> CHAPTER 7

> OXBLOOD

LAIRD BROWN WAS the truest outsider to be welcomed into the Cult of the Dead Cow, and yet he would have the greatest impact on its trajectory. He was a Canadian-born internationalist in a group dominated by Americans, and a modest technologist who joined at a time when cDc was attracting some of the best minds in security. Laird brought two things: a more refined style of Kevin Wheeler–quality marketing and a sense of moral urgency. Kevin and Bill Brown had always held that cDc was not about technology itself; it was about connection and communication. As it probed technological issues more deeply, the group became more frustrated with the way companies and government officials were acting. The big companies ignored problems unless they were exposed so badly that customers threatened to leave, which was rare for a monopoly like Microsoft. The security industry was not fixing things because the fundamental problems ran deeper than software: it was about business models, corporate power, and legal limitations. And the government was oblivious, slow-moving, or bought off, especially outside of the military. cDc had absorbed all of that, and with its newly bestowed rock-star status, it was ready to take the argument to a more radical place.

Tall and garrulous but cerebral, Laird had shown up before the Back Orifice releases. He had read John Lester’s personal account of hijinks at HoHoCon ’94, and he emulated its style. He spoke cDc’s own language and gradually convinced its members to stake out a broader position. Because he understood where the group had been and where it was heading, he had the answer to their nagging sense of frustration. He began with a lighthearted, oddball, flattering email out of the blue to Luke Benfey at his L0pht address in September 1995. “Cher legume,” it addressed Veggie, “I know your travails… the many calls upon your fertile resources.… Alas, it is part of the burden of greatness. That is why it pains me all the more to elicit your teaching.” Using Latin as well as French and his own version of self-mocking leet-speak, Laird said that he had spent two days reading cDc’s archived text files and was terribly sorry to bother him but wanted to know if there was anything else nearly as hip that Luke could recommend. The emails came sporadically over the next year, usually to one or a few members of cDc, who forwarded them to the whole list. Laird said he was working for a not-for-profit technical consulting group with a lot of Canadian government contracts.

Laird came by his sense of ethics, disdain for authority, and showmanship well before college. Born in 1950 to a welder father and teacher mother in the Toronto suburb of Hamilton, Laird was a nominal Protestant. But he attended a boys’ Catholic high school and enjoyed the clear moral framework of those around him, including strong support for the civil rights movement in the US and for Vietnam protestors, many of whom fled to Canada to avoid the draft. “It was a defining moment. All these things appeared to me to be moral evils, especially [denial of] civil rights,” Laird said.

He played classical violin from early childhood and performed on a range of instruments in various genres for money while studying music at the University of Windsor, until the studying took all the fun out of it. After jobs as an auto factory worker, cook, and photographer, Laird moved to New York. There he edited insider newsletters at the United Nations and then, assisting a State Department retiree who had intelligence connections, compiled a multivolume compendium about the inner workings of the UN. “I read a million documents and found out who everyone was,” Laird said, developing deep knowledge of the ideals and practicalities there. Then he consulted for West African and South American countries, explaining how things worked at the UN. He stayed until the Libyan mission offered him a lucrative job as spokesman. It would have been ridiculous to accept, but the offer prompted self-examination that ended with Laird leaving the city and moving back to Toronto. During his decade at the UN, the predicament of Chinese dissidents haunted Laird. Market liberalization in the 1980s had helped spawn a student movement in China for greater freedom of speech and democracy, and the Communist Party wavered on how to respond. After as many as a million protestors gathered in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Premier Li Peng declared martial law and sent in troops, who killed more than one hundred. Liberals were purged from Communist Party leadership, and the range of permitted discussion topics narrowed sharply. Still, Laird’s activism began only when he joined cDc in 1996.

Befitting someone who had labored for years among the silver tongues at the UN, Laird’s tone remained respectful even as he became a part of the group. But he gradually began cajoling cDc for change, with one underlying point and a well-chosen target. The point was that cDc was famous but did not stand for much that was vital beyond tech security. And the area to expand the vision, he suggested, involved the Chinese government. It was a deeply personal argument because Laird had traveled in Asia and was close to people fighting for human rights in China. He also said that during his time at the UN he had met Chinese diplomats who had hinted at unhappiness with events in their homeland. From the early days, Laird told the others about a guy he had met back in Toronto, a Chinese exile helping others get out in the wake of the massacre in and around Tiananmen Square. Gradually the story got more elaborate. The friend was protected by mobsters who smuggled people for other reasons. He had a network of helpers. And he was interested in using technology to help dissidents, which was conveniently right up the alley of cDc.

The house rules of cDc said that everyone would get a chance to weigh in on a candidate for membership but that Kevin would have the final say. In addition, someone needed to meet him in person. Luke visited Laird in Toronto in the summer of 1996, and Laird was admitted to cDc not long afterward. For his handle, he picked Oxblood Ruffin, combining a reference to the oxblood-colored Doc Martens boots popular in the British punk scene with a nod to David Ruffin, lead singer for the Temptations on songs including “My Girl” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”

In October, Luke returned to Toronto with John Lester and Sam Anthony in tow. Laird memorialized the event in classic cDc style, with a funny, text file–style email to the rest of cDc announcing that they had conducted the First Annual Won Ton Con at a Chinatown restaurant. He described the restaurant as a favored hangout of the Hong Kong Blondes, “a pairing of Chinese computer scientists and democratic activists” who he said could not join them that day for security reasons. A few months later, Laird gave an odd internal backstory for the Hong Kong Blondes. He emailed the others that he had invented the group as a joke, but his unnamed boss at the not-for-profit web consultancy had been “fascinated” by the fiction, “this great mythical force on the net” that could spawn imitators and confuse the Chinese government. Laird told cDc that he’d introduced his supervisor to the exiled dissidents in Toronto and that the Blondes had become a reality.

The Chinese government provided the perfect catalyst to push cDc into politics. It hated the free flow of information, a core value of cDc and the hacker movement it helped lead. China also naturally opposed the US government, where some of cDc and many of their friends and relatives worked. And China was doing business with the same companies cDc loved to hate, chief among them Microsoft.

Laird was a master marketer, and his cause sharpened his drive. Though his mysterious arrival and vague background perplexed the group, “Laird spoke human,” Misha Kubecka said, and that was a big step forward for the geeks. No matter what, he would find a way to tell a compelling story that would hook the media, security practitioners, and perhaps mainstream technologists. “Thank goodness we had Laird’s guidance,” Carrie Campbell said. “He said, ‘You have a little window of fame right now, what do you want to do with it? Do you want to run around like idiots or get something done?’” Laird was becoming the new wise elder, the role Chris Tucker had played.

Like Chris Tucker, Laird wasn’t coming from nowhere. He was building on the politicization that had been expressed most dramatically earlier in 1996 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow, a libertarian Republican. While a party had raged on around him during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Barlow had read that an over-the-top attempt to ban web porn had just been signed into law in America as part of telecom legislation.

“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” was Barlow’s over-the-top response. A deliberate echo of Thomas Jefferson, it began with a hint of Karl Marx: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” The sixteen-paragraph war whoop would soon be posted on tens of thousands of websites. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” they said.

“In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” It was idealistic, more than a bit silly, and remarkably naive for a technology culture that was already rewarding exploitation of click-happy human behavior.

Twenty years later, Barlow said that the innocence was a deliberate pose. “I knew the arrival of the net was liable to be as powerful in a very negative way as it was powerful in a very positive way. If it was possible for everything to be known for everyone curious about it, it was also going to be possible for just about anyone everywhere to devise turnkey totalitarianism, where they could flip a switch and see everything you are up to.” Barlow wanted to “set cultural expectations,” he said, to strengthen the side of righteousness for the battles to come. “I wanted people to think and feel that what we were entering into was a golden era, and that it was about freedom, and that it was about the explosion and dissemination of knowledge. And with any luck, we would figure out how to deal with the horrible part as those situations arose.”

For all its calculated omissions and excesses of passion, Barlow’s howl resonated with a burgeoning crowd of technologists, aspirants, and consumers who badly wanted the government to do anything other than screw up the greatest invention of their lifetimes. The biggest fans, as a class, were the programmers, the people creating technology daily for themselves and for others. By definition, they were all always at work on something unreleased that was going to be better than what had gone before. Within that group, the greatest enthusiasts were the hackers, the nonconformists and explorers who took things apart and put them back together in different ways, and who were the most likely in the world to, in the process, break laws like the Telecommunications Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Given their tendencies to work in isolation and reject social norms, it is hard to generalize about hacker beliefs. A great many tinkerers did their best to ignore large chunks of the outside world, especially the parts devoted to politics, and some did not pay much attention even to hackers working in adjacent spaces, like other hardware or operating systems or applications. But it is fair to say that most of those who were paying attention to the political world—a number that would grow dramatically as Barlow’s half-imaginary independent cyberspace clashed more with the reality of government—were on his side.

As Barlow’s declaration reverberated inside cDc alongside Laird’s railing about China, Misha would invent the term hacktivism, a portmanteau of hacking and activism and a concept that would play an enormous role for decades as hackers explored their role in society. “The word describes what the Hong Kong Blondes and cDc are doing together: Hacktivism,” Misha wrote to the group.

The following year featured an August revival of a hacking conference put on in New York three years earlier by 2600 magazine, called Hackers on Planet Earth, or HOPE. The name, updated for the 1997 edition as Beyond HOPE, was emblematic of a conference that would focus more on idealism than Def Con did. It attracted two thousand people, double the 1994 crowd. cDc members had multiple speaking slots, including a Saturday afternoon L0pht panel featuring Mudge and a Sunday afternoon panel with eight from cDc. It was the first hacking conference of any kind that Laird had attended, and by this point he had managed to latch on to cDc and take a surprisingly solid lead role within the group.

Luke played emcee for the half-hour panel, introducing by their handles Chris Tucker, “über-hacker laureate” Mudge, Sam Anthony, “foreign minister” Laird, Carrie, and John Lester. Though the panel was conducted as a general update on the group’s activities, Luke made clear that the most important development was a “strategic alliance” it was announcing with a Chinese prodemocracy group called the Hong Kong Blondes, which included technologists and activists. He then turned things over to Laird for his public debut as Oxblood. Clean-cut and short-haired, Laird was the only one on the panel who seemed like he would have been at ease in a suit, though he instead wore a yellow sports shirt.

Laird said that when he was working at the UN, he had met Chinese dissidents who were abroad as far back as 1989 and had stayed in touch with them even after that year’s slaughter at Tiananmen Square drove the democracy movement out of view. He explained that the Blondes’ name referred to slang for gold, which was seen as a cornerstone of freedom, and described some of what life was like under the repressive regime. He seemed to take credit for giving the Blondes the idea of using the net to help coordinate protests: “A couple years ago I was asking one of my contacts from Princeton, ‘Do you guys use the net for any of your advocacy?’ It sort of struck a bell with him, and he said maybe that’s not a bad idea. The next thing we know, he was getting in touch with some of his colleagues and his associates who were computer scientists and also very sympathetic to the democratic struggle,” Laird said. The Hong Kong Blondes had formally started in September 1996, with cDc offering advice. “The hacking community is an international community,” he said in his six-minute talk. “We’re all in the same community.”

Chris “Nightstalker” Tucker urged hackers in the US to be more active politically and educate lawmakers, and Sam said that those well versed in tech could have a major role in at least calling attention to the plight of the Chinese and others: “We have greater power than anyone else, those of us who understand this technology, to disseminate the information. And when the information is out there, it helps.” The group then fielded questions about the Blondes, security, text files, and an open-source operating system project led by an associate. For conference chief and 2600 founder Eric Corley, cDc had the perfect upbeat activism he wanted. “They had fun and conveyed an important message,” Corley said. “cDc was unique.”

The New York appearance gave the people who had traveled a chance to catch up with the local cDc members as well as each other. Laird had met very few of his fellow members before that weekend; they were just electronic pen pals and collaborators. Chris Tucker had never met Sam or Carrie. An especially joyful reunion occurred between Carrie and another old-timer, Psychedelic Warlord. Warlord had gone east for college and toured in a punk band during two of his college summers. Carrie had housed him and his bandmates and fed them when they reached Seattle.

Now in New York and working at an internet access provider, Warlord was out of hacking and didn’t attend the formal events. Instead he met the group at the conference’s home at the Puck Building on Friday night and came out with them for a party. Carrie, sporting short blond hair and black lipstick, introduced Warlord to John, Sam, friend of the herd Limor Fried, and others who had joined cDc after his time. They talked about the old days, and Warlord wondered if cDc home Demon Roach Underground was still working. One of the others dialed Kevin’s modem number and held up the phone to let Warlord hear it try to connect, proof that it was still humming along.

Oxblood had the spotlight for just a few minutes of a group panel on the last day of the conference. Most of those in the audience were interested in hacking, not Chinese politics. The mainstream press had not yet turned sustained attention to security, and cDc had not yet won the fame that would come from Back Orifice. So there was little media attention. One young reporter, Arik Hesseldahl, was intrigued and kept after Oxblood. A half year later, he wrote a short piece in Wired magazine about the Blondes, passing along Oxbood’s new claim to him that they had disabled a Chinese satellite. “Given the wild history of how hackers had so readily cross-pollinated with antiestablishment and counterculture types in the West in the 1970s, it wasn’t much of a leap to believe, though I think ‘hope’ is a more accurate word, that similar things were taking place in China,” Hesseldahl said later.

While most of the active cDc members were excited about Josh Buchbinder’s work on Back Orifice, Laird kept talking to Hesseldahl, who pressed him for an introduction to any member of the dissident group. Laird demurred but said he could ask questions on the reporter’s behalf. That developed into a full-fledged text file in the form of an interview between Laird, writing as Oxblood, and the dissident, whom he dubbed Blondie Wong.

Laird wrote that the conversation had taken place at a Toronto dive rock bar called Ted’s Collision and Body Repair. Their talk centered on Blondie’s underground network of technology-savvy rebels in China, which had grown by twenty members in the previous year, thanks in large part to advice from hacking groups, including the Cult of the Dead Cow. “When I understood how far the Cult of the Dead Cow reached into the hacker world, and how things were organized, I was able to take the best and use it for our struggle,” Blondie said. They chatted about Seinfeld, Bruce Lee, fashion, and high-school alienation. But the familiar bantering sucked in casual readers in order to dump them in dark territory: the murder of Blondie’s father by Mao’s Red Guards and the massacre of student protestors at Tiananmen. Blondie said the brutal repression convinced him to stay abroad and work to protect his compatriots at home. He asked readers to educate themselves, to keep trade relations contingent on improvements in human rights, and to expose or even hack American companies doing business with China. “If people want to participate, they should use the skills that they have,” Blondie told Oxblood.

Laird gave an advance version of the interview transcript to Hesseldahl as exclusive material, knowing that would make the article more appealing. Hesseldahl pitched his follow-up story to Wired again, but it demurred, and he ended up with a deal at online spin-off Wired News. The story traveled from there far more than it would have from most outlets. Despite the internet boom, most reporters were new to tech coverage, and almost none had expertise in security. Wired News was different. Its reporters knew about tech, security, and the Cult of the Dead Cow. So when mainstream reporters read Wired News’ coverage of the Hong Kong Blondes, they assumed the publication had vetted its sources and knew what it was talking about.

cDc members had mixed first reactions to Laird’s text file, but most were impressed. They believed the story because the details in his writing matched what he had told them before. But Kevin and cDc text-files editor Misha, whose reputations were more on the line, smelled something funny. Looking over a prepublication draft, Kevin wrote to the list: “The Blondie Wong interview is great. How much of that is real?” Laird replied: “It’s three-quarters real and the rest is a buncha yang.” Misha, charged with editing it, was more blunt in writing directly to Laird. “For the most part, he [Blondie] doesn’t get some of your humorous turns of phrase and he himself speaks in a very formal, careful language, and then out of the blue in parts, he says stuff like, ‘The guy’s an idiot. I mean, if I want advice from the president about getting a blow job from a young girl, I’m all ears.’ I gotta ask: Is this interview for real? Or did you write both parts?”

For all his doubts, Misha was backed into a corner. Laird had already given the file to Wired News, which had used it to publish its own story. “As leader of the Hong Kong Blondes hacking group, Wong has the credentials to back up his threats,” Hesseldahl wrote. “The Hong Kong Blondes claim to have found significant security holes within Chinese government computer networks, particularly systems related to satellite communications.” It would look awfully strange if cDc did not print its own scoop. Besides, Misha thought the piece might raise awareness, and he had been solidly behind media pranks in the past. He smoothed out Laird’s interview and published it on the cDc site.

After the Wired News piece, Naomi Klein got in touch. The rising Canadian journalist saw the Toronto angle and was especially interested in China. Clinton had been working to normalize relations and de-emphasize human rights, and he had just conducted the first presidential visit to the nation since the Tiananmen massacre. “She thinks we’re this righteous politicized hacking machine out for world peace or somethin’.… Anyway, we’re gonna get a lot of miles outa this baby,” Laird wrote to the group. He was right. Klein’s wide-eyed write-up in the Toronto Star reported that “the Blondes are the hacker wing of China’s pro-democracy movement, scattered around the world and forced underground after Tiananmen. On July 7, days after Bill Clinton returned from his trip to China, Blondie Wong, the pseudonymous director of the Blondes, met with Ruffin and the two went public with a new level in political hacking.” Many other outlets picked up Klein’s account. She would go on to write books including No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which also quoted Blondie Wong.

The story seemed to have come from the future. It flew from site to site on the still-young web, a fantastic tale of accomplished, mysterious hackers aiding heroic human rights activists inside a totalitarian world power. Though no one besides Laird even claimed to have been in contact with Blondie—described variously as an astrophysicist and a currency trader—or to have any other corroboration, more stories followed, bolstered by the innocence of the reporters and the fact that cDc previously had established itself in the national media as an elite club of hacking gurus.

cDc was now ecstatic, and it used the Blondes to stake out moral high ground. As Kevin paced the Def Con stage to launch Back Orifice and, a year later, BO2k, he cited the Blondes as the prime example of what the group was fighting for. When Microsoft switched from dismissing Back Orifice as a toy to calling it dangerous and attacking cDc for releasing it, Luke sent out a press release tying the company to China and suggesting that “hacktivists” use Back Orifice to attack businesses in bed with the regime.

Was releasing Back Orifice to the public immoral? Microsoft would love for their customers to believe that we’re the bad guys and that they—as vendors of a digital sieve—bear no responsibility whatever. But questions of morality are more often relative than absolute. So to make things easier, we’ll frame our culture and actions against theirs, and let the public determine which one of us looks better in black. We’d like to ask Microsoft, or more to the point, we’d like to ask Bill Gates why he stood shoulder to shoulder in 1996 with China’s president and head of the Communist Party to denounce any discussion of China’s human rights record at the annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva? Was the decision to cozy up to the world’s largest totalitarian state based on some superior moral position, or was it just more convenient to trample human decency underfoot and go for even more money?…

Now let’s return to Back Orifice. Would it be immoral to use this tool for untoward purposes on Windows networks? Would it be immoral for Back Orifice to find its way to China and cause a lot of dry heaving in Microsoft’s largest target market? Should hacktivists use Back Orifice as a form of protest against multinationals who share Microsoft’s position of dollars before dignity? It’s a short life and we’re all going to be judged by our actions. So, whether or not we’ve done the right thing is a matter for history and human conscience to decide. But if the gods want to curse us for bringing fire down from the mountain, we’ll take a seat with Prometheus and deal with the heat. At the end of the day, the CULT OF THE DEAD COW doesn’t think that the world was meant to be a dark place.

The group worked carefully on media strategy, matching reporters with stories and members who were the most quotable. Laird urged them all to use the word hacktivism, no matter what the questions were about. “If ten different journalists all file stories with the same word in it, it [hacktivism] shoots into the common lexicon very quickly,” he wrote to the mail list in July 1998. “Only get to their question after you’ve said what you want to say, then touch on theirs if it’s worth answering, or just ignore it completely.… After this, you’ll all be able to run for public office.” The strategy worked beyond anything he could have imagined. In January 1999, a respected China-based writer for the Los Angeles Times wrote a front-page feature story about various ways the net was being used by democracy advocates in China. She cited cDc and the Blondes as hacktivist groups fighting the Great Firewall. Then she quoted both Oxblood and Blondie Wong’s purported statements to him.

Not all of the press fell for the Hong Kong Blondes saga. Back Orifice was a clear story, with lots of experts involved, public demonstrations, and major companies issuing warnings. The Hong Kong Blondes had nothing verifiable behind it. Without anything to go on other than Laird’s word, most responsible publications didn’t print anything. As more asked for access to Blondie Wong in order to go ahead with their own stories, Laird said he had disappeared. In December 1998, just before the LA Times story appeared, he wrote another account of their relationship. In cDc text file #361, he said he had met Wong at a party by accident three years earlier, that they had jointly come up with the structure of the Blondes within hours, and that Wong had recently moved to India, mainly to work with South Asian programmers.

Then Laird changed the subject, citing irrefutable evidence of rights abuses in China and touting open-source software as having better potential for improving lives there than Western governments or companies. He also named genuine Chinese activists, and he said that hacktivists could assist them in multiple ways. They could get Back Orifice into China for use against corrupt party officials, and they could help fight for attention. In a prescient forecast, he said that hacktivism was powerful and that it was largely about spreading knowledge in a new kind of conflict, “the information war where memes compete for mindshare and ratings replace body count.”

Hackers and activists took notice of the Blondes story, and some defaced Chinese government websites. One group of US hackers, Legions of the Underground, in December 1999 called on allies to destroy networks in China and Iraq. Within days, cDc issued a joint statement with the L0pht, Phrack, and the long-political Chaos Computer Club of Germany in response. “Though we may agree with LoU that the atrocities in China and Iraq have got to stop, we do not agree with the methods they are advocating,” the statement read. “One cannot legitimately hope to improve a nation’s free access to information by working to disable its data networks.… If hackers are establishing themselves as a weapon, hacking in general will be seen as an act of war.” The LoU, which had been split internally over the matter, took the warning seriously and decided to call off the attack.

cDc tried to redirect the energy in a more defensible way. Laird worked with some of the other politically inclined members to create a cDc offshoot dubbed Hacktivismo. It nursed several projects for evading censorship and communicating securely, though none seemed to reach critical mass. In the meantime, the leading technical talents of cDc were focusing more on their day jobs. Mudge and Christien Rioux, in particular, took the L0pht in a shocking new direction. They and the rest of the group arranged for it to be bought by a for-profit company and took in venture money to go fully professional. cDc software and news releases slowed, and the group presentations at the summer 2000 hacking conventions included spectacle and dry updates but little in the way of fresh tools, news, or inspiration.

Some hackers grumbled that Laird had ruined cDc by making it political, and a few raised serious questions about the Blondes. More than a decade later, Laird walked the tale halfway back in a post on Medium, saying he had never met anyone besides Blondie and had made up parts of the story to protect him. Laird continues to insist that at least Blondie was real. But journalist Hesseldahl gradually realized he had been hustled. Twenty years after the fact, he said this: “The stories led to some interesting and constructive conversations in academic and intellectual circles around how hackers and activists might help each other. If those conversations led somehow to some positive change in the world, that’s great. But it doesn’t excuse me for either story.”

In the spring of 2001, a British transplant to India stumbled onto Laird’s story about Blondie Wong. Greg Walton had been a bit of a hippie when he left the UK treadmill for northern India, where he found dancing and distraction. As the web flourished over the next few years, Walton thought he could help as a human rights consultant and by developing websites for the Tibetans in Dharamsala, the de facto capital of the Tibetans in exile from China. He was taking a break in the office of a cultural institution, reading text files, when he found Laird’s three-year-old story about Blondie Wong. Walton couldn’t contain himself. Here was a Canadian technology activist conspiring with persecuted Chinese dissidents. The Tibetans needed help like that. Every day, barrages of trick emails and all manner of electronic subterfuge came at them from China, which was bent on discrediting the Dalai Lama and stopping him from leading ethnic Tibetans still inside its borders. Walton fired off an email to Laird, thanking him for his work and asking if he knew anyone who could help with the Tibetans’ woeful security.

Laird asked what Walton had been doing, then promised to think about aiding the cause. First, though, he invited Walton to come to Las Vegas that summer and join a panel at Def Con about the need for more security in the service of human rights. cDc had decided to make a stronger run at the idea of hacktivism.

Walton made the trip to Vegas and spent hours hanging out at the Hard Rock Hotel, across the street from the conference, with Laird and a parade of other hackers. cDc had control of the panel and had made an inspired pick for the main talk: Patrick Ball, deputy director of a rights project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ball was an ace programmer and one of the first to do exactly what Laird and the other cDc members had been talking about. After he had dropped out of graduate school in 1991 and traveled to El Salvador, Ball had moved to one troubled country after another, methodically drafting programs, installing protective cryptography, and compiling databases of some of the worst human rights horrors in the world. He presented at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in 1998 in Austin and debated crypto policy with an official at the Department of Justice who wanted back doors and weak encryption. It was there he met Cypherpunks mailing list sponsor and EFF cofounder John Gilmore and Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email encryption, who had also battled the federal government. “I ended up being friends with these people forever,” Ball said.

In Las Vegas, Ball and the others were speaking in a hot tent pitched on a hotel roof, because no ballroom was big enough. It was the largest crowd Ball had ever spoken to, perhaps seven hundred people. In El Salvador alone, Ball told the enthralled Def Con audience, his team had recorded nine thousand witness accounts describing torture, kidnappings, and extrajudicial killings. He compiled one database with reported crimes against seventeen thousand victims and another with the careers of thousands of people in the military, then merged them to discover which officers kept appearing in the worst abuse cases. He found one hundred who stood out, each with more than one hundred apparent crimes at his hands or under his watch, and got them fired from their positions. Ball’s technologically advanced crusade had since taken him to Haiti, Guatemala, South Africa, and Serbia, where he found incontrovertible proofs of genocide, drove out some of the worst offenders, and changed the history books.

Now Ball appealed to those in the crowd to help as well—by writing a letter a month for Amnesty International on behalf of political prisoners, by joining US interest groups fighting restrictions on internet and security research, or by donating programming time to efforts like cDc’s Peekabooty, a privacy-protecting browser. “Hacktivism is finding ways to speak truth to power,” Ball said. Laird and Walton then joined Ball in discussing Hacktivismo, the cDc offshoot with a new mission statement about human rights. Mimicking the form of a United Nations resolution, Hacktivismo’s initial July 4, 2001, “Hacktivismo Declaration” cited Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which held that everyone has a right to freedom of opinion and expression, including the right to receive information. Hacktivismo’s opening volley declared in all capital letters: “STATE-SPONSORED CENSORSHIP OF THE INTERNET IS A SERIOUS FORM OF ORGANIZED AND SYSTEMATIC VIOLENCE AGAINST CITIZENS, IS INTENDED TO GENERATE CONFUSION AND XENOPHOBIA, AND IS A REPREHENSIBLE VIOLATION OF TRUST.” Hacktivismo pledged to use tech to fight back. “WE WILL STUDY WAYS AND MEANS OF CIRCUMVENTING STATE SPONSORED CENSORSHIP OF THE INTERNET AND WILL IMPLEMENT TECHNOLOGIES TO CHALLENGE INFORMATION RIGHTS VIOLATIONS.”

Laird had written the first draft in Kevin’s Harlem apartment, calling it the “Harlem Declaration” while he thought up a permanent title. He crafted it carefully, with input from Luke, Misha, and others. Laird also consulted lawyers, including cDc member Glenn Kurtzrock, who was working as a prosecutor on Long Island, and Electronic Frontier Foundation contract lawyer Cindy Cohn, who would later lead that nonprofit. Cohn helped Laird to combine moral authority with UN legitimacy to reach as big an audience as possible without inviting condemnation by governments. A key idea was citing not just the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was nonbinding, but also the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was less well-known but had the force of a treaty. “I didn’t write the ‘Harlem Declaration’ to preach to the converted,” Laird said in explaining some of his choices to the others. “If that were the case I would have written something along the lines of ‘Li Peng is a cocksucker who’s out to destroy the internet.’”

In a public FAQ post, Laird and the other core Hacktivismo members wrote of the declaration: “The main purpose was to cite some internationally recognized documents that equate access to information with human and political rights; to state unequivocally that reasonable access to lawfully published material on the Internet is a basic human right; that we’re disgusted with the political hypocrisy and corporate avarice that has created this situation; and, that we’re stepping up to the plate and doing something about this.”

The 2001 Def Con panel was a defining moment for those onstage and many in the audience. “It really spoke to me,” Walton said. If Laird had before been an occasional agitator, a dilettante provocateur, Ball was the real deal, and he struck a nerve with the Def Con hackers. The following year, he testified at the war crimes trial of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević at The Hague. Milošević, acting as his own attorney, sought to discredit Ball and asked him on cross-examination: “Mr. Ball, did you in the—the advisory board of the hacktivism group of international computer hackers, are you in the management board of that group which is known as the ‘Dead Cow Cult’?” Ball said he merely advised cDc in its “efforts to try to help young computer programmers move away from illegal activities and direct their activities toward productive and legal activities,” including human rights work.

Walton kept in touch with Laird and helped him get a job organizing a conference in Dharamsala on wireless technologies that could expand the reach of the Tibetan monks while keeping them secure. Laird brought over technology luminaries who drew more people to the conference and inspired others to come help the Tibetan community. Walton, meanwhile, became far more sophisticated about the nature of the threats to the Tibetans, and he deepened his commitment to protecting those he was serving. Western intelligence, meanwhile, kept a close watch on the Tibetans because better defenses in Tibet meant that the Chinese would try more sophisticated attacks. Once the game got fancier, they knew that what the Chinese threw at the Tibetans today would be coming at big US defense contractors like Lockheed Martin tomorrow. Walton himself kept agents up-to-date on his efforts. “If you have the same malware samples reporting back to a command-and-control server that is attacking defense contractors and nunneries in Dharamsala, that’s a pretty good indication” that China is driving it, Walton said. “So I shared with a couple national intelligence agencies. Laird was certainly well connected to all kinds of people too.”

Actually, Laird was more connected to the intelligence establishment than even most of cDc realized. Before he picked Ball to speak at the Def Con panel that gave the greatest prominence to the idea of hacktivism, he had floated the idea of having James Mulvenon on the panel instead. Mulvenon, an intelligence contractor at RAND, was a China specialist focused on helping US intelligence, not the oppressed citizens of China. The two had connected after the Hong Kong Blondes articles, when Mulvenon was looking for any evidence of Chinese dissidents harnessing the net. But Chinese internet accounts were still rare in those days. Mulvenon had traveled to the mainland and looked deeply into hacking groups. The only ones he found with any political awareness at all, like the one called the Honker Union, were patriotic, often acting at the direction of the government.

Mulvenon had found nothing like what Laird wrote about. But his idea was so appealing that people within US intelligence promoted it as a goal to strive toward. “The Hong Kong Blondes were part of a story line that inspired people to believe it was a moral mission,” said a US intelligence official who came to know Laird. Under President Barack Obama, the American government would take up the cause on its own, distributing tools for uncensored internet connections through Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The program, informally known as “internet in a box,” was championed by Clinton’s innovation advisor, Alec Ross, who declined to say which countries it reached.

In the meantime, Laird spoke often to Mulvenon, briefing him in person on at least one cDc project for circumventing censors. That was the Peekabooty plan to route web page requests through strangers’ browsers to obfuscate who was viewing what. Laird and Mudge were not the only ones in cDc close to Western intelligence. Member Adam O’Donnell, known as Javaman, also worked on a CIA project to reverse engineer the Great Firewall of China, the nickname for the system China uses to control internet traffic into and out of the country, and to figure out how to get content inside. Brought into cDc in 2004, Adam was the son of two supermarket employees, one of whom later earned a doctorate in education. After attending Philadelphia’s magnet Central High School and heading to college, he interned at Lucent Technologies, the old Bell Labs. He also went to 2600 meetings in New York. People there took him to Boston to meet the L0pht guys. Later, in California, he worked for anti-spam company Cloudmark, begun by fellow w00w00 member Jordan Ritter, before cofounding security firm Immunet in 2009.

The reverse proxies Adam built allowed people in the US to make it appear that they were in China, mainly so they could see what the Firewall was blocking. It also made it easier for those Americans to share information with people who really were in China. Finally, it put the CIA in a better position to monitor dissident traffic or hack Chinese targets without raising alarms about foreign intrusion.

It seemed like a decent way to help people in China and make a bit of money off the government, but it occasionally gave Adam an unpleasant feeling. Once he had to pick up a payment at a dive bar in Washington’s Dupont Circle. The men he met didn’t say much, but they handed over a Chipotle bag with $20,000 in cash inside. When Adam asked if they needed a receipt, they just laughed. “Not for anything less than a hundred K,” one said.

While some in cDc tried using the government to advance the cause of internet freedom and security, others were hoping to do good by riding the internet boom.