Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

by Gabriella Coleman

  11.For more on botnets, see Finn Brunton’s excellent Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

  12.“Activists Target Recording Industry Websites,” bbc.com, Sept. 20, 2010.

  13.Ernesto, “Anti-Piracy Outfit Tries to Erase History,” torrentfreak.com, Oct. 15, 2011.

  14.David Kravets, “Wired Exclusive: I Was a Hacker for the MPAA,” abcnews.go.com, Oct. 22, 2007.

  15.Enigmax, “Anti-Piracy Outfit Threatens to DoS Uncooperative Torrent Sites,” torrentfreak.com, Sept. 5, 2010.

  16.Enigmax, “4chan DDoS Takes Down MPAA and Anti-Piracy Websites,” torrentfreak.com, Sept. 18, 2010.

  17.“Hackers Hit Hollywood’s Piracy Watchdog,” reuters.com, Sept. 19, 2010.

  18.Christopher Williams, “Piracy Threats Lawyer Mocks 4chan DDoS Attack,” theregister.co.uk, Sept. 22, 2010.

  19.Nate Anderson, “‘Straightforward Legal Blackmail’: A Tale of P2P Lawyering,” arstechnica.com, June 6, 2010.

  20.“Lords Hansard text for 26 Jan 201026 Jan 2010 (pt 0003),” parliament.uk, last accessed May 29, 2014, available at http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200910/ldhansrd/text/100126-0003.htm.

  21.Nate Anderson, “The ‘Legal Blackmail’ Business: Inside a P2P Settlement Factory,” arstechnica.com, Sept. 28, 2010.

  22.Enigmax, “ACS:Law (Gay) Porn Letters Target Pensioners, Married Men,” torrentfreak.com, Sept. 25, 2010.

  23.Charles Arthur, “ACS:Law and MediaCAT Close Their Doors, Ending Filesharing Claims,” theguardian.com, Feb. 4, 2011.

  24.“ACS:Law Solicitor Andrew Crossley Suspended by SRA,” bbc.com, Jan. 18, 2012.

  25.Josh Halliday, “ACS:Law Solicitor at Centre of Internet Piracy Row Suspended,” theguardian.com, Jan. 18, 2012.

  26.Ernesto, “Behind the Scenes at Anonymous’ Operation Payback,” torrentfreak.com, Nov. 15, 2010.

  27.“Anonymous Is Not Unanimous,” last accessed May 29, 2014, available at http://pastebin.com/4vprKdXH.

  28.“PPi Ask Anonymous to Stop Payback,” The pp.international.general, Nov. 2010, last accessed May 29, 2014, available at http://lists.pirateweb.net/pipermail/pp.international.general/2010-November/thread.html#8046.

  29.Pirate Parties of the UK and US, “Pirate Party Op,” Nov. 19, 2010, last accessed May 29, 2014, available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/43400303/Pirate-Party-OP.

  30.Ernesto, “Behind the Scenes at Anonymous’ Operation Payback.”

  31.Online interview with author.

  32.Ibid.

  33.For an example, see “Untitled,” Feb. 24, 2011, last accessed May 29, 2014, available at http://pastebin.com/0Y5CkrF9.

  34.Online interview with author.

  35.Online interview with author.

  36.gster, “DDoS Attacks on Pro-Copyright Groups: Pirate Parties and ‘Operation Payback,’” Play Station Universe, Nov. 25, 2010, last accessed May 29, 2014, available at psu.com.

  4. The Shot Heard Round the World

  1.Art Keller, “Dozens (Yes, Dozens) Show Up for Anonymous’ Million-Mask March,” newsweek.com, Nov. 7, 2013.

  2.Justin Elliot, “The 10 Most Important Wikileaks Revelations,” salon.com, Nov. 29, 2010.

  3.Martin Beckford, “Sarah Palin: Hunt WikiLeaks Founder Like al-Qaeda and Taliban Leaders,” telegraph.co.uk, Nov. 30, 2010.

  4.Kathryn Jean Lopez, “On This Sunday Outrage,” nationalreview.com, Nov. 28, 2010.

  5.At the time, statistics were available at http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top10.php and http://searchirc.com/channel-stats.

  6.Richard Stallman, “The Anonymous WikiLeaks Protests Are a Mass Demo Against Control,” theguardian.com, Dec. 17, 2010.

  7.For precise figures, see Molly Sauter, The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

  8.Noam Cohen, “Web Attackers Find a Cause in WikiLeaks,” nytimes.com, Dec. 9, 2010.

  9.Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency (New York: Back Bay Books, 2013), 109.

  10.Sean-Paul Correll, “’Tis the Season of DDoS—WikiLeaks Edition,” PandaLabs Blog, last accessed June 3, 2014, available at http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/tis-the-season-of-ddos-wikileaks-editio.

  11.Sean-Paul Correll, “Operation:Payback Broadens to ‘Operation Avenge Assange,’” PandaLabs Blog, last accessed June 3, 2014, available at http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/operationpayback-broadens-to-operation-avenge-assange.

  12.Nick Davies, “10 Days in Sweden: The Full Allegations Against Julian Assange,” theguardian.com, Dec. 17, 2010.

  13.Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), xix.

  14.Jon Snow, Twitter post, Dec. 9, 2010, 5:22 am, https://twitter.com/jonsnowC4/status/12814239458656256.

  15.Zeynep Tufekci, “WikiLeaks Exposes Internet’s Dissent Tax, Not Nerd Supremacy,” theatlantic.com, Dec. 22, 2010.

  16.Online interview with the author.

  17.Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1981).

  18.Ethan Case, “The Dark Side of Anonymous: Everything You Never Knew About the Hacktivist Group,” policymic.com, Jan. 3, 2012.

  19.“Untitled,” Dec. 10, 2010, last accessed June 3, 2014, available at http://pastebin.com/WzzJ1Jp3.

  20.Joel Johnson, “What Is LOIC?” gizmodo.com, Dec. 8, 2010.

  21.Gerry Smith, “Feds Charge 13 Members of Anonymous in ‘Operation Payback’ Attacks,” huffingtonpost.com, Oct. 3, 2010.

  22.For the definitive account of early hactivism, see Tim Jordan and Paul Taylor, Hactivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? (New York: Routledge, 2004).

  23.Molly Sauter, “‘LOIC Will Tear Us Apart,’” American Behavioral Scientist, 998, vol. 57 (2013): 983–100.

  24.Frances Fox Piven, Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?: The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate (New York: New Press, 2011).

  25.Sauter, “LOIC Will Tear Us Apart.”

  26.Elinor Mills, “Old-time Hacktivists: Anonymous, You’ve Crossed the Line,” cnet.com, March 30, 2012.

  27.Tod Gemuese, Facebook comment on page of Cult of the Dead Cow, Jan. 10, 2013, last accessed June 5, 2014, available at http://www.facebook.com/groups/28828338908/permalink/10151344658883909.

  28.For an extended and illuminating discussion on the DDoS campaign as an intervention that furthers speech objectives but also qualifies as conduct, see Sauter, The Coming Swarm.

  29.Ethan Zuckerman, Hal Roberts, Ryan McGrady, Jillian York, and John Palfrey, 2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks, Berkman Center for Internet and Security, Dec. 20, 2010, available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2010/DDoS_Independent_Media_Human_Rights.

  30.For example, in March 2013, the Los Angeles Times issued a correction after erroneously stating in a post that an indictment charged Anonymous with what amounted to hacking. See Matt Pearce, “Wisconsin Man Indicted in Anonymous Attack of Koch Industries,” latimes.com, March 27, 2013. The correction appears near the end of the article.

  31.Lee Mathews, “Man Fined $183,000 for Helping Anonymous Ddos a Site for One Minute,” geek.com, Dec. 10, 2013. Ryan J. Reilly, “Loading Koch Industries Website Too Many Times in 1 Minute Just Cost this Truck Driver $183,000,” huffingtonpost.com, Dec. 3, 2013.

  32.Sandra Laville, “Student Convicted over Anonymous Cyber-Attacks,” theguardian.com, Dec. 6, 2012.

  33.Joe Kloc, “Anonymous’s PayPal 14 Enter Pleas, Most May Skirt Jail,” dailydot.com, Dec. 5, 2013.

  34.Anu Passary, “Anonymous Members Plead Guilty in Paypal DDoS Attack Case,” techtimes.com, Dec. 8, 2013.

  35.Somini Sengupta, “British Police Make Arrest in Net Attacks,” nytimes.com, July 27, 2011.

  5. Anonymous Everywhere

  1.Eduard Kovacs, “Anonymous Hackers Leak Documents on Governor of
Italy’s Lombardy Region,” softpedia.com, Nov. 25, 2013.

  2.See Carola Frediani, Inside Anonymous: A Journey into the World of Cyberactivism (Informant, 2013).

  3.Lina Ben Mhenni, “Tunisia: Censorship Continues as WikiLeaks Cables Make the Rounds,” globalvoicesonline.org, Dec. 7, 2010.

  4.Quinn Norton, “2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread,” wired.com, Jan. 11, 2012.

  5.Ibrahim Saleh, “WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring: The Twists and Turns of Media, Culture, and Power,” Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 237.

  6.WikiLeaks, “Cable: 09TUNIS516-a,” wikileaks.org, last accessed June 5, 2014, available at https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09TUNIS516_a.html.

  7.John Pollock, “How Egyptian and Tunisian Youth Hacked the Arab Spring,” technologyreview.com, Aug. 23, 2011.

  8.See twitter.com/TAKRIZ, last accessed June 5, 2014.

  9.“Tunisia Suicide Protester Mohamed Bouazizi Dies,” bbc.com, Jan. 5, 2011.

  10.“Thousands of Tunisia Lawyers Strike,” aljazeera.com, Jan. 6, 2011.

  11.Tarek Amara, “Tunisian Government Says Two Killed in Clashes,” reuters.com, Jan. 9, 2011.

  12.See anonnews.org/press/item/135, last accessed June 16, 2014.

  13.For a few representative articles claiming Sabu as the leader see: Charles Arthur, “The Darkness at the Heart of Anonymous,” theguardian.com, Aug. 23, 2011; Josh Halliday, “LulzSec Mastermind Sabu: An Elite Hacker and Star FBI Informant,” theguardian.com, March 6, 2012; Andy Greenberg, “LulzSec Leader and Informant ‘Sabu’ Let Off with Time Served,” wired.com, May 27, 2014. For articles claiming Topiary as the leader, see: Adrian Chen, “Meet the LulzSec Leader Arrested by British Police Today,” gawker.com, July 27, 2011; Peter Finocchiaro, “LulzSec Leader ‘Topiary’ Arrested in Britain,” salon.com, July 27, 2011.

  14.John Cook and Adrian Chen, “Inside Anonymous’ Secret War Room,” gawker.com, March 18, 2011.

  15.Arthur, “The Darkness at the Heart of Anonymous.”

  16.Joseph Menn, “SPECIAL REPORT—U.S. Cyberwar Strategy Stokes Fear of Blowback,” reuters.com, May 10, 2013.

  17.Ibid.

  18.Although I have access to most of the subsequent log, there was no other mention about why the zero-day did not pan out, and when I asked some participants, no one could remember why. It is not unusual for an issue or possibility that is raised and explored to not pan out and never be discussed again.

  19.Tom Jagatic, Nathaniel Johnson, Markus Jakobsson, Filippo Menczer, “Social Phishing,” Communications of the ACM, (Fall 2007): 94–100.

  20.“St. Jude Memorial and Virtual Wake,” The Well, August 1, 2003, last accessed July 6, 2014, available at http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/190/St-Jude-Memorial-and-Virtual-Wak-page01.html.

  21.Spencer Ackerman, “Former NSA Chief Warns of Cyber-Terror Attacks if Snowden Apprehended,” theguardian.com, Aug. 6, 2013.

  22.Ryan J. Reily, “Stephen Heymann, Aaron Swartz Prosecutor, Compared Internet Activist to Rapist: MIT Report,” huffingtonpost.com, July 31, 2013.

  23.Hal Abelson, “The Lessons of Aaron Swartz,” technologyreview.com, October 4, 2013.

  24.Gabriella Coleman, “Gabriella Coleman’s Favorite News Stories of the Week,” techdirt.com, Oct. 12, 2013.

  25.Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 27 (2001): 415–44.

  26.Roli Varma, “Why So Few Women Enroll in Computing? Gender and Ethnic Differences in Students’ Perception,” Computer Science Education vol. 20, no. 4 (2010): 301–16.

  27.For more precise figures, see Christina Dunbar Hester and Gabriella Coleman, “Engendering Change? Gender Advocacy in Open Source,” June 26, 2012, last accessed July 9, 2014, available at http://culture digitally.org/2012/06/engendering-change-gender-advocacy-in-open-source/.

  28.Ibid.

  29.See Douglas Thomas, Hacker Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

  6. “Moralfaggotry” Everywhere

  1.Barret Brown, Twitter post, Nov. 9, 2011, 9:56 pm, https://twitter.com/BarrettBrownLOL/status/134464512064626689.

  2.Barret Brown, “Why the Hacks Hate Michael Hastings,” vanityfair. com, June 23, 2010.

  3.Ian Shapira, “‘Anonymous’ Movement Views Web Hijinks as Public Good, but Legality Is Opaque,” washingtonpost.com, Jan. 25, 2011.

  4.Richard Borshay Lee, “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari,” natural historymag.com (originally published in Dec. 1969).

  5.“US Urges Restraint in Egypt, Says Government Stable,” reuters.com, Jan. 25, 2011.

  6.Although some Anons certainly dabble in credit card fraud, they are not in the business of large-scale carding and identity theft. One of the most notorious carding rings—Shadowcrew—was busted in November 2006 in what journalist Kevin Poulsen has described as “the biggest crackdown on identify thieves in American history.” Poulsen, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground (New York: Broadway Books, 2012), 113.

  7.For the definitive account of Operation Sundevil, see Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), available at http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html.

  8.“Document Management in the FBI,” ch. 2 in An Investigation of the Belated Production of Documents in the Oklahoma City Bombing Case,” US Justice Department, March 19, 2002, last accessed June 16, 2014, available at http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/0203/chapter2.htm.

  9.Since the FD-302 provides a summary of an interview instead of a transcript, activists and lawyers have long criticized it for its bias. Civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate encapsulated its problems in an op-ed: “Frightened and confused interviewees, who, if they deny they said what any 302 report claims they uttered, can then be indicted for making false statements” (Silvergate, “Unrecorded Testimony,” bostonglobe.com, May 11, 2013). In May 2014, the FBI reversed its policy and will now mandate recording for most interviews with federal suspects. (Andrew Grossman, “FBI to Record Most Interrogations of Suspects in Federal Custody,”online.wsj.com, May 21, 2014.)

  7. Revenge of the Lulz

  1.Jules Boykoff, The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 2006), 121.

  2.Ibid., 115–17.

  3.Ibid., 118.

  4.US Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, “COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens,” April 23, 1976, last accessed June 18, 2014, available at http://terrasol.home.igc.org/HooverPlan.htm.

  5.Quoted in “The FBI, COINTELPRO, and the Most Important Robbery You’ve Never Heard Of,” Privacy SOS, April 3, 2013, last accessed June 18, 2014, available at https://www.privacysos.org/node/1015.

  6.Mark Mazzetti, “Burglars Who Took on F.B.I. Abandon Shadows,” nytimes.com, Jan. 7, 2014.

  7.Glenn Greenwald, “The Leaked Campaign to Attack Wikileaks and Its Supporters,” salon.com, Feb. 11, 2011.

  8.Nelson D. Schwartz, “Facing Threat from WikiLeaks, Bank Plays Defense,” nytimes.com, Jan. 2, 2011.

  9.See Eric Lipton and Charlie Savage, “Hackers Reveal Offers to Spy on Corporate Rivals,” nytimes.com, Feb. 11, 2011.

  10.Marcus Kabel, “Ark. Court Says Wal-Mart Can Copy Data of Fired Worker,” utsandiego.com, April 13, 2007.

  11.Gary Ruskin, “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organization”, Center for Corporate Policy, 23. Available at http://www.corporatepolicy.org/spookybusiness.pdf.

  12.Ibid. Emphasis my own.

  13.Peter Bright, Nate Anderson, and Jacqui Chang, Unmasked (Amazon Digital Services, 2011), 54

  14.Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger, “Nations Buying as Hackers Sell Flaws in Computer Code,” nytimes.com, July 13, 2013.

  1
5.Ryan Gallagher, “Cyberwar’s Gray Market,” slate.com, Jan. 16, 2013.

  16.Nate Anderson, “Black Ops: How Hbgary Wrote Backdoors for the Government,” arctechnica.com, Feb. 21, 2011.

  17.Ruskin, Spooky Business, 3.

  18.Available at http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=u4mtivNN, last accessed June 17, 2014.

  19.Mike Masnick, “Play by Play of How HBGary Federal Tried to Expose Anonymous … And Got Hacked Instead,” techdirt.com, Feb. 11, 2011.

  20.Joseph Menn, “Cyberactivists Warned of Arrest,” ft.com, Feb. 5, 2011.

  21.Emails sent in the fall of 2010 discussed closing down HBGary Federal for not being profitable, and suggested that Aaraon Barr’s “CEO job was under threat.” (See page 28 in Unmasked for emails detailing the company’s financial position.)

  22.Peter Bright, “Anonymous Speaks: The Inside Story of the Albany Hack,” arstechnica.com, Feb. 15, 2011.

  23.Aphorism by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, nineteenth-century Romantic (and super oddball!).

  24.Available at http://archive.today/lMuqh#selection-207.17-207.32, last accessed June 18, 2014.

  25.John Cook and Adrian Chen, “Inside Anonymous’ Secret War Room,” gawker.com, March 18, 2011.

  26.Dan Kaplan, “Anonymous Takes Over Security Firm in Vengeful Hack,” scmagazine.com, Feb. 7, 2011.

  27.“Hacker of Sacramento Company HBGary Pleads Guilty,” FBI press release, March 6, 2012, last accessed June 18, 2014, available at http://www.fbi.gov/sacramento/press-releases/2012/hacker-of-sacramento-company-hbgary-pleads-guilty.

  28.Parmy Olson, “Victim of Anonymous Attack Speaks Out,” forbes. com, Feb. 7, 2011.

  29.According to the plan, Palantir would provide its expensive link analysis software running on a hosted server, while Berico would “prime the contract supplying the project management, development resources, and process/methodology development.” HBGary Federal would come alongside to provide “digital intelligence collection” and “social media exploitation.” Nate Anderson, “Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks,” arstechnica.com, Feb. 14, 2011.