It is a hot summer’s day and Jake Davis is sitting cross-legged on the green grass of a public square in Peterborough, a midsize English city. Though it is the middle of the working week in August 2012, dozens of men, women, and children are walking about with shopping bags and strollers, reveling in the sunshine that’s been absent from local skies for most of the summer.
It’s been more than a year since plainclothes police officers from London knocked on the door of Jake’s wooden chalet on the windswept Shetland Islands, walked him onto a plane, and then placed him in a custody cell. For nearly all of the time since then, he has worn an electronic tag around his ankle, confining him to the brick house he now lives in with his mother and brother, between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. every day.
In April 2012 he scraped together most of the money he had in his bank account and bought his first suit and tie. He wore it to court on May 11 and answered to his criminal charges. Three other young men stood next to him: Ryan Cleary, Ryan Ackroyd, and a minor suspected of being Tflow. Each was named with some degree of culpability on an eight-count indictment. Cleary faced all eight charges, Ackroyd, the minor, and Jake Davis four.
Ackroyd, who wore jeans and a beige sweater that covered dark tattoos circling his arm, denied every one of the charges of cyber crimes committed under the nickname Kayla. “Not guilty,” he said in a thick, northern-English accent, pulling his hand into a fist and punching downward with each word, as if fortifying his own convictions. Jake pleaded guilty to the two most serious charges involving conspiracy to attack the likes of News International, HBGary Federal, and the Arizona Police Department, but contended one charge that alleged he had tried to make money through fraudulent means during his time with LulzSec. Cleary pleaded guilt to six of eight charges, the minor not guilty to all four of his charges.
About thirty minutes later, the four young men silently filed out; three of them headed back home. Ryan Clearly was sent back to jail, having broken his bail conditions earlier in the year. The four of them are scheduled to stand trial on April 8, 2013, and there’s a chance that Hector “Sabu” Monsegur will be flown to the U.K. to testify against them. The trial could last eight weeks.
Making the plea was something of a weight off Jake’s mind. He could talk about LulzSec a little more freely; he could look at job opportunities. But greater contentment came from something else: being offline.
“I’ve moved on a lot from the whole ‘Internet hate machine’ stuff. The whole trolling stuff. I’m happier and more fulfilled,” he says, still sitting cross-legged on the grass. “I quite like the free air. Not that I thought I wouldn’t, but it’s not that bad.”
It is another world now, filled with silence. “My head is a lot clearer.” Before he was flicking between fifty IRC channels—text flashing, constant clicking, head buzzing, on edge. Now the frantic, paranoid thoughts are gone. He enjoys seeing how slow everything is, like that pigeon walking in front of him.
Jake had felt the life being sucked out of him when he was up in Shetland. The problem wasn’t the islands themselves. It was the isolation and boredom he found himself trapped by, stoking the recklessness and disregard for consequence he practiced online. He had been happy as Topiary, “But it doesn’t mean I was happy in real life. I was motionless.”
It is strange to hear Jake say this, since his brain had been in a whirlwind of frenetic activity in the first half of 2011. Now his life looked muzzled by comparison: no e-mails, no smartphones, no Twitter, no YouTube, no chatting, no instant learning. The latter was one of the most difficult to bear.
Yet by “motionless” Jake is referring to the usual ebb and flow of life. Events feel more potent now with no online world to retreat to afterward, not least the court appearances, living with his family once again, and the specter of a jail sentence.
What’s a little mindboggling is that Jake faces years in jail largely because of things he said in chat rooms, a frictionless ether where thought instantly translates into text. Much of what he said on Twitter and in IRC channels as Topiary has now been printed out as thousands of pages that the police have used as evidence.
The main piece of evidence against him relates to a conspiracy charge—a conspiracy to attack the website of Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency—and includes a log of him telling Ryan Cleary that it is fine to go ahead and DDoS the site. He had typed something along the lines of “SOCA works. Do whatever.”
“And that split-second decision is worth an entire criminal charge,” he says now. “That’s why I’m glad I’m off the Internet. Because one thought and doing so little can get you into trouble. Botnets are so easy. Everything is so easy.”
It may be that in a decade or more, criminal law will place a more circumspect kind of judgment on people’s online behavior, maybe judge more leniently on the “conspiring” that takes place in chat rooms by young people who are in the mindset only of trolling and messing around. Right now it’s too early for that. Judges are not young; Jake’s had white hair and spectacles.
“They look at us saying bizarre rhetoric online and think we’re immature racists, when actually no one is,” he says, staring at the grass. “IRC is just the crap out of everyone’s mind being transferred via keyboard to a roomful of people on a constant basis.”
Jake has good reason to regret the things he “thought-typed” in chat rooms, now that they have been printed on paper as evidence. Reading through the posts he was making on Twitter, he sees nonsense. “Everyone just sniping at each other in 140 characters. It’s not real conversation. It’s drivel,” he says. “Finally you are taken off the Internet, sat down, and given a sheet of paper and [told,] ‘Here’s a day’s worth of your Internet usage.’ You can’t imagine doing or saying those things.”
He winces at the root of his ambitions. “I was trying to put on this face, the ‘Topiary’ face to get in with the culture that worked. But it was stupid and [about] trying to impress people I didn’t know, who didn’t really care what was going to happen to me. Cheap laughs.
“I can’t even relate to that person, you know?” he says. “I wouldn’t say those kinds of things now.”
Jake’s derision of his past life might have echoes of lawyer prep, but this seems a genuine opinion. He goes on to admit that it would be easy enough to slip back into running elaborate schemes and getting in trouble again on the Internet.
“Maybe give it another year,” he says of going back fully online. “If I went on it now there’s a slim chance I’d be tempted to get back into speaking to people.” By that he means the wrong crowd. “I’d end up trolling people…getting into a community, and then climbing to the top of that community, and then organizing things and saying stupid things to try and impress people…talking my way into weird groups. I can see it happening really easily.”
Over in the United States, Hector “Sabu” Monsegur has stayed out of the public eye and is, as far as most people know, not frequenting the usual Anonymous IRC channels. But he appears to be allowed online and is sending e-mails. His attorneys have proposed that due to his substantial cooperation with the FBI, he is eligible to get a sentence of fewer than two years. One lawyer involved in the case has suggested he could even get “no time at all.” At the time of writing he was due to be sentenced in February 2013, but prosecutors could delay that, holding the undecided sentence over Hector’s head until after he has testified against others.
Among them: Jeremy Hammond, who allegedly headed the Stratfor hack that led to the theft of thousands of corporate emails.
Then there’s Raynaldo “Royal” Rivera, an IT administrator from Texas whose story speaks to the ease of doing stupid, even illegal things online. Royal was an easygoing young man—intelligent enough to take college courses in high school—who left home to attend the University of Advancing Technology in Arizona in the fall of 2010. Finishing off his studies at the same prestigious college was twenty-four-year-old Cody Kretsinger. Cody was online friends with Sabu from back in the original Antisec days of 2000, and the two of them even talked on the phone from time to time. Around May 2011, Sabu invited Cody to join LulzSec’s exclusive “pure-elite” chat room. Cody logged on using the nickname Recursion. Sabu then asked him to find more skilled young recruits, people he could trust 100 percent. “[Sabu] wanted to start creating an elite group capable of doing anything,” Royal later remembered. Cody thought of two like-minded friends he had met at college, a fellow student named Chase Shultz and Chase’s roommate, Royal. At the time, Royal was eighteen and Chase twenty, and both were hoping to get jobs with the National Security Administration (NSA) after graduation. Both were qualified. Despite his age and freshman status, Royal already worked as an IT administrator at the tech institution.
When Cody invited the two young men to meet with him, he asked them to accompany him outside one of the college buildings for a cigarette break. “I want to talk to you about something,” he said. In between puffs of smoke, Cody told them about his involvement in LulzSec, the hacker group that was already getting plenty of press attention, and which included the same guys who had pulled off the legendary HBGary hack. He also offered them the chance to speak privately to Sabu, and to be a part of it all. The two were interested.
Later, Royal and Chase went online and entered a private chat room with Sabu himself. Sabu told them his team could use their skills, and he also told them about the benefits of working with LulzSec. They would gain the kind of knowledge that they were never going to learn at a regular school. He referred to it as “next-level stuff,” according to Royal’s lawyer, Jay Leiderman. “That’s what spoke to Royal,” Leiderman added. “The knowledge.”
Of course, there was no “next-level” knowledge that Royal or Chase ended up learning, but at the time the two were beguiled enough to jump in. For a week and a half, sometime after May 20, 2011, they talked with the other rock stars in the #pure-elite chat room, with Royal using the name Neuron, and Chase the name Devrandom. Chase soon dropped out, but Royal helped out in the Sony Pictures hack, after Sabu had directed different people to siphon different portions of data—personal details of people who had entered Sony contests—from the company’s servers. It was an exciting time for Royal and Chase.
Then Sabu started talking about hitting government targets, and their blood ran cold. Hacking Sony had looked worthwhile for punishing a big, bullying corporation who’d hit George Hotz with a lawsuit. But it was hard to see the reasoning to hit Senate.gov, which could get them in serious trouble.
Royal started telling some of the others that he wasn’t comfortable. When he eventually spoke to Sabu to say he was out, the veteran cracker replied, “No, you’re not.” Sabu reminded Royal that he’d already got his hands dirty, like the others, helping out with the Sony hack. Royal stuck around, but when Sabu suddenly disappeared from the IRC (his arrest) for more that a day, Royal felt he could finally split. He remained anxiously aware that Sabu knew Cody well, and that he probably knew they all went to the same college.
Royal was right to be worried. Sometime in late 2011, the police caught up with Cody and turned him into an informant. Then in January 2012, Cody started talking to Royal out of the blue about LulzSec, “asking very weird questions,” according to Royal, who had an inkling of what was going on.
Some of the evidence against Royal came from chat logs stored on Ryan Cleary’s computer. “The kid saved everything,” said Leiderman of Cleary. But oral testimony was an even greater asset for prosecutors. On April 2, 2012, about a month before Sabu was outed as an informant, the FBI paid Royal a visit, and the college student eventually turned himself in for further questioning. They had tracked him down through a combination of statements from Cody, and a court order to the HideMyAss VPN service that revealed his IP address.
In October 2012, Royal pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cause damage to a protected computer, primarily the servers of Sony. The company sought $605,000 in restitution from Royal, including the cost of upgrading its network. It would be up to Royal to get other alleged coconspirators, including Sabu, Chase, and Cody, to help him pay the fine. The former honor student was suspended from college and stopped from finishing his degree, and faced up to five years in jail. It was unlikely he would ever be able to work on high-level projects with defense contractors, as he had hoped, much less get a job with the NSA.
Leiderman, his lawyer, scrambled to get Royal a lesser sentence, perhaps some kind of house arrest so he could continue working and going to school. He was frustrated with the law on this matter. “We’re over-criminalizing childish mischief,” he said. “A twelve-year-old with moderate knowledge of computers could have signed up for a VPN and used this SQL tool Havij and, with the instructions he had, done this attack. [Royal] has lived an exemplary life, and gets what he did. We don’t need to be locking people like that up.
At the time of writing, less than a handful of people had been sent to prison. In January 2013, a British judge sentenced twenty-two-year-old Christopher Weatherhead, the AnonOps network operator known as “Nerdo,” to eighteen months in jail. He also sentenced Ashley “NikonElite” Rhodes, twenty-eight, to seven months. Both were accused of carrying out DDoS attacks against the websites Mastercard.com, Visa.com, and PayPal.com in December 2010. Although thousands of volunteers had also taken part, Weatherhead and Rhodes would be among the few to see a jail cell, and their cases helped set a legal precedent for punishing such activities.
Defense lawyers are waiting for more legal precedents, and are particularly interested to see what happens to Hector “Sabu” Monsegur. Sabu’s old friend Cody Kretsinger pleaded guilty to causing damage to a protected computer, as well as conspiracy, and faces up to fifteen years in prison, a $500,000 fine, and his share of the $605,000 restitution due to Sony. But both he and Royal are waiting to see what jail term Sabu gets.
Some are still angry about the way the FBI appeared to use Sabu as an entrapment tool. “Sabu said to bring more people. So he brought Neuron in,” says one of the six former LulzSec members, while sitting in a coffee shop in Europe in October 2012. He wishes to remain nameless because of his tenuous legal situation. “That was when he was privately recruiting. But once it blew up, it came to the point where it was no longer LulzSec, it was this Antisec thing. [Sabu] was saying, ‘If you know people with skills, bring them, because we need to replace so-and-so.’ In hindsight, he needed more people to get dirt on.” It begs the question: had Sabu not become an informant, might Antisec never have been revived, much less become a popular and disruptive cyber movement between late 2011 and early 2012?
“After that the Feds were happy, to a degree,” he added. “They didn’t like the damage being done but they were catching more people. A lot of it was almost entrapment, but that’s not something that’s going to hold up too well as a defense.” This is the main concern for all defendants now. No matter how unjust the ethics of their arrest might seem, they want as light a sentence as possible. The British defendants in particular, including Jake Davis and Ryan Ackroyd, are keen to avoid being extradited to the United States, where they would likely face harsher punishments.
Oddly, there seems to be little antagonism anymore toward the police. While they were part of Anonymous and LulzSec, several defendants were forever taunting the feds, referring to them in chat rooms as their ultimate enemy. Of course, meeting that enemy face to face across a table brought home the solemn realization that these were people doing their jobs, who could even be bargained with. The cyber insurgency that had been so easy to jump into and was so dramatic in its tenets was not black and white when it came to allies and adversaries. Former brothers in arms could be snitches, and detectives often did their homework. “As much as it will pain me to say it, they were extremely professional,” said Leiderman of the FBI agents who had worked on Royal’s case. “They were polite. Really, one could even call them gentlemen.”
“The forsensics guys were competent,” says the former LulzSec hacker. “They’re good.”
Detectives with London’s Metropolitan Police even take a relaxed view of the case that had attracted thousands of international headlines. “It’s just another job,” said one detective who was attending a recent court session, while giving a shrug.
But there are others still to keep them busy, more hacker splinter groups with names like PrivateX and Team Ghost Shell that have sprung from the meeting ground of Anonymous and have threatened more leaks. In September 2012, a Pastebin statement apparently aligned with Antisec announced the leak of one million and one Apple device ID numbers, claiming they had been derived from the hacked laptop of an FBI agent. A mobile app developer later came forward as the source of the breach. Slowly but surely, this is denting the credibility of Anonymous’s often dramatic claims.
Commentators continue to see Anonymous as another example of disaffected youth, a generation using the Internet as an outlet to express their angst, the same way punk did with music in the 1980s. The trouble is that this time, authorities cannot dismiss their outlet for expression in the same way they could once dismiss music. The Internet is a powerful tool that hosts critical infrastructure—a landscape with few walled gardens, where script kiddies with a few simple tools and basic instructions can disrupt the sometimes badly protected online property of companies and government agencies. Policy makers are struggling with how best to protect and regulate the Internet, knowing that they cannot use the same structural norms of the offline world.
Chris Poole, who was a teenager when he started 4chan in his New York bedroom nine years ago, believes that putting restrictions on the Internet just won’t work. “People are assholes,” he says during an interview on the sidelines of a conference in October 2012, wearing his usual garb of gray hoodie and skinny jeans. “I think it’s more representative of a people problem. Manners are learned over a lifetime, and as it turns out, throughout history there were people who were well-mannered and people who weren’t.” But, he admits, the Internet makes it a little easier to fall down the wrong path, because the amount of investment it takes into being a jerk is so small. “I’ve never been in a fight in real life. It’s a lot of effort and hassle. On the net you need fifty-five seconds and you make trouble. It’s just so easy.”
Jake Davis understands this too well. He cannot risk talking to others online to encourage them to stop and think about what they’re doing. But if he could go back and talk to himself last year, what would he say? Jake has to think about this for a moment. “I wouldn’t say, ‘Stop.’ I’d say, ‘Don’t feel pressured.’”
Saying “stop” doesn’t work for someone who feels so embedded within a group, and so disconnected from the real world, that they firmly believe the police cannot touch them. Of for someone who is convinced they must always be at their computer, because if they leave for a few hours, something magical might happen in their absence. In that frame of mind, the worst thing that can happen will be online—being doxed or ridiculed, for example—overshadowing the more serious offline risks of wasted time, poor health, or arrest.
The trick would have been to remind the past Jake of the pressure, and to question its source. “If someone pressures you into being there, then don’t feel pressured because they don’t care about your interests,” he says, with a hint of bitterness. “Fuck ’em.”
Someone once tried telling him to stop, but it didn’t halt his slide deeper into what was becoming a mass digital insurgency. It was in 2010. A Norwegian friend who he had played online games with was on the internet 24/7 and used it as an emotional dumping ground. Then he moved to a house with no Internet and everything changed. He got a job, found a girlfriend, and today has a child. The friend came back online in early 2010 and warned Jake against spending so much time on the Web. “Be careful,” the friend said. “It’ll eat you away.”
“I chose not to take the advice,” Jake says, even though now he would dispense it to others. “When the Internet is everything to you, you don’t see anything that’s happening,” he adds.
Now Jake is contemplating his future. “I’ve got eight or nine months before sentencing,” he says. “Before that I’m hoping to get a part-time job somewhere, maybe get an education going.” This will not be easy. There’s not much on offer in the town he lives in, twenty minutes north of here by train, and it’s hard to resist the desire to do something that could so dramatically utilize his communication skills in the same way Anonymous did. He hopes to eventually get into some sort of college course, perhaps while he’s incarcerated, then see where things go.
His Internet-addicted friend had managed to find something he enjoyed—his job. “If he can change like that, then it must work,” says Jake. “There must be some worth in the words.”
With that, Jake gets up and brushes some of the grass and dirt from his jeans. The sun is still shining and he plans to linger in town for a few more hours. His face is relaxed. The brief smiles come easier now. A year ago, in Shetland, Jake was not expressing himself with this much self-awareness. Now he has changed, from a quiet and awkward young man to someone at ease with himself in person, more sure of what he wants to be and even more sure of what he doesn’t want to be. It just took a few months of being Topiary, and having that life snatched away, to get there. The future is still uncertain, and in this offline world Jake is just another anonymous passerby. But that seems to suit him fine for now. Putting his hands in his pockets, Jake walks out of the grassy square and into the crowd.