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

by Parmy Olson

  Like Emick, Bailey went to one of the simultaneous worldwide protests on February 10, in Houston, Texas. Like Emick, he was also enthralled by the demonstrators, but not because of the good behavior or collaboration. Messing with Scientologists was entertaining. He saw one woman draw occult symbols on the sidewalk in front of the Scientology center, then sprinkle foot powder around the symbols and add flickering black candles. The idea was to spook Scientologists who were deeply suspicious of black magic and the occult. He joined other Anons in offering Scientologists cake if they would come join the protest. This was a nod to the “delicious cake” meme. They also played an audio version of OT3, confidential documents that are believed by Scientologists to lead them to a spiritual state known as Operating Thetan. Adherents are not supposed to listen to or read them until they are ready. Bailey found it hilarious.

  “But then,” he remembered a few years later, “they stopped coming out to play.” By the end of 2008, Scientology stopped responding, and the demonstrations and cyber attacks stopped altogether. Bailey and Emick wound up in the middle of the infighting that followed.

  There were dramatic rows between the IRC network operators and admins on Partyvan, between the people who ran Anonymous forums, and between protest organizers. There was discord among the original anti-Scientologist campaigners who had been there long before the Anonymous flood came along. Emick recalled a spat between two organizers, with one supporter accusing another of cheating with her husband, then “freezing out” mutual acquaintances to create a rift. The war of words escalated to lofty heights of machismo—this was the Internet, after all.

  “You have no idea who you’re fucking with,” Emick remembered one person saying. “Just wait and see what’s coming.”

  If 2008 was the year Anonymous burst into the real world with well-organized demonstrations, 2009 was when it started unraveling into the chaos of e-drama. The biggest rift was over what Anonymous was about. Activism? Or lulz? And it was to be fought between moralfags like Emick and trolls like Bailey.

  In late 2008, just before being deployed with the army to South Korea for a year, Bailey had set up a new website called ScientologyExposed.com. The protests were dying down, but Anons were still communicating online, albeit more chaotically. His idea was to create an alternative to Gregg Housh’s more popular Enturbulation.com (which turned into the slick-looking WhyWeProtest.net). Housh had by now given many interviews to newspapers and television reporters about Anonymous after being outed by name, and Enturbulation was his baby. He told journalists that he was absolutely not an Anonymous “spokesman,” since no one could speak for the collective, but more of an observer. By then, he’d gotten burned in the courts. The Church of Scientology had sued Housh for trespassing, criminal harassment, disturbing an assembly of worship, and disturbing the peace. When the protests were at their peak, a Scientology spokesman told CNN that the church was “dealing with six death threats, bomb threats, acts of violence,” and vandalism from Anonymous. Housh didn’t exactly fit the stereotype of an activist, but Bailey didn’t like him or his site.

  Bailey believed the people surrounding Enterbulation were too earnest, too “moralfaggy” to be effective. Housh’s site had become the de facto meeting ground, and there needed to be an alternative. Bailey designed his site to encourage pranks and trolling over peaceful activism against the church. The site contained hidden forums, a section of “fun stuff” like WiFi-router passwords used by Scientology organizations, and tips for pranks. One was to send an official-looking letter of warning to each of the highest-ranking leaders of Scientology to freak them out.

  Bailey was dedicated to maintaining his site even while stationed in South Korea, working on it for four to six hours in the evening and on weekends. It was a tough schedule. He would work on the site until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, then get up at 5:00 a.m. to do an hour of jogging and physical training with the other soldiers while it was still dark outside. Bailey hated all the running and developed shin splints, but he looked forward every evening to getting back on his laptop in his dorm. He had fully embraced the goal of destroying Scientology and made new friends along the way. One of them was Jennifer Emick.

  Bailey and Emick first began talking on an online forum. Bailey liked Emick’s chutzpah and invited her to be an administrator on his site. Over time, though, he realized the two had starkly different views about Anonymous. Emick didn’t understand the darker side of chan culture and seemed to think Anonymous should focus on peaceful protest. The two hard-talking individuals began to have blazing public arguments. The final straw came one day when the pair was fighting on the site’s anonymous forum, and Emick suddenly said, “I know it’s you, Raziel.” By outing Bailey’s regular online nickname, Raziel, Emick had betrayed an important custom on forums like this: that hiding your online identity, or nickname, could be just as important as hiding your real-world identity. Enraged, Bailey removed Emick’s administrative access and the two stopped talking.

  Looking back, Bailey said Emick had realized that Anonymous was not a peaceful protest group but “full of hackers and people on the net who don’t do nice things for fun.…It broke her,” Bailey added. “She had invested so much personal pride in it.”

  Years later Emick also found it hard to talk about why she broke away from Anonymous. “The group itself was losing sight of…I don’t want to pinpoint exactly,” she said. “In 2008 and 2009 there was a group ethos. You weren’t confrontational with the community, you didn’t yell at cops, you were a good example. You fight an evil cult you can’t be evil yourself. Then at some point they said, ‘Well, why not?’”

  Emick seemed to revel in the drama and gossip, but she hated the threats and real-life mischief. What had happened to the well-behaved ethos at those first protests? Anonymous was becoming increasingly vindictive not only toward Scientology but to other Anons who didn’t agree with its methods. This nastiness was nothing new for people like Bailey, who had found Anonymous via the netherworld of 4chan, but for Emick it was a crushing betrayal.

  “We tried to tell her Anonymous isn’t nice and it isn’t your friend,” Bailey said. “We tried to tell her these aren’t good people. They are doing fucked-up things because it’s funny.” Eventually, Emick became a target herself. The more she tried telling other Anons that they were being irresponsible bullies, the more they threw insults and threats back at her. People found out her real name and address and posted it online, along with her husband’s details. People from various schisms in Anonymous began harassing her stepdaughter. There was talk of SWATing her house—calling up the FBI to send a SWAT team, a surprisingly easy prank to carry out. Soon Emick got her family to move to Michigan and started going online from a fake server that hid her true IP address. Though she was breaking away, Emick would come back more than a year later, having honed her skills in social engineering and “doxing,” helping to nearly rip Anonymous apart.

  Military man Bailey had meanwhile become fascinated by a subset of Anonymous that everyone wanted to join but few could understand: the hackers. He had noticed that a small contingent of skilled hackers had checked out Chanology early on in the project but had left. As Anonymous descended into a chaotic civil war between moralfags and trolls, Bailey set out to find the hackers. He wanted to be able to do what they could do: track down an enemy, steal someone’s botnet, or hack their servers. It bothered Bailey that he didn’t have these skills already. First, however, he had to make a drastic change to his personal life, after leaving the army in 2009.

  Since childhood, Bailey had harbored deep, secret feelings that he was really female. Even as he and his wife pursued a polyamorous relationship and went to swinging parties, he had kept those particular feelings repressed. Soon after leaving the army, though, Bailey became friends online with a transgender woman and felt an instant attraction. She was beautiful and confident, and Bailey started to believe it might be possible for him to look and feel the same. On May 26, 2009, he bought a case of ho
rmone replacement therapy (HRT) pills online and started secretly taking them. He was excited but decided to see how he felt before telling his family about his decision. The pills ended up taking effect more quickly than he had expected; within a month he had developed B-cup breasts.

  He asked his mother and brother to come over and sat them down in the living room with his wife and two children, ages three and two at the time. It took him an hour of stalling to finally get to the point, but eventually he told them why they were there. He wanted to undergo a sex change and become a woman. They were stunned into silence. Eventually one of them asked if Bailey was sure he wanted to do it. He told them flat-out that he had already begun taking estrogen supplements. He knew that they would try to talk him out of it, so he had resolved to be firm.

  He gave them two choices: accept that he was becoming a woman or stay out of his life. Not long after that meeting, he and his wife filed for divorce, agreeing to share custody of their two children. Bailey’s mother and brother were accepting. Bailey went by the name Laurelai, the name his mother had picked in case he’d been born a girl.

  Laurelai had an educational mountain ahead of her. Learning how to be female was like going through puberty all over again. It was tough, but she felt that she was becoming the person she was meant to be. Soon her soldier’s buzz cut had grown long and she was walking around the house in pink tank tops. In the mornings she would sit down in front of her computer and take a few hormone pills with a swig from a bottle of Coke. As she left her old sexuality behind, she also wanted to change what she was online, from a simple website administrator to a full-fledged hacker. She started exploring the darker arts of the Web while maintaining her website, ScientologyExposed. It was now late 2009, and as the site got fewer visitors, Laurelai realized the goal of “destroying Scientology” was probably too grand.

  One day, someone started attacking her site. Laurelai checked the site’s configurations and saw it was getting flooded with so much junk traffic that it was now offline—a classic DDoS attack. She hopped onto an IRC network, and, as she was discussing the problem with a few of her site’s moderators, a new person came into the chat room to claim responsibility. The moderators suspected that this was just a troll, but when Laurelai exchanged private messages, the person explained that someone was using a botnet to hit her site. To Laurelai’s surprise, the stranger invited her into the botnet’s command channel to speak to the person causing the damage. Laurelai agreed and went into a new channel on another IRC network. There, controlling the botnet that had shut down her website, was Kayla. Laurelai had never heard of her before.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Kayla asked.

  A little taken aback, Laurelai explained that she was the owner of the website ScientologyExposed, the one that Kayla happened to be attacking. Kayla seemed surprised. She explained that she hadn’t meant to hit ScientologyExposed but rather Enturbulation.org. Laurelai knew it as Gregg Housh’s site. Thanks to some technical complications from a previous time when they had briefly worked together, she and Housh shared the same server. By hitting Enturbulation, Kayla had caused collateral damage to Laurelai’s site. Laurelai explained that her site was an alternative to Housh’s, concentrating more on trolling. Kayla’s mood suddenly lightened.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. “Why are you on the same server as those moralfags anyway?” Laurelai realized that Kayla hated moralfags; it was why she was hitting Enturbulation in the first place. Kayla explained that she disliked the way the Chanology organizers had put a stop to black hat hacking. She believed that hitting Scientology with hard and fast attacks was more effective than a long, drawn-out protest. Laurelai felt an instant meeting of minds and was especially intrigued when Kayla mentioned black hat hackers. The adversaries of white hats, black hats were people who used their computer programing skills to break into computer networks for their own, sometimes malicious, means. The two talked for about an hour, after which Kayla said she would put the brakes on for a few hours to give Laurelai some time to move her site to a different server. Kayla then resumed her DDoS attack.

  Later Laurelai asked some black hat hackers she had recently met if they’d heard the name Kayla. She learned that her new acquaintance had the reputation of someone not to be crossed. “A lot of people were afraid of her,” Laurelai later remembered. Some were surprised that Kayla would even talk to Laurelai—who at the time was just somebody with a website.

  Regardless, the two kept in touch. A few days later, Kayla found Laurelai on IRC and invited her to the public chat network where she normally hung out. The two got to know each other a little better. At one point, Laurelai asked Kayla her age. Kayla replied that she was fourteen. When she asked her sex in real life, Kayla said she was female. Kayla asked the same, and when Laurelai replied that she was transgender, Kayla launched into topics like hormone supplements. To Laurelai’s surprise, Kayla seemed to know the details about hormone dosages and their side effects better than she did. Kayla even used the nickname for the little blue pills sold as Estrofem: titty skittles.

  Laurelai wondered if she was speaking to a transgender hacker.

  There was not much research on hackers who were trans but plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting the number of transgender people regularly visiting 4chan or taking part in hacker communities was disproportionally high. One reason may have been that as people spent more time in these communities and experimented with “gender bending” online, they could more easily consider changing who they were in the real world. Lines between the offline and online selves could become blurred, and some people in these communities were known to talk about gender as just another thing to “hack on,” according to Christina Dunbar-Hester, a professor at Rutgers University who studied gender differences in hardware and software hacking. If people were already used to customizing a machine or code, they might have come to see their own bodies as the next appealing challenge, especially if they already felt uncomfortable with the gender they were born with. Still, according to Dunbar-Hester, plenty of people immersed themselves in another gender online, but didn’t replicate that in real life. In other words, Kayla could have been a man who enjoyed being female online, and nothing more.

  “Are you trans?” Laurelai ventured.

  “No,” said Kayla. “I just know someone trans. :)” Kayla had answered this quickly, and it strengthened Laurelai’s suspicions.

  “Well it doesn’t matter if you’re trans or not,” Laurelai replied, adding that if Kayla wanted to be called “she” online, then Laurelai would refer to her as “she” out of respect for her wishes. The two talked more about hacking, trolling, and social engineering, Laurelai as student and Kayla as teacher. In the coming years, Kayla would introduce Laurelai to her secretive world, while Anonymous would fall back into the shadows. All that was needed was for a new cause to come along, and in late 2010 one finally did, pushing Anonymous into the international spotlight.

  Chapter 7

  FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE

  It was September 2010, and for a couple of years now the Anonymous phenomenon had vanished from news headlines. Raids were small, petty assaults on other sites, mostly carried out by chans or /b/ itself. Very little was happening on IRC, either. The thousands who had piled into #xenu had moved on, put off by the internal discord, their interest lost in the novelty.

  On September 8, an article about an Indian software company called Aiplex started getting passed around online. Girish Kumar, Aiplex’s CEO, had boasted to the press that his company was acting as a hit man for Bollywood, India’s booming film industry. Aiplex didn’t just sell software. It was working on behalf of movie studios to attack websites that allowed people to download pirated copies of their films.

  Recently, for instance, it had launched DDoS attacks against several torrent sites, including the most famous of them all, The Pirate Bay. Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay was the most popular and storied BitTorrent site on the net, a treasure trove from which anyone could illegally d
ownload movies, songs, porn, and computer programs. Aiplex had used a botnet to flood The Pirate Bay with traffic, overload its servers, and temporarily shut it down. Kumar had explained that when torrent sites didn’t respond to a notice from Aiplex, “we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service.”

  Tech bloggers and journalists already suspected that antipiracy groups were DDoSing torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, but Kumar’s admission was the first proof. It was still a shocking admission; DDoS-ing was illegal in the United States, having sent Brian Mettenbrink to jail for a year. Now the Indian company was openly boasting of using the same method.

  Soon enough, users on /b/ started discussing the news. It turned out that lots of people wanted to hit back at Aiplex. A few started pasting an everyone-get-in-here link to a channel on IRC for proper planning. This time, there weren’t thousands piling in like they had done with #xenu. Fighting copyright wasn’t as sexy as hitting a shady religious group that suppressed a video of Tom Cruise. But piracy was popular among /b/ users, and, soon enough, roughly 150 people had entered the new IRC channel, game for Anonymous to give Aiplex a taste of its own medicine.

  Coordinating an attack would not be easy. By now, IRC network hosts had become more aware of Anonymous and would quickly shut down a chat room if they thought people were using it to discuss a DDoS attack. To deal with this, the Anons jumped from IRC network to IRC network, pasting links to the new rooms on 4chan and Twitter each time they moved so others could follow. No one was appointed to find the new locations; whenever the group had to move, someone would find a new network and make a channel. The channels were always innocuously named so as not to attract attention, but the regular channel name for attacking Aiplex was called #savethepb, abbreviating Pirate Bay.