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 deserved 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.
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 proxy server to obfuscate 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 hormone 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 log files 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.