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

by Parmy Olson

  William spent the next few nights keeping hold of Selena’s credentials, meeting with his new Facebook group of /b/ pranksters, and terrorizing people on Selena’s social network, including posting comments on the photos of her female friends and calling them fat. The mother of one of Selena’s Facebook friends, who happened to be a police officer, eventually sent harassment papers to the real Selena’s home address. Selena, William said, was “the gift that keeps on giving.” At one point he posted a status update on Selena’s Facebook profile, announcing to her friends that her account had been hacked but that everything was back to normal—then followed that up with another update purporting to be from a friend, saying Selena had been hit by a drunk driver and died. This was how William liked to cause a stir. Not by entertaining an audience of thousands on Twitter, like Topiary did, but by embarrassing others to entertain himself. Still, there were things that William and Topiary had in common, not least that both had found Anonymous through 4chan.

  Two months after hacking Selena’s account, he accepted the chance to meet Jake Davis, who was now on bail, over an organized lunch to talk about Anonymous. It would be the first time they would talk, offline or online, and the first time either would meet another Anon face to face and discuss the impact of Anonymous on his life.

  William and Jake both bought train tickets to a nondescript town in England where they would meet. Though Jake would learn William’s real first name and see him face to face, he would not ask for any other identifying information and would never know his full name. The morning of their meeting, William’s train snaked through the countryside, past green and beige fields, dawdling sheep, and brown rivers that shimmered in the harsh winter sun. He couldn’t help but feel nervous. Jake felt the same. His train was headed south, the electronic tag snugly reminding him to be home by 10:00 p.m. When Jake’s train arrived at the station, he stepped out, walked over to a wall in the main concourse, and waited.

  Fifteen minutes later William’s train squealed to a stop along the opposite platform. He walked into the station’s entrance, wading through a large crowd of commuters, then saw Jake standing by a wall in a small stream of sunlight. Jake wore a black coat, had a five o’clock shadow, and was small. He looked up and smiled. William was expressionless. The two said their hellos and shook hands before quickly looking away.

  Anons almost never met in person since, naturally, it defeated the point of anonymity. So William and Jake’s meeting was awkward at first. What made it harder was the fact that William was going through a particularly dark phase in his mind, and in recent days he had been constantly fighting thoughts of suicide. Jake, who wanted to speak to people outside his immediate family, especially those he had something in common with, was eager to talk.

  As the pair sat in a local pizza restaurant for lunch, Jake chatted amiably about his court case and some recent news he had seen about Anonymous on television. William was quiet and sullen. When Jake told a funny story from his LulzSec days, hoping it might generate a laugh, William greeted it with stony silence. The meeting was not going well.

  Finally, when talk turned to 4chan, William opened up a little. He talked about his frustration with the site he visited so much, and how it had become a community filled with “newfag cancer,” eager young participants who did not understand the culture or how to cause real mischief.

  Jake, like William, was not a skilled hacker, but he knew a little about programming languages. When William mentioned that he was interested in developing those skills, Jake pulled out his netbook. The small laptop had been stripped of its wireless card and Ethernet, so that there was no way it could connect to the Internet. But Jake could still play around with Zalgo script, a type of programmable font that packed lots of digital bytes into each letter. If you were looking for fun, you could use it to send someone a message over Skype; it might crash his or her program.

  Jake started typing. “If you put that into Skype it’ll reverse your text,” he said.

  William looked visibly impressed. “Your memory is amazing,” he said, shaking his head and leaning forward in his seat.

  Jake kept going. “Just load up the character map in Windows, dump that anywhere, and it messes it up,” he said, now typing furiously.

  “So I could do this on Windows?”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of complex.”

  “So eight bytes is equal to…one bit,” William said, hesitating.

  “Eight bits is equal to one byte.” William was getting a short lesson in programming basics.

  “Yeah, yeah,” William said, laughing a little, now more relaxed. “I don’t know any of this.”

  “I’m kind of enthusiastic about Unicode,” Jake said, shrugging. Once the netbook had been closed and put away, the two started talking about Anonymous and how it had changed them.

  “It’s made me a more extreme version of myself,” William said. “I used to sleep badly. Now I sleep terribly. I used to be sarcastic; now I can be an asshole.” He didn’t just “like” tormenting people; he loved it. He didn’t just “like” porn; he looked at it every day. “None of it bothers me,” he added. “I don’t care about anything.” William had said in the past that he had no moral code; everything was case by case, his decisions based on a gut reaction. Ernest Hemingway had said it best: “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

  Jake was nodding. “I have to agree with all of that,” he said. “It desensitized me. You can have Japanese dubstep playing to the Twin Towers falling. It might seem horrific, then it seems like a natural thing you see every day.” That was the culture that so many outside of Anonymous could not understand. Acting out with crowds of people on the Internet had created a detachment from reality and a sense of obliviousness to certain consequences. Anonymous did bad things, but its members were not bad people, per se.

  As if to illustrate the point, a woman sitting nearby suddenly turned to Jake and William and asked if they knew how to access the restaurant’s WiFi on a phone. The two looked at each other blankly then quickly explained that neither had a mobile that could go online. Genuinely apologetic, they tried to help the woman with some advice.

  “Maybe you could ask the staff downstairs?” suggested William. “Sorry.”

  The woman smiled and turned back to her panini. She would never have guessed this pair of polite young men had been two notorious members of Anonymous. There was a common misconception about the lack of morals on /b/ and in Anonymous. “It doesn’t mean you do bad things,” said William. “It just means there’s no rules. We don’t revert to being bastards at every opportunity.”

  “It’s also nice to just be nice,” Jake added.

  Many of /b/’s most hard-core users, like William, didn’t care about jobs, family, or life’s typical milestone events. Both Jake and William relished the idea of living a life that had no impact on real people. If William could scrape enough money together from blogging—he had a clever web script that allowed him to exploit Google Ads without his having to do too much writing—he would fly to mainland Europe later that month and sleep rough in a major capital. He was tired of being a burden to his father and brother, tired of playing his guitar and knowing they could hear him.

  “To have as little impact on anywhere as possible is a really appealing thought, which is like never being born,” said Jake. No legitimate home, no name on a piece of government paper, no fingerprints. To be nameless, with no identity, not bogged down by any system but to “lightly live everywhere” was something they both craved in real life.

  Did that craving come from what they’d experienced with Anonymous: vandalizing things often with little consequence?

  “It’s Anon and Internet culture,” said Jake. “Online you see everything. Gore, disgusting things, and you realize you don’t care. Let’s stop fussing over little things. There’s always something bigger or smaller or worse or better. Most of what we do is what people have done before.”


  Nothing that occurred on /b/ was meant to be taken seriously, William added. They were just things that happened. “Nothing matters.”

  “Exactly,” said Jake. “That’s the main thing about life. People think we are superior to animals. And they’re looking for this missing link, but what if we are the link to animals and real human beings haven’t evolved yet? It’s pretentious to think we’re superior in the universe because we can communicate with each other.”

  “It’s so arrogant,” said William.

  “Bees found out that the earth was round before us,” said Jake. “So bees are more clever than us.”

  “They don’t kick up a fuss,” William added.

  Did people take Anonymous too seriously?

  “Anonymous takes Anonymous too seriously,” William said quickly. “When I started getting more involved it was 50 percent fun and 50 percent passing the time and that’s it. Now there are all these political messages and I just don’t care about it. It bothers me it’s a bunch of rich kids whining about being oppressed. There are much worse things going on in the world than copyright law [one of the big causes cited by the recent Anonymous attacks]. But I don’t think we should kick up a fuss anyway.”

  “I struggle with that,” Jake admitted. “Sometimes I care so much about something, but the next minute I don’t. When I try and explain that to people in the real world they attribute that to schizophrenia.”

  “Sometimes something will happen and then you suddenly care about it,” said William. “It matters for thirty seconds.” Though this sounded unusual at first, it was not all that different from the twenty-four-hour news cycle or the hype that surrounded popular new stories; they faded just as quickly from the public’s short-term memory.

  “That’s what it was like writing press releases for LulzSec,” said Jake. “‘I care, I care, I care.’ Then it causes a shitstorm in the news, and then I think, ‘Whatever.’ I feel bad that people are getting arrested and inspired and I don’t care afterwards. Like the Antisec movement.”

  “Opinions on stuff like that are so fluid,” said William, “maybe because we’re young and impressionable. Maybe we’re just honest when we change our mind.”

  “We care suddenly about something because we’re more enriched by the sense of victory,” said Jake, referring to the large-scale attacks by Anonymous and the big LulzSec hits. “Then it goes and you don’t care anymore.”

  Did either of them ever feel like he had been manipulated by Anonymous?

  “Not at all,” said William.

  Jake looked down for a moment, then answered. “Not manipulated, but influenced,” he said. “When you’re in a mob mentality with lots of others. You have a ‘mob extreme’ version of yourself too, this one, unified mind-set where you don’t care that anything exists and you want to wreck something.” William was nodding now.

  “I’ve said no but the mob thing rings true,” he said. The issue of mental health meant a lot to him personally, but sometimes he’d see a thread on /b/ where the original poster has said, “I’m really depressed and want to kill myself.” If the thread’s participants leaned toward telling him to commit suicide, William would join in, posting a picture of a can of cyanide and reminding the OP to do it properly. “Which is something I don’t even believe. I don’t want people to die, but”—he shrugged—“it’s something to write and something to do.”

  Of course, both William and Jake had done their fair share of manipulating too. William was dismissive of the younger “goombie” users and newfags on 4chan who cared about the V for Vendetta revolutionary symbols of Anonymous, and sometimes he would rile them up for fun.

  “They want to think the world is against them so there’s something to justify their angst,” he said. That’s why it was almost easy to get people to join the revolution in Anonymous. “You can just make stuff up [about government or corporate corruption] and they buy it.” To write a rousing post on /b/, for instance, you just needed to write in a way that would appeal to the Anon crowd, using linguistic devices like alliteration, repetition, sound bytes, and dramatic words like injustice, oppression, and downtrodden to describe corporations and governments, and justice, freedom, and uprising when referring to Anonymous.

  “You could inspire some fifteen-year-old, or someone with a fifteen-year-old’s mind-set, to hate whoever you want them to hate,” said William matter-of-factly. In having no clear goal, Anonymous was like any other modern-day movement that had become fragmented by the user-generated, crowd-sourced nature of a web-enabled society. Movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street had the same issue; they were often vague in their goals, but their supporters fought passionately against rival ideologies. Anonymous was a new movement, and a new process for fighting perceived oppressors. And it could be manipulated.

  “It’s easy to come up with examples of ways that we’re oppressed, and some idiot, some gobby student who has a political awakening at fourteen or fifteen who thinks they’re clever will buy it!” William was almost shouting now. He stopped in a moment of self-reflection, as if taken aback by the strength of his own opinion, then laughed a little. “I’m only five years older than these guys and I feel like I’m their dad.”

  But Jake was nodding again. If you knew how to communicate with the Anons, sometimes you could direct them. “It’s just so easy,” he said.

  As Jake and William walked back to the train station through a biting wind, they swapped stories about elaborate trolling, barely noticing how their earlier tensions had disappeared. Jake ran through one of his favorite incidents as William listened: Years before, he and a friend had convinced an online enemy to perform a sexual act in front of his webcam in the middle of the night. They had filmed it, then told the boy they would show the video to the local police and his school if he didn’t wake up his mother so they could show it to her. At four in the morning, he did, and he cried most of the way as his mother watched, horrified. Jake and his friend had laughed.

  “We decided to let him off by just showing his mum,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the strong wind.

  William looked shocked. “That’s what you call letting someone off?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Yeah,” said Jake, shrugging. William blew air through his lips, as if impressed.

  William’s train pulled up and it was time to go. There followed an unceremonious good-bye, the weighty discussion and baring of souls quickly forgotten in the final, awkward handshakes. Jake and William each nodded quickly to the other and then glanced in the opposite direction. William got on the train without turning around. Jake went back to wait for his own train.

  They had found Anonymous in the same place and adopted similar perspectives on life, but they were on divergent paths. Even after meeting Jake and seeing the consequences of getting arrested for hacking, William still wanted to learn to do more than just trick someone into giving him her Facebook password. He wanted to know how to break into a computer network. For weeks afterward, he continued downloading free e-books and reading sections about programming on Encyclopedia Dramatica. Gradually he started testing popular hacking techniques like the Cain and Abel password cracker, SQL maps, Googledorks, and Backtrack5. Then on March 10, 2012, William reached a milestone. After five hours of tinkering, he cracked the password of his neighbor’s WiFi, and started using it.

  “Next I’ll try and steal their shit,” he said hopefully, “but I think they’re old, so I’m not holding my breath for n00dz.” William had no plans to stop disrupting other people’s lives, and just like Jake, Sabu, and Kayla before him, he was sure he’d never get found out.

  Jake, by March of 2012, had been banned from using the Internet for eight months. If his case went to trial, the thousands of pages of chat logs and complex computer configurations that served as evidence meant it could easily last a year. It was hard for him to think about his future and what he might do when he got out of jail. He still liked the idea of “lightly living everywhere,” travel
ing to places where no one knew who he was. He hoped that one day, he would get a job where he could work outdoors, maybe drive around. He most definitely did not want to work with computers. He was tired of all the stress they had led to in the past. Even without the Internet, it was hard to escape those fraught, paranoid memories. But that month, they would come flooding back stronger than ever, when he found out why Sabu had been at large for so long.

  Chapter 26

  The Real Sabu

  What ended up happening to Hector “Sabu” Monsegur? After the arrests of Topiary and Tflow, he continued leading the revived Antisec movement, tweeting from the account he had labeled “The Real Sabu” to a growing stable of tens of thousands of followers. Sometimes he incited revolution—“I love the smell of cyberwar in the morning #fuckisrael”—and sometimes he funneled supporters into the Antisec chat channel, “irc.anonops.li payload is coming soon!” When his handlers needed him to pull in the reins, he complied, cautioning Anonymous on September 21, 2011, that attempts to DDoS Wall Street financial firms was “a fail…Not because of lack of manpower, but rather, wrong direction. Own them, don’t waste resources DDoSing.”

  For someone who had been so loud about hating the police, it had not been all that hard to get Sabu to work for the FBI. On June 8, 2011, the day after he had gone missing from LulzSec and caused distress among his clique of hacker friends, Sabu went to court, where a judge decided to release him from police custody on bail. The condition was that he let the FBI supervise his every movement online and in real life.