On June 6, 2013, I sat in a frigid New York University auditorium, waiting for my turn to speak at the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), a yearly event showcasing the Internet’s role in nourishing democratic life. I felt myself falling into a vortex of negativity. Writing about those who tunnel and undermine, who desire to be incomprehensible, concealed, and enigmatic (to slightly rephrase Friedrich Nietzsche’s opening lines in Daybreak), was beginning to seem like an exercise in doom and gloom. Anonymous was still ruffling feathers with political operations, but Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond, and numerous others, now sat in prison cells. The Internet had become a giant, sophisticated tracking machine. Private defense firms, corporations like Facebook, and American three letter agencies (alongside their equivalents in other Five Eyes countries) had sunk their claws in deep: collecting our every trace, predicting our every move. Even if each organization and country did so for different purposes and utilized distinct techniques, the net effect was a troubling and pervasive curtailment of rights. Anonymous, I was planning to suggest in my talk, had been “the raucous party at the funeral of online freedom and privacy.”
I was not alone in holding this bleak assessment. As one Anon, m0rpeth, had put it to me: “We will be small scattered darknets on the fringes of the Internet after all is lost.” Even the organizers of PDF, normally cheery about the power of the Internet to tilt the balance of power in favor of freedom and justice, had admitted at a dinner the evening before that “things have not turned out as we had hoped.”
And then, right before being called onto the stage, PDF’s co-organizer, Micah Sifry, suddenly and unexpectedly proffered a lifeline. He leaned over, handed his phone to me, and whispered, “There has been a major leak about government surveillance.” I skimmed an article on the phone. Written by journalist Glenn Greenwald, it divulged the dragnet collection of metadata phone records by Verizon, on behalf of the NSA. In a few days, Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who had provided the information behind the story, would become a household name. Sifry walked up to the stage to introduce me. Before he did, he broke the news to the audience, and I modified my talk on Anonymous to include this hopeful turn of events.
Snowden’s decision to blow the top off the NSA (and, by extension, its British counterpart, the GCHQ) was a risky but carefully plotted act. It substantiated what privacy activists had been warning about for years, providing them with far more solid and extensive facts upon which to base their claims. Laura Poitras, one of the first three journalists to receive the trove of NSA documents, remarked on the novelty of this situation: “The disclosures made by Snowden have lifted a curtain and revealed a vast hidden world where decisions are made and power operates in secret outside of any public oversight or consent. So my vision hasn’t really changed, but what I’m able to see has vastly increased.”1 Here is but a fraction of what we we can now see thanks to the mega-leak: the NSA spied upon or directly surveilled thirty-eight embassies and missions; until 2011, the NSA harvested and stored vast swaths of American emails and metadata under a program called Stellar Wind; the NSA compelled tech giants to hand over data using FISA court warrants—while also covertly tapping into fiber-optic cables, like those owned by Google, to secretly siphon even more data; the NSA hacked into Al Jazeera’s internal communications systems; the GCHQ led a DDoS attack against Anonymous and hacked Belgacom, a partly state-owned Belgian telecommunications company; and under a program fittingly called Optic Nerve, the GCHQ intercepted and stored webcam images from millions of Yahoo! users. And there was more: a four-month investigation by Barton Gellman and Julie Tate demonstrated that “ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency.”2
Astonishingly, a 2012 NSA report, also included in the leaks, revealed the spy agency’s dissatisfaction with all of these accomplishments. The NSA sought to broaden its reach further by deploying an even more aggressive cyberoffensive strategy, allowing them to gather data from “anyone, anytime, anywhere,” as reported by Laura Poitras and James Risen for the New York Times.3
Such aggressive and wide-ranging forms of surveillance preemptively decimate the possibility of a “right to be let alone,” to use the famous 1890 phrasing of Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, who were among the first to consider the legal basis of privacy.4 And the style of surveillance employed today strikes not only at the personal, exploratory private sphere deemed valuable in liberal subject formation—it also preempts many forms of association that are essential to democratic life. The radical technology collective and Internet service provider Riseup sums it up well:
What surveillance really is, at its root, is a highly effective form of social control. The knowledge of always being watched changes our behavior and stifles dissent. The inability to associate secretly means there is no longer any possibility for free association. The inability to whisper means there is no longer any speech that is truly free of coercion, real or implied. Most profoundly, pervasive surveillance threatens to eliminate the most vital element of both democracy and social movements: the mental space for people to form dissenting and unpopular views.5
Intelligence agencies naturally require some secrecy to function effectively in the public interest. But when secrecy is left entirely unchecked—especially when granted to those already afforded extraordinary amounts of power and resources—it becomes a breeding ground for the sorts of abuse we saw emerge under J. Edgar Hoover’s helm at the FBI, such as COINTELPRO.
The surveillance apparatus exposed by Snowden is also technologically, and thus historically, distinctive. With enough computer power it becomes frighteningly easy to gather data, especially through complete automation. And as civil liberties lawyer Jennifer Granick points out, “Once you build the mousetrap of surveillance infrastructure, they will come for the data.”6
The state leans with particular force on collected data and informant reports to actively target niche groups—currently the US and UK spy disproportionately on Muslims, environmental activists, and, increasingly, hacktivists.7 This is the conclusion reached in Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims, an investigative report about NYPD’s tellingly named “Demographics Unit” issued by a trio of nonprofits.8 Established by a former CIA official soon after 9/11, the program proved so controversial and so ineffective—no actionable intelligence emerged from the collected data—that it was dismantled in April 2014, but only after disrupting and distorting the social fabric of targeted Muslim communities for more than a decade.9 The program included the use of 15,000 informants and the building of a large dossier through extensive video and photographic surveillance. A Muslim college student featured in the report, Sari, captured the invasiveness in a single sentence: “It’s as if the law says: the more Muslim you are, the more trouble you can be, so decrease your Islam.”10 The leaks also confirmed that the NSA monitors “prominent Muslim-Americans,” including lawyers, professors, and other professionals even when they have no links to terrorist or criminal activity. After three months of investigative research and extensive interviews with five targets, “all vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press.”11
In the United States, Muslim Americans endure the brunt of what the ACLU describes as “suspicionless surveillance.”12 But ubiquitous monitoring has consequences throughout society. As journalist Laurie Penny has persuasively argued, “If you live in a surveillance state for long enough, you create a censor in your head.”13 When video cameras are routine fixtures in urban landscapes; when corporate Internet giants store records of online navigation and communication (and make them frighteningly easy for the NSA to access); and when managers and bosses maintain capabilities to “measure and monitor employees as never before,” as reporter Steve Lohr has put it, society at large pays the price.14 These different vectors of surveillance aggregate, exerting a pressure for us to blend in, to think twice before speaking out, to, in essence, follow a narrow set of prescribed norms. Social conformity encourages quiet resignation and discourages the experimental—and necessarily risky—acts of speaking, thinking, and doing required for healthy democratic dissent.
Will we, with the help of people like the ex-NSA contractor who bore enormous risk in speaking out, manage to compel our governments to curb such abuses and, in so doing, restore our right to associate free of undue surveillance? The hurdles are gargantuan; the sanctioned channels for political change in the United States are frighteningly narrow.15 The technical architecture of the Internet—wherein centralized, corporate-controlled servers house most of our data—makes capture both trivially easy and ubiquitous; this technical scenario has been described by civil liberties lawyer Eben Moglen as a “recipe for disaster,” prompting him and other Internet technologists, like security expert Bruce Schneier, to declare, “We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying.”16 Finally, as ACLU staff technologist Chris Soghoian argues, so long as Internet firms continue to “monetize their users’ private data,” they can never adopt a truly “pro-user” privacy policy.17
And yet, a field which had seemed hopelessly desolate now resembles fertile terrain. The politically engaged geek family continues to grow—in size and political significance. It is constituted by various organizations and activists working with politicians, lawyers, journalists, and artists. Many emerged from the geeky quarters of the Internet. There is Julian Assange, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Chelsea Manning, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sarah Harrison, the Tor developers, Anonymous, Riseup, Edward Snowden, and many more. The last two years have been singular—never before have so many geeks and hackers wielded their keyboards for the sake of political expression, dissent, and direct action.18
Increasingly, thanks to their combined actions, we recognize that we stand at a crossroads. Snowden ignited a fiery national conversation over privacy that has continued for over a year—a minor miracle in a mass mediascape that lionizes novelty and eschews long-term, sustained deliberation. There are promising signs of legislative change. In what free speech advocate Trevor Timm described as “a surprising rebuke to the NSA’s lawyers and the White House,” the US House of Representatives passed a sweeping bill in June 2014 prohibiting warrantless access to Americans’ emails and banning intelligence agencies from installing back doors in commercial hardware, with or without vendor complicity.19 The effects of the leak have in turn reverberated far beyond national borders, as Glenn Greenwald attests:
[Snowden’s leak] changed the way people around the world viewed the reliability of any statements made by US officials and transformed relations between countries. It radically altered views about the proper role of journalism in relation to government power. And within the United States, it gave rise to an ideologically diverse, trans-partisan coalition pushing for meaningful reform of the surveillance state.20
All this seems even more remarkable when one considers the viciousness with which many government officials, especially within the intelligence community, have reacted to Snowden. One anecdote is emblematic of the attitude: during the 2014 Ottawa Conference on Defense and Security, Melissa Hathaway, former director of the US Joint Interagency Cyber Task Force in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, recounted to her audience that she learned of Snowden’s flight to Russia (to seek political asylum) while in Tel Aviv. “I have to tell you the Israelis have a point of view that I do too. That he should have never been allowed to get on that plane—and then they [the Israelis] took it a little bit further: that the plane would have never landed.” As the uproarious laughter died down, Hathaway punctuated the sentiment with a one-liner: “I still might subscribe to their point of view.”21 Yet, even as the American state diminishes Snowden by calling him a mere criminal, his political claims are becoming more salient every day. Hathaway herself acknowledged this in the statement that catalyzed the above anecdote. “Our allies feel betrayed. Their citizens believe that Edward Snowden is a hero.”
Snowden has fueled a nascent movement composed of technology collectives, lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, politicians, and NGOs of varying stripes. This movement has lent its voice to the preexisting struggles of groups like the nonprofits Fight for the Future and the Open Technology Institute. The result has been a range of targeted policy and technological campaigns, such as Reset the Net, a grassroots effort to “to spread NSA-resistant privacy tools” so that they might become default features of the Internet.22 Technologies like The Amnesic Incognito Live System (also known as Tails, an operating system built for anonymity), Open Whisper Systems (an open-source endeavor to develop encryption software for mobile phones), and LEAP (a recursive acronym for the LEAP Encryption Access Project, which modifies existing encryption tools to make them user friendly) are being funded by citizens and organizations like Freedom of the Press Foundation. Snowden himself has endorsed encryption projects as both effective and necessary: “The bottom line is that encryption does work,” he told a packed room at South by Southwest in March 2014.23 These technologies are poised to facilitate some semblance of privacy for future generations of Internet users.
Soon after the first batch of NSA revelations, Ireland saw its first hacking court case. Two members of LulzSec and Anonymous, Donncha O’Cearbhaill and Darren Martyn, were tried in July 2013 for the 2011 defacement of the website of Irish political party Fine Gael. En route to the courthouse in Dublin, I got lost and ended up arriving late. Because I own no personal tracking device (or cell phone, as you will), I did what people have done for centuries: I consulted a paper map and confused myself. It took me another forty-five minutes to reach the correct court, housed in a modern circular glass building. I was sure I had missed the proceedings.
As it turned out, the two cases were sandwiched between more than a dozen petty criminal hearings; it would be another hour before O’Cearbhaill and Martyn stood before the judge. As I waited, sitting next to a local Anon nicknamed Firefly, we had a grand time watching the judge—a sensible and matronly woman in her fifties—gently, but firmly, scold the dozen other defendants. Most of them had been involved in youthful mischief and disorderly conduct. In one case, a twenty-something young lady with stunningly long black hair, an indignant scowl, crossed arms, and an immodest wardrobe was found guilty of beating up a member of the Garda—the local police—while thoroughly inebriated.
The two Anonymous cases clearly stood out from the lineup of brawls and drunken mischief. After hearing both sides in two defacement cases, the judge expressed skepticism about the prosecution’s claim that restoring the Fine Gael website was expensive. How, she asked, could it possibly have cost ten thousand euros if nothing was damaged? The prosecution had no answer. The judge concluded that this hack was a “stunt to embarrass a political party rather than to disclose data to the public at large.” She did not want to see O’Cearbhaill and Martyn go to jail for the digital equivalent of graffiti. Nor did she think that their acts were laudable. Instead, she admonished both, calling their hack “a terrible abuse of talent.” Then she fined them each five thousand euros—payable by October (and with half going to charity)—and ordered them to enroll in a restorative justice program. She did not see what they did as political—had she, the humane punishment might have been even more lenient.
After the case adjourned, O’Cearbhaill and Martyn slipped out with their families. Firefly and I headed out toward the center of town, strolling along Dublin’s main canal under the sun—Ireland was experiencing a miraculous two-week heatwave. Together, we did a postmortem of the trial. We agreed that O’Cearbhaill and Martyn got off very light; compared to the Anons tried in the United States, the Irish and British cases were remarkably mild. While the act of defacing a website does not compare to Hammond’s actions, the long string of hacks that Ryan “Kayla” Ackroyd, a British national, carried out with LulzSec came a bit closer. In May 2013, after he pled guilty to one charge of hacking the Pentagon and conspiring to hack Sony, Britain’s National Health Service, and Rupert Murdoch’s News International, the British state sentenced Ackroyd to thirty months in jail, of which he served ten; notably, he received no fine. In the US cases, even when the prison sentences are relatively short, the fines added on top virtually guarantee years of indentured servitude. At the age of twenty-two, John Anthony Borell III, aka Kahuna of the CabinCr3w, was sentenced to thirty-six months in prison for hacking into multiple police websites and dumping personal data. After serving his time, he will then still have to pay nearly $230,000 in damages.
In addition, many of the charges leveled against hackers in the United States have seemed to come out of left field, as illustrated by the ordeal of Barrett Brown. On March 6, 2012, the same day Fox News outed Sabu and the FBI arrested Hammond, the G-men executed a search warrant for Barrett Brown’s residence. Among other things, authorities sought to locate “records relating to HBGary, Infragard, Endgame Systems, Anonymous, LulzSec, IRC Chats, Twitter, wiki.echelon2.org, and pastebin.com.”24 Six months later, in September, the FBI arrested Brown (live on video chat, fittingly) after he—to be entirely frank—set himself up for a raid. He had posted a video online entitled “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith Part Three Revenge of the Lithe,” which featured a hyperbolic tirade against a federal agent who had questioned his mother.25 As expected, he was then arrested for threatening an FBI agent. An excerpt from Brown’s rant might demonstrate more clearly why he was so full of fury—and why the FBI, in turn, was compelled to raid him (rather than simply writing the video off as a piece of performance art):
Guess what’s on my fucking search warrant: fraud! I bring in no money … a fucking fraud charge for a fucking writer activist, who has no money, who has spent all his money on fucking lawyers for himself and his fucking mother … Agent Smith posted addresses of [my house and my mother’s house] … He is a criminal, involved in a criminal conspiracy … Anyway, that’s why Smith’s life is over. When I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to go kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids … How do you like them apples? As Smith has noted, I’m in danger from the Zetas … Thanks to that fella [for putting up my address] … I will assume that since the Zetas often take the guise of Mexican security personnel [and often are] government officials, I’m concerned that the same trick may be played here … Particularly the FBI … will be regarded as potential Zeta assassin squads, and as the FBI [knows] … they know that I’m armed, that I come from a military family, that I was taught to shoot by a Vietnam vet … and I will shoot all of them and kill them if they come and do anything because they are engaged in a criminal conspiracy and I have reason to fear for my life not just from the Zetas, but the US governments [sic] … I have no choice left but to defend myself, my family … and frankly, you know, it was pretty obvious I was going to be dead before I was forty, so I wouldn’t mind going out with two FBI sidearms like a fucking Egyptian pharaoh. Adios
Alongside charges for these threats, Brown also faced charges related to the Stratfor hack. In his Project PM chat room, he had shared a web link to an externally hosted file containing the leaked Stratfor credit card data. For doing so, he was charged with ten counts of aggravated identify theft and two counts relating to credit card fraud, with a combined total possible sentence of forty-five years (plus the sixty-some years for the other charges). Many other people who had also publicly circulated the link were not charged. Journalist Adrian Chen, who tended to be critical of Anonymous, wrote: “As a journalist who covers hackers and has ‘transferred and posted’ many links to data stolen by hackers—in order to put them in stories about the hacks—this indictment is frightening because it seems to criminalize linking.”26
Because Brown was Anonymous’s ethical foil, flaunting himself as the face of a collective seeking to be faceless, he was a divisive figure. Nevertheless, Anons concurred with Kevin Gallagher, the system administrator running Brown’s support campaign, when he argued that “it was this journalistic work of digging into areas that powerful people would rather keep in the dark that made him a target.”27 Brown’s supporters raised funds, helped secure top-notch lawyers, and worked to publicize his charges.
In a surprising plot twist, the government dropped the linking charges just two days after the defense filed its motion to dismiss. (Dropping the charges avoids bad precedent and allows the government to continue pursuing investigations of the same ilk.) Still facing an extraordinary 105 years in prison, gagged against speaking to the media, and having already spent over a year and a half in custody, Brown accepted a plea bargain. At the time of writing, it remains unclear what the plea bargain will mean for the charges relating to threatening a federal officer.
The takeaway is this: whether one seeks to hack with impunity and anonymity—whether politically motivated or not—or to simply attain the status of a witty and sprightly rabble-rouser, it is best to do so on the European side of the Atlantic (where Anonymous and other forms of geek activism are more common).
Later that evening in Ireland, I was keen to ask O’Cearbhaill his thoughts about the case, but he was nowhere to be found. As it turns out, the Garda had been waiting for him outside of the courthouse, where they again arrested him—not for hacking this time. O’Cearbhaill, a chemistry student, maintained a laboratory at his parent’s home. Some of the chemicals could (in theory) be used to make explosives. Although there was not an iota of evidence that he was using, or intended to use, the chemicals for such purposes, he was arrested under Irish antiterrorism legislation.
While the prosecutor later determined that there was insufficient evidence to bring a case, some Anons floated a hypothesis that the Garda was attempting to intimidate O’Cearbhaill into fessing up to his alleged involvement in what had become a legendary hack. Back in early February 2012, AntiSec had released audio of an intercepted conference call among the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the Garda. The subject of the conference call was none other than Anonymous itself. The leaked call was not only a 100 percent lulzly hack, but also an (apparently) lasting embarrassment to the agencies involved, in particular the Garda. It was the email account of one of its own officers that had been compromised to obtain the data needed to “join” the call. (At the time of this writing, no one has been found guilty of this intrusion).
The case may also suggest another reason why law enforcement is hostile toward computer spelunkers. Hackers occasionally make it their mission to “watch the watchers.” Two Kevins—Poulsen and Mitnick—had done it before. Media scholar Douglas Thomas, who covered the ordeal of both hackers, noted how “Poulsen hacked into the FBI’s systems and discovered a maze of wiretaps and surveillance programs that were monitoring everyone and everything from the restaurant across the street from him to (allegedly) Ferdinand Marcos.”28 AntiSec pulled off the same thing, but even more loudly and publicly.
A few days later, O’Cearbhaill, free again, joined a group of us for a summer picnic on Saint Stephen’s Green. I had brought together a range of Anons from different networks and operational iterations, from the ex-Scientologist Pete Griffiths (a keen Anonymous supporter) to David from Chanology, Firefly from AnonOps, and hackers like O’Cearbhaill. He told me more about how he first got into hacktivism at the age of fifteen, and about his father’s experiences in the IRA—including the six years he spent in jail and the forty-day hunger strike he carried out. His father, unlike the judge, had naturally understood his son’s actions as political. By the summer of 2013, I was confident that most Anonymous participants were politically inclined; they may tunnel and undermine, but they do so in an attempt to dig through to daybreak—to end the dark reign of injustice. Still, something shifts when a person hears stories like the ones O’Cearbhaill shared with me. Fleeting shadows and perceptions become grounded and legible; it becomes so clear that each contributor has a rich life story that has led him or her to Anonymous, and that Anonymous itself functions as a portal to further destinations still.
Indeed, a year later I returned to Dublin and, alongside fifty other audience members, sat in Trinity College’s Science Gallery and listened to O’Cearbhaill—now the auditor of the Dublin University Pirate Party—give a talk about Tor, the privacy tool. We were at a meet-up organized by CryptoParty, a grassroots movement that aims to teach cryptography to the general public. The idea was hatched by Asher Wolf and some other geeks in 2012. Just days later, over beers at a pub in London, Mustafa Al-Bassam (tflow) told me about his internship at Privacy International, the leading European NGO fighting for the right to whisper. There are dozens of other examples. Whatever one may think of Anonymous, it clearly acted as a political gateway. Many who left the group will continue, in different ways, to contribute to political life.
Unlike Al-Bassam and many others, Hammond and Monsegur were activists well before they became involved in Anonymous. But their paths diverged radically when their involvement with the collective ended. Soon after news broke about Monsegur’s cooperation, he vanished—and nobody had any clue as to where he had gone. As it turns out, he spent seven months in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the same prison where Hammond was incarcerated before he was moved to Kentucky to serve out his ten-year sentence. An anonymous source had tipped me off—but my pleas to reporters for a detailed investigation as to why he was in prison fell on deaf ears. Only later did I receive confirmation from Hammond himself. It wasn’t until May 26, 2014, when Monsegur was finally sentenced after seven delays, that the circumstances leading to Monsegur’s rearrest and incarceration were made available to the public. He had violated his bail conditions by penning a blog post and chatting with an Anonymous participant. At the sentencing, Judge Loretta Preska breathlessly trumpeted Monsegur as a model informant and determined that his 2012 stint in jail was punishment enough. He was a free man. Before he strolled out of court, Preska further lauded Monsegur: “The immediacy of Mr. Monsegur’s cooperation and its around-the-clock nature was particularly helpful to the government … That personal characteristic of turning on a dime to doing good, not evil, is the most important factor in this sentencing.” Preska’s lenient sentence not-so-subtly relayed the following message to future informants: cooperate and you will be treated well.
Although the outcome was far from surprising, Twitter was a flutter with wails of outrage: “Jeremy Hammond is serving a ten-year sentence for hacks that Sabu (working for the feds) told him to do. When will the feds go to prison?”29 asked @YourAnonNews. “Preska is an absolute disgrace to the concept of justice,” offered Firefly during an interview. These laments could do nothing to alter Hammond’s situation—but many Anons derived some measure of comfort when, only days later, both Motherboard and the Daily Dot published accounts which called the government storyline into question—effectively corroborating Hammond’s version of the events. Along with cooperating “around-the-clock,” the news reports ascertained that Monsegur was given free rein to initiate, coordinate, and carry out dozens of hacks.
Following Monsegur’s release, Hammond issued his own statement: “By aggressively prosecuting hackers who play by their own rules, they want to deter others from taking up the cause and hope future arrests will yield more aspiring cooperators. We must continue to reject excuses and justifications that make it acceptable to sell out your friends and become a pawn of cyber-imperialism … Sabu avoided a prison sentence, but the consequences of his actions will haunt him for the rest of his life. Not even halfway through my time, I would still rather be where I’m at: while they can take away your freedom temporarily, your honor lasts forever.”30 While Hammond’s lengthy detention will undoubtedly be trying, his vocal commitment to his principles in spite of his unmasking and incarceration have already proved a beacon of inspiration to many in the activist community.
While it might seem unusual for a researcher to become so entangled with his or her object of study, it has long been par for the course in anthropology. As Danilyn Rutherford writes, anthropological methods “create obligations, obligations that compel those who seek knowledge to put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within the setting and among the people they describe.”31 As part of a letter-writing campaign organized by Hammond’s lawyers, I, along with 150 other citizens, wrote to Judge Loretta Preska to ask for leniency; in the letters, we emphasized the political nature of Anonymous. Wherever possible, I have attempted to translate the confusing world of Anonymous for multiple publics. I have also been writing letters to some of the Anons in prison. As part of these obligations, I’ve thought long and deliberately about the underlying goals motivating this book. Ultimately, I reached the conclusion that I have two clashing objectives: to stamp out misinformation and to embrace enchantment.
First and foremost, in this book I have sought to dispel some of the many misconceptions about Anonymous: many participants like O’Cearbhaill were not primarily driven by a desire to accrue lulz—even if this irreverent spirit still guided social interactions and underwrote strategies. Anonymous has matured into a serious political movement, so much so that many of the trolls from the “Internet Hate Machine” days would “not recognize” the Anonymous of today, as Ryan Ackroyd told me. He is among the tiny fraction of participants who bridged the divide between these now clearly distinctive eras. (Of course this does not mean that the Machine of Hate won’t rise again, as an Anonymous activist named “blackplans” tweeted: “Without the trolls, the hackers, the 4chan hordes, how many of you nice, sensitive people would ever have heard of #Anonymous? Remember.”)32
As part of this first mission, I’ve sought to avoid extolling Anonymous’s every move. Even in its activist incarnations, Anonymous has clearly engaged in morally dubious—and sometimes downright awful—endeavors. The most troubling moments come when innocent people are caught up in the Anonymous cross fire. Some hacks struck me as counterproductive, and not always worth the risks taken by the persons involved. Indeed, parts of Anonymous are riddled with irresolvable contradictions.
And so, when assessing Anonymous, it seems impossible to arrive at a universal—much less neat-and-tidy—maxim regarding the group’s effects. Instead, I have tried to relay the lessons of Anonymous by narrating its exploits, failures, and successes. These compiled stories are idiosyncratic and told from the vantage point of my personal travels and travails. There are so many untold and secret tales that, were they publicized, would likely shift our comprehension of Anonymous. While all social life and political movements are complex, even convoluted, displaying endless facets and dimensions, Anonymous’s embrace of multiplicity, secrecy, and deception makes it especially difficult to study and comprehend.
This dynamism and multitudinous quality is also one of Anonymous’s core strengths. Anonymous is emblematic of a particular geography of resistance. Composed of multiple competing groups, short-term power is achievable for brief durations, while long-term dominance by any single group or person is virtually impossible. In such a dynamic landscape, it may be “easy to co-opt, but impossible to keep co-opted,” as Quinn Norton thoughtfully put it during a South by Southwest panel in March 2013. In this way, the multitudinal “nature” of Anonymous precludes its subjection to either aspirational figures working internally, or external figures who would exert influence either through informants, like Sabu, or through exogenous pressure. Anonymous is cryptic, forcing us to work and dance with the scraps and shards it shows us.
That is to say, Anonymous leaves a lot to the imagination. But not everything; it is vital to understand how Anonymous underwent a metamorphosis from underworld trolls into public-facing activists, especially given that nation-states, prosecutors, government officials, and judges would like to cast them all as mere criminals. These powers-that-be are unwilling to acknowledge Anonymous’s actions as driven by an activist calling; indeed, it may be the potency and the politically motivated character of the group’s actions that prompts the state to so swiftly criminalize them.33
And so, while I have aimed to blot out misconceptions, the prospect of fully stripping away the aura of mystery and magic felt somehow unacceptable (were it even possible). Philosopher Jane Bennett urges us “to resist the story of the disenchantment of modernity,” and to instead “enhance enchantment.”34 This has been my second aim in collecting riveting tales about Anonymous. This deliberate elevation of enchantment, Bennett argues, is a meaningful political gesture, and one that I am driven to make—for reasons that will become more clear in these last pages.
Given this second goal, it was only natural for me to adopt a mythic frame and invite the trickster along for the ride. The figures in this book embody the contradictions and paradoxes of life, many of which are irresolvable. By telling these characters’ stories, lessons emerge, not through dry edicts but, instead, through fascinating, often audacious, tales of exploits. Trickster lore may be patently mythic, but it bears remembering that, at one point, it was spun by human hands. My role has been to nudge forward this process of historical and political myth-making—already evident in the routine functioning of an entity constituted by adept artists, contemporary myth-makers, and concocters of illusion.
Now that we have nearly reached the end of this journey and I have unveiled the objectives guiding my book, it is left to you to judge whether I have displayed the cunning requisite to balance the Apollonian forces of empiricism and logic with the Dionysian forces of enchantment. Whatever your conclusion, please permit me the license to weave some final thoughts through and along the gaps which still remain, and on top of other areas already thick with embroidery. While Anonymous still leaves me frequently bewildered, there are a string of inspiring messages we can glean in its wake.
Though it is shifty, and though its organizing structures can never quite be apprehended, Anonymous is composed of people who decide together and separately to take a stand. Who might these people be? A neighbor? A daughter? A secretary? A janitor? A student? A Buddhist? An incognito banker? You? Whatever sort of people are involved today, one thing is certain: what began as a network of trolls has become a wellspring of online insurgency. What started as a narrow reaction to the Church of Scientology now encompasses a global selection of political causes, from fights against censorship in Tunisia, through salvos against North American rape culture, on to condemnations of economic and political injustices in Zuccotti Park and Tahir Square.
Despite an unpredictable—not to mention irreverent and often destructive—attitude toward the law, Anonymous also offers an object lesson in what Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch calls “the principle of hope.” Bloch, having fled Nazi Germany, wrote a three-volume tract on the topic while exiled in the United States. Striving for an “encylopedic” accounting, he unearthed a stunningly diverse number of signs, symbols, and artifacts that channeled hope in different historical eras. The examples gathered range from personal daydreams to time-honoured fairy tales, from the love of music and sports to mystical or philosophical tracts—anything that might spark or communicate a glimmer of hope. Working in the shadow of an overly pessimistic strain of Marxist critique, his opus reminds us that a better world—or at least the understanding of what that world could be—is in our midst. As a sort of philosophical archaeologist, Bloch excavated hidden or forgotten messages of utopia, that they might combat “anxiety” and “fear” in all who encountered them. “The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them,” writes Bloch. “The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.”35 That a robust activist politics emerged from the depths of one of the seediest places on the Internet—that geeks chose to throw themselves actively into a process of political becoming—strikes me as a perfect enactment of just such a principle of hope.
Bloch indicted “fraudulent hope,”36 characterized by blind or overt optimism, for its failure to catalyze movement. Instead, his hope is a restless one, sustained by passion, wonder, and even mischief—all qualities embraced by Anonymous. We can see, then, a strong positivity inherent in Anonymous—a striving toward a realistic form of hope that, once manifest, seems suited to impel disruption and change. Of course, these activists hold no monopoly over such affective states of passion and hope. Nevertheless, with the exception of a narrow band of important thinkers like Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, the emotional character of political life is often relegated to the sidelines—odd, because desire and pleasure are so central to its very being. But there are other reasons, more urgent than simply undoing the omission of such a primary component of activist endeavors, to convey the emotional factors that play an integral role in social change.
In 2008, when the fearsome, Loki-esque band of trolls that then constituted Anonymous took that decisive left turn away from “ultracoordinated motherfuckery” and toward activism, they in essence conquered one of the prevailing sentiments of our times. Media scholar Whitney Phillips convincingly argues that a widespread cynicism pervades our moment—and that in trolls we find one of the most distilled, concentrated, and grotesque extremes of an emotionally dissociative (or politically fetishistic) subculture.37
Many theorists and writers from radically distinct traditions, stretching from the American novelist David Foster Wallace to Italian autonomist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, have persuasively argued that cynicism has become a prism through which large swaths of North Americans and Europeans filter and feel the world. Wallace writes about the pervasiveness of “passive unease and cynicism,” and calls for “anti-rebels, born oglers” to rise up and “and dare somehow to back away from ironic watching.”38 Bifo, who has written multiple tracts on the topic, turned to poetry to convey the frightening, dead emotional burden of cynicism:
Before the tsunami hits, you know how it is?
The sea recedes, leaving a dead desert in which only cynicism and dejection remain.
All you need to do, is to make sure you have the right words to say, the right
clothes to wear, before it finally wipes you away.39
Feelings of dejection are not merely figurative shackles. Even when citizens are aware of the forces that fleece the majority, cynicism can disable political change. When this stance becomes prevalent enough, it settles into the sinews of society, further entrenching atomization, preventing social solidarity, and sharply limiting political possibilities.40 Add anxiety to the mix, and the resulting cocktail becomes the most lethal of poisons. The UK-based radical collective Plan C has penned a perceptive tract entitled “We Are All Very Anxious Now.” It connects the dots between dire economic conditions, precarious labor, preemptive crackdowns against activists, a cultural emphasis on self-promotion, and an overpowering technical state of surveillance: “One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multifaceted omnipresent web of surveillance … But this obvious web is only the outer carapace,” they write. “Ostensibly voluntary self-exposure, through social media, visible consumption and choice of positions within the field of opinions, also assumes a performance in the field of the perpetual gaze of virtual others.”41 When this push toward the panopticon is stacked with a litany of broader issues—from growing wealth inequality, waves of global and national recession and unrest, and the looming prospect of climate-induced environmental disaster—it is not difficult to understand how a disabling, pervasive, and frightening uncertainty has come to colonize our states of being.
Cynicism and anxiety may be prevalent, but they are neither omnipotent nor omnipresent; they run up against friction and resistance—every single day. Untold numbers of activists, immigrants, displaced people, refugees, various unknowns, artists, and, remarkably, even some politicians, are all fighting against oppression and pushing against the emotional onslaught that can so easily lead to such existential traps. If we are not careful, we might paint too bleak a picture and reify the very cynicism and anxiety we seek to dismantle. Bloch insisted that we contribute to a living archive of hope, that we take care to listen to and take hold of “something other than the putridly stifling, hollowly nihilistic death-knell.”42
When we consider that the members of Anonymous know such conditions well, it is either less remarkable, or more remarkable, that they were able to add to this “living archive of hope.” I am unable to decide whether Anonymous attracts those with dark, emotional lives, or whether the pseudonymous environment creates a safe space for sharing what are simply universal facets of the human condition. Likely it is some combination of the two. I nevertheless was struck time and again by this pairing of personal pain with the ardent desire for its overcoming.
By sacrificing the public self, by shunning leaders, and especially by refusing to play the game of self-promotion, Anonymous ensures mystery; this in itself is a radical political act, given a social order based on ubiquitous monitoring and the celebration of runaway individualism and selfishness. Anonymous’s iconography—masks and headless suits—visually displays the importance of opacity. The collective may not be the hive it often purports and is purported to be—and it may be marked by internal strife—but Anonymous still manages to leave us with a striking vision of solidarity—e pluribus unum.
“A small fire demands constant tending. A bonfire can be let alone. A conflagration spreads”—so said Anonymous activist papersplx. By embracing the mask, which sociologist Richard Sennett rightly notes is “one of culture’s oldest stage props connecting stage and street,” Anonymous took the dynamics of theatrical trickery and transferred them from the Internet to the everyday life of resistance.43 Anonymous became a generalized symbol for dissent, a medium to channel deep disenchantment with a dictator, with a law, with the economy, with the culture of rape—basically, with anything. Anonymous, always the risk-taker, liked to play with fire—and many participants despised or shunned safety measures; it is not surprising that the group itself, as a whole, eventually caught fire, blazing a path for others. Some got burned—both participants and targets alike. Or as Firefly put it in the film We Are Legion: “It’s like a phoenix. It might occasionally catch fire and burn to the ground but it’ll just be reborn from the ashes. It’ll be reborn stronger.” Pushing hard against rules and boundaries may often lead to entrapment or demise, but the entity’s core animating idea—Anonymous if free for anyone to embody—positions it well for resurrection and reinvention.
Anonymous has appeared many times like a vision, confounding us as we watch the bright flashes of its delightful (and offensive and confusing) dreams. It is this quality of straddling, on the one hand, mythic space, and on the other, the reality of activists taking risks and taking action, that makes the group so enticing. Taken at a distance, it’s like observing the northern lights, a quiet but mythic battle of gods and tricksters in the night sky, a sky all the more enchanting because it is everyone’s to watch. The power of Anonymous’s eponymous anonymity is that we are all free to choose whether or not to don the mask.