AntiSec had released audio of an intercepted conference call among the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the Garda. The subject of the conference call was none other than Anonymous itself. The leaked call was not only a 100 percent lulzly hack, but also an (apparently) lasting embarrassment to the agencies involved, in particular the Garda. It was the email account of one of its own officers that had been compromised to obtain the data needed to “join” the call. (At the time of this writing, no one has been found guilty of this intrusion).

  The case may also suggest another reason why law enforcement is hostile toward computer spelunkers. Hackers occasionally make it their mission to “watch the watchers.” Two Kevins—Poulsen and Mitnick—had done it before. Media scholar Douglas Thomas, who covered the ordeal of both hackers, noted how “Poulsen hacked into the FBI’s systems and discovered a maze of wiretaps and surveillance programs that were monitoring everyone and everything from the restaurant across the street from him to (allegedly) Ferdinand Marcos.”28 AntiSec pulled off the same thing, but even more loudly and publicly.

  A few days later, O’Cearbhaill, free again, joined a group of us for a summer picnic on Saint Stephen’s Green. I had brought together a range of Anons from different networks and operational iterations, from the ex-Scientologist Pete Griffiths (a keen Anonymous supporter) to David from Chanology, Firefly from AnonOps, and hackers like O’Cearbhaill. He told me more about how he first got into hacktivism at the age of fifteen, and about his father’s experiences in the IRA—including the six years he spent in jail and the forty-day hunger strike he carried out. His father, unlike the judge, had naturally understood his son’s actions as political. By the summer of 2013, I was confident that most Anonymous participants were politically inclined; they may tunnel and undermine, but they do so in an attempt to dig through to daybreak—to end the dark reign of injustice. Still, something shifts when a person hears stories like the ones O’Cearbhaill shared with me. Fleeting shadows and perceptions become grounded and legible; it becomes so clear that each contributor has a rich life story that has led him or her to Anonymous, and that Anonymous itself functions as a portal to further destinations still.

  Indeed, a year later I returned to Dublin and, alongside fifty other audience members, sat in Trinity College’s Science Gallery and listened to O’Cearbhaill—now the auditor of the Dublin University Pirate Party—give a talk about Tor, the privacy tool. We were at a meet-up organized by CryptoParty, a grassroots movement that aims to teach cryptography to the general public. The idea was hatched by Asher Wolf and some other geeks in 2012. Just days later, over beers at a pub in London, Mustafa Al-Bassam (tflow) told me about his internship at Privacy International, the leading European NGO fighting for the right to whisper. There are dozens of other examples. Whatever one may think of Anonymous, it clearly acted as a political gateway. Many who left the group will continue, in different ways, to contribute to political life.

  Unlike Al-Bassam and many others, Hammond and Monsegur were activists well before they became involved in Anonymous. But their paths diverged radically when their involvement with the collective ended. Soon after news broke about Monsegur’s cooperation, he vanished—and nobody had any clue as to where he had gone. As it turns out, he spent seven months in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the same prison where Hammond was incarcerated before he was moved to Kentucky to serve out his ten-year sentence. An anonymous source had tipped me off—but my pleas to reporters for a detailed investigation as to why he was in prison fell on deaf ears. Only later did I receive confirmation from Hammond himself. It wasn’t until May 26, 2014, when Monsegur was finally sentenced after seven delays, that the circumstances leading to Monsegur’s rearrest and incarceration were made available to the public. He had violated his bail conditions by penning a blog post and chatting with an Anonymous participant. At the sentencing, Judge Loretta Preska breathlessly trumpeted Monsegur as a model informant and determined that his 2012 stint in jail was punishment enough. He was a free man. Before he strolled out of court, Preska further lauded Monsegur: “The immediacy of Mr. Monsegur’s cooperation and its around-the-clock nature was particularly helpful to the government … That personal characteristic of turning on a dime to doing good, not evil, is the most important factor in this sentencing.” Preska’s lenient sentence not-so-subtly relayed the following message to future informants: cooperate and you will be treated well.

  Although the outcome was far from surprising, Twitter was a flutter with wails of outrage: “Jeremy Hammond is serving a ten-year sentence for hacks that Sabu (working for the feds) told him to do. When will the feds go to prison?”29 asked @YourAnonNews. “Preska is an absolute disgrace to the concept of justice,” offered Firefly during an interview. These laments could do nothing to alter Hammond’s situation—but many Anons derived some measure of comfort when, only days later, both Motherboard and the Daily Dot published accounts which called the government storyline into question—effectively corroborating Hammond’s version of the events. Along with cooperating “around-the-clock,” the news reports ascertained that Monsegur was given free rein to initiate, coordinate, and carry out dozens of hacks.

  Following Monsegur’s release, Hammond issued his own statement: “By aggressively prosecuting hackers who play by their own rules, they want to deter others from taking up the cause and hope future arrests will yield more aspiring cooperators. We must continue to reject excuses and justifications that make it acceptable to sell out your friends and become a pawn of cyber-imperialism … Sabu avoided a prison sentence, but the consequences of his actions will haunt him for the rest of his life. Not even halfway through my time, I would still rather be where I’m at: while they can take away your freedom temporarily, your honor lasts forever.”30 While Hammond’s lengthy detention will undoubtedly be trying, his vocal commitment to his principles in spite of his unmasking and incarceration have already proved a beacon of inspiration to many in the activist community.

  While it might seem unusual for a researcher to become so entangled with his or her object of study, it has long been par for the course in anthropology. As Danilyn Rutherford writes, anthropological methods “create obligations, obligations that compel those who seek knowledge to put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within the setting and among the people they describe.”31 As part of a letter-writing campaign organized by Hammond’s lawyers, I, along with 150 other citizens, wrote to Judge Loretta Preska to ask for leniency; in the letters, we emphasized the political nature of Anonymous. Wherever possible, I have attempted to translate the confusing world of Anonymous for multiple publics. I have also been writing letters to some of the Anons in prison. As part of these obligations, I’ve thought long and deliberately about the underlying goals motivating this book. Ultimately, I reached the conclusion that I have two clashing objectives: to stamp out misinformation and to embrace enchantment.

  First and foremost, in this book I have sought to dispel some of the many misconceptions about Anonymous: many participants like O’Cearbhaill were not primarily driven by a desire to accrue lulz—even if this irreverent spirit still guided social interactions and underwrote strategies. Anonymous has matured into a serious political movement, so much so that many of the trolls from the “Internet Hate Machine” days would “not recognize” the Anonymous of today, as Ryan Ackroyd told me. He is among the tiny fraction of participants who bridged the divide between these now clearly distinctive eras. (Of course this does not mean that the Machine of Hate won’t rise again, as an Anonymous activist named “blackplans” tweeted: “Without the trolls, the hackers, the 4chan hordes, how many of you nice, sensitive people would ever have heard of #Anonymous? Remember.”)32

  As part of this first mission, I’ve sought to avoid extolling Anonymous’s every move. Even in its activist incarnations, Anonymous has clearly engaged in morally dubious—and sometimes downrigh
t awful—endeavors. The most troubling moments come when innocent people are caught up in the Anonymous cross fire. Some hacks struck me as counterproductive, and not always worth the risks taken by the persons involved. Indeed, parts of Anonymous are riddled with irresolvable contradictions.

  And so, when assessing Anonymous, it seems impossible to arrive at a universal—much less neat-and-tidy—maxim regarding the group’s effects. Instead, I have tried to relay the lessons of Anonymous by narrating its exploits, failures, and successes. These compiled stories are idiosyncratic and told from the vantage point of my personal travels and travails. There are so many untold and secret tales that, were they publicized, would likely shift our comprehension of Anonymous. While all social life and political movements are complex, even convoluted, displaying endless facets and dimensions, Anonymous’s embrace of multiplicity, secrecy, and deception makes it especially difficult to study and comprehend.

  This dynamism and multitudinous quality is also one of Anonymous’s core strengths. Anonymous is emblematic of a particular geography of resistance. Composed of multiple competing groups, short-term power is achievable for brief durations, while long-term dominance by any single group or person is virtually impossible. In such a dynamic landscape, it may be “easy to co-opt, but impossible to keep co-opted,” as Quinn Norton thoughtfully put it during a South by Southwest panel in March 2013. In this way, the multitudinal “nature” of Anonymous precludes its subjection to either aspirational figures working internally, or external figures who would exert influence either through informants, like Sabu, or through exogenous pressure. Anonymous is cryptic, forcing us to work and dance with the scraps and shards it shows us.