Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

by Gabriella Coleman

  During research I could be found chatting with a number of journalists and filmmakers who, like me, spent an enormous about of time toiling away trying to crack the Anonymous puzzle. Their presence was welcome—talking shop and trading some research notes proved to be both comically relieving and professionally invaluable. Conversations with Quinn Norton, Asher Wolf, Steve Ragan, and Brian Knappenberger were instrumental to my thinking on Anonymous. Steve Ragan also deserves special mention for sharing so freely—most journalists are far more guarded about their possessions. Knappenberger’s film and Parmy Olson’s engrossing account of Anonymous and LulzSec proved to be valuable resources for this project.

  In 2013, a slew of colleagues read a couple of early chapters and dispensed thoughtful commentary: Danielle Citron, Nathan Schneider, Jonathan Sterne, Darin Barney, Christine Ross, Carrie Rentschler, Sandra Hyde, Michael Ralph, Whitney Phillips, and Chris Kelty. Over the years, I have lectured extensively on Anonymous, and it would be impossible to take stock of all the bountiful feedback I received; however, comments from Paul Eiss, Angela Zito, Faye Ginsburg, Haidy Geismar, Daniel Miller, Alberto Sanchez, and Bob Rutledge are of particular note.

  At McGill University, I am fortunate to hold a position designed to enable my engagement in both outreach and writing; I am deeply grateful to the generous donor who provides its funding. The environment at McGill has proved stimulating, and I am especially thankful to all the Bits, Bots and Bytes participants for contributing to a research forum and scholarly exchange that has become one of the highlights of my month. Two of its members, Scott Kushner and Elena Razlogova, read and commented incisively on additional material shared outside of the meet-up. My undergraduate student and unflagging research assistant Maya Richmond has successfully hunted down every last bit of material I asked her to procure while also providing sharp insights regarding hackers and tricksters. Caroline Habluetzel, who received a PhD from our department, also provided invaluable and meticulous research assistance, all while battling cancer. She passed away in May 2013 and will be missed. My graduate class, “Technological Underworlds,” was given an early draft of the first five chapters to read, resulting in fascinating questions and the identification of various problems. Darcie DeAngelo went beyond the call of duty to provide extensive commentary. Molly Sauter was completing her own book—The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet—throughout the same period, and reading the manuscript proved both essential and fascinating as I worked through the ethics of digital direct action.

  Writing a book for a popular audience while remaining faithful to complex, esoteric, technical, and legal details is a formidable challenge. I sought the advice of a host of experts to ensure that I was not misrepresenting these nuances. Orin Kerr, Marcia Hoffman, Ahmed Ghappour, and Andres Guadamuz read through the legal sections. Many technologists and hackers always delivered answers to my many questions: David Mirza, Chris Soghoian, Dino A. Dai Zovi, Chris Wysopal, Space Rouge, James Atkinson, Patrick Gray, Dan Guido, Morgan Marquis-Boire, and Brian Martin. Meanwhile, journalists Kim Zetter and Ted Bridis clarified some uncertainties I held about hackers and FBI policies toward informants. Any inaccuracies that remain stem from my inability to follow the excellent guidance of these consultants.

  Family members should be thanked for enduring the negative consequences of book writing—and the Andersons were patient and gracious as the last three holiday seasons saw me not quite as present as everyone else. My father, an unflagging supporter of my work, ensured that his friends, most of them retired, learned something important about Anonymous. My dog Roscoe, with his cute snaggletooth, was daily able to woo me from my desk, ensuring that I took necessary breaks from writing.

  Finally, there are three people whose imprint is everywhere in this book and who have read it start to finish, two of them more than once. My partner Micah Anderson, who spends his days (and too often nights) running a privacy-friendly ISP, is a talented writer. He read the first few chapters, took me aside, and clued me in to the fact that I needed to be far more lively and descriptive if this was to be a nonacademic/popular book. His subsequent readings of every chapter always generated useful comments or edits. He certainly doused with gasoline all my attempts at humor, before throwing a match and fueling the fire with jokes of his own. Some were just too wild and imaginative and I had to stamp the fire out, but in the aftermath, things were typically much improved. I am extremely thankful that he is willing to be part of the creative process, and that he put up with me as I wrote two books back to back—something I will never, ever do again.

  In part because of Micah’s advice—and in part due to my own proclivity to explain everything—I went completely overboard with writing. Two people were poised to contain me, call out my inconsistencies, help me whittle the manuscript down to an appropriate size, and generally do everything in their power to make this a better book.

  First, my research assistant Matt Goerzen, who is also my MA student and a quirky and talented artist specializing in, among other topics, anonymity, was a first line editor. Trained as a journalist, he is also a dexterous writer gifted in adding a touch of grace and clarity to any prose that comes his way. Since he has deeply pondered and completed so much research on the cultures of online anonymity, his comments were sharp and discerning. This book is much stronger because of his unstinting willingness to impart his wisdom. I will be forever grateful that he took on the role of my most trusted guide and interlocutor, and I only hope I can return the debt as his MA thesis supervisor.

  When entertaining possible publishers, I wanted one that would help me reach the right balance between analysis and accessibility; Verso immediately presented itself as the number-one candidate and it has been a pleasure working with the entire team, including Mark Martin, Colin Beckett, Jennifer Tighe, and Jacob Stevens. I am especially grateful to have worked with Andrew Hsiao. When my book ballooned to an unacceptable size, I will confess that I dreaded the stringent measures he might enact to trim the manuscript. As I feared the worst, his advice ultimately proved both stellar and specific, making the pruning process far less painful than could have been. He went through the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb; he was persnickety about the small details of phrasing, he entertained the value of my arguments, and he zoomed out to identify the sections, sentences, and even chapters where shaving and cutting were necessary. There were moments when, if it were possible to hug someone through email, I would have hugged him, multiple times. I have also thoroughly enjoyed our conversations about publishing and politics and look forward to many more in the future.

  Finally, I would like to thank all of the masked activists and pranksters for staging this wildly epic play and giving me the opportunity to write about it.

  A Note on Sources

  In presenting a popular ethnography of Anonymous, this book leans heavily on journalistic convention and sourcing methodologies. Many readers will wonder how the information contained herein can be verified, given that lies, guile, and fabrication are the tools of the trade—often wielded with pride—by those operating under the mantle of Anonymous. But while some of the anecdotes recorded remain unverifiable, or simply accompanied by chat logs, they complement a factual narrative largely made possible by legal records. Indeed, this book could not have been written were it not for the unmasking of many participants upon their arrest and prosecution—and the troves of careful (and sometimes problematic) information made public by law enforcement toward this end. Additionally, while anonymity by nature enables individuals to speak out against and challenge powerful institutions, upon capture and sentencing many participants are suddenly afforded a different sort of freedom: the ability to speak honestly about their personal identities and experiences as individuals, distanced from a collective or protective pseudonym. Access to chat logs and especially court documents has further enabled me to authenticate many claims made by Anons and their colleagues prior to arrest (in the great majority of instanc
es what I had been told turned out to be true). The extensive chat logs cited in the book come from numerous sources: from public IRC channels, from published logs put online by Anonymous, from private logs given to me, and finally from logs submitted as court evidence and leaked to reporters. In instances where no documents existed, I have attempted to interview multiple participants and relied, where possible, on accounts published by respected media figures. It is a sad reality that many fascinating tales and participants, unable to be substantiated beyond rumor, were not included in these pages. Since many of the figures covered in this book are now well known to the public—and have been written about extensively—I have not changed their names or their pseudonyms, except in instances where doing so might pose a threat to the individual in question.

  This book should be read as a collection of personal experiences and reflections. While I address major events and historical turning points, and attempt to be inclusive of multiple (even, at times, conflicting) perspectives, there is much more at work within Anonymous than what is in these pages.

  Notes

  Introduction: “And Now You Have Got Our Attention”

  1.“Dear Fox New,” YouTube video, posted by dearfoxnews, July 29, 2007, last accessed July 8, 2014, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFjU8bZR19A.

  2.This quote comes from a class lecture.

  3.“Message to Scientology,” YouTube video, posted by Church0f Scientology, Jan. 21, 2008, last accessed July 4, 2014, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ.

  4.Siobhan Gorman, “Power Outage Seen as a Potential Aim of Hacking Group,” online.wsj.com, Feb. 21, 2012.

  5.Sam Biddle, “No, Idiots, Anonymous Isn’t Going to Destroy the Power Grid,” gizmodo.com, Feb. 21, 2012.

  1. On Trolls, Tricksters, and the Lulz

  1.Danielle Keats Citron, Hate 3.0: The Rise of Discriminatory Online Harassment and How to Stop It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming); Danielle Keats Citron, “Cyber Civil Rights,” Boston University Law Review, vol. 91 (2009).

  2.For a detailed critique of the CFAA and recommendations for reform see http://www.eff.org/issues/cfaa.

  3.Tom McCarthy, “Andrew Auernheimer’s Conviction over Computer Fraud Thrown Out,” theguardian.com, April 1, 2014.

  4.Joseph Carey, Twitter post, July 22, 2013, 10:22 am, http://twitter.com/JDCareyMusic/status/359362756568285184.

  5.weev, “I am weev. I may be going to prison under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act tomorrow at my sentencing. AMA.,” reddit, March 17, 2013, last accessed May 21, 2014, available at http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ahkgc/i_am_weev_i_may_be_going

  _to_prison_under_the/c8xgqq9.

  6.Daniel Bates, “Standing by Her Man: Strauss-Kahn’s Wife Puts Her Mansion Up as Collateral to Get Him out of Jail and She’s Paying the Rent at His ‘Golden Cage,’” dailymail.co.uk, May 21, 2011.

  7.“Lulz,” Encyclopedia Dramatica, last accessed May 23, 2012, available at http://encyclopediadramatica.es/Lulz

  8.For early references to “lulz” on Jameth’s LiveJournal site, see http://web.archive.org/web/20021102004836/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/jameth (last accessed May 22, 2014).

  9.Whitney Phillips, “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online,” First Monday vol. 16, no. 12 (2011).

  10.Many of these insights are delectably explored in Lewis Hyde’s majestic account Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

  11.Ibid., p. 9

  12.Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

  13.Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (New York: Grove Press, 2013), 226.

  14.Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution—25th Anniversary Edition (Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010).

  15.Adam L. Penenberg, “A Private Little Cyberwar,” forbes.com, Feb. 21, 2000.

  16.“Biography of u4ea,” soldierx.com, last accessed May 21, 2014, available at https://www.soldierx.com/hdb/u4ea.

  17.Marco Deseriis, “‘Lots of Money Because I Am Many’: The Luther Blissett Project and the Multiple-Use Name Strategy,” in Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 65–93.

  18.Trond Lossius, “/55[Fwd: [max-msp] it’s over],” /55 mailing list, Jan. 15, 2001, last accessed May 21, 2014, available at http://www.bek.no/pipermail/55/2001-January/000102.html. A good example of Nezvanova’s art can be found at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-bold-0009/msg00073.html (last accessed May 21, 2014).

  19.Lee Knuttila, “Users Unknown: 4chan, Anonymity and Contingency,” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 10 (Oct. 2011).

  20.“Internet Hate Machine” was a phrase used by a local Fox News program in Los Angeles in 2007 to describe Anonymous. The group promptly turned the phrase into a popular meme.

  21.Phillips, “LOLing at Tragedy.”

  22.David Graeber, “Manners, Deference, and Private Property in Early Modern Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 39 (October 1997): 694–728.

  23.Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

  2. Project Chanology—I Came for the Lulz but Stayed for the Outrage

  1.Anonymous, “The Story Behind the Tom Cruise Video Link,” Why We Protest, July 27, 2013, last accessed May 23, 2014, available at http://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/the-story-behind-the-tom-cruise-video-leak.93170/page-4.

  2.“The Cruise Indoctrination Video Scientology Tried to Suppress,” gawker.com, January 15, 2008, last accessed July 11, 2014.

  3.L. Ron Hubbard, “Scientology Technology,” The Auditor, no. 41 (1968).

  4.XENU TV, “The Story Behind the Tom Cruise Video Link,” Why We Protest, Sept. 7, 2011, last accessed May 23, 2014, available at http://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/the-story-behind-the-tom-cruise-video-leak.93170/page-3#post-1875660.

  5.“Code of Conduct,” YouTube video, posted by ChurchOfScientology, Feb. 1, 2008, last accessed May 23, 2014, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-063clxiB8I.

  6.Cain, “Hal Tuner Raid Planned for Tomorrow,” The PFLD, April 20, 2007, last accessed May 23, 2014, available at http://episkoposcain.blogspot.ca/2007/04/hal-turner-raid-planned-for-tomorrow.html.

  7.Asterix, “August Theme: Anonymous Takes Back Chanology,” Why We Protest, July 14, 2008, last accessed May 23, 2014, available at http://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/august-theme-anonymous-takes-back-chanology.18139/page-2.

  8.Why We Protest, http://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/false-press-we-need-to-deal-with-this-immediately.80242

  9.“Operation Slickpubes,” Motherfuckery, Jan. 10, 2009, last accessed May 23, 2014, available at http://motherfuckery.org/this-is-how-a-post-looks.

  10.“In 2009, NYPD Issued ‘Surveillance Request’ to ‘Identify’ Anonymous Members During Their Anti-Scientology Rally,” techdirt.com, Sept. 4, 2013, last accessed July 11, 2014.

  11.Eric Hobsbawm, “Subculture and Primitive Rebels” in the Cultural Resistance Reader (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 136.

  12.Ibid., 147

  13.Tony Ortega, “Meet the Man Behind WWP, the Web Home of Anonymous and Project Chanology,” The Underground Bunker, June 22, 2013, last accessed May 23, 2014, available at http://tonyortega.org/2013/06/22/meet-the-man-behind-wwp-the-web-home-of-anonymous.

  14.Online interview with author.

  15.Anonymous, “What the Dicks Is Marblecake and What Do They Do?” Why We Protest, July 23, 2008, last accessed July 4, 2014, available at http://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/what-the-dicks-is-marblecake-and-what-do-they-do.16012/page-13.

  16.Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012).

  17.Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Struct
urelessness,” The Second Wave, vol. 2, no. 1 (1972).

  18.“Operation Clambake Present: The Scientology Fair Game Policy,” Operation Clambake: Undressing the Church of Scientology, last accessed May 23, 2014, available at http://www.xenu.net/fairgame-e.html.

  3. Weapons of the Geek

  1.David Leigh, “Guardian Gagged from Reporting Parliament,” the guardian.com, Oct. 12, 2009.

  2.Christian Christensen, “Collateral Murder and the After-Life of Activist Imagery,” medium.com, April 14, 2014.

  3.Evan Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed,” wired.com, July 13, 2011.

  4.Lamo has claimed that, since he has published some articles, he is a journalist. He has also said that he is a minister for the Universal Life Church. See Luis Martinez, “Bradley Manning Accuser Adrian Lamo Takes the Stand,” Dec. 20, 2011, abcnews.go.com.

  5.Ed Pilkington, “Bradley Manning’s Treatment Was Cruel and Inhuman, UN Torture Chief Rules,” theguardian.com, March 12, 2012.

  6.Raffi Khatchadourian, “No Secrets,” newyorker.com, June 7, 2010.

  7.The connection can be drawn even further, as the young Julian Assange had his own foray into fighting Scientology as well. Back in Australia, he ran a free speech Internet service provider, Suburbia, which hosted anti-Scientology material. He also organized an anti-Scientology protest in Melbourne in 1996.

  8.Wilford’s Dog, “AMA Request Sabu from LuLSec this would be amazing,” reddit, Sept. 23, 2011, last accessed May 29, 2014, available at http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kpfsp/ama_request_sabu_from_lulsec

  _this_would_be_amazing/

  9.Guest, “Untitled,” July 5, 2010, last accessed May 29, 2014, available at http://pastebin.com/ytZ7N1x7.

  10.For reasons of privacy, this is not a real IP address.