We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

by Parmy Olson

  Over the next few months, more people from 4chan, 711chan, and IRC were taking part in real-world protests. On February 2, 2008, about 150 people gathered for the first time outside a Church of Scientology center in Orlando, Florida. A week later, the Tampa Bay Tribune reported that seven thousand people had protested against church centers in seventy-three cities worldwide. Often the protesters were people in their teens and early twenties, standing in groups or sitting around in lawn chairs, holding signs with Internet memes and yelling at passersby. Some of the participants saw the demonstrations as being tongue-in-cheek, an elaborate prank by the Internet itself on an established organization. Many others took the protests seriously and held up signs with messages like “$cientology Kills.” One YouTube account associating itself with Anonymous ran a regular news program on YouTube called AnonyNews. It featured an anchor reporting on the real-life protests around the world. He wore a dark suit and a red tie, slicked-back hair, and the same grinning white mask worn by the protagonist V in the 2006 dystopian movie V for Vendetta that was fast becoming a symbol for Anonymous. This was thanks to a key scene in the film, which showed thousands of people wearing V’s mask in solidarity with the main character, loosely based on British revolutionary Guy Fawkes.

  That V mask was everywhere at Anonymous’s demonstrations, hiding protesters’ faces so that in at least some form they could still be anonymous in the real world. Over time, the mask would come to represent the one-half of Anonymous who took the idea of revolution and protest seriously. People like William, who thought Anonymous should be about fun and pranks, abhorred it. (Time Warner profited from the sale of more than one hundred thousand V masks every year by 2011, while other masks associated with its films sold barely half that figure.)

  When passersby approached the demonstrators to ask who had organized the protests, DDoS attacks, pranks, and cyber attacks, no one knew an official answer. Most regular volunteers did not see the small groups of self-appointed organizers in the background who were pulling various strings.

  But the physical protests were working, and when they first got under way, Housh remembered the scout who had counted all the different country and city chans and, assuming that he liked grunt work, asked him to go into the channels for each major city and look for one person who appeared to be giving orders and generally taking responsibility. “Look for them in Paris, London, New York,” Housh said.

  The scout spent the next three days dropping in on an array of city-based chat rooms and looking out for the organizational minds, anyone who seemed especially keen on the cause. He then started a private chat with each, asking if they had seen the first Message to Scientology video. “One of the guys who made that wants to talk to you,” he would tell them. Intrigued, and probably a little nervous, they would then be led into #marblecake and told not to tell anyone about the channel.

  “We’re not trying to control everyone,” Housh would explain to them. “But bringing lists of suggestions and hoping people go with it.” Over the next two weeks #marblecake grew to about twenty-five talented members, including Web designers who could throw together a website in a day and organizational types who knew to call the police about obtaining protest permits.

  By the end of March, a few people had also set up new websites for Chanology, which included discussion forums. These were places for the new Chanology community to hang out, and two popular sites were Enturbulation.org and WhyWeProtest.net. Chanology was now no longer being discussed on 4chan—it had permanently moved to these sites and IRC channels. For the next few months, Anonymous continued holding mostly small, physical protests around the world, while Housh was helping maintain regular meetings every three days in #marblecake to discuss attack strategies against Scientology.

  The meetings would last anywhere from three to six hours, Housh remembered. He would post an agenda of points, hear reports of what people had done, and delegate responsibilities, from making a website, to designing a flyer that advertised the next raid, to finding background music for the next YouTube video. The group tried to plan Anonymous events over the following month. Before then, no one had actually been scheduling Anonymous raids or pranks in advance.

  Here’s an example of what the #marblecake channel had as a “topic,” based on a chat log from Friday, June 6:

  03[19:44] * Topic is ‘press releases, videos, ideas, collaboration, basically things we need done. || Meeting thursday nights at 9pm EST || /msg srsbsns for cosnews.net writefagaccounts || you should think of things you hate about the present state of chanology and want changed._’

  03[19:44] * Set by gregg on Fri Jun 06 19:27:08

  “I started running it with an iron fist,” he said. “Very few [meetings] were missed.” If someone couldn’t make it to a meeting, there was a Google doc they could read to catch up.

  By June, motivations were fizzling out and people in #marblecake were reminiscing about when Chanology first kicked off in January.

  “I loved the old days,” said one user called 007, in a June meeting. “No one knew what was gonna happen IRL [in real life]. Everyone was totally into it. I wish we could get the same amount of participation as before.”

  By the summer of 2008, Project Chanology was also suffering from infighting among organizers, and the number of participants in physical demonstrations, which had been occurring monthly in major cities, was tapering off. Housh claimed that a blow to the fledgling movement came that summer when a couple of Anons nicknamed King Nerd and Megaphonebitch outed #marblecake and the people in it, labeling them “leaderfags” and prompting most of the people who started the organizational hub to leave. In the coming months, Chanology wouldn’t so much wrap up as unceremoniously fade away. Many Anons were simply bored with Project Chanology, by any measurement the longest and biggest series of attacks that Anonymous had ever initiated against a single target.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, was just getting started. Also by the summer of 2008, the FBI, or “feds” as Anons referred to them, had managed to track down and apprehend two out of the hundreds of people who participated in the DDoS attacks on Scientology. They would be the unlucky sacrificial lambs and the first of scores more arrests over the next few years. Anons had always thought till now that they were immune to arrest, or well hidden from the authorities. One of the first to learn the hard truth was Brian Mettenbrink, the bored college student who in January 2008 had left LOIC running in the background of his computer for a little too long.

  “Brian.”

  “Yeah?” Brian Mettenbrink was asleep on his couch in the basement when he heard the voice of his housemate calling his name. It was a cool morning in mid-July 2008, six months since he had downloaded LOIC and taken part in the very first DDoS attacks by Anonymous against Scientology. He barely remembered that weekend spent mostly in his dorm room. Since then, he had dropped out of his aerospace engineering classes at Iowa State, moved into a large, pea-green house with a few friends in Omaha, Nebraska, and started looking for a job to help pay the rent.

  “There’s some men here to see you.”

  He sat up. Bleary-eyed, Mettenbrink padded up the stairs and went to the door, wearing the plain t-shirt and shorts he’d been sleeping in. Two men in suits were standing on the doorstep. They each took out a badge and identified themselves as FBI agents. They asked Mettenbrink if he had time for “a friendly conversation.” Mettenbrink answered yes and invited them in. He still had no idea that this had anything to do with DDoS attacks.

  The agents walked through the arched entranceway of Mettenbrink’s house, their shoes clicking on the ceramic tile floor as they entered the dining room, and sat at a wooden table. Mettenbrink adjusted the wire-rim glasses on his nose. He was more oblivious than nervous at this point. The agents began asking him questions about the attacks last January and about Anonymous itself.

  “What does Anonymous think of Scientology?” one of them asked. “What’s its stance?”

  “I know Anonymous do
esn’t like Scientology,” Mettenbrink said, telling them about the flurry of excited posts about a Scientology raid on 4chan and 7chan. “They were saying we should attack their websites.” Mettenbrink had been reading up on Scientology after the attacks and added that the religion’s beliefs were “weird,” and that it charged people hundreds of dollars to be members.

  “Were you involved in the DDoS attacks?” one of the men asked. Mettenbrink shifted in his seat.

  “I was involved for a little bit,” he said. The computer he had used to run LOIC was now sitting downstairs in the basement.

  “Did you…enjoy taking part in the attacks?”

  “Yeah,” said Mettenbrink, thinking back to how dull he had found college. “It was fun. It was something new and interesting to do.”

  “Did you know that your actions were a criminal violation?” one of the men asked.

  “Sure,” Mettenbrink said, “I just didn’t think the FBI would be showing up at my door.” He stared at the two men. Mettenbrink had known all along that using LOIC was illegal, but he had no idea it was a serious criminal offense. He believed the crime was as bad as running a red light, the punishment akin to a speeding ticket or hundred-dollar fine. Later he would regret being so open with the agents.

  The two men then told Mettenbrink that an FBI investigation had shown that an IP address used in the attacks traced back to Mettenbrink’s computer. “Do you understand that?” they asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you know anyone from the group in real life?” one of the agents asked.

  “No,” said Mettebrink.

  The “friendly conversation” lasted about an hour, giving the FBI and, later, prosecuting attorneys representing the Church of Scientology evidence to use against the hapless Mettenbrink. Later, the FBI would contact his old college to access his Internet records. Mettenbrink didn’t hear from the FBI again for months, and it was a year before he truly realized, during a conversation with his lawyer, the seriousness of his offense. “Do you have any idea how much monetary damage the Church of Scientology is saying you caused?” the lawyer had asked during one of his meetings with Mettenbrink.

  The young man thought for a moment. “I can’t imagine there was any monetary damage,” he said. All he’d done was help send a bunch of spoof traffic to a website and slow it down for a couple days.

  “They’re claiming one hundred thousand dollars,” the lawyer replied. Mettenbrink was stunned. He had attacked Scientology.org on a whim, his weapon a tiny, freely available program he’d run in the background for three days while he browsed an image board. How could that have cost someone a hundred thousand dollars?

  Eventually, Scientology lowered its estimate for damages to twenty thousand dollars. Mettenbrink would have to pay it all back, but at least it wasn’t a hundred thousand. Prosecutors representing the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles also called for a twelve-month jail sentence, adding that a probationary sentence, or one that avoided jail time, “might embolden others to use the Internet to engage in hate crimes.”

  According to his sentencing memo, Mettenbrink had been given “every advantage in life,” coming from a close, “supportive” family in Nebraska and parents who helped pay his way through college. He was also said to have “special skills” with computers and hardware. In court, a lawyer representing Scientology used words like Nazis and terrorism when he described Anonymous.

  On January 25, 2010, almost two years to the day he downloaded the LOIC tool, Mettenbrink pleaded guilty in a federal court to accessing a protected computer, having agreed to serve a year in prison. He would be only the second person to be sent to jail for joining in an Anonymous DDoS attack. In November 2009, nineteen-year-old Dmitriy Guzner of Verona, New Jersey, had been sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.

  In the meantime, IT security experts were scratching their heads about this new breed of hacktivists who seemed to have come out of nowhere. Prolexic, the security company that had gained some experience protecting Scientology from the DDoS attacks, had some advice for future targets of Anonymous.

  “Let sleeping dogs lie,” the company said, adding that, once a DDoS attack finished, stop talking about it. “Don’t issue warnings or threats to the attackers via the media; this will only keep the issue alive, raise tempers and greatly enhance the possibility of another assault. Most DDoS attackers seek publicity, so don’t hand it to them on a silver platter.” Scientology, of course, had done just that.

  What few realized was that as Anonymous had responded to Scientology’s provocations, its participants also split into two camps. People had already seen it in the demonstrations, with the differences between the signs scrawled with lighthearted jokes and those with serious remonstrations against Scientology. This was the evolution of a fundamental divide between those who believed in Anonymous’s roots in fun and lulz, and the new, activist direction it was taking. In the coming years, this split in motivations would make it harder to define what Anonymous was trying to be. It would even drive a wedge between Topiary and Sabu, and as Chanology started to fizzle out, one of Sabu’s biggest future adversaries would take to the stage.

  Chapter 6

  Civil War

  While most of the participants in Anonymous were young single men, women joined in, too, some of them married and with children. When news of Chanology reached California, a married mother of four named Jennifer Emick decided to investigate. At thirty-six with black hair and Celtic jewelry, Emick was intrigued by the snippets of information she had heard about Chanology. When she was younger, a member of her family had become involved with Scientology and had had a harrowing experience, convincing Emick that the church was evil. Emick ended up becoming a writer who specialized in new religious movements and religious symbolism. By the time Chanology came along she was writing off and on about religion and esoteric issues for About.com, an informational website affiliated with the New York Times.

  Armed with a notebook, she went along to the first Anonymous protests in front of a Scientology center in San Francisco on February 10, 2008, to write a report. There were between two hundred and three hundred people at the event, including ex-Scientologist celebrities and the son of founder L. Ron Hubbard. On the same day, about eight hundred Anonymous supporters attended protests in front of Scientology centers in Australia, and more in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, and Dublin. Between seven thousand and eight thousand people took part, in ninety-three cities worldwide, according to local news reports. But Emick saw past the protesters’ playful attitude. She was enthralled by how momentous these new demonstrations seemed to be. Emick decided to return for another protest the following month, this time as a participant.

  She liked the way demonstrators were well behaved toward police officers. The protesters were equally impressed by Emick’s forceful personality and ability to throw watertight arguments at Scientology representatives. They designated her a resident expert on Scientology. Emick explained that the church’s intimidation tactics were perfectly normal. Scientology reps had been following demonstrators home, accusing them of “perpetrating religious hate crimes.” At the Los Angeles event in March, a man thought by some protesters to be aligned with Scientology flashed a gun to the crowd. A protester began following him around with a placard saying, “This guy has a gun.” Emick noticed that the more Scientology overreacted, the more enthusiastic the protesters became. The organization’s prickly defensiveness made it the perfect troll bait.

  As more Anonymous supporters published research on Scientology online, they discovered new reasons to keep up the fight. “People were thinking, ‘Holy cow, they’re not just entertainingly crazy, they’ve hurt people,’” Emick remembered a few years later. When one researcher got hold of what was alleged to be a list of murdered Scientology defectors, the mood toward the church darkened considerably. Scientology had gone from being a kooky plaything to an evil organization that the protesters felt deserv
ed punishment and exposure. Emick threw herself into the cause. This was now full-blown activism.

  Of course, not everyone liked where this was going. Activism was not what Anonymous was about, some argued, and betrayed its origins in fun and lulz. Many of the original /b/tards who had pushed for a Scientology raid were now criticizing the continuing campaign as being hijacked by “moralfags.”

  One of those critics was Wesley Bailey. Tall, thin, with a military buzz cut, Bailey was twenty-seven and a network administrator for the army, working on a Fort Hood military base in dusty Killeen, Texas. He had been a soldier for nine years, enlisting when he was eighteen. In the summer of 2008, he was married and had two small children, a boy and a girl. His was an unconventional family life: Bailey and his wife were swingers, and he loved spending hours surfing the net and chatting with people online. When he first stumbled on 4chan, he was confused by forced anonymity and disturbed by the wild creativity and shocking images. It took him months to get used to the phrases and weird porn, but slowly he got hooked. He realized that this was a unique place in which people could say whatever they wanted, no matter how dark or improper. He also liked the vigilante justice, watching someone on /b/ post the photo of a known pedophile and getting scores of others to help him find out his name and address. He started seeing “Anonymous” referred to as an entity and realized it had power. When he saw a series of 4chan posts on Project Chanology, including long articles about Scientology that were being farmed to other websites like Enturbulation.com, he realized this was a new level of collective pranks and online harassment.