Summer in New York City is oppressive. Soaring temperatures combine with the harsh metropolitan reality to create a dystopian urban hellion. The sun, reflected off the glass skyscrapers, blinds you. Subterranean orifices lead to the city’s viscera: the bowels of the stations and the intestines of the subway system, spitting people out. Sweat, sounds, sights, as if these were not enough: you are also enclosed by the mephitic, durian-like rot of the city—smells of deceased rats and human waste, oven-baked by subway stations. So when the cooler fall weather finally settles in, the city sighs with collective relief. The hanging leaves of dazzling burnt yellow, amber, and orange provide a complement to olfactory respite. The swing to fall feels like a new lease on life. Finally, you won’t be sweating all night long. Finally, the smell will be washed away. Finally, respite.
On September 17, 2011, I awoke to a bundle of delicate pink, purple, and red flowers protruding from a vase encased in a Guy Fawkes mask. It was my birthday. The timing was perfect: it was a day of protest in New York City. The financial collapse had seared its streak of corruption, oligarchy, and the 1 percent into the minds of an angry generation. Instead of being depressed, oppressed, and immobilized by the combination of the financial situation and the city’s heat, the day was crisp and it felt like there was a refreshing optimism that people were ready to act upon. Nobody wanted to call it hope—it was too early to declare such a thing—but the possibility was still on the table.
I grabbed the mask and made my way to Bowling Green, near Wall Street. Approaching the small grassy park, I spied out of the corner of my eye a number of young men with Guy Fawkes masks slung over their shoulders. Upon seeing me, a pair of them nodded. One gave a thumbs up and told me to “Keep up the good work.” By early afternoon, protesters had marched to what became the event’s target and nerve center, Zuccotti Park (later renamed Liberty Square). Many came and went as the day inched toward twilight and the first General Assembly, but a steady stream of younger activists continually trickled in with camping equipment on their backs and threw their gear down.
Even if Occupy was defined by its rootedness in a place, it was understood that social media could and should play a vital role. Not the nor even a central agent of revolution, online communication acted more like an adjuvant—it provided an essential boost, facilitated coordination, and allowed those unable to attend bodily to witness and become invested, and entangled, in the events. And so on that first day of Occupy, many of us were hooked to our phones even as we were present at the square. Every half hour or so, I would fetch my phone from my pocket and skim through my Twitter feed. In the afternoon, two back-to-back messages from Sabu vaulted off the screen. A month prior, on August 16, Sabu had vanished from Twitter after enigmatically tweeting, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that … he is gone.”1 These new tweets marked his reemergence with a roar:
“ATTN: I never left, I am NOT @AnonSabu or any of those posers. I wasn’t owned, arrested, hacked or any of the other rumors. Go get lives.”2 He followed with another: “They tried to snitch me out, troll me, dox every one around me, bait me into endless arguments but theres one thing they can’t do: STOP ME!”3
In an early August chat, Sabu had warned me he was going dark. “Sabu is a name that doesn’t need to exist eventually,” he wrote.
<biella>: well ok
<biella>: then :-/
<biella>: not saying it does either nor that you should stick around here, just sayin’ dont be a stranger Sabu
<Sabu>: well
<Sabu>: its not like im leaving to be a dick or run away
<Sabu>: its just that the community itself
<Sabu>: needs to look towards itself for motivation
<Sabu>: not me
<Sabu>: I feel too many people follow me
<Sabu>: and im not here to be a leader. yes im a natural born leader
<Sabu>: and yes if I wanted to I can lead this entire movement on my own if I wanted to live like a dictactor
<Sabu>: but truth is
<Sabu>: I’m not the leader of anything involved with anonymous
<Sabu>: and by me leaving I prove this point
Following his exit from Twitter, and unbeknownst to myself, Sabu remained active on various secret IRC channels. Also unknown to me—and, in this case, even to those he worked so closely with online—the day before our chat, on August 15, he had appeared in court. He had pled guilty to all twelve charges leveled against him, including conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft and three counts of conspiracy to commit computer hacking. Facing 124 years, he agreed to work for the government in exchange for the reduction of his maximum sentence to one hundred years. He also assented to the “obligation to commit no further crimes whatsoever.”4
Unlike his earlier disappearance in June due to his (also secret) arrest, this time he had notified people that he was going to take some time off. AntiSec members came and went, a factor that further disabled suspicion of Sabu. He also created a permanent connection to IRC using what is typically called an “IRC bouncer,” “proxy,” or “screen session.” When he wished, he could then reattach himself to the permanent connection. This enabled him (and the FBI) to have access to all conversations on the channels, and people could send him messages, even when he was not online. Sabu’s method of connecting aroused no mistrust because it is common for hackers, many who are terminal junkies, to rely on such technical proxies.
When he initially left, I took his reasoning at face value. But he was also going dark to deflect some strong accusations that had recently come his way. Just before his public disappearance in August, a hacker named Mike “Virus” Nieves accused Sabu of being a snitch. The logs of this exchange quickly surfaced on Pastebin. It started with Sabu obliquely suggesting that someone in Virus’s crew was a rat. Virus bit back hard:
<Virus>: regarding topiary, you ratted him out
<Virus>: it’s so obvious sabu
<Sabu>: my nigga
<Virus>: but I keep my mouth shut
<Sabu>: you better watch your fucking mouth because I’m not a rat
<Virus>: I don’t get involved
<Sabu>: and I definitely didnt rat my own boy
<Virus>: I don’t care if “Anonymous” gets pwned
<Sabu>: I can tell you exactly how he got knocked
<Virus>: I never liked them, never will
<Sabu>: and if you actually knew anything you’d know how it went down too
<Sabu>: for a hot minute there was some troll on twitter that’d hit up atopiary’s twitter mentions with
<Virus>: Anonymous is nothing but a bunch of fat, pimply basement dwelling losers who masturbate 3+ times a day
<Sabu>: he got it from an xbox forums
<Sabu>: topiary was an avid xbox gamer
<Sabu>: was known in the community talked a lot
<Sabu>: one of the forum users doxed him and kept throwing the info out there
<Sabu>: enough that someone was smart enough to make the connection
<Virus>: I’m a social engineer, a professional social engineer, actually
<Sabu>: I’m a social engineer too.5
Sabu tried to defuse the accusation first by showering Virus with compliments, but when that failed, he switched strategies:
<Sabu>: you’d know that if I were raided
<Sabu>: I’d take myself down if anything
<Sabu>: I’m the martyr type
<Sabu>: I grew up in the streets
<Virus>: it’s a hunch, I’m always right
<Sabu>: this time you’re wrong
<Sabu>: I rather go down for my own shit than take down my own niggas
At the time, the accusations seemed plausible, but certainly not definitive. It was just as likely that the spat stemmed from personal conflict—hacker drama—or that Mike Virus was himself a snitch, trying to deflect attention. Virus even admitted that there was little evidence to back up his accusation; he was relying on a hunch. As usual, Sabu was suave and fierce in staving off the accusations.
Regardless, his lowered profile signaled that he was being careful. During his hiatus, Anonymous did just fine. The group had gone full throttle with OpBART, and soon after, Occupy engaged its collective attention. Making ops run smoothly requires an increased amount of communication and shared time online, so it is not surprising that in these intensive moments, the rumors exploded like a backdraft—or that they burnt out almost as abruptly as they had flared up. Sabu’s return on September 17, the day Occupy started, was a shrewd move that helped nourish his mythos as a bona fide revolutionary. Like a salmon who knows to return thousands of miles upriver to where it was born, Sabu, it seemed, was programmed to show up at an important political happening. His reappearance sent the following message: the allure of a protest overrides everything else. The revolution was what mattered. And accusations that seemed justified by his disappearance quickly looked more like unfounded drama.
Sabu seemed truly excited by Occupy, and as it gained momentum he tweeted about it frequently. Other Anons became similarly preoccupied. The turnout on the first day was so meager that Nathan Schneider, who became one of the most prominent chroniclers of the movement and later wrote a book about it, recalled: “I didn’t think it would last. I didn’t think it would change anything.”6 But thanks to the persistence of the occupiers, thanks to the social media messages, and thanks to the police (who sparked mass-media attention and public outrage by cracking down against peaceful protesters and marches), in less than two weeks Occupy transformed from smoking embers into a bonfire.
The first week of Occupy, I returned to the camp a few times—and would later join some of the large New York City marches—but as a full-time professor with two classes, a book to finish, and a string of appointments in preparation for an approaching move to a foreign country, it was tough to be there as much as I would have liked. Sometimes other factors kept me away as well. On Tuesday, September 20, my day seemed to be miraculously free, but gazing out my window into the drizzly morning, I was prompted to contemplate all the other valid uses of my time. And call it fate, but had it not been for this lazy reluctance, I might never have met Sabu in the flesh. Of course, reflecting now on the events that transpired, I can only think that it might have been better if I had braved the rain.
Late in the afternoon that day, the rain now gone, I headed to NYSEC, the informal meet-up of security professionals. I ambled toward Swift, a Greenwich Village bar. From a distance, I spotted weev, the famous troll who had headed up Goatse Security and now lived in the Tri-State Area awaiting trial. A cigarette dangled from his mouth and he was talking to two people I did not know.
weev was tipsy and content. You could tell that he was gearing up for a good rant. He sported a pin from Trinity Church, where he regularly attended service—and the sermon he was preparing was on the subject of Occupy. It was unclear whether he supported Occupy or merely saw it as an opportunity to troll. He gave one memorable speech, managing to indict the evil financiers, call out police brutality with a nod to Oscar Grant, and speak to state threats against artisanal cheese makers, all in four minutes. But at other times, weev also held up a sign “ZIONIST PIGS ROB US ALL.”7 weev greeted me. Upon hearing my name, one of the other hackers raised his eyebrows. “So you are Gabriella who studies Anonymous?” he asked. I replied in the affirmative. weev updated us about Occupy and we headed inside. We fetched some drinks and settled into the back room with the twenty or so hackers already there. I figured that the other hacker (let’s call him Freddy) likely followed Anonymous from a distance, like many security researchers. But as it turned out, he knew a lot more than I could have imagined. As the evening wore on, Freddy and I found ourselves in a dark corner of the bar. “Are you an FBI agent?” he asked—a question that no longer rattled me the way it might have only a few months previous. I replied, in a somewhat annoyed tone, “No. In fact, I just accepted a position in Canada. Why would the FBI ship me off to a country they largely ignore if I were working for them?”
He clearly knew a great deal about Anonymous, including the secret back-channel IRC groups like #internetfeds. I was informed, also, that he was arranging a meeting between Sabu and Parmy Olson, who was in the midst of writing a book on Anonymous. (Olson says this didn’t happen, though she did acknowledge having contact with Freddy.) As our conversation unfolded, it became increasingly clear: he was deep inside Anonymous, and seemed to have known Sabu for quite some time.
Freddy also intimated that Sabu was in New York City. This aligned with hints I had gotten directly from him in our chats. But there were a lot of swirling rumors about Sabu, many maintaining, contrarily, that he lived in Brazil. It seemed equally credible; he worked closely with Brazilian hackers and often spouted off in Portuguese on Twitter.
The information flowed both ways: I spoke about a number of AntiSec and AnonOps IRC backchannels and shared details pertaining to many “black ops.” His interest was piqued. And then I mentioned that I was raised in Puerto Rico. Upon hearing this, he offered point blank: “Do you want to meet Sabu?” He could arrange it. I was totally taken aback. I told him, “Meeting him intrigues me, but, to be frank, I am skeptical.”
The conversation excited me, less due to the prospect of meeting Sabu—I truly was skeptical—and more for the taste of what many hackers experience all the time: the use of secrets as an valuable object of exchange. Those who write about secrecy commonly recount how an information seeker can, by providing a secret of his or her own, induce further disclosure from his or her interlocutor. Graham Jones, an anthropologist of magicians, describes sharing secrets as “a token of recognition, a gesture of inclusion, a microritual of initiation, and a move in a system of exchange.”8 Sharing secrets can be about revenge or about forging trust. It can be a simple display of status, or a measured revelation in the hopes of prompting a response. But whatever the reasons and whatever the mechanisms, secrets shared often do beget more secrets.
Back in the bar, my mind raced. Is this guy just a regular guy, or is he working on behalf of the government? We did meet by chance … didn’t we? Eventually, I decided to leave the bar. At home, exhausted, I transcribed every detail I could remember before passing out fully clothed.
Early the next morning, I made my way to a neighborhood cafe as usual. A couple of hours later, sipping at my second or third coffee, I was lost in work. My IRC client, as was usually the case, was running but ignored. My name flashed on the screen, signaling a private message. Deep in work mode, and allowing no interruptions, I attended to the query after forty minutes had passed. I toggled to the window:
<Sabu>: estas?
<Sabu>: yo
<Sabu>: you there?
<biella>: hi
<biella>: yes
<biella>: am here
[…]
<Sabu>: checkea tu fucking voicemail loca
[…]
<biella>: lol i am wondering here, should i be doing this? :-)
<biella>: giving out my cell to one of the most notorious hackers of all time ?
<biella>: let me listen to the vm first but you know someone you know has it
<biella>: if i went to my office now would you be able to talk? or should i just listen to my VM?
<biella>: i am across the street at a coffee shop
<Sabu>: cono biella just go listen and delete
Back at my office, there was a message and a number. I called and our first phone conversation lasted for an hour. Haughtily declaring himself “the most trusted” hacker, he asked, “What the fuck is up with the snitches?” He then launched into a three-part typology: First, there are the “infiltrators.” Second, there are “those that want fame.” And third, there are “those that are pinned to the wall and don’t want to go to jail.” Almost everything he said made me blind to Sabu himself. But just in case I had my doubts, he hammered away with statements like: “Even if the FBI was outside my door and heard what I said, there is no way they could pin the technical act on me … That is why I am not locked up.” At the time, this struck me as a perfectly plausible explanation.
The rest of the conversation largely centered on politics, with him ranting and boasting, and me listening. He railed against the NYPD, claiming they were far more corrupt than the FBI—willing to implant false information and break their own rules. He railed against Sony and AT&T, insisting that they were the criminals for the shitty state of their security. The conversation turned to WikiLeaks. He proclaimed it a “tragedy” that Assange had squandered an amazing opportunity, but ultimately expressed his love for Manning.
Finally, I had to interrupt and ask, “Why reach out?”
His reply was immediate. “My days are numbered,” he reasoned. “This story needs to get out and the media will not do the job.” The conversation wound down, leaving me to ponder just what he meant by this.
It wasn’t long before we talked again. This time he was on the street, evident from the noise of honking cars and the side conversations between him and his homies. He told me, “Cops are chasing a black kid over a bag of weed.” This second conversation centered around his defense of Anonymous’s style of hacking. “We are no skids,” he insisted, referring to the eternally derided “script kiddies.” He described LulzSec as a “proof of concept” which had done more than “any other hacker group in fifteen years.” He called AntiSec his brainchild.
I was writing at breakneck speed but, unaccustomed to taking notes longhand, my cramping wrist proved unsuited to the task. Ultimately, none of it was too surprising. Until, that is, the end of the conversation. “I hope I don’t sound like a dick,” he started. “But I refuse to let my politics die. This is how I feel. I will continue to push for the idea of decentralized organizing.” He paused, and then continued, “With decentralization, it is harder to infiltrate.” But, “There are snitches.” He ended gruffly. He wanted “war. I want total revenge for Recursion. He is just a college student.” Just days before, twenty-three-year-old Cody Kretsinger from Phoenix, Arizona, had been arrested by the FBI in connection with hacking Sony Pictures with LulzSec.
During these initial phone conversations, Sabu had intimated that he wanted to meet. I was growing interested in the prospect—but I was determined not to hold my breath. There was much to do in the meantime, as Anonymous’s involvement in Occupy escalated. As camps sprang up across North America and Europe, a handful of core Anonymous veterans traded days and nights online for days and nights in the field. A few even found contingents of occupiers who identified as Anons but had never logged into an IRC channel.
On occasion, the two distinct though complementary movements directly crossed streams in a more dramatic fashion. On Sunday, September 25, protesters gathered at Union Square and marched south toward the camp, until police enclosed them behind a length of orange plastic netting. Occupiers chanted, “Shame! Shame! Who are you protecting?! YOU are the 99 percent! You’re fighting your own people!” A high-ranking police officer, Anthony Bologna, whipped out his can of pepper spray without provocation and directed the chemical stream at three young women. As the liquid engulfed their faces and stung their eyes, they crumpled to the ground, pleading, “No! Why are you doing that?!”9 Bologna answered by sauntering away.
Onlookers filmed the entire incident and the video went viral. Anonymous retaliated by swiftly doxing the officer—uploading his name and address to Pastebin. It opened with this message:
As we watched your officers kettle innocent women, we observed you barbarically pepper spray wildly into the group of kettled women. We were shocked and disgusted by your behavior. You know who the innocent women were, now they will have the chance to know who you are. Before you commit atrocities against innocent people, think twice. WE ARE WATCHING!!! Expect Us!10
Bologna’s information was uploaded by a young female college student who “earned her badge” in the CabinCr3w for the effort. During an online interview I conducted with her, she explained the mechanics of her expose: “a lot of rewatching [the video], zooming, trying to get facial features, badge number, and a partial name. It turns out that when I resorted to just a simple google, I found out that he had previously been a problem with abuse, and had a case against him.” (There was a pending lawsuit against him brought by a protester at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.)
Since she did not strike me as someone who doxed for doxing’s sake, I asked where she drew the line between acceptable exposure and privacy violation: “[the police] work for the public, therefore your life … is public just as a news organisation would hound you.” She continued, “morally: I think there is a limit and boundary by which how deep the dox go,” claiming she only disclosed information that identified Bologna himself. Other Anons, however, decided to go deeper, doxing members of his family.
The NYPD defended Bologna’s actions at first, but soon retracted. An internal police review determined that the officer had indeed violated protocol. As punishment, he lost ten days of vacation and was reassigned to Staten Island (implicitly divulging the NYPD’s opinion of the city’s smallest borough).11 There was, at least, a silver lining. The incident helped catapult Occupy onto the national stage. The Guardian and other major news outlets reported on the event, quoting directly from Anonymous’s Pastebin message and cementing a nascent association between Anonymous and Occupy.12 From that day on—and especially following the mass arresting of over seven hundred people during a peaceful march across the Brooklyn Bridge—Occupy became a fixture in activist circles and the mainstream media alike.
Thanks to a detailed FAQ published by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, we know roughly how many sidewalk payphones dot the five boroughs: “As of January 2, 2014 there are 9,903 active public pay telephones on or over the City’s sidewalks.”13 I, personally, had never even noticed them, until Sabu asked me to use one. He did not want to arrange a meeting online. It felt safer and prudent to use a payphone; key loggers are always a possibility with computers.
Our first rendezvous was scheduled for soon after Bologna’s doxing, on October 3 at the Chipotle on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. He assured me that “you will recognize me.” The one picture purporting to be Sabu floating around the web was of a wiry, yet muscular, Latino man. I arrived early. The minutes moved slowly, until suddenly, I was aware of a tall commanding figure sauntering toward me. Carrying his large body with aplomb, he seemed to be in his element. It was Sabu. He grabbed my hand and I was afraid it would shatter in his grip. I gathered my things and we went to order food. In the midst of our small talk, Sabu paused, casually nodded to the food prep worker (a tough-looking Latina), and asked, “What’s up?”
She replied, “I have not seen you here in a while.” As would become increasingly clear, whether in Chipotle, a local diner, or Tompkins Square Park, many locals knew Sabu and treated him with deference—out of respect or fear, I can’t say which, but he was clearly a known quantity in the neighborhood.
Before long, he steered the conversation toward his past. “I came from a drug family,” he divulged almost immediately, and then continued nonchalantly: “By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I carried four to five thousand dollars in cash in my wallet.” He also explained that he was the “father figure” to his adopted cousins—both younger than seven at the time—though he left the reason for taking on such massive parental responsibilities unstated until later. (When Sabu was thirteen, his aunt and father were sent to jail for dealing heroin. He was raised by his grandmother until she passed away on June 7, 2010, exactly one year before he was apprehended by the FBI. Upon her passing, he assumed parental responsibility for his cousins.)
Sabu said that he worked hard to overcome a “ghetto mentality,” an immobilizing mixture of self-hatred and anger. Later, he briefly recounted a few episodes that substantiated his everyday experience with harsh racism. Sabu attended Washington Irving High School, near East Sixteenth Street, alongside many poor students. One day, entering the school, he walked through a metal detector and, carrying a screwdriver, was stopped by a guard. He defended himself: “I am the geek that fixes your system when you forget not to execute ‘weird’ .exe’s.” The guard bought none of it and a tiff between the two ensued. Sabu, who felt disrespected, complained to the administration, but found only deaf ears. So he made some noise by penning a strident, and self-described “controversial,” missive and circulating it to teachers. The principal deemed it “threatening” and he was temporarily suspended. Sabu, reflecting later upon the incident in a Pastebin document, concluded: “Very well then, it is such a shame that one … such as myself would have to be deprived of my education because of my writing.”14
It made immediate sense, then, why Sabu found hacking—with its elevation of ideas and arguments—to be an appealing oasis. This is not to say that the zone of hacking is free of prejudice. Far from it. The white male-dominant scene, with some hackers especially prone to acting out elitist cowboy bravado, is alienating and repellent to many.15 The barriers are especially pronounced in underground quarters that are composed nearly exclusively of male (and a few transgender) participants. Nevertheless, since ideas are (in theory) exalted over social pedigree, it has functioned as a safe space, at least online, for a class of technical weirdos.16 The social boundaries erected by hackers also exhibit contradictions: while the gender gap is vast, some identities—such as transgender, queer, or disabled—are more common and accepted. (It took some time, but I eventually figured out that the chatroom #lounge on AnonOps doubled at times as a gay pickup spot.) Sabu’s explanation that he “rarely hangs out with hackers in person” hints at the sort of partial freedoms provided by anonymity and technical skills online.
After we said our goodbyes, I could not help but think of Sabu as a cooler and savvier version of Oscar Wao, the lead character in Junot Díaz’s electrifying novel on the travails of being a corpulent, ostracized, “hardcore sci-fi and fantasy”–loving nerd of Dominican descent. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells the story of Oscar as he shuttles between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, bumbling through life while trying to fulfill a cherished rite of passage: getting laid.
Sabu, like Oscar, is a consummate cultural boundary-crosser, flitting easily between vastly distinct cultural spheres. Unlike Oscar, Sabu was no dud, and his machismo was overpowering. He was notorious for hitting on the ladies in #AnonOps and told journalist Quinn Norton in a chat, “I like you quinn, next time you’re in new york, you can watch me hack, naked.”17 With me, he was more restrained, alternating between calling me “mi amor” (“my love”) and “cupcake.”
After our first meeting, now mentally equipped with a picture of Sabu, I resumed my chats with him. The Guardian newspaper had asked Sabu to write an op-ed about Occupy. He asked me to give some editorial feedback. Meanwhile, I attempted to convince him to be filmed for Brian Knappenberger’s documentary We Are Legion:
<Sabu>: also
<Sabu>: if I do this thing with your boy knapp
<Sabu>: you gotta make sure that nigga doesnt leak my identity
More than any other journalist covering Anonymous, Brian Knappenberger had sought out a wide cross section of individuals, pouring his funds and time into a project he was wildly passionate about. I wanted to help him. That Sabu was considering doing it was great news, but I had to reassure him about my ability to be discreet and to impress upon Knappenberger the necessity of further discretion. My protocol was generally one of “silos of interaction.” When I chatted on public channels, an observer could get a sense of who I spoke with, but my private chats were largely confidential, following a protocol commonly adopted in Anonymous. Eventually, a small group of the journalist/researcher confederacy—namely Knappenberger and Olson—knew I had met Sabu, but otherwise I kept it to myself.
Our seemingly trivial conversations would sometimes become much more interesting in retrospect. For example, the following conversation, which happened the day after we first met, seemed relatively mundane at the time:
<Sabu>: and ioerror is good people [ioerror = Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum]
<Sabu>: I’m trying to reach out to him
<Sabu>: I know hes been supportive of me in the last year
<Sabu>: I want to support him back
<biella>: yea he has
<Sabu>: during this time
<biella>: i know him well
<Sabu>: they’re trying to rail him
<biella>: for over 9 years now
<Sabu>: tell him I send my regards then
<biella>: i will for sure
<Sabu>: if theres anything we can do for him, to pass it through you
At the time, I interpreted this as a reasonable gesture of solidarity. Now, these chats—and his motivations for reaching out to me in the first place—look different. The “we” he referred to was not Sabu and Anonymous. It was Sabu and the FBI—privileged with direct access to all his conversations, including the one above. It would not be the last time he tried to “to reach out to” Applebaum through me.
In late October, as winds shook off the remaining leaves still clinging to branches, Occupy was blossoming. Organizers were branching out; alliances with unions and other civil society groups yielded new rivers of people flowing into Liberty Square on October 15, a planned “day of action.” As I marched for hours alongside throngs of strangers, everyone appeared energized and amazed by the vibrant turn Occupy had taken in the short course of a single month. “The Occupy assemblies were opening tremendous space in American political discourse,” reflected Nathan Schneider, who also noted that “by mid-October, Occupy Wall Street had an approval rating of more than 50 percent—higher than President Obama or Congress.”18
Naysayers and pundits would accuse Occupy of being led by lifestyle activists, for fizzling out after being unable to drum up broad-based support—a misguided account made clear by the repressive crackdown that would come, just one month later, to stamp out many of the US camps. Documents procured by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that most every law enforcement entity—Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, local police, Fusion Centers, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and even, oddly, the Federal Reserve—took a keen interest in Occupy.19 Since the documents are so heavily redacted, it is hard to gauge the specific role played by each organization, but it is clear that, at minimum, they “Cast [a] Wide Net in Monitoring Occupy Protests,” as the New York Times titled its piece covering the documents.20 One reason why Anonymous had already thrived for five years was that despite the arrests of members of the collective, its decentralized and online character had made preemption extremely difficult. This would not prove to be the case with Occupy.
I continued to meet Sabu. On some occasions, his two younger brothers accompanied him. The older one was Sabu’s sidekick. He admired him and, while not as technically proficient as Sabu, he loved to talk about computers. The younger one, who sported sleek, straight, black-as-night hair and a lot of muscles, was, like many teenagers, absorbed in thought, totally uninterested in the geek talk that consumed the rest of us.
One meeting stands out. On an unusually warm November evening, we hung out in Tompkins Square Park with his brothers again. Then Sabu and I went to the Odessa, a classic New York City diner with a mind-boggling array of dining options. By now, one thing had become clear: Sabu was a talker. Entering the diner, Sabu greeted with a handshake a man whom I presumed to be the owner or the manager. Easing into a booth, we became one with the ageless Naugahyde seats, their well-worn springs clenching us desperately. That day he broached a dizzying number of topics in the course of our conversation: gentrification, the hacker Phiber Optik, Middle East politics, Occupy, his dog (whose name was China, and who had an awful skin condition), the sociology of hacker crews, the Anonymous haters, and dozens of other topics that his mind alighted upon. Among the deluge of details, a few stood out. It was the first time he mentioned a mysterious hacker he worked closely with, whom he called “burn.” I now know him as Jeremy Hammond. Sabu boasted that he liked to own security companies while “burn liked to hit the police.” And in this conversation, one thing became patently evident: more than anything else, Sabu seemed to genuinely care what others thought of not only himself, but the whole of Anonymous. His contempt for those critical of Anonymous—both journalists and random people on Twitter—was noticeable; he jeered at those who he felt had not treated him, or Anonymous, with respect. Soon after, winding down, he sighed in a weary voice. “I sometimes just want to walk away and quit.” He did seem tired, and he had developed a chronic cough since our previous meeting. I knew he had also talked extensively with Olson over Skype, and it struck me suddenly that he had a burning desire for his life story to be put out into the world.
When someone is wearing a mask, there is at least a symbolic reminder that insincerity, duplicity, and play might be at work. Sitting across from Sabu, seeing his face, hearing his voice, and looking into his eyes, I suspended my mistrust, even though I knew that with or without a mask, I really had no access to his true motivations. We can never really access the inner thoughts of other humans; we can only attempt to gauge sincerity or authenticity. Then there’s what Hume identified as one of the most enduring qualities of human nature: “No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others.”21
It’s hard to constantly question people’s motives. It is precisely the human proclivity to want to sympathize that enables the FBI to perform exploits through its informants. We left The Odessa and, as usual, Sabu lit up a sweet-smelling cigarette. He took a deep puff from the white filter. And then, suddenly, he confessed: “I was indeed a criminal. I used to sell heroin.” Then he walked away.