<Anonymous9>: There’s one thing which makes me a bit bittersweet actually
<Anonymous9>: Biella is here for college research
<Anonymous9>: I can’t help feeling that as soon as she’s written her thesis or whatever the project is, she’ll have no further reason to hang out here :(
<Anonymous9>: I don’t think she realizes how much she’s contributed to Anonymous
<Anonymous9>: Even if she doesn’t see herself as part of it necessarily
This 2011 chat log between a core Anonymous organizer and reporter was given to me in 2013. Upon reading it, a flood of emotions and memories washed over me. It reminded me how the quintessential anthropological life cycle—the alienation of initial entry, followed by the thrill of finding your footing, and the painful end of extraction—characterized my research on Anonymous. Anonymous9’s prediction was right—following Operation Tunisia I became intimately involved with Anonymous, and this entanglement has waned over time, especially when I started to write this book. Soon after reading this leaked conversation, I assured Anonymous9, one of my closest Anonymous confidants, that he would remain a friend even as I moved on to other research subjects (but only on the condition that he realizes that I am no longer a college student).
Anonymous9’s statements also reminded me that it took only the single month of January 2011 to graduate from a confused outsider to a confused semi-insider. The transformation was underwritten by the hours I clocked for research: five hours a day online—at least—every day of the week. I tuned in to between seven and ten IRC channels at a time, observing and absorbing the comings and goings of Anonymous. Additionally, I was spending roughly ten hours a week doing interviews with the media about Anonymous. I spoke with over one hundred fifty different reporters in two years. As a result, I now hold the dubious distinction of teaching more journalists about IRC than anyone else in the world.
Over time, the vertigo that came from wading through so much data, day after day, was replaced by a sense of belonging. I began participating in discussions and became known, and more-or-less accepted, in a number of the sub-communities and channels that were constantly popping up, like mushrooms in a forest after a good rain. No longer lost in the woods, I became part of the woods. Like all forests, danger lurked in certain areas—but at least I became increasingly aware of where the enchanting parts could be found as well. I found that my home became the AnonOps IRC channel called #reporter.
Settling into my new home was far from a smooth transition. No matter how many times I psyched myself up to say something, speak up, introduce myself, like now, this very moment—I always backed down. I was terrified to say anything for weeks, scared, quite simply, of being kicked out of the channel and losing such an incredible opportunity. This group of Anons, unlike those from Chanology, was fiercer and rowdier. I had watched, in rapt attention, others get banned from the channel for violating some codes of ethics that weren’t so clear to me and also, even more terrifying, for no other reason than the lulz.
It wasn’t until early January 2011 when I first spoke up. And it wasn’t entirely voluntary. Seemingly out of the blue, they noticed me. I had been observing safely, nobody paying any attention to me, until suddenly it was as if the lidless eye of Sauron had swiveled his gaze to my corner of the room, melting the shadows I hid behind and bathing me in a fierce beam of light. I was away from the computer getting some food in the kitchen. When I came back, I found this on the screen:
<Topiary>: Can anyone in here confirm biella?
<q>: i talked to her today but…
<m42>: you know her q?
<q>: if she would send me a DM on twitter, i could.
<m42>: “biella is away: I’m not here right now” and no @’s in any of 7 channels…
<q>: yes, if she’s the biella from twitter, i talked to her before
<Topiary>: We may need to dispose of journalists from here in just a bit.
<m42>: she can come back later
You have been kicked by q: (hi biella, could you DM me on twitter please? Thanks!)
My heart pounded. I groaned. It sucks to get kicked off a channel. It means you can no longer see what is happening and you don’t know why you were summarily removed before you could defend yourself. It is embarrassing—one has to wonder what they say about you when you aren’t there—and you are not sure if you are going to be allowed to return. You might get “z-lined” or “q-lined,” actions that operators can take to permanently ban your IP address from the entire server, which would mean that I would get removed from all channels at once. Thankfully, that is not what they had in mind. It turns out that they didn’t ban me from reentering the channel. And so ten minutes later, racked by anxiety, I logged back on:
<biella>: sorry about that i was away cooking
<biella>: this is me
<biella>: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman
<biella>: i have referred many reporters here
<biella>: and am writing/presenting on Anonymous
They responded immediately:
<Topiary>: Hi biella, apologies for the kick.
<biella>: no it is ok
<biella>: you gave fair warning :-) and i have been too too idle
<biella>: more than i would like
<Topiary>: We’re just usually very strict and sometimes a little paranoid of unidentified users in here.
[…]
<Topiary>: I liked what I read in your link. What aspects of Anonymous will you be covering in your presentation?
<q>: biella, can you send me a DM on twitter?
<Topiary>: Certainly look forward to reading your work.
<biella>: cool Topiary and i will be opening with 1) if i am wrong/off please contact me. always open to feedback
<biella>: q, what is your twitter account?
<biella>: i am https://twitter.com/#!/BiellaColeman
[…]
<biella>: glad you got it and i wont idle or hang out so often here for no reason
<biella>: ok i will leave you all and come back when i got questions. i do have questions but everyone is pestering me to go to dinner
<Topiary>: You seem pretty down-to-earth, glad to have you reporting on us. Enjoy your dinner.
<Trivette>: agreed
<biella>: thanks Topiary, ok catch you later
<q>: yar, can only say good things about biella. just wanted to be sure it’s the same her :)
Phew. Come to think of it, it was more like PHEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWW. It was a make-or-break moment. Had they called me out as lame or untrustworthy, it would have spelled my end—or at least converted the prospect of trust and access into a Herculean feat. Those on #reporter held more authority than your average Joe or Jane Anon. Their opinions counted.
Perhaps my painless acceptance bears further explanation. Recall that I was two years into researching Project Chanology. While AnonOps’ political culture was distinct from the anti-Scientology crusaders, there was enough of a cultural connection so that when participants rummaged through my work, it struck a familiar chord. From my video lectures especially, it was not hard get a whiff of the degree of sympathy I held toward Anonymous—enough at least to determine that I enjoyed the lulz.
And I was not alone. There was a confederacy of about half a dozen outsiders given extra access in exchange for functioning as Anonymous media mouthpieces. A hacker turned reporter named Steve Ragan dished out the most detailed and nuanced technical articles relating to Anonymous for the Tech Herald. A business writer for Forbes, Parmy Olson, churned out waves of stories, eventually becoming LulzSec’s private reporter. Two of its members, Sabu and Topiary, spilled their guts to her, even admitting—almost unbelievably—to law breaking. Writing for Wired.com, Quinn Norton’s long-form reporting shone brightly during Occupy as Anonymous converged with the 99 percent. Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger spent over a year tirelessly interviewing more than forty Anons on IRC, video chat, and in person for a full-length documentary. (Brian and I would eventually team up in a hunt to film Sabu, which failed miserably.) Asher Wolf, geek lady extraordinaire, talked to many Anons behind the scenes and managed, like no one else could, to capture its esprit de corps in chunks of 140 characters or less on Twitter. Amber Lyon, then a reporter for CNN, won special points for doing the most un-Internety thing of any of us: she trekked across a remote mountain pass from Washington State into British Columbia with the Anonymous fugitive hacker Commander X (Christopher Doyon) as he fled the United States to avoid prison.
Anonymous’s exchanges with media figures and researchers are as contradictory and varied as the collective itself. Most participants worked with journalists as respectfully and transparently as the clandestine nature of Anonymous allowed. The primary goal, typically, was to gain publicity for their causes, such as the turmoil in Tunisia, but they also sought, whenever possible, to carefully manage their own image. On a few occasions, the goal was to troll particular journalists as well.
Image management or trolling was aided by some in-house publicists adept at framing content toward both goals, who populated #reporter alongside the reporters and outsiders like myself. Two in particular were known for speaking to journalists with panache: Topiary, who was eventually revealed to be eighteen-year-old Jake Davis from the remote Scottish Shetland Islands (self-described on his Twitter bio as a “simple prankster turned swank garden hedge”) and Barrett Brown, a fair-skinned, honey-haired Texan whose home den was strewn with books and a taxidermied bobcat posed as if about to pounce off the wall. During OpTunisia, tflow had invited Topiary into the inner sanctum, and he proved himself so adroit at spinning lulz-fueled and delightful propaganda that he remained a core member. After Brown wrote a short article praising Anonymous, Gregg Housh (one of the original members of marblecake) pulled him in.
Topiary and Barrett Brown were also AnonOps’ resident tricksters—each with a distinctive brand of chicanery. Inspired by twentieth-century avant-garde art pranksters the Dadaists and the Situationists, Topiary found his knack in spinning 140 characters of brilliant nonsense and absurdist media manipulation. On the reporter channel, he would brag of exploits and scheme aloud:
<Topiary>: I’ve done a voice interview with these before, they’re good, they work through Skype
<Topiary>: I told ’em we had over 9000 members and made them lose the game, you should bel-air them
<Topiary>: Or something
<Topiary>: Anyway, just got done talking with some monstrous homogay named Andy who’s writing up on our latest fax shenanigans
Topiary, who held the admiration of many Anons, was a masked joker—adopting the pseudonymity almost unanimously deployed by his peers. His name was only revealed upon arrest. On the other hand, I did not include Brown’s covert nickname—because he did not have one. He was just Barrett Brown—sometimes semi-naked, as you will see—but always Barrett Brown. He assumed the role of Anonymous’s spokesperson in winter 2011 and held it until May, when waves of critics nudged him to take a step away. He also played the part of AnonOps’ court jester. Like any self-respecting trickster, he enjoyed a really hot bubble bath while sipping (presumably cheap) red wine. After announcing his plans on Twitter—“Going to get red wine. Will have live bubble bath when I return in 15 minutes”1—spectators could log into Tinychat, a live video chat service, and watch him half-submerged in water as viewers lobbed offensive and trollish comments his way, in this case, “rape jokes.”
Arriving with name in tow, he was informally booted with name in tow for violating an originary rule of Anonymous (hinted at by the name itself): drawing attention and fame to one’s name is the ultimate taboo. Brown attempted to iconoclastically occupy a liminal—betwixt and between—zone/ status. He acted like an insider but never concealed himself. He was tolerated for so long only because he poured significant work into both the network and the larger cause. A journalist by training, he was adept at afflicting the powerful with ironic, scathing parodic writing. In one Vanity Fair piece praising the investigative journalist Michael Hastings (now deceased), whose unflattering profile of US General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone led to the general’s downfall, Brown mockingly suggested, “McChrystal would have been better off talking to Thomas Friedman, who is so amusingly naive that in 2001 he declared Vladimir Putin to be a force for good for whom Americans all ought to be ‘rootin’,’ a term he chose because it rhymes with Putin.”2 Brown possessed an excellent feel for media dynamics, and he freely offered advice to other Anons. In an interview, one Anon who worked on writing press releases put it this way: “It was Barrett who told me about how to get the attention of journalists, how to get [press releases] published, how to utilize the news cycle and get the timing right and that sorta thing.” Eventually through his antics, and the fact that he assumed the role of flack, sat too uncomfortably with the dominant ethics at work in Anonymous. AnonOps informally banished its own court jester.
In the middle of December 2010, Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira contacted me. I debriefed him about Anonymous’s history and strongly encouraged him to pay a visit to IRC, specifically #reporter, for the story he was working on. I am not sure if he ever did, but on January 22, 2011, he published a substantial article featuring a Washington-area AnonOps participant:
He goes by the code name AnonSnapple to keep secret the fact that he’s part of the Internet collective of cyber-pranksters and activists called Anonymous. Few at his D.C. private school know that the 17-year-old senior attends Anonymous’s public protests, where he wears the movement’s signature face mask of a grinning, mustachioed Guy Fawkes …
AnonSnapple, who lives near Bethesda with his mother, a housewife, and father, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, worries that investigators might link him to last month’s DDOS attacks launched by some Anonymous members against MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, which had stopped processing payments to WikiLeaks. “A while ago, the FBI did some raids on servers from Anons that were involved in the attacks,” he said. “Even though I don’t do them, I am still a part of them. I am still active on the same chat rooms as people that [did] the DDOS [attacks] … I can be easily linked to them.”3
On January 25, 2011, a few days after the article was published, I linked to it on #reporter. Before I did, it was business as usual on the channel, busy with chatter. In minutes, they devoured the piece. Then all hell broke loose. It went on for about an hour on various different IRC channels, notably #reporter and #lounge:
<shitstorm>: snapple seems to have done this on his own
<shitstorm>: eg a local interview
<biella>: i tried to get him on irc but i dont think he ever made it and well it kinda shows
<shitstorm>: That interview is ridiculous, its more of an advert for snapple
<shitstorm>: “namefagging”
<shitstorm>: I did this
<shitstorm>: I did that
<owen>: indeed
<q>: :/
<shitstorm>: That is retarded actually
<shitstorm>: Im kinda mad
<owen>: i will remove him
<owen>: everywhere
<shitstorm>: excellent
<owen>: self serving bullshit
<shitstorm>: “He worries so much about being exposed”
<shitstorm>: THEN DONT GIVE AWAY ALL THOSE DETAILS
Watching the conversation cascading down my screen, I could feel the seething contempt emanating from the words. It stung. Although I understood the source of their anger, by then I had worked with enough journalists to offer the following cautionary advice:
<biella>: before you kick em make sure that the journalist was not twisitng anything (unless this is a pattern)
<owen>: im so tired of children who think this is some giant game
<q>: he must have twisted the whole thing
<biella>: but who knows, i just have had my words seriously seriously seriously twisted
<q>: and i dont think ian would do that
<q>: he is a serious journalist
<owen>: that sounds exactly like snapple imo
<shitstorm>: I agree
<biella>: k, u all know best for sure
Although Anons at times worked earnestly with reports, they also often tore or trolled journalists to pieces (yes, even “serious journalists”). But this was not one such occasion. What pissed people off most was how AnonSnapple who had incurred no personal risk during any op was speaking on behalf of those who had:
<owen>: he knows nothing
<owen>: he needs to gtfo [get the fuck out]
<owen>: isnt he one of yours, q?
<shitstorm>: AnonSnapple recently asked a teacher if he could submit a time sheet of hours spent designing and passing out flyers for an Anonymous rally in Dupont Circle.
<shitstorm>: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
<shitstorm>: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
<owen>: i wanna know when he shows up please
<owen>: stupid little punk kids
<shitstorm>: nah im going to strangle him
<shitstorm>: as well
And strangling him was pretty much what happened next. They summoned AnonSnapple to the channel:
<shitstorm>: my god Snapple
<shitstorm>: what is that
<shitstorm>: ?
<shitstorm>: Snapple that has to be the dumbest shit, more dumb than cloldblood
<shitstorm>: coldblood*
<q>: now its on the floor.
<owen>: snapple
<owen>: talk now
<shitstorm>: Snapple
<shitstorm>: Snapple
<owen>: before i remove you from here
<shitstorm>: Snapple
<Nessuno>: snapples queir
<Nessuno>: quiet
<shitstorm>: cus he knows hes fucked
<Snapple>: hahahaa
<shitstorm>: ohai
<Snapple>: you believe half of that shit is true
<MTBC>: fuck he know he cused
<owen>: you think its funy?
<Nessuno>: in during shitstorm
<shitstorm>: Snapple, why wouldnt it be?
<owen>: so wait
<shitstorm>: it seems about spot on from what Ive heard and seen
<owen>: youre saying they lieD?
<owen>: I WILL BRING THEM HERE NOW
<Snapple>: Because I would never state where I live
<owen>: and we will see
<Snapple>: First of all
<Snapple>: and what my parents do
<shitstorm>: well you tell us you are in dc
<owen>: you would if you seek glory
<Snapple>: I live in DC
<shitstorm>: derp
<Snapple>: That’s all
<owen>: we all know where you live
<shitstorm>: ^
<Snapple>: :)
<owen>: you tell everyone
<Snapple>: come by
<shitstorm>: alright
shitstorm grabs the shotgun
<shitstorm>: owen, lets go shall we?
<Snapple>: *runs*
<shitstorm>: Master-IT bring the M16
MTBC steals the shotgun and shoots himself in the face
Snapple left the room (quit: Z:lined (dumbass)).
The rage against AnonSnapple ran so deep and so strong that even the banning—usually an effective release mechanism—did little to blow the dark clouds away. The Anons were still fuming, expressing a deluge of insults—owen, for instance, proclaimed that “in the meantime, snapple can concentrate on his schoolwork instead of IRC tonight.” After I informed them that I knew the reporter, I got put to work:
<biella>: owen, q, i know ian
<q>: it was in reporter
<q>: biella, could you help us out here?
<biella>: sure i could get him on or let him know he should get on q
Finally, on another channel, owen added some concluding remarks:
<owen>: attempting to use all the work that so many have done for your personal promtion is something i will not tolerate
<Nessuno>: owen speaks sense
<owen>: he was all ‘hey look at me but i didnt do anyhting’
<butts>: I can’t believe he told him all this
<owen>: fuck that
<owen>: i can
I was dumbfounded. Sure, I was familiar with the prohibition against “namefagging”—attaching your identity to your actions. The norm was so well established in Anonymous, stretching back even to its pre-activist days, that it was rarely broken, at least back then (though Barrett Brown would soon be accused of similar behavior). So I had never seen the repercussions in real time. What made this all the more captivating was that I finally got to witness a phenomenon I had only previously read about in ethnographic accounts. Tactics for enforcing the ideal of egalitarianism are common but vary in morality across many cultures. They range from the life ruining (such as being found to be a witch), to the relatively mundane, but all are quite effective. One of my favorite examples comes from the !Kung people in Africa’s Kalahari Desert. Among the !Kung, when hunters return to the village with an enormous slab of meat they are not showered with praise, as you might expect among a meat-loving tribe, but instead with a slab of insults. The teasing helps keep egos in check:
“Say there is a bushman man who has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggard, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all [pause] just a little tiny tone.’ Then I smile to myself,” gaugo continued, “because I know he has killed something big.
“In the morning we make up a party of four or five people to cut up and carry the meat back to the camp. When we arrive at the kill we examine it and cry out, ‘You mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here to make us cart home your pile of bones? Oh, if I had known it was this thin I wouldn’t have come.’ Another one pipes up, ‘People, to think I gave up a nice day in the shade for this. At home we may be hungry, but at least we have cool water to drink.’”4
Moral leveling of this kind does not extinguish power relations, much less differences in abilities. Some individuals are just better hunters than others. On IRC there are those, like owen and shitstorm, who run the network and unmistakably command the authority to enforce norms by appeal to technical power. Banning individuals on IRC after profusely insulting them doesn’t engender a strict egalitarianism. It simply functions to downplay and modulate power differentials. While among Anons it is acceptable to shower some degree of praise, any perceived attempt at converting internal status into external status is deemed unacceptable. The public, individual persona must be kept out of the equation, in the interest of collective fame.
Had AnonSnapple accomplished more—especially the risky work of civil disobedience—I suspect he would have been reprimanded without banishment. By claiming enough responsibility to be profiled while simultaneously insulting the risky tactics employed by others, AnonSnapple’s aggrandizing was received as an affront of the highest order. By this time, people were hyperaware of the legal risks (and only two days later, arrests were made in the UK and warrants were issued in the US in response to a recent DDoS campaign). AnonSnapple was judged to have acted out of an improper self-interest, and the dozens of individuals logged onto #lounge watched the extermination with popcorn in hand. But this wasn’t mere entertainment. The drubbing served as a clear moral lesson for the wider audience, one that they tacitly endorsed in their silence or eventual agreement.
Beginning the very day of Snapple’s banishment, my old vertigo returned due to a remarkable flood of events pouring in and out of AnonOps. For the next two weeks I was online during every waking moment, watching Anonymous engage in a historic revolution. In coming to terms with the first wave of arrests to hit their network, they planned and executed Anonymous’s most extraordinary act of revenge yet.
The day AnonSnapple had been unceremoniously summoned to Mount Olympus and ritually tossed away, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a response to the mounting populist upheaval in Egypt: “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”5 Piggybacking on revolutionary ferment in Tunisia, Egyptians rallied for most of January to demand Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak, the dictator in power for three decades, step down. Egyptian organizers had called for a day of rage on the 25th, and throngs of protesters obliged. As the events unfolded, the recently christened #OpEgypt public channel was awash in excitement and horror (pseudonyms have been changed):
<WebA18>: yes, they censor twitter in egypt
<WebA18>: and they are trying to censure facebook
<0n>: cell phones too
<t23>: not being in egypt i cannot confirm 100%
<t23>: but is known tactic
<WebA18>: a friend in egypt is telling me they censor it
<eb>: Ps, if it is enarby, consider demonstrating at the egyptian embassy
<Ion>: JOIN #propaganda TO CREATE & DESIGN MATERIAL FOR #opegypt
<jeb>: to get media attention and support our egyptian /b/rothers
[…]
<WebA18>: thanks!
<mib>: The protests are spreading and becoming bigger
<bi>: Egyptians have balls of steel. GO Go GO!
<pi>: is there a hive mind i have to get to work ?
<mib>: we should not stop untill this regimes falls Algeria: translation:
Gov blocked the cell phones
<b>: Spread that POSTER to RECRUIT more people: http://i.imgur.com/LfLhN.png
What had at first been a sporadic flicker of government-initiated communication disruptions became wholesale on January 28. The Egyptian government shut the whole damn Internet off.
In order to reestablish some connectivity, Anonymous teamed up with another hacktivist crew, Telecomix. AnonOps and Telecomix had demonstrated differences in the past. Telecomix, opposed to DDoS tactics, would try to keep sites up as Anonymous gummed up access. But if there is an urgent or interesting enough problem to solve—like getting communications access to people in need—hackers can put aside major differences to work together. A number of Anons contributed to the Telecomix-led effort to figure out how old modems, faxes, and phones could be used to connect circuitously to the Internet. At the same time, Anonymous’s small technical elite, which had coalesced during OpTunisia and formed a persistent IRC channel, continued in their hackscapades in support of the Arab Spring.
As OpEgypt gained momentum against Mubarak’s government, Anonymous themselves came under threat. Two days after Snapple’s banning and the historic day of Egyptian rage, the following warning flashed on #reporter in big red letters:
<ew>: ATTENTION: Any of you anons that are from US or UK and have been involved in Mastercard, Visa or BOA [Bank of America] attacks, delete any data on your machine(s) that might link you to them, right now!
On January 27, 2011, authorities rounded up and arrested alleged participants in the UK, while in the US three FBI agents issued forty warrants in connection with the December 2010 DDoS Operation Payback campaign (and eventually arrested a batch of fourteen Anons in connection with the attacks):
<Anonymous9>: Hey folks
<Anonymous9>: I presume you’ve all heard the news? :(
<shitstorm>: yes
<shitstorm>: this is a sad day in my mind
<shitstorm>: a new low for governments
<Anonymous9>: Sad indeed
<Anonymous9>: But, in fairness, not unexpected.
<shitstorm>: well kinda true
<Anonymous9>: Yeah
<shitstorm>: but they still have dick all for evidence
<Anonymous9>: It’s amazing the way they’re pursuing us all so thoroughly
<Anonymous9>: Whilst the actual criminals named in the leaked wikileaks cables are being defended by their respective governments
<Anonymous9>: There’s something so sick about that
<shitstorm>: I agree
<Anonymous9>: I mean whatever they say about us, we’ve never actually been party to torture or murder
<Anonymous9>: Yet they’re spending what must be a shitload of money to get people to come after us
<Anonymous9>: Whilst offering those who have committed the most serious of crimes, diplomatic immunity and all that shite
Anonymous9 critically assessed the first major state crackdowns against Anonymous with an incisive and soulful lament about the hypocrisy of state power. Since that first shoe dropped, over one hundred people have been arrested across the globe, from Indonesia to the Dominican Republic and from Cambodia to the United States. These arrests are historically exceptional—a high-water mark in the history of hacking. Never before have so many hackers and geeks been rounded up around the globe for their political ideas and actions in one cohesive push. Over the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, scores of hackers were arrested, but raids were more sporadic and usually took one of two distinct forms (I am excluding hackers arrested for purely criminal operations like carding).6 Either law enforcement sought out single hackers, like Kevin Mitnick or Gary McKinnon, who were not hacking for social change but for their own enjoyment, or authorities raided underground hacker groups to shut them down and close their meeting spots, such as bulletin board systems. The most famous and largest of these raids was Operation Sundevil, carried out across fourteen American cities on May 8, 1990, when twenty-seven search warrants were executed and four arrests made.7 On occasion, as was the case with the young Julian Assange, hackers wielding skills for broader political goals faced criminal charges, but this style of intervention was less common and arrests on these grounds were even more rare.
With Anonymous came the first large-scale hacktivist movement that spurred a multi-state coordinated and extensive crackdown. It qualifies as what Graínne O’Neill, at the time a National Lawyers Guild representative for many of those arrested, aptly described as “the nerd scare.”
Having since met and interviewed individuals targeted in the “nerd scare,” the version of events given by one particular person, Mercedes Haefer, sticks in my mind. Haefer joined the AnonOps network in November 2010, when she was nineteen, and quickly rose to prominence due to her tart wit and intellect. Haefer is and was a linguistic force of nature—her mouth can run circles around a drunken sailor looking for a fight. I sat with her on a panel at the 2012 edition of DEF CON, the largest hacker conference in the world. Before delving into a serious and impassioned description of her involvement in Anonymous, she demanded that the audience—composed roughly of 99 percent males—show their tits or get the fuck out (“Tits or gtfo” is a disparaging comment which, in some online communities, follows any user’s self-identification as female).
DEF CON is held in Las Vegas, where Haefer happens to live. However, her apartment was far from the conference, so I suggested that she crash in my hotel room, on one condition: that inimitable troll, the troll’s troll, weev, was not allowed anywhere near the room. He had made some flirtatious overtures to her on Twitter and had been spotted at the conference—and while I was happy to spend time with him, and in no way opposed to their pursuit of any mutual affections, I could not bear the thought that a hideous troll love child could be yanked out of the depths of hell due to an unholy carnal meeting in my hotel room (too much responsibility and not enough connections with exorcists).
She agreed and we plunged into many conversations in Las Vegas, which continued later online. Knowing that she had been party to one of the notorious raids that occurred in this period, I asked her just what it felt like to have the FBI descend upon you. It is worth conveying her story because having a mental picture of what can transpire during such visits is handy for negotiating a potential visit from law enforcement. Most people I interviewed were ill-equipped to handle the sudden and intimidating show of force; they spoke freely when they should have stayed silent except to request a lawyer. As hacker Emmanuel Goldstein put it during the infamous HOPE panel on snitching, “People panic, people panic … and the authorities count on this. The authorities live for this kind of thing so that they get as much information.” (Note that the following account of the raid is largely anecdotal, and represents her side of the story. But many crucial details match up with descriptions of events found in the FBI document known as a FD-302, a summary of interviews that was later leaked to me.)
The FBI arrived at dawn. Haefer peacefully snorlaxed away in her apartment in a working-class Las Vegas neighborhood, as five to eight agents approached quietly in the winter desert dawn. (It was difficult for Haefer to remember the exact number of agents, as she was disoriented. They “all looked alike,” she said.) They broke the silence by pounding on the doorway. Though jolted from her slumber, she was not scared—figuring simply that her father, who worked odd hours, had forgotten his keys. She dragged herself out the bed, shuffled to the front door wearing her jammies, and was greeted with “a flashlight in my face, which at six in the morning is offsetting for anyone.” The bewildering quality of the situation was magnified by her realization that a pack of rifle barrels also pointed her way.
She described how they led her out of the doorway and into the walkway that cut through the complex, then began patting her down. While performing a thorough search they asked questions, seeking to confirm her identity. Early in the questioning, her mouth woke up and bit back. “It’s me fuckwit. Piss off. I’m going inside. It’s cold.” With that formality taken care of, they all headed to the warmth of her apartment.
An agent asked if she would like to sit down. She questioned his sincerity and perceived his gesture as display of power. “You don’t ask someone if they want to sit down in their own house,” she explained to me. The assertion of power booted her into a wakeful realization: “These are not my friends. They will not help me. They’re here for their jobs.”
They searched the house, snapped pictures of equipment, confiscated her computer, and interrogated her. She had told me she was a bit of a wiseass, the following story confirmed it. As is official FBI protocol, two of the agents paired off for the interview, one asking questions, the other scribbling the answers.8 She claims they asked about 4chan. At the time, she thought to herself, “If you guys think this is about 4chan, then you’re even more incompetent than I thought.” She told me she began prattling on “about this thread I’d read about this guy who was in love with his dog and wanted to get her pregnant so he went around getting samples and stirred them in a cup and injected them into his penis and got her pregnant.”
She noted that “they stopped taking notes for that part,” and—sure enough—there is no mention of 4chan in the leaked account filed by the agents. But, given Haefer’s chutzpah and adept mastery of the lulz, it is theoretically possible—even plausible. And the quote’s exclusion may be in keeping with their methodology—the FBI (understandably) is not in the business of the lulz (much less documenting it). Based on two additional documents I was also given (covering interviews with two other Anons who were raided the same day and eventually arrested), the genre combines long summaries of interviews that stick to factual statements with the occasional direct quotation, while glossing over trivialities. There is no trace of, much less reflection upon, the tone or emotional tenor of the exchange.
And yet, in Haefer’s recounting of events for my benefit, these small acts of defiance meant a lot. In that exchange, law enforcement and Haefer applied very different criteria when it came to valuing information, as one might expect. Regardless of whether they were trolled, or aware of being trolled, or cared in either case (or whether I was trolled), the agents’ report sticks to matters of legal relevance.9 They wrote: “Haefer then asked the specific purpose of the search and the interview. Special Agent (SP) X then stated to Haefer that he believed she (Haefer) already knew the reason why the FBI was searching her home and for the interview. She then responded they were there for “DDoSing and vandalism.’”
Still, the report and Haefer’s account agree in many regards. She was asked numerous times to “explain further,” and she responded by touching on a range of topics: from her precise involvement in activities, to broader reflections on the ethics of DDoSing. At first the report recorded her stating she “was not involved that much in either [vandalism or DDoS]” but “after being told she was not being truthful” (indicated, they told her, by evidence in the IRC logs) she admitted she had full knowledge that her computer was involved in DDoSing PayPal and helped others configure LOIC. She also gave them all her usernames, which the report lists, but claimed not to remember the names of chat rooms, operators, and servers because there were too many of them (in other reports I read, the interviewees had less difficulty with recall).
Her report, as well as the two others I had access to, attempt to describe, to some limited degree, the political defenses offered for engaging in DDoS campaigns. But the presentation of this information was different coming from Haefer and the report. For her part, she told me she was asked directly about Assange. No such question was evident in the report, only the following claim, which is nevertheless interesting: “She was supportive of PayPal being a target of DoS because she didn’t like that PayPal [sic] withheld Julian Assange’s account, was money owed to Assange. She stressed she was not an Assange fan, just upset at what PayPal had done.” This was in addition to a detailed summary of her political defense:
Haefer agreed with what Anonymous is doing. When a store or real-world business is doing something that is unacceptable it can be protested in front of the property. Since VISA or Mastercard is online, they can’t be physically protested and therefore must be an online protests [sic], or in the form of a DoS attack. Haefer described such protests as a “right.”
During our interview, she elaborated on what she meant by “right”:
It was about rights. It wasn’t about supporting Assange. It was about supporting freedom of speech and government transparency. It was about telling the government that they can’t just interfere in foreign court cases. It was about telling the government that they work for us not the other way around. And that even though I didn’t like Assange, I still believed he had the right to freedom of speech and a fair trial. And that if we only supported the rights of people we liked, then they weren’t rights, they’re privileges. And that privileges can be taken away. Rights can’t be taken away. They can only be oppressed.
If it is routine for the FBI to show up at 6 am, it is also routine for them to ask for cooperation; this can mean various things, from providing information on the spot to becoming an informant. Haefer claims she was asked (and this request was in the two other full reports I read). She declined, or in her own more vivid words to me, “I told them to fuck off.”
When the special agent left, Haefer felt that despite what she had just told him, he still considered her a ruffian troll instead of an activist. According to Mercedes, he handed over his card and asked her to “please not go after his family.” “If he still thought that was an issue, then he still didn’t understand the case,” she said. Since we don’t know his side of the story, perhaps he was also cracking a very dry joke.
Reflecting back on the situation, Haefer, who, like so many Anons, was caught off guard when the Feds came, concluded, “If I got raided again, I probably wouldn’t tell them I did it.” But she was still proud then, as she still is now, of her small contribution to defending rights.
Dozens of other individuals in the United States were interrogated in a similar fashion during roughly the same time period. A few people shared stories with each other or on forums soon after, but for the most part, no one had any insight into what had transpired. All the while, Anonymous kept rolling along with contributing to the hard work of ousting a regime. Throngs of Egyptians were descending on Tahrir Square in the first of the dynamic occupations that would eventually occur in Spain, then North America, and, eventually, Europe. The numbers were breathtaking. By January 31, the square held a reported 250,000 people. But the hopeful excitement was dampened by escalating violence. On the IRC channels, a number of Egyptians requested that Anonymous attack government and state-controlled media. They refused. Even though some groups of Anons were actively DDoSing government websites—a move that irked Telecomix—the general consensus, echoed in both IRC chats and publicly released statements, was to never attack the press (all pseudonyms have been changed):
<dr>: hello, as an Egyptian i request you to attack their media please !!! http://www.ahram.org.eg/ “http://www.algomhuria.net.eg/”http://www.algomhuria.net.eg/
<MS>: http://ahram.org.eg/ <--- the main newspaper have been talking about nothing but lebanon
<sudor>: guys trust me! it’s much more useful to bring down AHRAM.
ORG.EG
<Fr>: no media
<hat>: sudo, i argued that but its against policy to attack media even if it’s dictatorship regime owned
<at>: sudo, is the media you are talking about a part of the government?
<sudo>: YES IT IS at!
<tru>: no media
<kan>: guys, Egypt Loves you and prays for you
<Ter>: NO MEDIA
<Cyberp>: lrn2protect freedom of speech
<MS>: ahram is misleading media
<Ci>: Along with MCIT
<cru>: Thx, kanta.
<sudot>: ahram is govt owned
<Cyberp>: misleading media is media too
As part of their endeavors, Anons from AnonOps, members of marblecake, and Telecomix worked to make a stunningly detailed and well-illustrated pamphlet called “How to Protest Intelligently.”
By the end of the month, it was as if AnonOps was acting more like a human rights advocacy group than a mass of lulz-drunk trolls. Its efforts tended away from unilateral actions and toward infrastructural support that might enable citizens to circumvent censors and evade electronic surveillance. They sent a care package composed of security tools, tactical advice, and encouragement, like this note, clarifying the limited role social media plays in such uprisings, even if they are touted by pundits as a “Twitter Revolution”: “This is *your* revolution. It will neither be Twittered nor televised or IRC’ed. You *must* hit the streets or you *will* loose the fight.”
While many Anons were invigorated by their ability to support the historic toppling of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, for others, there could be no clearer evidence of the ascendancy of moralfaggotry. Indeed, by contributing to the Arab revolutions and their idealistic political ends, Anonymous had so transformed itself that it seemed as if, like AnonSnapple, the lulz had itself been banished. As it turns out, this was not the case. As the revolutions raged overseas, a small team of hackers took revenge against an American security researcher and his firm, and the lulz returned with a vengeance.
