I’ve only just a minute,
Only sixty seconds in it.
Forced upon me, can’t refuse it,
Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it,
But it’s up to me to use it.
I must suffer if I lose it,
Give an account if I abuse it
Just a tiny little minute,
But eternity is in it.
—Benjamin Elijah Mays,
American educator and president
of Morehouse College
Commentators often cast Anonymous as an amorphous and formless entity existing in some mythical and primordial jelly-like state of non-being, only solidifying into existence when an outside agent utters its name. Buying into this logic, some writers suggest that Anonymous and its interventions suffer from an inherent lack of cohesion. “The group’s hazy message, with no spokesmen, leaders, or firm political plans to provide steady direction,” Art Keller wrote for Newsweek, “isn’t helped by an ideology that veers between extreme left, extreme right and mainstream concerns.”1 A more prosaic example comes from an Anon himself who relayed the following to me during a personal chat conversation: “I spoke to a real life friend today about Anonymous and he seemed to have some vision of disembodied brains held in suspension orbiting the earth in battle satellites or something, the idea that actual people were involved seemed to flummox him.”
These generalizations—promulgated by the media and commoners alike—are not only mostly wrong, but they also lead us further away from actually understanding Anonymous. Far from lacking structure or flailing wildly about like a compass at the North Pole, Anonymous incorporates an abundance of relationships, structures, and moral positions. Human beings—speaking, coding, debating, arguing, making art, and acting—are there every step of the way. This sentiment found a particularly nice expression during a conversation I had with Mustafa Al-Bassam, a notable former member of LulzSec, a hacker group that broke away from Anonymous. Exasperated by attempts to catalog every secret channel and collate every relevant note, I found him online one day and pestered him—begged him, really—to provide a neat, tidy, and definitive list of all the channels he could remember. He kindly acquiesced and in the middle of his meticulous explanation, which still left me confused, he asked, “Do you know kittencore?”
Oh damn, kittenporn?, I thought to myself. Thankfully, he reined in my imagination and clarified: “The IRC channel—we had a channel called #kittencore, and another called #upperdeck. The only difference is that #upperdeck had all the same people in #kittencore but one less.” I asked why they kept one person in the dark. He replied, “Because he came very late into it and we became reluctant to have him in the center and also because he came just as we were splitting the bitcoins.”
“Micro-micro-politics and cabals nested within cabals,” I replied.
It is precisely this mixture of concreteness and abundance—one channel, exactly the same as the other, minus one person, since he is too new and not yet trustworthy—which makes Anonymous both so difficult to describe and so resistant to being slotted into a pre-fabricated mental template. Within Anonymous, the pressure and desire to efface the public presentation of self allows the participants to perform an admixture of their souls, conjuring into existence something always emergent and in flux. The number of relationships, fiefdoms, and cliques in simultaneous existence is largely invisible to the public, which tends to see Anonymous from the vantage point of carefully sculpted propaganda and the media’s rather predictable gaze.
And yet, peering through the computer, we find Anonymous in any instant to be an aggregate sack of flesh—meshed together by wires, transistors, and wi-fi signals—replete with miles of tubes pumping blood, pounds of viscera filled with vital fluids, an array of live signaling wires, propped up by a skeletal structure with muscular pistons fastened to it, and ruled from a cavernous dome holding a restless control center, the analog of these fabulously grotesque and chaotically precise systems that, if picked apart, become what we call people. Anonymous is no different from us. It simply consists of humans sitting at their glowing screens and typing, as humans are wont to do at this precise moment in the long arc of the human condition. Each body taken alone provides the vector for an irreducibly unique and complex individual history—mirroring in its isolation the complexity of all social phenomena as a whole—which can itself be reduced yet further, to the order of events: mere flights of fingers and an occasional mouse gesture which register elsewhere, on a screen, as a two-dimensional text or a three-dimensional video; the song their fingers play on these keyboards ringing forth in a well-orchestrated, albeit cacophonous and often discordant, symphony; it is sung in the most base and lewd verse, atonal and unmetered, yet enthralling to many: the mythical epic of Anonymous.
Anonymous was not always this complex; it was only in late 2010 that the activist group became such a tangled and constantly shifting labyrinth. In November 2010, the minotaur running the maze of Anonymous had not yet found its escape route into the world, but it was getting closer. Chanology was still ongoing and AnonOps’ IRC remained the central nerve center for a cavalcade of DDoS campaigns lobbed against the copyright industry. By the end of November, this steady stream of direct action in support of file sharing came to a screeching halt. Participation in the public-facing IRC channels dwindled to an all time low. But the core teams, who had collaborated on the private channels, did not quietly shutter the doors and close up shop (though the low numbers did worry them). Instead, they sought to organize themselves better. A brainstorming session resulted in a collaboratively written document hashing out the purpose and structure of the private channel #command, which scandalized the broader ranks of Anonymous publicized earlier in November (see figure on facing page).
The document, which existed in various garish states, first defined the limited role of #command as “act[ing] as an intermediary” that “does not take decisions alone” and should lead “only the discussion, not the direction” of the operations. The document ends with a list of rules, including the ironic pronouncement that “only grownups” are allowed to be in “Command.” Ironic because a number of the individuals were under eighteen (and really, Anonymous as “grownup”?).
There are many concepts embedded in this document that are likely unfamiliar to IRC virgins and could bear some explanation. First: you use an IRC client to connect to a server, and then you pick a handle or “nick”—this could be your legal name, but more typically it’s something else. You have the option to speak one-on-one with other connected users, or you can join “channels,” which are denoted by a preceding octothorpe (#) and can be joined by any user who knows of the room’s existence—assuming it’s not an invite-only room. Once you join a room, you converse with other users who are there, typically about a channel-specifc topic. Whoever creates the channel is called the channel “founder” and has a certain amount of power to change its properties, determining who can enter, whether the channel is visible in the server’s list of public channels, and so forth. These operators can also bestow—at least in some versions of IRC—power on others, adding them to what’s called the “AutoOp (AOP)” list. Anyone on that list can “kick” anyone else out of the channel for whatever reason they choose, and even ban them from returning. At a higher order of power are the IRCops—a fraction who run the server and have the power to not only kick people from individual channels, but also from the server itself, disconnecting them completely. IRCops also have the ability to alter individual channel configurations and perform many other administrative functions. Typically, there are many individual channel operators but few IRC server operators. For many IRCops, getting involved in any individual channel’s dispute is a frustrating exercise—requiring them to pass judgment on events they were not privy to. As a result, channel decisions are typically deferred to the channel operators, with a server admin intervening only in extreme circumstances.
Rules in Command:
•Nobody kicks and certainly not bans inside command.
•Don’t interrupt another one’s subject.
•First point out the matters at hand, then point out priorities.
•People who troll in command get (permanently) thrown out of the AOP list.
•Personal disputes are taboo.
•Grown-ups only.
•No offtopic subjects in (staff) discussions.
•Pointing out problems in a structured way: name problem, suggest solution. If you can’t hint a solution, then at least give evidence or argue your statements, as long as your point is valid.
•If you don’t like somebody, get over it. Were all in this together.
•Admins/OPs are considered an example. Act on that behavior!
•Don’t expect IRCops to sort out all your problems, try it yourself, if all else fails, ask OP!
Many participants draw (or at least seek to draw) sensible lines of order from IRC and other stable sites of interaction. This order, nevertheless, is delicate and precarious—always on the edge of disorder. However, like so many trickster scenarios of turmoil, these moments of chaos don’t necessarily lead to breakdown and stasis. Instead, they often function as beginnings—necessary for the vitality and even regeneration of the broader community. Juxtaposing two quotes, one by Spanish philosopher George Santayana and another by Henry Brooks Adams, puts this lesson into relief:
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds but it won’t be chaos once we see it for what it is.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
In the somewhat tangled story I am about to tell, it will be clear how Anonymous, like most social movements, remains open to chance, and chaos. The difference being that Anonymous is perhaps just a touch more open to mutation. Nowhere do we see this demonstrated more vividly than at the beginning of December 2010, when a whimsical decision ended a period of inactivity in AnonOps, flinging open the door for new actionable possibilities and allowing scores of newcomers to arrive as ready conscripts (mostly unaware, again, of the still-private #command IRC channel). This decision revitalized AnonOps to such a degree that the group’s IRC network became a fountain of nonstop activity for over a year, surpassing WikiLeaks as the primary hacker-activist hub of the Internet.
But, before we describe this whimsical decision, we would do well to keep in mind its infamous outcome: AnonOps’ support of WikiLeaks via a massive DDoS campaign in the aftermath of the whistleblowing organization’s most contentious release yet. On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks publicly released 220 of 251,287 classified US diplomatic cables—the most extensive leak of classified materials ever, timed to coincide with in-depth analyses by the Guardian, the New York Times, El País, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. The US government was furious, and a trio of powerful companies—Amazon, MasterCard, and PayPal (among others)—bowed to its influence, refusing to process donations or provide website hosting for the embattled organization.
Even though WikiLeaks had already released hundreds of thousands of military documents about the Afghan and Iraq wars, which brimmed with revelations of detention squads, civilian casualties, the solicitation of child prostitutes, and a host of other horrors, “Cablegate” still managed to stand in a class of its own. It pulled back the curtain on not only the intra-diplomatic discussions that were normally hidden behind a veil of diplomatic etiquette, and also—and even more salaciously—on the internal discussions and intelligence gathering of US diplomats themselves. Then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had in 2009, we learned, merged diplomacy and spying into one activity, ordering US diplomatic officials to collect credit card numbers, frequent flyer numbers, and biometric information on foreign officials. We learned for the first time that the Obama administration had been secretly conducting a war in Yemen, launching missile attacks at suspected terrorists, while the Yemeni government covered it up by claiming responsibility themselves. We learned that American intelligence agencies believed that North Korea had given Iran nineteen of its longest-range missiles—which the public didn’t know existed in the first place. We learned that Saudi Arabian leaders had been urging the United States to bomb Iran in order to, as King Abdullah himself put it, “cut off the head of the snake.” The cables showed that Israel was bluffing on its threat to launch airstrikes against Iran, and that the United States engaged in criminal dealings with the corrupt, drug-trafficking brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. The cables also touched on comparably banal subjects, like US diplomats’ routine bad-mouthing and name-calling of foreign leaders.2 Previously, things were merely interesting and provocative. But now, as the revelations kept coming, members of the public discovered their jaws dropping lower and lower by the day, as if they were strapped into some orthodontic-transparency device, hand-cranked by Julian Assange himself.
Sarah Palin suggested Assange be hunted down “with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”3 Senator Joe Lieberman declared it “an outrageous, reckless, and despicable action that will undermine the ability of our government and our partners to keep our people safe and to work together to defend our vital interests.”4 Lieberman’s staff reached out to Amazon—not only the world’s largest book retailer but also its largest web host—and asked it to ban WikiLeaks from its servers. It acquiesced. The financial firms that process credit card transactions worldwide followed suit, cutting the umbilical cord between donors and WikiLeaks. Although WikiLeaks had not been found guilty of anything by any court of law—these companies, without any legal obligation to do what the government asked of them, went ahead anyway. Anonymous was outraged.
Two weeks later, AnonOps became ground zero for the single largest digital direct action campaign the Internet had—and still has—ever witnessed, at least when measured by number of participants. Over seven thousand individuals logged onto AnonOps’ IRC channel, #operationpayback, to lend a helping hand, cheer or, at the very least, simply spectate. Seven thousand users in one channel remains the largest single human IRC congregation ever.5 It was a “mass demo against control,” as free software hacker Richard Stallman described the event in a Guardian editorial.6 In the month of December alone, LOIC was downloaded 116,988 times, far more than during the earlier DDoS campaigns.7 While only a fraction of those actually connected to the Anonymous hive, interest in the tool was undoubtedly fueled by reporting on Anonymous’s activities.
Media attention was frenzied, catapulting this collective of collectives out of relative obscurity and into the international spotlight. Not only did the usual suspects—like technology-oriented publications and blogs—report on the uprising, but so did most of the major nightly news programs. CNN hosted the digital strategist Nicco Mele, who praised Anonymous during an in-depth interview. In the New York Times, one of the Internet’s original patron saints, John Perry Barlow, cast the Anonymous campaign as “the shot heard round the world—this is Lexington.”8
WikiLeaks and Anonymous seemed like a perfect fit. Anonymous’s DDoS campaign solidified the alliance through a spectacular display of solidarity and support. But, as hinted at before, AnonOps’ decision to intervene came about in a rather convoluted, disorderly manner. Journalist Parmy Olson, in her book We Are Anonymous, portrays AnonOps’ decision to rally around WikiLeaks as straightforward:
The people who set up AnonOps were talking about the WikiLeaks controversy in their private #command channel. They were angry at PayPal, but, more than that, they saw an opportunity. The victimization of Wiklileaks, they figured, would strike a chord with Anonymous and bring hordes of users to their new network. It was great publicity.9
But this account barely scratches the surface of what transpired. AnonOps was in idle mode, with almost no supporters outside of the core team. This so-called “opportunity” only manifested once AnonOps command was forced to consider involving themselves following the independent actions of only a few unknown Anons, thus opening the floodgates for thousands.
It could be said that the initial nudge that reinvigorated the team behind Operation Payback, pushing them into Operation Avenge Assange, came from a rather wordy poster. It showered Assange with praise: “Julian Assange deifies everything we hold dear. He despises and fights censorship constantly [and] is probably the most successful troll of all time … Now Julian is the prime focus of a global manhunt, in both physical and virtual realms.” It then called on Anonymous to “kick back for Julian” by engaging in multiple political acts from DDoSing PayPal to complaining “to your local MP.”
On December 4, as this message traversed the Internet, an unknown party DDoSed the PayPal blog—most likely with a botnet.10 This action was followed by a trickle of journalistic coverage and a statement on the PandaLabs security blog that announced, in a matter-of-fact way, AnonOps’ involvement: “The organizers behind the anonymous group responsible for Operation: Payback are in the midst of refocusing their campaign to assist WikiLeaks in their quest to release classified government documents.”11 This was all news to many in Anonymous. As media reports continued to roll out, a convoluted and angry conversation broke out in AnonOps’ #command chat room. Most of the team had no idea they were “refocusing their efforts on WikiLeaks.”
To make sense of this moment, it might help to follow a few members of Anonymous (all pseudonyms have been changed) through the events that unfolded on December 6. We will start with Fred, one of the most important participants on #command (according to one interview subject, “[Fred] is AnonOps”). Fred invested a serious amount of time maintaining the infrastructure. A Kurt Vonnegut adage comes to mind: “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Fred was willing to do the work others took for granted, and as a result he was heavily invested in AnonOps. On that day, as Fred logged into #command, he was very angry. A conversation would transpire over the next hour that would forever change the future course of both AnonOps (specifically) and Anonymous (in general):
<Fred>: offs [oh for fuck’s sake]
<Fred>: that operation assange thing is just a poster
<Fred>: no site names, nothing
<Fred>: its not ours
Trogo (author of the PandaLabs blog post) was on the channel. He was one of a handful of embedded outsiders given access to the secret areas—typically there were very few of them—in order to ferret information out of the AnonOps bunkers and into the public domain. (Trogo, however, stands unique for being around #command since its founding.) It seemed that a statement published by Trogo had catalyzed many into the actions now under review. Trogo defended his hasty decision to publish without broad consensus.
<Trogo>: [It was] approved by Radwaddie [another member of #command]
<Trogo>: We ran with the name because media has a short attention span
<Trogo> [to captor]: Last night I wrote a blog post announcing the change of plans
<captor> [to trogo]: what change of plans?
A change of plans had indeed been decided by those chatting in AnonOps—but most Anons, even those in #command, had not been invited to take part in the decision-making process. As this became increasingly clear to those who were left out in the cold, many expressed dismay and confusion. “It seems many here are unaware,” wrote Fred. As blame circulated, others, dumbfounded, defended themselves: “it’s not us, we are not firing at paypal.”
Despite being an outsider, Trogo proceeded to remind the Anons how Anonymous works: the name is free to be taken by any who would take it. Someone noted the irony of raising this ostensibly well-known fact to Anonymous (and in what was perhaps the most important Anonymous IRC channel at the time, no less). And in addition to stating the obvious, the security researcher and blogger defended himself by characterizing what happened as being “nothing new.” He was well aware that the channel had already largely decided to support WikiLeaks, even if its commitment to mirror the site by duplicating its content had not yet been actualized. Recognizing that what was done was done, Radwaddie switched from a defensive stance to an offensive one, making a vigorous attempt to convince the disgruntled parties to embrace the momentum and push forward, hitting PayPal regardless of the strategy that had already been chosen:
<Radwaddie>: since we all agree on that [helping WikiLeaks]
<Radwaddie>: why aren’t we hitting paypal?
<Fred>: because no one knew we were suppose ot?
<Radwaddie>: i mean, shit hitting the fan already, might as well help them
It was a shrewd and opportunistic move—and almost immediately consensus started to favor jumping into the fray. But there were calls for due process. If they wanted to do it right, they first needed to rev up their propaganda machine. And even as some were swayed toward DDoSing PayPal, the growing anger (particularly directed at Radwaddie and Trogo for violating decision-making protocol) spread to others:
<dubiosdudious> [to Radwaddie]: who are you to make all the decisions?
<Radwaddie> [to dubiosdudious]: you wanna sit down and have a cup of tea over it and discuss the next cause of action?
[…]
<Radwaddie> [to dubiosdudious]: what’s your objection (bulletpoint please)
<dubiosdudious>: 1. no preparations
<dubiosdudious>: 2. no vote
<dubiosdudious>: on the top of my head
As Radwaddie attempted to push the campaign forward in spite of attacks thrown his way, semantic arguments broke out over the role of #command in general. Radwaddie yelled-typed: “ok, the fuck, WHO THE FUCK IN HERE HAS ANY IDEA AT ALL?” And as the seed germinated amid the gathered Anons, the debate slowly—perhaps inexorably—shifted from a question of whether to hit PayPal to a question of where to hit PayPal. Most participants favored the “main site.” Radwaddie then interwove pragmatic and moral arguments: “we’re trying to make a point, [that] we disagree with paypal [which is why] we do the thing we do best: ddos.” He wrote that this was what Anonymous was about, not “awesome speeches or fabulous community.” Just as support for Radwaddie’s position seemed poised to reach a consensus, someone named “lark” entered the room with a surprising nugget of information: “the [initial] attack on the paypal blog was one of our own as a side project.” So, in fact, the very first DDoS hit, which everyone thought was instigated by an unaffiliated Anon, happened to be carried out by one of their own. I guess he had just gone about his business quietly, since AnonOps at the time was primarily focused on supporting file sharing.
But despite this revelation, it seemed that the momentum could not be stopped. Given the hubbub generated by Trogo and Radwaddie’s decision to piggyback on the first DDoS hit, which everyone thought was accomplished by an outsider, it might seem incredulous that no one responded to lark. But we can imagine that the Anons were at this point so deeply immersed in their course of action—debating targets and strategy—that this single statement was easy to overlook. The conversation simply continued. Finally, an announcement came:
<captor>: DONE
<captor>: we have target [the paypal main site]
The propaganda team was notified and the attack commenced (with botnets being secretly deployed). Conversation naturally shifted to consider the significance of enlarging the scope of Operation Payback (aka “o:p”) to include other matters aside from copyright and piracy:
<Mobile>: so o:p has turned into a war on censorship and copyright?
<Radwaddie>: and we see this as a sideOP, we’re not suspending our “normal” activities
[…]
<Trogo>: Is it even possible to DDoS PayPal?
<Radwaddie> [to Trogo]: we will find out, won’t we?
The attack, unbeknownst to all participating, was no longer just a “sideOP” initiated by the Anons in #command—instead, it was the opening salvo that would galvanize a global movement, ushering in a new age of Anonymous. This new node would boast thousands of participants, and would be borne not out of an obvious and straightforward determination, but, rather, out of confusion: a mixture of manipulation, false information, good intentions, and rampant uncertainty.
The answer to Trogo’s question—“Is it even possible to DDoS PayPal?”—turned out to be “yes.” (The same turned out to be true of MasterCard and many financial companies.) What had been conceived as a mere diversion metamorphized, rather quickly, into the apotheosis of AnonOps. Between December 6, 2010, and December 8, 2010, AnonOps expanded its scope, targeting not only the PayPal blog and the PayPal website, but also the Swedish prosecutor’s websites (as the Swedish government was seeking to extradite Assange on rape charges)12 and the websites of Senator Joe Leiberman, Sarah Palin, MasterCard, Visa, EveryDNS (a domain name service provider), and others. Exacting vengeance against any party complicit in the smearing of WikiLeaks, AnonOps caused all of these sites to experience some amount of downtime, though the exact hours vary depending on who you ask. By December 8, numbers on the main IRC #operationpayback channel spiked to an all-time high of 7,800.
These examples demonstrate how Anonymous’s tactics conform to Michel de Certeau’s account of “everyday tactics of resistance” whereby “a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’”13 Radwaddie and Trogo decided to act independent of the group, seizing exactly this sort of timely opportunity; this style of on-the-fly decision making is an Anonymous staple. The group is often reactive rather than proactive; to paraphrase the poem which opens the chapter: the decision was forced upon them, they could not refuse it, they did not seek it, they didn’t choose it, but it was up to them. To fully execute the operation nevertheless required considerable organization and resources, which in this case took the form of zombie and voluntary botnets and propaganda.
What made the difference was both simple and simply beyond Anonymous’s control: it was the general indignation regarding the payment blockade. The Internet was awash in articles and tweets expressing dismay; everyone was asking some version of the question posed by a UK journalist on Twitter: “Of what have either Assange or Wiki-leaks [sic] actually been convicted, that allows VISA, Mastercard, PayPal, Amazon to withdraw service this week?”14 To illustrate the hypocrisy of it all, people pointed out that while MasterCard refused to process payments for WikiLeaks, racists around the world remained free to donate to their racist organization of choice, like the Klu Klux Klan. Internet scholar Zeynep Tufekci issued the following warning:
The WikiLeaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere “quasi-public sphere,” the Internet is somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private.15
Everyone was indeed confronting this cold hard reality: the Internet, so often experienced as a public space, is in fact a privatized zone, with the Amazons and PayPals of the world able to shut down conversation and commerce.
The mood in certain quarters at the time was captured in the following statement by an activist who went by the Twitter name “AnonyOps” (no relation to AnonOps, even if the names bear an unmistakable resemblance):
I remember a mountain of angst building up and I didn’t realize until that day that it wasn’t a mountain. It was a volcano and the day that WikiLeaks donations were held, the volcano blew and that’s the day I searched for a way to call out the bullshit. A way for me to talk publicly, without jeopardizing my career.16
A skilled and wealthy engineer in his thirties, he created the AnonyOps Twitter account (it would eventually become one of the largest multiple-author Anonymous accounts) and, like so many others, logged into IRC.
AnonOps, because it was not some amorphous blob but rather a team with a dedicated volunteer force and resources, had erected a platform from which all kinds of people could act. Confusion and happenstance mingled with operational readiness and the deployment of resources. Droves of concerned citizens from all over world flocked to the renegade army.
In the fall of 2010, when AnonOps was banging out wave upon wave of DDoS attacks under Operation Payback, I had taken a leave of absence from Anonymous to finish my first book on free software hacking. I was behind on the book, and with my tenure clock ticking, the pressure was on. It was psychologically crushing me: to retain my job, I had to publish a book. So I set aside the month of December to sprint to the finish line. When Anonymous resurfaced as an activist force in early December, I trusted my Spidey sense: it struck me as too historically significant to ignore. I put aside my manuscript and gave my attention to Anonymous. To be entirely frank, the gamble felt safe; extrapolating from previous actions, I figured it would peter out, or at least slow down, after a month, and I could then return to writing. But instead I remained chained to my computer for roughly three years.
At the height of the holidays that December, I went to the West Coast to spend time with my family. While family members went hiking on rugged cliffs overlooking the shimmering Pacific Ocean and watched movies late into the night, I huddled over my laptop. I was engrossed, dumbfounded, mystified, and addicted to the wild energy and excitement coursing through the channels. I’m pretty sure my family thought I was being purposely antisocial, and for good reason. I was hands down the scrooge of the bunch, never quite as excited as everyone else about holiday cheer, eggnog, or (most especially) the board games they loved and I loathed. In any given year, a half dozen excuses were ready to roll off my tongue at the mere hint of Settlers of Catan.
For most of my family, the Internet represents the dreaded chore of email; it’s the place where they read the morning news over coffee, skim Facebook for the latest pictures of friends and their cherubic babies, and, in moments of workplace desperation, fire up those fantastic cat videos. The Internet is all these things for me as well, but also more—a place of multiple worlds, a galaxy really. For them, it is simply not a “place” where something like the anti–World Trade Organization protests, which took Seattle by surprise over ten years ago, could possibly happen. And, undoubtedly, there is an ocean of difference between tear gas and typing. Incommensurabilities aside, one thing was certain: I was witnessing the first large-scale, populist, full-bodied online protest, and I was not going to miss it for the world, especially not for the Settlers of Catan.
After a long day of research, I wanted nothing more than to describe to my relatives the passionate and rambunctious scenes I had witnessed. But I fumbled to find the adequate words and terminology. For weeks I struggled to get a handle on things and judge just what sort of “mass demo” was taking place. Questions rather than answers sprung to mind: Was it civil disobedience? Direct action? Something akin to a street demonstration? A virtual sit-in? A blockade? Did DDoS attacks violate free speech and essential liberties, as some critics claimed? Was it ethical, unethical, effective, ineffective? Who were all these people, anyway?
I had only a vague idea at the start. There were so many nicknames zinging by me on IRC. Soon I would incessantly chat with a number of them, and eventually I would meet a smaller slice in person. But, at the time, they were mysteries to me. I had no clue about the existence of secret back channels; I was primarily viewing the conversations on #operationpayback and other public channels. I also had to learn just how LOIC worked at a technical level, and I had to read up on AnonOps’ fall DDoS campaigns. The pace and the sheer number of participants made all previous conversations I had witnessed on IRC seem trivial. Even though I was expending very little physical energy—sitting all day, staring at conversations—by the end of the day my head ached. I was worn out, and torn as to my opinion on things. It took a few weeks to process the ethics of how Anonymous ran its DDoS campaigns.
The amount of information-processing required of participants was staggering. Logging into the main channel, a screen popped up displaying the topic and a terse condensation of target information: the IP address to enter into LOIC, Twitter channels you should check out for context, and other IRC channels worth visiting. Typically, it looked something like this:
(04:56:18 PM) The topic for #opb is: OPERATION PAYBACK “http://anonops.eu/” http://anonops.eu/ | Twitter:
“http://twitter.com/Op_anon “http://twitter.com/Op_anon | “http://www.justiceforassange.com/” http://www.justiceforassange.com/Hive: 91.121.92.84 | Target:
“http://www.mastercard.com/” www.mastercard.com | See: #Setup #Target #WikiLeaks #Propaganda #RadioPayback #Protest #Lounge and /list for rest | “http://808chan.org/tpb” http://808chan.org/tpb
In conjunction, Anonymous was churning out a slew of well-reasoned manifestos, videos, and posters; Anonymous had tapped into a deep, widespread disenchantment, and by providing a conduit for confrontational activism, had channeled it into a more visible and coherent form. It was as if everybody knew it was history in the making: the first popular uprising on the Internet. Strangers were reaching out to work toward a common goal. I myself was inspired.
The conversations were a whole other matter. With thousands of people logged in and up to a hundred users talking at once, it was wildly cacophonous and required every last shred of my already ADHD-addled brain to follow. Indeed, there is probably no other medium on earth as conducive to what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin terms “polyphony” (multiple voices, each with a unique perspective and moral weight) than IRC.17 And while some would come to describe Anonymous as “a microcosm of anarchy, with no morals, empathy, or agenda,”18 I witnessed something altogether different: everyone had a moral viewpoint, a reason for being there. They cared, wanted justice, wanted to end censorship (and some even were there to disagree—vehemently—with the tactics being used). Yes: Anonymous had no universal mandate as a collective, but participants had their own, often well-tuned moral compasses guiding them.
To take but one example from among dozens of issues being hotly debated: in December 2010, #operationpayback was home to a vociferous debate over the effectiveness and ethics of technological protest in general, and DDoSing in particular. Two subtopics stood out: the safety of LOIC, and the more philosophical question of whether DDoSing is an exercise of the right to free speech or an act aimed at precluding the same right for others. The excerpts from two distinct conversations below exemplify the polyphonous character of these interchanges and the multiplicity of ethical positions on these technological protests. These issues were visited and revisited throughout the course of the month.
Early in the campaign, participants grappled with the political significance of Anonymous, with most everyone expressing support for DDoS:
<P>: this is better than WTO Seattle
[…]
<P>: bottom up approach
<z>: you need a critical mass though, before people start feeling inspired
<z>: 2 or 3 people standing around doesn’t look epic, it looks lame
<a>: this attack seems pretty unorganized right now
<z>: it’s gotta go viral, you know?
<P>: pretty appealing message imo
[…]
<a>: I think these attacks are less about hurting the businesses than drawing attention and forcing the media to cover the story
<a>: most people I know have never even heard about WikiLeaks until I bring it up
[…]
<a>: The point for me is that this is the technological way of mass protesting that’s actually effective so until there’s total freedom of information then there isn’t an end.
[…]
<m>: theres nothing wrong with technological protest. other than we struggle to organize. do any damage. hardly any of us are propper hackers.
<P>: synchronized twitter and facebook postings, jolly rogers wherever you can on the internet, and then a manifesto about how to take to your local street corner and do something
<P>: anon can get it moving, but this is bigger than anon
A few days later on the same channel, a few ripped DDoSing apart, as others continued to defend it:
<26>: i dont think DDoS can be in the name of freedom of speech
<26>: cause it is an act of silencing
<matty>: ^
<sc>: think of a target as a sign on a building
secreta: its pretty clear how hypocritical a ddos is to me
<PN>: you keep screaming that everyone is going to jail. you are just here to discourage. cunt.
<sc>: you do not agree with what that building represents
<26>: but people are going to jail
<ri>: DO NOT BE AFRAID OF JAIL
[…]
<ri>: every civil rights protest ends with people in gail
For the great majority of participants who contributed or used LOIC, it is safe to assume that they considered this tool and tactic a morally acceptable method of protest. Whether LOIC was in fact legal is a different question. At the time, the AnonOps party line affirmed that DDoSing with LOIC was safe: not because the tool anonymized your IP address (it did not, and generally no one claimed it did), but because the huge numbers of individuals participating would make it nearly impossible, or at least unduly inconvenient, for authorities to track down and arrest everyone. The main operators in the #operation-payback channel, some of whom were also in #command, would, in rare moments, ban those who warned others of its illegality. Those in #command wanted to instill trust, not fear, in their methods. AnonOps also circulated “instructions” for how to use LOIC, which featured atrocious security advice coupled with the overly pushy—and extremely dubious—legal advice in case of arrest:
IF YOU ARE V& [vanned] declare you had no participation in this event. Note you are using a dynamic IP address and that many different people use it, because it’s dynamic. If they prove that it was yours, then tell them you are a victim of a “botnet virus” that you had no control or knowledge of. Additionally if you set your wireless to unsecured or WAP prior to LOIC you can claim someone hacked your wireless. Case closed.19
More shockingly, a small cohort of journalists also spread misinformation. While Anonymous could, perhaps, be understood and forgiven for its mistakes, journalists should have done their homework rather than relaying incorrect legal advice and misleading technical information provided by their sources. The most egregious example of this practice came from the popular tech news site Gizmodo on December 8, 2010, in an article entitled “What Is LOIC?”: “Because a DDoS knocks everything offline—at least when it works as intended—the log files that would normally record each incoming connection typically just don’t work.”20 This point is just plain wrong. The DDoS’ed site can still monitor its traffic, culling and keeping IP addresses, which can be subsequently used to identify participants.
LOIC was about as safe as a torn condom. If a person using LOIC did not take other measures to cloak their IP address, it would be plain in every packet—in every attack—transmitted. Many participants likely lacked even rudimentary knowledge of how the technology worked, a baseline necessity for making an informed decision. The heat of the moment and the dominant sense of safety swept up journalists and participants alike. Generally speaking, and with a few exceptions, most people involved in #command, however naive the position might seem in hindsight, were, I think, sincere in believing that protection followed from strength in numbers; some of the individuals in #command used LOIC themselves and were subsequently arrested.
For much of the fall of 2010, Anons used DDoS with no repercussions, boosting the false sense of confidence that would soon evaporate under the first FBI raids at the end of December. There was also the issue of personalized messages accompanying the DDoS attacks. When individuals connected to the AnonOps hive, and packets were sent to a target, it included a message: “Goodnight, and sweet dreams from AnonOps.” The government could surely use this message to counteract claims that the sender was ignorantly a “victim of a botnet virus.” But with a good lawyer, that argument would crumble because the message could be identified as part of the virus (problem is, good lawyers are pricey). Regardless, none of this was discussed or seemingly understood.
The tide changed quickly. Soon after the first wave of attacks, a poster warning that LOIC was unsafe made the rounds. The bad advice presented by sites like Gizmodo was soon set straight by carefully researched articles on sites like Boing Boing, providing warnings and accurate technical details about LOIC’s security vulnerabilities. Around this time, a talented programmer managed to corral a small team of Anons to start writing a more secure, but harder to use, version. Upon release, it was downloaded en masse—before people realized it contained a trojan.
Finally, irrefutable proof of traceability arrived: law enforcement in plain blue jackets with yellow FBI letters visited over forty homes across the United States, trucking out hard drives loaded with incriminating data. Eventually, in July 2011, the FBI arrested fourteen alleged participants, thirteen of whom have since pled guilty. In October 2013, a grand jury indicted thirteen American citizens for participating in Avenge Assange and some of the earlier Operation Payback attacks.21
Now everyone knew that LOIC was an unsafe tool; that the US government was willing to go after online political protesters, even those who had not used LOIC (some of the participants swept in by the DDoS raid never used LOIC or botnets, but were charged based on IRC log conversations); and that there was no safety in numbers. Presumably, a hard lesson was learned.
Equipped with these details, what ethical and historical insights might be drawn from these extraordinary direct action events—the largest DDoS political demonstration the web has seen? By fall 2010, the use of DDoS attacks was an established political tactic among hacktivists; Anonymous by no means pioneered the technique. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), for instance, staged DDoS campaigns that they labeled “virtual sit-ins.” These actions combined technical interventions with poeticism and performance art. EDT targeted Mexican government websites to publicize the plight of Zapatistas fighting for autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico.22 They distributed press releases before the events and, while drawing less than a few hundred participants and causing no downtime to the sites, succeeded (somewhat) in the goal of gaining media attention. Regardless, the action hardly qualified, as Molly Sauter has perceptively argued, as “disruptive,”23 and it never reached a saturation point in the mainstream press.
Anonymous altered the scale, expression, and effects of DDoSing enough that the group broke the mold it inherited. Rather than spending months organizing small, well-crafted events, Anonymous experimented with the art of harnessing realtime anger into a wild, unpredictable, and continual uprising. As with any form of public assembly, alongside the politically motivated were those along just for the ride—and also those who were there simply to make the ride as bumpy and wild as possible. It’s inevitable that participants in Anonymous will have an array of positions and desired ends, given the group’s philosophical platform and the accessibility of its software tools; the actions are open to seasoned activists and newcomers alike.
By considering this tactic historically, we can plainly see that DDoSing is nothing new—virtually every movement advocating social change in the past two hundred years (from abolitionists to ACT UP) has relied on large-scale, rowdy, disruptive tactics to draw attention and demand change.24 The novelty lay in how the availability of a software tool, LOIC, and an Anonymous hype machine publicizing its existence, enabled such sizable and disruptive demonstrations to take root and unfold nearly spontaneously on the Internet. In a detailed analysis of the tool’s features, Sauter convincingly argues that the “Hive Mind mode” helped secure the hefty numbers: “Although Anons may not have ‘hit the streets’ as EDT envisioned Hive Mind mode did enable them to go to school, work, sleep, or anywhere while still participating in DDOS actions as they arose.”25
But even if DDoS simply extends a longer tradition of disruptive activism, it still sat uneasily with many Anons and hackers—even those who had no issue with law breaking. One day, chatting with an Anonymous hacker about the morality of the protests, I was told, “Trying to find a sure-fire ethical defense for Anonymous DDoSing is going to twist you into moral pretzels.” Particularly troubling to many Anons was the discovery that the DDoS campaigns in the fall and winter of 2010, including Avenge Assange, were built on deceit and buffered by the deployment of hacker-controlled botnets. Had participants known that an army of zombie computers provided the ammunition, they might have chosen differently.
And yet, without this turbo boosting enabled by the hijacked computers, the use of LOIC—even by thousands of willing, ideologically committed participants, each contributing a small bit of power—would never have resulted in the downtimes that generated the media attention that was sought. This same hacker, critical of the technique, elaborated: “I have had several discussions about DDoS with people who, similar to myself, are not overly fond of it, but we keep coming back to it, as it is effective; the media does drive a lot of this activity.”
It was pivotal. Robust public participation may not have been technically necessary, and claims of LOIC’s safety were atrociously off the mark, but without the appearance of a critical mass, the operation would have likely lacked moral gravitas and authority. In this case, strength in numbers conveyed a potent message, even if there was no safety in them (and no technical need for them): it palpably revealed to the world at large the scope of supporters’ disenchantment with what they saw as corporate censorship.
Geeks and others also leveled more general critiques against the tactic, struggling to analogize the DDoS campaign with offline equivalents. Most persistent was the notion that DDoS attacks trample the targets’ right to speak freely. If one takes an absolutist view of free speech, then DDoS extinguishes the possibility of speech by disabling access to a website expressing a set of views. This mirrors the position of some hackers, like Oxblood Ruffin of the Cult of the Dead Cow, resolutely against this tactic for decades. In an interview with CNET, he reasoned: “Anonymous is fighting for free speech on the Internet, but it’s hard to support that when you’re DoS-ing and not allowing people to talk. How is that consistent?”26
He is right, up to a point. A more dynamic view of free speech could take power relations into account. By enabling the underdog—the protester or infringed group—to speak as loudly as its more resourceful opponents (in this case, powerful corporations), we might understand a tactic like DDoS as a leveler: a free speech win. I favor a more contextualized, power-driven analysis of free speech. In the case of Avenge Assange, PayPal and its kin never really lost their ability to speak, and the action itself was in response to a unilateral banking and service blockade that crippled WikiLeaks’ capability to speak or present a position. Where WikiLeaks had one proactive outlet—its disabled website (and the occasional sympathetic journalist)—many of the targets, like the MPAA and PayPal, commanded lobbyists, advertisers, and media contacts capable of distributing their message far and wide.
But understanding DDoS as a modulator of free speech is itself contentious. Others think it aligns more with another traditional protest tactic: the direct action blockade. In one debate among members of the Cult of the Dead Cow, hacker Tod Gemuese declared the free speech analogy to be “hooey.” He continued: “It’s the digital equivalent of physical-world forms of protest such as padlocking the gate of a factory or obstructing access to a building, etc.”27 Those who were critical of the tactic because companies had to expend resources to defend their websites failed to understand the nature of direct action. Direct action exceeds a liberal politics of publicity, speech, and debate, having the goal of directly halting activity or impacting and inconveniencing the targeted party.28 DDoS fits the bill.
Of course, all of these arguments do not necessarily justify DDoS in all situations. Rather, they more thoroughly demonstrate its pretzel-logic and ethical relationality. Internet scholar Ethan Zuckerman and his coauthors have written persuasively about how DDoS can truly harm small organizations lacking the defensive resources of a large corporation.29 Even if one supports its limited use (say, against well-resourced and powerful organizations), the proliferation of DDoS, critics charge, still encourages the use of a tactic that can quickly devolve into an arms race where those with more bandwidth can out-muscle those with less.
Whatever one might think of the utility and morality of the tactic, we can gain additional perspective by considering the actual technical and legal outcome of a typical DDoS attack. This will also help us weigh the fairness (or lack thereof) of the punishments meted out to participants. In spite of erroneous media reports, the servers that bear the brunt of DDoS traffic are not hacked into—nor do they suffer any permanent damage or data loss.30 Costs are incurred primarily because targets need to hire firms to provide DDoS protection. A successful DDoS attack against a corporation blocks access to an Internet domain. This may stall access to e-commerce, but it does not affect an organization’s internal computer system. The typical Anonymous DDoS attacks, or “traffic floods,” were unsuccessful against service sites that perform a lot of data transactions and are served by CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) like Amazon.com. (AnonOps briefly tried to target Amazon.com directly and it was a spectacular failure.) Even with the estimated thousands of individuals contributing their computers to a voluntary botnet, their efforts never shuttered infrastructural backbones like Amazon Web Services. Anonymous’s DDoS campaigns tended to be more successful against informational sites like mpaa.org. Anonymous’s digital protest tactics essentially blocked access to these domains, but only their Internet-facing websites.
Given what transpires during a DDoS attack, and whatever one might think of the risks and seriousness of it, one thing seems certain: the charges leveled against Anonymous participants in the US and the UK tend to be out of line with the nonviolent nature of these actions. In the US, arrests for DDoS attacks were made under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which tends to lead to harsher punishments as compared to charges brought under analogous offline statutes. Offline protesting tactics such as trespassing or vandalism—wherein damage is not merely speculative—rarely result in catastrophic consequences for participants. Yet this nuance that recognizes the intention and the consequences of actions is rarely granted to online activities, especially when the CFAA is invoked. As a result, similar behavior that might earn an offender an infraction or misdemeanor offline (with a penalty of perhaps thirty days in jail) is punished as a felony with hefty fine and jail time when it takes place online.
To put this in perspective: in Wisconsin, a thirty-eight-year-old truck driver, Eric J. Rosol, was fined for running an automated DDoS tool against the Koch Industries website for sixty seconds. (As part of an Anonymous operation, he was protesting the billionaire Koch brothers’ role in supporting the Wisconsin governor’s effort to reduce the power of unions and public employees’ rights to engage in collective bargaining.) The actual financial losses were less than $5,000, but he was slapped with a fine of $183,000—even though a far worse physical crime, arson, would earn a fine of only $6,400 in the same state.31 The fine represents the cost the Koch brothers spent hiring a consulting firm prior to the campaign for advice on mitigating the attack. In the UK, Chris Weatherhead—who didn’t directly contribute to a DDoS campaign but ran the Anonymous communication hub where the protests were coordinated—received a whopping eighteen-month sentence, “convicted on one count of conspiracy to impair the operation of computers.”32
The legal outcome for those arrested for the PayPal attacks merits further discussion. Due to excellent legal help and a plea bargain (still in the works), most of the thirteen defendants charged with DDoSing PayPal will be fined only a modest $5,600 each and will evade jail time. Even though they will be charged with felonies, the judge will likely wipe it off their records if they comply with their probation. Two others will likely go to jail for ninety days to avoid the felony charge, and one defendant’s fate is undecided.33 (Final outcomes will be delivered in December 2014.) Even though the punishments are less harsh than expected, the defendants were still put through an expensive and draining three-year ordeal, and with felonies hanging over their heads, many may have had (and will likely continue to have) trouble landing jobs.
The whole affair is also marked by doublespeak that illustrates the flagrant hypocrisy of a single corporation, PayPal, going after protesters who participated in Avenge Assange. (MasterCard and Visa did not seek to prosecute.) In court, PayPal’s lawyers estimated damages to be up to $5.5 million.34 Meanwhile, in other venues, corporate officials claimed either that “PayPal was never down,” or that the attack only “slowed down the company’s system, but to such a small extent that it would have been imperceptible to customers.”35 This is a perfect example of how corporate actors not only can continue to voice their positions just fine through multiple channels, but can also engage in hypocritical and contradictory doublespeak as they put defendants through a costly, time-consuming legal process.
Eventually, the debate about DDoS became largely moot within Anonymous. The tactic’s success became identified with its ability to generate news headlines. This reliance on an obsessively cycling news media would grant a very short half-life to the visibility of actions like Avenge Assange. Anonymous, no fool, saw this coming; ceasing the operation, the group announced to the world in a poster that “we have, at best, given them a black eye. The game has changed. When the game changes, so too must our strategies.” From December 2010 on, DDoS, with all its moral conundrums left unsorted, became one occasionally wielded weapon in an increasingly diverse portfolio of tactics. Meanwhile, events began to stir in the small country of Tunisia, and the actions of a couple of hackers, one from AnonOps, set in motion events that would, yet again, shift everything for the collective of collectives—events as important as the birth of Chanology itself.