by Parmy Olson
Chapter 2: William and the Roots of Anonymous
Details about how Christopher Poole created 4chan come from an interview that Poole gave to the New York Times Bits blog. The article, entitled “One on One: Christopher Poole, Founder of 4chan,” was published on March 19, 2010.
I sourced the information on Japan’s 2chan from the 2004 New York Times article “Japanese Find a Forum to Vent Most-Secret Feelings” and Wired’s May 2008 story “Meet Hiroyuki Nishimura, the Bad Boy of the Japanese Internet.”
Further details about the development of 4chan, such as its “TWO TIMES THE CHAN” announcement on Something Awful, come from an article on 4chan history by Web developer Jonathan Drain, on jonnydigital.com. Moot’s referral to /b/ as a “retard bin” comes from an announcement on the 4chan “news” page, 4chan.org/news?all, on October 2, 2003.
Though the story of Shii’s enforcement of anonymity on 4chan is relatively well known among image board users, the details come from testimony provided on Shii’s website, shii.org.
Details about the life, viewpoints, and exploits of the young man named in this book as William come from scores of e-mails and several face-to-face meetings, all taking place between February of 2011 and the summer of 2012. After telling me—in a meeting that took place in July of 2011—the story of hacking “Jen’s” (not her real name) PhotoBucket account, William e-mailed me photos of Jen and “Joshua Dean Scott.” I have the images on file. Scott’s photo, for instance, shows him holding a piece of paper reading “‘Jen’ owns my ass 3/2/11.” He wears a black baseball cap, a lip ring, and a black Converse shoe on top of his head, along with a slight smile. On several occasions William e-mailed me screenshots of the conversations he was having with the people he trolled on Facebook, as well as the raid threads he sometimes participated in on /b/, to corroborate his stories. The pranks and online intimidation of individuals described in this book are only a small fraction of the many nightly exploits that William alerted me to.
Further details about /b/ and 4chan were sourced from the meme repositories Encyclopedia Dramatica (now redirecting to ohinternet.com) and KnowYourMeme.com, as well as interviews with Jake Davis.
Chapter 3: Everybody Get In Here
The vast majority of details about Topiary’s early childhood and life on Shetland come from online and face-to-face interviews with Topiary (Jake Davis) himself, with further details and corroboration coming from discussions with his mother, Jennifer Davis, after his arrest. As of mid-April he was living in her home on bail, awaiting a plea and case management hearing at a British crown court on May 11, 2012. A few key details, such as the death of his stepfather, Alexander “Allie” Spence, were corroborated by newspaper reports. Descriptions of the scenery and lack of modern shops in Shetland come from my own one-day visit to Lerwick, where I first met Davis in late June 2011.
Details of Davis’s frequent prank calls to the Applebee’s restaurant in San Antonio, Texas, are a result of interviews with Davis himself. Though he could not provide recordings of the Applebee’s calls, he did provide audio files of other similar prank calls.
A common feature of /b/ raids was a “surge” of users against an online target, the idea usually being to overwhelm them. Among the examples provided are spamming shock photos on a forum; this is a common tactic of /b/ users, and was most recently perpetrated on the comedy site 9gag. The raid in which /b/ warped the votes for Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” took place in 2009, when 4chan users famously teamed together to program a bot that would crank out fake votes that put Christopher “moot” Poole at the top of Time’s ranking. As well as giving him an unfeasible sixteen million votes, they gamed the system so that the first letters of the following twenty names in the ranking spelled out the words “Marblecake also the game.” This was thought to be a reference to the IRC channel in which much of Project Chanology was organized in 2008 (see chapter 5). Time magazine provided details of the hack in a video and quoted moot as saying that he had no idea who was behind the vote rigging.
The stories of the Habbo Hotel raid and Operation Basement Dad come primarily from Davis’s testimony, but are also corroborated by online news reports, such as ReadWriteWeb’s April 16, 2009, article “Operation Basement Dad: How 4Chan Could Beat CNN & Ashton Kutcher” and, in the case of Habbo Hotel, the April 8, 2009, Fox News article “4Chan: The Rude, Raunchy Underbelly of the Internet.”
Details of the origins of Internet Relay Chat come from the online article “History of IRC” by computer consultant and hacker Daniel Stenberg, posted on his website, http://daniel.haxx.se/. Some extra descriptions, such as the numbers of IRC channels and numbers of users in channels, come from my own exploration of IRC. The source for the common “Everyone get in here” feature is Jake “Topiary” Davis, and I have verified the phrase’s frequent use through repositories for image board content, such as chanarchive.org.
Chapter 4: Kayla and the Rise of Anonymous
Main sourcing on the backstory that Kayla claimed about her childhood and parents came from online interviews with Kayla herself (I refer to the online entity as “her.”).
The source for the notion that Kayla lied about being a sixteen-year-old girl comes from my own observations and discussion with other hackers, with further evidence coming from the Metropolitan Police’s arrest of Ryan Ackroyd in September 2011. As of mid-April 2012, I cannot confirm that the person I was interviewing on Internet Relay Chat between March and September of 2011 was Ackroyd. As far as rumors that Kayla was “a transgender hacker,” Ackroyd did not appear to be transgender when he first appeared in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, then aged twenty-five, on March 16, 2012.
The quote “Kayla seemed to have a deep need to tell stories to prove her value to others” comes from reading comments by Kayla in the leaked chat logs from #HQ and #pure-elite during the days of LulzSec, including those in which she boasted about attacks she instigated during Project Chanology. So elusive has Kayla been online that phone and face-to-face interviews conducted with Hector Monsegur, Jake Davis, Aaron Barr, Gregg Housh, Jennifer Emick, Laurelai Bailey, and other anonymous sources yielded little more than speculation about who she really was.
Background information on the tendency for some men to claim to be women online comes from conversations with hackers and general knowledge from the world of memes and Internet culture. The phrase “There are no girls on the Internet” has its own entry in KnowYourMeme.com, from which some of this context is sourced, while the popular /b/ comment “Tits or GTFO” comes from my own exploration of /b/ and discussions with William. Incidentally, the list of 47 Rules of the Internet has been widely published online.
In my explanation of IP addresses, I am referring in this instance to IPv4 addresses (which have now sold out). The latest IPv6 addresses are a combination of numbers and letters that are segmented by colons.
Details about Partyvan were sourced from interviews with an organizer from the time of Chanology who wished to remain nameless, interviews with Kayla, and content on the partyvan.info website, also known as the /i/nsurgency W/i/ki.
Details of the Fox L.A. television news report from July 2007 were sourced from a YouTube video of the report.
Chapter 5: Chanology
Details about the publication of the Tom Cruise video come from interviews with anti-Scientology campaigner Barbara Graham and e-mails exchanged with journalist Mark Ebner. Patty Pieniadz wrote her own detailed account, entitled “The Story Behind the Tom Cruise Video Leak,” and posted it on the forum WhyWeProtest.net under the nickname “pooks” on September 4, 2011; some of the first part of this chapter is also sourced from this account. Descriptions of the video come from watching the video itself on YouTube. According to Ebner, ex-Scientologist and TV journalist Mark Bunker had originally uploaded the video to his YouTube account and notified several of his media contacts. Then, a few hours later, he took the video down.
The detail about Viacom’s $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Y
ouTube parent Google was sourced from various news articles, including the New York Times story, “WhoseTube? Viacom Sues YouTube Over Video Clips,” published March 14, 2007.
Text from the original discussion thread on /b/ about a raid on Scientology on January 15 come from 4chanarchive.org. The rumor that the original poster on /b/ for the first anti-Scientology thread was female come from an interview with Gregg Housh.
Details about DDoS attacks come from numerous Web articles about how such cyber attacks work, along with background discussions with IT security professionals and hackers from Anonymous. The Graham Cluley analogy about “15 fat men” originally comes from an August 6, 2009, article by Cluley on the Naked Security blog of the research firm Sophos. Background on the 4chan attack on Hal Turner comes from numerous blog posts, as well as from archived 4chan threads. The point that one could download “at least a dozen free software tools” from 4chan’s /rs/ board to take part in some sort of DDoS attack comes from an interview with Housh. Details of phases 1, 2, 3, etc., and how /b/ was hitting Scientology.org, specifically with Gigaloader, come from an archive of the actual thread. Details about Gigaloader come from piecing together and corroborating various Internet forum discussions about the Web tool.
Details later on in the chapter about the hundreds of people that piled into the #xenu channel on IRC, then the move to physical protests and establishment of the #marblecake organizational hub, come from a phone interview with Gregg Housh and e-mails exchanged with one other Chanology organizer who wished to remain anonymous. There also exists a timeline of the main Chanology events on the aptly named chanologytimeline.com.
Housh confirmed in an interview that he had been arrested for copyright violations. Further details were sourced from a “motion for booker variance” filed through the U.S. District Court of New Hampshire on November 23, 2005. The motion showed that Housh had pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate copyright laws, related to creating a computer program in the summer of 2001, which automatically searched for new software. Details about Housh’s family background were sourced from the court motion and the section “The History and Characteristics of the Defendant.” The motion also states Housh was approached by the FBI about the case in 2001, and that he sought to mitigate his offenses by cooperating with the Bureau “for four years.” Further details about Housh serving three months in federal prison come from Housh’s interview with the Huffington Post in the story “Anonymous and the War Over the Internet,” published on January 30, 2012. Housh’s age of thirty-five was also mentioned in the interview.
The factoid about 25,000 Scientologists in America in 2008 originally comes from the American Religion Identification Survey, cited in a report by the Associated Press.
Information on the posting of internal church documents by the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology is sourced from the January 2008 Globe and Mail article “Scientology vs. the Internet, part XVII.”
The detail that XSS is the second most common hacking technique after SQL injection is sourced from the Web Hacking Incident Database (WHID) of 2011, an online database that tracks media-reported security incidents and is led by Ryan Barnett, senior security researcher on Trustwave’s SpiderLabs Research Team.
Details about the technical impact of Anonymous DDoS attacks on Scientology’s website come from research by Arbor Networks, along with court documents related to Brian Mettenbrink’s case; these documents provide, among other things, the date when Scientology hired Prolexic Technologies.
Details on LOIC come from numerous online articles about the Web application, screenshots of the interface, news reports from tech site Gizmodo, and research from the IT security firm Imperva. Details on Praetox come from the programmer’s own website, http://ptech.50webs.com/, which appears to have been created in 2007 but was abandoned around 2009 or 2010. The emergence of NewEraCracker as another programmer to develop LOIC comes from details on GitHub, a Web-based hosting service for software projects.
The anecdote that Time Warner would profit from the V for Vendetta mask comes from an August 2011 article on the New York Times Bits blog.
The example of a channel topic in #marblecake came from a chatlog provided by Jennifer Emick’s Backtrace Security, via logs obtained from a leak among Chanology organizers.
The vast majority of details about Brian Mettenbrink come from a phone interview conducted with him on December 16, 2011, as well as from court documents and an FBI transcript, both of which were published on the Partyvan website. A few extra details came from an archive started when Mettenbrink uploaded a scan of his driver’s license and photo, along with the business card of one of his visiting FBI agents, to WhyWeProtest.net, as well as from comments in that thread made by Mettenbrink and others. Mettenbrink was banned from using the Internet for a year after his jail sentence and, at the time of this writing, still had to receive e-mails through a friend.
Chapter 6: Civil War
The vast majority of details about the experiences of Jennifer Emick are derived from phone interviews with Emick herself, as well as from a few interviews conducted over Skype text chat. Extra details about the methods of intimidation used by Scientology representatives against Anonymous protesters come from the testimony of Emick, Laurelai Bailey, various Web reports, and YouTube videos.
Details about the life and experiences of Laurelai Bailey (formerly Wesley Bailey) come from phone interviews with Bailey herself, along with several discussions held via Internet Relay Chat and Skype text chat.
The details of “simultaneous worldwide protests on February 10” come from Bailey’s and Emick’s own testimonies as well as from various blog posts that reported on the events afterward. Details about playing an audio version of OT3 at protests come from testimony by Laurelai Bailey as well as from the Der Spiegel article “Tom Cruise and the Church of Scientology,” published on June 28, 2005.
The point about an alleged list of “murdered Scientology defectors” came originally from conversations with Jennifer Emick, who also pointed me to discussions on the anti-Scientology message board ocmb.xenu.net, also known as Operation Clambake. A number of campaigners on this board, for instance, believe that former Scientologist Ken Ogger, found dead in his swimming pool on May 29, 2007, was murdered.
The description of Chanology as “full-blown activism” comes from interviews with multiple participants in the raids and protests, including Emick, Laurelai Bailey, and an anonymous Chanology organizer, with viewpoints split on whether the veering toward activism was a good thing or not. The notion that Scientology “stopped coming out to play,” i.e., stopped responding defensively to the antics of Anonymous, is sourced from testimony by Bailey and Emick, as well as from various online forums in which Chanology is discussed, such as WhyWeProtest.net.
The rows between IRC network operators, including the quote “you have no idea who you’re fucking with,” are sourced from Emick’s testimony, and the squabbles are also chronicled in detail on the main Partyvan website. Details of Scientology’s litigation against Gregg Housh are sourced from various news reports, including an October 2008 article in The Inquirer entitled “Anti Scientology Activist Off the Hook. Sort of.” Scientology’s perspective on receiving “death threats” is sourced from a CNN video from May of 2008, in which the news network’s John Roberts spoke to a Scientology spokesman who claimed that Anonymous was “terrorizing the church.”
Details about the way Emick “outed” Bailey’s online nickname, Raziel, leading to their falling-out, come from the accounts by both Emick and Bailey.
The information about SWATing a house comes from testimony from Emick as well as from interviews with William, who directed me to websites that showed the steps one needs to take to “SWAT” someone.
Details of Laurelai’s first online meeting with Kayla come primarily from interviews with Bailey. The extra context on transgender hackers comes from e-mails I exchanged with Christina Dunbar-Hester, PhD, Affiliated Faculty, Women’s & Gender St
udies, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
Chapter 7: FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE
The introductory paragraph, which suggests that Anonymous went quiet between Chanology in 2008 and WikiLeaks in late 2010, comes from interviews with various key players, including Jake Davis, Jennifer Emick, Laurelai Bailey, and conversations with other Anons, along with my own observance of a drop in news coverage about Anonymous between those dates.
The interview with Girish Kumar from Aiplex that is referred to at the start of this chapter is sourced from the September 8, 2010, article “Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen to Take Down Internet Pirates” in the Sydney Morning Herald. Kumar was quoted as saying similar things in the TorrentFreak.com article “Anti-Piracy Outfit Threatens To DoS Uncooperative Torrent Sites,” published on September 5, 2010. It is unclear if Kumar or Aiplex were ever prosecuted for launching DDoS attacks; there are no press reports since that suggest the company was.
