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

by Parmy Olson

  Of course, keeping the idea of Anonymous alive would be complicated. The media, police, and even the hackers themselves had their own concepts of what it really was: an idea, a movement, a criminal organization, and other things besides. By March of 2012, the public and parts of the media still seemed to think that Anonymous was a very large group that made plans and carried them out in an orderly way. Though the notion was deeply misguided, it was understandable. A newfangled phenomenon like Anonymous, born of the Internet itself, was something society would struggle to make sense of at first. On top of that, the mystery surrounding what really happened inside the hive-mind had left just enough room for the public to create its own versions of the Anonymous narrative, just as when Topiary had spun a vague tale about getting raided when he wanted to leave AnonOps. Anonymous wasn’t just a group or a process; it was also a story that people were telling themselves about how the Internet was fighting back. Anons could grab headlines by simply tweeting a threat, which is why the power of Anonymous spoke to the power of myth. Anonymous was another example of social engineering, on a mass scale. It was not too dissimilar from Kayla herself.

  Over the past few years, the online entity Kayla had been telling her friends different stories about who she was in real life, tempting them to try to piece together a puzzle of her real identity. A teenage girl who hated her father; a teenage girl who loved him. In the end, though, her hacker colleagues stopped being interested in the truth.

  “We told her we’d prefer her to lie to us,” one longtime friend remembered. “We all loved the story. I don’t think we cared if it was true or not.” Like children wanting to keep the magic of Santa Claus alive a little longer after starting to doubt his existence, to her hacker friends, Kayla’s story had become more important than the truth itself.

  This spoke to the constant struggle within Anonymous: weighing the ethos of anonymity and lies that came with it against the need for trust and truth. Anons have spoken of how persistent lying detached them from reality and “warped” their ethics. It was hard for someone to remember what he was ultimately trying to achieve when he was constantly lying to others. Even Sabu started to believe his own lies by openly claiming to the police that he was a federal agent.

  During Operation Payback, thousands of new volunteers had trusted AnonOps operators who claimed that using LOIC would not lead to arrest. That was naive of the volunteers, but there was also manipulation at work, or at least a major split in motives. The operators in #command had quietly latched onto the idea of avenging WikiLeaks, because it would lead to publicity for their new chat network. They hungered for the kudos of having thousands of people visit their channels and follow their orders. Then the botmasters hit PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa to show off their power. The thousands of volunteers were oblivious to this, believing they were part of a digital sit-in, for a cause they cared about. Similarly, in 2008 Gregg Housh and his #marblecake team had thought they were spearheading the mother of all pranks, but Chanology had turned into serious activism. In many ways, Anonymous could be like a scam—with people attracted to the camaraderie, learning, and new experiences, but coming away disillusioned by the disorganization, big egos, and sobering reality of arrest. But Anonymous was something else too: a gateway to political activism, a strange but compelling elixir to the apathy among young people in today’s real-time society.

  These were issues Anonymous would deal with over time. No single person would make a final decision about how it evolved; it would be a collective effort. People from this current generation of Anonymous would leave, having had enough of the Sabu drama. But plenty of newcomers would take their places and make changes. And a few, including hackers that were there during #InternetFeds or even Chanology, would stick around. A few have indeed stuck around so far.

  “They still haven’t caught Kayla,” said Emick on March 6, the day Sabu was outed. “It’s an 18-year-old boy in California.” She laughed, then went back online. Emick was still carrying on with her investigations, trying to track down who Kayla really was. She was sure it was a composite name that more than one person had used and that while Ryan Ackroyd was getting charged for some of her offenses, others remained at large. If Anonymous could share a collective identity, why couldn’t Kayla?

  As for Jake, the Internet ban gave him a chance to reflect on the Web itself, a new entity that has become an integral part of everyone’s life. In February 2012 he put a USB flash drive in the mail, and on it was this short missive—his view of how the Internet looks at us:

  Hello, friend, and welcome to the Internet, the guiding light and deadly laser in our hectic, modern world. The Internet horde has been watching you closely for some time now. It has seen you flock to your Facebook and your Twitter over the years, and it has seen you enter its home turf and attempt to overrun it with your scandals and “real world” gossip. You need to know that the ownership of cyberspace will always remain with the hivemind. The Internet does not belong to your beloved authorities, militaries, or multi-millionaire company owners. The Internet belongs to the trolls and the hackers, the enthusiasts and the extremists; it will never cease to be this way.

  You see, the Internet has long since lost its place in time and its shady collective continues to shun the fact that it lives in a specific year like 2012, where it has to abide by 2012’s morals and 2012’s society, with its rules and its punishments. The Internet smirks at scenes of mass rape and horrific slaughtering followed by a touch of cannibalism, all to the sound of catchy Japanese music. It simply doesn’t give tuppence about getting a “job,” getting a car, getting a house, raising a family, and teaching them to continue the loop while the human race organizes its own death. Custom-plated coffins and retirement plans made of paperwork…the Internet asks why?

  You cannot make the Internet feel bad, you cannot make the Internet feel regret or guilt or sympathy, you can only make the Internet feel the need to have more lulz at your expense. The lulz flow through all in the faceless army as they see the twin towers falling with a dancing Hitler on loop in the bottom-left corner of their screens. The lulz strike when they open a newspaper and care nothing for any of the world’s alleged problems. They laugh at downward red arrows as banks and businesses tumble, and they laugh at our glorious government overlords trying to fix a situation by throwing more currency at it. They laugh when you try to make them feel the need to “make something of life,” and they laugh harder when you call them vile trolls and heartless web terrorists. They laugh at you because you’re not capable of laughing at yourselves and all of the pointless fodder they believe you surround yourselves in. But most of all they laugh because they can.

  This is not to say that the Internet is your enemy. It is your greatest ally and closest friend; its shops mean you don’t have to set foot outside your home, and its casinos allow you to lose your money at any hour of the day. Its many chat rooms ensure you no longer need to interact with any other members of your species directly, and detailed social networking conveniently maps your every move and thought. Your intimate relationships and darkest secrets belong to the horde, and they will never be forgotten. Your existence will forever be encoded into the infinite repertoire of beautiful, byte-sized sequences, safely housed in the cyber cloud for all to observe.

  And how has the Internet changed the lives of its most hardened addicts? They simply don’t care enough to tell you. So welcome to the underbelly of society, the anarchistic stream-of-thought nebula that seeps its way into the mainstream world—your world—more and more every day. You cannot escape it and you cannot anticipate it. It is the nightmare on the edge of your dreams and the ominous thought that claws its way through your online life like a blinding virtual force, disregarding your philosophies and feasting on your emotions.

  Prepare to enter the hivemind, motherfuck.

  Since 2008, Anonymous had destroyed servers, stolen e-mails, and taken websites offline. But in the collective act of social engineering, its greatest feat was in g
etting people to believe in the power of its “hivemind.” This was what attracted the supporters, what got them arrested, and what inspired others to avenge their arrests. Anonymous was how a new generation of computer-savvy individuals could show the world that they had a voice, and that they mattered.

  What they do next has yet to be written. These small groups of young people from around the world, often male, often poor and unemployed, who mostly just talk together in Internet chat rooms, have finally managed to grab hold of the public consciousness. They are still holding on, and they will not let go.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would never have happened were it not for the contributions of several key individuals. First and foremost is Jake Davis, who has given unceasingly helpful and clear insights into the bewildering world of Anonymous, LulzSec, and Internet culture generally. There is more from Davis than I could fit in this book, and I maintain that he should, at some point, write a book of his own. I would not have first started talking to Davis back in December of 2010 were it not for a crucial e-mail introduction from Gregg Housh, whose own role in the history of Anonymous is detailed in chapter 5. At that time I had just started covering Anonymous for Forbes on its new blogging platform, but, being based in London, I was interested in speaking to a U.K. representative. I asked Gregg if he could recommend anyone, and he gave me a general e-mail address for AnonOps. It turned out that one of the people manning that address was Jake “Topiary” Davis. As I exchanged e-mails with this address, I became even more intrigued. This representative spoke confidently as “we” when referring to Anonymous, yet maintained that theirs was a fluid system, allowing jobs to be carried out by “anyone and everyone.” I asked how he had found Anonymous and I was told about image boards. I’d never heard of them. “I know it sounds a bit silly,” he added, “but it really is a whole different world once you’re refined to it. You start seeing things differently in life.” I found this fascinating. When this person then revealed that his nickname was Topiary, I Googled the word and found references to gardening. Who were these people?

  After covering the HBGary attack, I struggled to figure out where to take the story next and called Forbes managing editor Tom Post seeking answers. After listening to me ramble on about social media vulnerabilities, he gave me what was probably the most valuable advice I received all year: “Marshal everything you have on Anonymous that has not been reported, then let’s find a focus there.” He told me to find out more about the people behind Anonymous, like Topiary. I took his advice and ran with it. The idea for a book came to me after some initial encouragement from staffers at Forbes in February of 2011, including the magazine’s cyber security writer, Andy Greenberg. Andy would later become a brother in arms as we both grappled with the book-writing process—he has written a book about WikiLeaks, and hacktivism, published in 2012. From there I went on to gain invaluable advice and mentoring from Eric Lupfer at William Morris, whom I cannot thank enough for having helped me write and then rewrite a decent book proposal.

  By now I had met (via e-mail) the extraordinary young man referred to in this book as William. That started when he first tried to friend me on Facebook, then sent a cryptic, direct message: “Hello. What would you like to know? In return for answering what you ask, may I ask some questions of you? I’d really appreciate a response, negative or otherwise. Thank you, Chelsea.” Not knowing who or what this “Chelsea” was, I ignored the message. A week later another message came: “Please don’t ignore me, it’s rude.” And then: “Is it really too much to ask to get a simple dialogue going?” Today I am grateful that I did, not only because I might have otherwise ended up on the receiving end of one of his “life ruins,” but because I eventually discovered someone far more articulate, helpful, and forthcoming than William’s original message suggested. Though he will come across to many as a somewhat vindictive individual, William has answered almost every question I have ever asked him about 4chan, Anonymous, his life, and even the darker corners of his own mind. For that, and for helping to give this book an important insight into 4chan culture, he deserves enormous thanks.

  Among the other key people who deserve acknowledgment: Forbes’s chief product officer, Lewis D’Vorkin. He met some skepticism when he first established the Forbes contributor platform in the summer of 2010, which completely changed the way journalists at the publication posted online stories. But this book would never have happened if D’Vorkin had not made that bold and rather brilliant move. It gave journalists like me the freedom to pursue the stories that truly intrigue us, and then the ability to measure how much our readers are intrigued by them, too. Thanks to D’Vorkin’s complete revamping of the architecture of Forbes, I could see there was a healthy appetite for stories about the world of Anonymous, and now had an unprecedented opportunity to chase those stories down. The Forbes technology editor, Eric Savitz, who is also my boss, has given me a wealth of helpful encouragement on this book. Coates Bateman, Forbes’s executive producer of product development, has been an invaluable collaborator with this book’s publisher, Little, Brown, while Forbes’s legal counsel Kai Falkenberg has also offered me sound advice on legal matters.

  I am grateful to all the other people associated with Anonymous that I spoke to for this book, including LulzSec’s core members Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, Kayla, Tflow, AVunit, and Pwnsauce, along with Barrett Brown, Laurelai Bailey, Jennifer Emick, and a number of others who have asked to remain, fittingly enough, anonymous. Though some of these people, particularly hackers, were not always completely forthcoming, or honest, when speaking to me, I was fortunate, as a journalist, that they would speak to me at all. Many have asked how I was able to get access to people who frequented such hard-to-reach corners of the Web, and the answer is that I had enormous help from sources who made introductions and vouched for me. I also believe that people, no matter how sociopathic, narcissistic, or duplicitous they may seem to be, have a genuine urge to tell their stories and carve out some sort of legacy. I believe that is why it helped that, when I first started speaking in March 2011 to the hackers who hit HBGary and then formed LulzSec, I told them their interviews would be contributing to a book I was writing about Anonymous.

  In addition, Gabriella Coleman, now Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, regularly provided me with a refreshing dose of clarity on who Anonymous was as a collective and how it worked. Coleman has shown extraordinary dedication to studying the Anonymous phenomenon. She has spent more time speaking to a broader base of regular Anons on IRCs than I likely did for this book, and she is rightly seen as the expert on Anonymous and its evolution. Be sure to keep an eye out for her forthcoming book on Anonymous in the next year or so.

  Sincere thanks goes to my former colleagues at Forbes Anita Raghavan, who offered some smart advice on my book proposal, and Stephane Fitch, who also introduced me to David Fugate of Launch Books. David has proved himself to be a brilliant and continually supportive agent who helped me find the best possible publisher in the form of Little, Brown. From the beginning of my relationship with Little, Brown, I have been impressed with the company’s genuine, solid championing of this book and with the clear and incisive editing by John Parsley. Given the subject’s intricacies and complexities, its multiple identities and sometimes unreliable storytellers, I can imagine that We Are Anonymous might have been a troublesome manuscript for some editors, but John did a masterful job of keeping me focused. He helped me tell the story as clearly as possible, and aided me with just the right amount of editorial intervention.

  I must finally acknowledge my wonderful circle of friends and family, whose constant support and encouragement kept me going through the sometimes ulcer-inducing process of researching and writing this book through most of 2011 and early 2012. Those friends include Miriam Zaccarelli, Natalie West, Luciana and Elgen Strait, Victor Zaccarelli, Nancy Jubb, Il-Sung Sato, Anthea Dixon, Leila Makki, and ethical hacker Magnus Webster. My fat
her has been my number one cheerleader for writing this book, while my husband has shown unbelievable support and patience as I worked my way from idea to proposal to manuscript. Another member of my family who did not know about the book but has been a guiding light in spite of that fact was my grandmother, who died on the day I finished revising the final draft of the manuscript and to whom this book is dedicated. Though she was ninety-six years old and hailed from a farming village on a remote volcanic island in the Azores, I think even she would have found something familiar in the stories that underlie Anonymous and its adherents. Despite their modern, mysterious world, steeped in jargon and technobabble, I think she might have seen, as I did, that Anonymous is a very human story.

  Timeline