(Editor’s Note: Any decent coverage of Anonymous is going to verge on some NSFW material at points. There will be questionable language and strange imagery.)
Part Three of a Three-Part Series Examining the History of Anonymous. Part One. Part Two.
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” – Marshall Mcluhan
“They are made of money. We are made of cocks.” — Antisec Anonymous, on targeting law enforcement.
Ever since we learned that people, distances, and dollars could all be counted in millions, then billions, the human struggle has been about consequence: What could anyone do that would matter in such a huge world? And in 2011, having left the self-indulgent identity of 4channers behind, Anonymous faced this existential dilemma.
A single question haunted every video, every news report, every AnonOps channel on IRC: Is what Anonymous does of consequence? It’s not a universal requirement; we don’t require our sports stars and celebrities to be of consequence. Hell, we don’t even require it of our politicians.
[bug id=”anonymous-2011″]But Anonymous had taken up the idea of making a difference in the late 2010 operations. Sure, Anonymous is bombastic, entertaining, sometimes quite clever, sometimes cruel, nearly always vicious, and eternally sophomoric, but will the actions of Anonymous change the world?
As Anonymous, its online watchers and the media evaluated its moves, it became clear through the growing protest movements and collectives of 2011 that the question of consequence wasn’t just about Anonymous.
It was about whether action outside a system that few of us are, or can be, a real part of can affect the world. When we judged Anonymous, we were also judging our own willingness to act outside the confines of normal society. We were judging not only if Anonymous could leave its mark, but whether we could or should.
The question of consequence was, by the end of 2010, hanging in the wings, but it took the fire that sparked the Arab Spring to bring it to center stage.
A postage stamp issued with Bouazizi's likeness by the Tunisian transitional government
Mohamed Bouazizi was a produce vendor in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. He was always meant to be a little person in the world, whose life and death could never matter. You were never meant to hear of him. But for no explicable reason, that changed on Dec. 17, 2010. His produce cart was seized by police, and he was beaten. Less than an hour later, he stood on the street doused in paint thinner, screamed “How do you expect me to make a living?” and let a lit match drop.
Bouazizi was at the end of his ability to endure, silently, the pain and abuse that had been the way life worked. But it turned out so was Tunisia, and the whole Middle East.
Within hours protests against the systemic corruption that had driven Bouazizi to self-immolation filled the streets of Sidi Bouzid, and over the next two weeks spread like fire over Tunisia.
It was Jan. 2, 2011. Ben Ali would leave power in 12 days, but no one knew that.
“There were two different posts in channel #operationpayback. First one about some law about to pass in Hungary, second one about a Tunisia problem. For some reason I paid attention to the Tunisian one, and it seems other people did too,” said an anon who participated in OpTunisia. It was a claim that Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was censoring Wikileaks cables related to Tunisia. Rumors emerged about Bouazizi as well, that he was a computer science student (he wasn’t), that he had immolated himself to protest police corruption (he had), and so on.
A few people formed #optunisia on IRC and started talking about what to do. The OpTunisia anon who spoke with Wired.com didn’t think either the op or the revolution had a chance.
“I saw nobody cared about those people, because it wasn’t a big country. It was like, ‘Fuck this is impossible…. Let’s fucking do it!'” the anon wrote in an online chat.
Over the next couple of weeks the small group DDoSed and defaced Tunisian government websites and passed media and news reports about the Tunisian uprising in and out of the country.
“We also distributed a care package containing stuff to workaround privacy (restrictions in Tunisia), including a Greasemonkey script to avoid proxy interception by the Tunisian government on Facebook users,” said the anon. (Greasemonkey scripts are powerful browser plug-ins).
Within that digital care package was a message to the people of Tunisia from Anonymous: “This is your revolution. It will neither be Twittered nor televised or [sic] IRC’ed. You must hit the streets or you will loose [sic] the fight. Always stay safe, once you got [sic] arrested you cannot do anything for yourself or your people. Your government is watching you.”
Some of those in the #optunisia channel were Tunisians, including slim404, whose real name was Slim Amamou, an outspoken Tunisian blogger. Amamou and others put themselves at risk by passing news and software back and forth between anons and the outside world and the people on the ground.
Amamou was arrested on Jan. 6, 2011. The anons in #optunisia barely slept. Police were shooting protestors, the government was censoring websites including Facebook, but the news still spread, and the protests only grew. Then, less than a month after Bouazizi’s immolation, 23 years of brutal dictatorship ended with Ben Ali’s flight from Tunisia.
“I remember I woke up like two days later and my house was full of empty bottles of champagne,” said the anon. “But then we started OpEgypt, so no rest.”
Did Anonymous make a difference in Tunisia?
“I think its better to ask Tunisians if they think we helped,” said the anon. “I did whatever I thought I could have done. My little grain of sand.”
Amamou was released from jail and went on to become the secretary of state for sport and youth — perhaps Anonymous’ first minister — though he resigned in May to protest the transitional government’s censorship of the web.
Perhaps we will never know how consequential Anonymous was for Tunisia, but Tunisia changed everything for Anonymous. OpTunisia was the first of what became known as the Freedom Ops, Anonymous operations that mostly started in Middle Eastern countries in support of the Arab Spring, but spread much further.
The next was OpEgypt, where the protests were much bigger, and the situation even more complex.
Right from the beginning of the occupation of Tahrir Square and the Jan. 25 “Day of Revolt”, Anonymous started to set up lifeline internet connections and target government servers to DDoS just as they had in Tunisia.
Three days later, Mubarak turned off the internet. Anonymous was aghast, both at this display of existential threat to the net as a way of political expression, and to their impotence in the case of a nation just taken offline.
But Mubarak fell on Feb. 11, not having lasted much longer than Ben Ali. Once again anons found they liked the sense of being part of history. For a few weeks, the pranksters-turned-activists were most known around the world for fighting the good fight beside the people, and they liked it. The Freedom Ops proliferated.
The Freedom Ops are useful in explaining how Anonymous ops work. At any time on IRC there were ops for any number of countries, not just Middle Eastern ones. There were channels for Britain, Italy, Ireland, the USA, Venezuela, Brazil, and many more, as well as Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and most of the rest of the Middle East. Most of the ops had few participants, so those who were there linked to a press release or video about problems in that country with a bold call to action, but, for long stretches, nothing would happen.
That was OK; that is how Anonymous proposes ideas to itself. This reverses the order that the media was used to. In most of the world, the bold proclamation comes after the decision to act. In Anonymous, hyperbolic manifestos and calls to apocalyptic action show you want to talk about an issue. For many people reporting on Anonymous, it often looked like Anonymous was all bluster and no action.
But that’s the wrong way to look at it. For the lulzy hive mind, bluster can be the point itself. Other times, quieter, less dramatic actions would spring up and fill the channel, only for it to go quiet again when anons had moved on to another action. For the Freedom Ops, lying fallow was no shame, and dormant ops often sparked up in response to news events from the relevant region.
It’s important to understand what sort of op each one is if you want to understand whether it was successful, and sometimes that’s not even possible.
If the infamous #OpCartel — a call to take on murderous Mexican drug cartels — was launched to spark a real war between Los Zetas and Anonymous, it failed. If it was launched to create confusion and generate media hype, then the anons behind it can take those lulz to the bank; it was very successful as trolling. But without ever knowing who did it, we can never know why it was done, and this is the case with many, perhaps most, ops.
Anonymous’ January belonged to Tunisia, Egypt, and the Arab Spring, and it was the most serious moment in the hive mind’s history. But their February belonged to a previously obscure security company called HBGary Federal, and may have Anonymous’s lulziest of moments.
It began with a Financial Times article in which Aaron Barr, the CEO of an obscure government-focused security company formed by the better known security company HBGary, claimed to have uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He said the group had around 30 members, and 10 “core” members who made the decisions, and that he’d linked their IRC handles to their real names using social network analysis. He was building a security conference talk around his research.
“I am doing a pretty good job identifying key people and illuminating how they work. All of this I am doing using social media analysis. There are probably a few government organizations that might be interested in this data before I go public with it…. I think it will make quite a splash,” said Barr in an e-mail to a colleague.
The reaction from Anonymous was electric, but not for the reason many believed. It wasn’t the threat of arrest and prosecution per se — that had been a part of life as an anon for years, going back to DDoSing the Church of Scientology. Anonymous was incredibly angry, but at something more akin to heresy than infiltration. By claiming the leaderless collective had leadership they all secretly obeyed he’d walked into Anonymous’ Vatican and declared their Virgin Mary a whore. They responded with the viciousness of the defiled.
The defacement of the HBGary Federal website
A team of several anons, allegedly five, swung into action. They hacked HBGary Federal’s server, social engineered their way into founding company HBGary’s servers as well, and even took down rootkit.com, HBGary founder Greg Hoglund’s site that tracks rootkits in the wild. They pulled out over 71,000 e-mails and internal documents. They defaced the websites. The notice on HBGary Federal’s site read “This domain seized by Anonymous under section #14 of the rules of the Internet.” (Rule 14: Do not argue with trolls — it means that they win. See more of the ‘rules‘, link is NSFW.)
Their public statement on the hack was, in part, addressed to Aaron Barr:
“You think you’ve gathered full names and home addresses of the ‘higher-ups’ of Anonymous? You haven’t. You think Anonymous has a founder and various co-founders? False. You believe that you can sell the information you’ve found to the FBI? False…. The personal details of Anonymous ‘members’ you think you’ve acquired are, quite simply, nonsense.
So why can’t you sell this information to the FBI like you intended? Because we’re going to give it to them for free.”
That first release contained mainly material pertaining to Aaron Barr and HBGary Federal; Greg Hoglund and HBGary’s material remained, unreleased, in the hands of a few anons. But Barr and the others were not naive computer users, and Barr had already been in Anonymous IRC channels for some time. On Feb. 7, two days after the Financial Times article that had started the fracas, Aaron Barr, HBGary founder Greg Hoglund and Penny Leavy, president of HBGary and wife of Hoglund, came to IRC to talk to the hive mind.
Like something out of a surrealist cyberpunk novel, the three executives debated the people in #ophbgary, negotiating and pleading for the future of their companies with anons who went by nicks like heyguise, PewPewPew, Sabu, and n0pants. Barr himself went by CogAnon.
The chat was fast paced and erratic, sprinkled with jokes, insults, soft statements of support, and apparent candor on both sides. Leavy and Hoglund took a conciliatory note with the collective — at one point Leavy tried to engage the room in talking about the game Fallout.
But Barr seemed unable to back down in front of the anons, even for the good of his colleagues, whose mail hadn’t been released. “I repeat this was only about research on social media vulnerabilities,” he told the anons. “You guys crossed the line.”
“No CogAnon,” came the blunt reply, “you did.”
The anons holding the HBGary mails offered a deal to Leavy and Hoglund. They asked that Barr be fired and a contribution be made in his name to Bradley Manning’s legal defense.
Leavy started to debate with the anons over the morality of Manning’s actions, but the anons warned her off the topic. She took the hint, but not before the room nearly turned on her. It was untrod territory for all involved. No one, not the anons or the security company executives, had a sense for the etiquette of negotiations between button-down corporate America and the rude boys of the net.
Still, anons didn’t release Hoglund’s mail immediately, until it became clear that his IRC attitude had been a negotiation tactic. Anonymous looked through the purloined e-mails and found triumphant chatter between the two companies on Barr’s work, including Hoglund discussing how to frame HBGary’s post about it:
That, and a few hostile messages about Anonymous from Hoglund to the media sealed the deal: The remaining e-mails were released.
Despite Hoglund’s dire predictions for the group, no law enforcement hammer fell on Anonymous. To this day very few arrests of anons have been for sophisticated hacking, and given the nature of the group, it’s hard to tell if the few arrests that have been made were of the right people.
Instead HBGary showed the hive mind that it could be bold and lulzy, and the police weren’t right there to arrest them. They learned that they could be colder, and funnier, than ever. They could capture the media imagination, and they weren’t hunted down like dogs. They could dump data on the internet, and all over the world people picked through the HBGary e-mails to uncover security world schemes and even plots against WikiLeaks. HBGary had taught them that they could be lulzy, and a certain kind of anti-establishment hero at the same time.
But this new way of being an anon wouldn’t fully blossom until May, when the Lulzsboat set sail.
After OpTunisia and OpHBGary, most of 2011’s Anonymous major actions fell into one of two camps: the activist and lulzy hacking. But the old culture went on as well, the lolcats of 4chan, the protests in front of the Church of Scientology. Anonymous only got harder to characterize, and there were no anons that agreed with all of the collective, except maybe about liking cats.
As with any culture, there were factions that hated each other. Some anons thought the hacker anons were ruining it for everyone else, others thought trying to assist with revolutions in far-flung, tiny countries was a waste of time. And some still simply liked crank-calling people and sending unpaid pizzas to random victims’ homes.
By April Anonymous had someone beyond HBGary and Middle Eastern dictators to love to hate: Sony. The Sony PS3 console had been a favorite of hackers, who used a jailbreak created by George Hotz (geohot) in 2010 to install custom firmware and run Linux and OtherOS. Running Linux was originally a feature used by Sony to promote the PlayStation, but later removed the feature with a patch.
In January 2011, Sony sued Hotz and others for allegedly violating federal law against circumventing encryption. Hotz settled in April under a gag rule, but it didn’t stop him from blasting Sony on his personal blog and asking people to join him in a boycott of Sony products.
Anonymous went further, relaunching Operation Payback to DDoS Sony websites. Some anons were content with that, while others wanted to punish Sony. 77 million accounts on the PlayStation Network were hacked in April, which Sony laid at Anonymous’ feet, although some anons denied it. Hackers hit again in May, this time the Sony Online Entertainment network, with 24.6 million account records breached.
The Sony PlayStation Network was down from April 20 to May 14, and by the time Anonymous was done with Sony, its stock price had fallen from $31 per share to just over $25.
But while Sony’s terrible security practices were highlighted by around 19 to 20 security breaches between April and June of 2011, the most flamboyant came from the Anonymous spinoff group, Lulzsec.
The oenophilic dandy: Lulzsec's, and later Antisec's, logo
In May a small group of anons broke off from the hive to form Lulzsec, short for Lulz Security. They started a 50-day flamboyant hacking spree that germinated the seeds the HBGary hack had sown. At the beginning of 2011, Anonymous, for all its bombastic video editing, was still often shy to act, careful of its targets, and worried about retaliation. HBGary had taught anons to aim bigger and d0x harder. Lulzsec would teach Anonymous to shoot the moon, or at least try to DDoS it.
Lulzsec, under the motto “The world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense”, veered between the political and funny, and the completely random and hilarious. Early on in their rampage they hacked PBS as a way to give a negative review of a documentary on WikiLeaks, and released PBS login information. But while they were there, they also put up fake news stories claiming that deceased rappers Tupac and Biggie Smalls were alive and living in New Zealand.
At another point, Lulzsec called magnets.com, then tweeted that the website’s customer service wouldn’t tell them how magnets worked. (Wired speculates that the actual question was probably “Fucking magnets, how do they work?”) In retaliation for not finding out how magnets work, Lulzsec not only DDoSed magnets.com, but used a phone redirect to clog magnets.com’s phone system. The same day they DDoSed cia.gov offline. While not really hacking, this did show what many considered to be an excess of chutzpah — a way of saying to the world that there was no hornet’s nest Lulzsec wouldn’t kick.
They hacked Sony six times, the U.S. Senate website twice, and an FBI contractor once, getting account data and releasing it onto the web. They hit Minecraft, Eve Online, and Nintendo. They released account data, logins and passwords from a porn site and Arizona law enforcement. They lit up the media in May and June as no other hacker group ever had.
Much of the computer security industry came to love the group. Lulzsec hadn’t used particularly sophisticated hacks in many cases, but that was the point. After years of security staff complaining to their managers that security was abysmal and privacy dead — only to be told there wasn’t money for security, the hacker group had done what they could never do: made people pay attention.
In a post called Why we secretly love LulzSec Patrick Gray admitted his pleasure at watching the mayhem.
“LulzSec is running around pummelling [sic] some of the world’s most powerful organisations into the ground… for laughs! For lulz! For shits and giggles,” he wrote. “Surely that tells you what you need to know about computer security: there isn’t any.”
But after 50 days, Lulzsec called it quits (even as law enforcement closed in). They quietly folded back into Anonymous to create Antisec, Anonymous’ black hat hacking wing. While Antisec retained the witty and sarcastic voice of Lulzsec, they too succumbed to the pull of current events, and their attacks became progressively more political. Events around the world were once again about to change Anonymous, including the pursuit and arrest of people purported to be associated with Lulzsec itself.
During OpBart, an Anon carries a sign that says "Stop killing the poor"
OpBART arose out of unlikely ground for Anonymous: the messy, offline world of race relations and police violence from the California Bay Area’s light rail system’s police force. Anti-police brutality protests had become a recurring feature in San Francisco and Oakland since the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant in an Oakland station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.
On Aug. 11, anti-BART activists were planning a rally at San Francisco’s Civic Center transit stop to protest the July 3 shooting of a homeless man named Charles Hill. It was nationally unremarkable, and a local transit police shooting wasn’t likely to ever draw in Anonymous, but the response from BART to the planned protest put them right in the Anonymous crosshairs.
By coincidence I was there that day, getting off at Civic Center. I wasn’t there as a journalist or protestor — just meeting a friend for dinner nearby. I was only vaguely aware of the protest. As I pulled into San Francisco, my phone went dead. At first I assumed it was my phone, but it dawned on me as I went through the downtown stops that it might be something else. The train’s doors slid open to a line of police in riot gear, and I got off, still clutching my dead phone.
To thwart protesters from coordinating via mobile devices, BART cut cell service to its downtown stations. It might not seem like much, but it’s different to be there. To face a line of blank-faced paramilitary police is one thing, and something that I have done many times for my Wired coverage of the Occupy movement. During that time, I have been yelled at, pushed, struck, and tear gassed by police. But none of that was as chilling as standing in front of that peaceful and even bored line of BART police and knowing that they had cut off my way of communicating with the rest of the world.
When news got out, Anonymous turned on BART with a vengeance. Announcements of action on behalf of the anti-BART protestors began pouring onto YouTube; Anti-BART anon accounts opened on Twitter; #OpBart formed on IRC. Over the next month, Anon hackers attacked the ill-defended BART and MyBART websites and did data dumps, and in one nadir moment that caused a public fights among anons, attempted to blackmail BART spokesman Linton Johnson into resigning after finding and threatening to post explicit pictures of him, which they eventually did.
As OpBART progressed, it became a media circus. Anonymous released customer and police data, and talked about protests going on forever. They were perfecting their media hacking toolkit, sometimes addressing media professionals directly.
A few anons showed up in masks at the protests and were mobbed by press. They amplified and encouraged voices on the ground, in particular the longstanding group calling for the dismantling of the BART police force, No Justice No BART. No one in the press could tell where the Anonymous protest ended and the local news story began.
Between Anonymous’ bombastic support online and the potential national ramifications of a small regional police force having power over telecom infrastructure (the FCC opened an inquiry), representatives of all levels of media showed up at several Monday protests, helicopters circling overhead, and police riot lines greeted them. A couple of times, media and police found they far outnumbered the protestors. The BART police closed stations and kettled the media at one point. The San Francisco police department arrested activists outside the stations.
No one knew it yet, but it was a dress rehearsal for what would become the largest effort Anonymous has ever undertaken — its support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. There was no downtime; OWS began just as OpBART wound down.
An anonymous tent monster dances in the plaza at Occupy Oakland.
Occupy Wall Street was not an Anonymous plan, but Anonymous came out in support of it in late August, and drew more media attention to it. When people descended on Lower Manhattan on Sept. 17 and wound up in Zuccotti Park, it was often the people wearing Guy Fawkes masks that were most swamped by the press. Anonymous was using the techniques it had learned over the course of OpBART to create media buzz.
As occupations spread, anons were there at each step, encouraging. “I think it was some Anonymous people who saw my tweets, said I should start Occupy Boston,” said Occupy Boston founder Robin Jacks, “and I thought, I think I will.”
During the early days of the Occupy movement, the ebullient spirit that was lighting up parks was contagious; the normally cynical hive mind began to sound a little more happy — even hippie-like — in their support.
“Everyone, everywhere, will be occupying their towns, their capitols, and other public spaces,” intoned a popular Anonymous video. “Already we have made tremendous progress… this is now bigger than you, or me. It is about us, a collective 99 percent.”
Not all anons support OWS. But many anons said to me when I would talk about Anonymous and OWS: “Same thing.” — not paraphrasing a shared idea — but those exact two words — “Same thing.” After September most of the activist energy of Anonymous seemed to be swallowed by Occupy.
But why was Occupy so important to Anonymous? In part it was that many anons hail from the United States and United Kingdom, and could culturally connect with the local Occupys than with the Arab Spring movement.
But it was more than that. In the Occupy movement, Anonymous seemed to find a body its peripatetic spirit could inhabit.
Occupy Wall Street was not like Tahrir Square in Egypt, or the summer demonstrations in Spain. Tahrir attracted the young heroes, the educated and cutting edge of Egypt, and its activists. The Spanish protests brought out the full strata of society.
But Occupy, smaller and more distributed than the uprisings elsewhere, welcomed the misfits of society. Many were society’s forgotten and disempowered, not the widely oppressed masses that had demonstrated elsewhere. The people who found their way to the parks around America and set up tent cities in September and through October were the rejects, the fuck-ups, people that had fallen for debt scams and got in over their heads with student loans or meth.
They were the misfit army, unarmed but unwilling to remain silent and invisible. In this they were a perfect fit for Anonymous. Both collectives were bound together by being the kinds of people who never found a comfortable place in society.
When the crackdowns started, all the occupiers had to throw at the police were their own bodies.
And so they did.
Anonymous watched the evictions, arrests, and even beatings and chemical violence over the weeks, some on screens, and some onsite with their local Occupys. As the painful images pileed up, the rhetoric of the hive mind turned darker. Antisec started targeting law enforcement as retribution.
Of the recent hack of Stratfor — a private intelligence firm, one of the participants explained on IRC that “They [Stratfor] promote global market stability, whereas we want financial meltdown” — a meltdown specifically aimed at the 1 percent. “It’s about creating an egalitarian society without bosses or masters, it’s about forcefully redistributing the wealth and power in society.”
The same anon said of the Lulzxmas campaign and the targeting of law enforcement in general, “We thought we had every right to gather in public parks, to speak our demands. And they systematically targeted us for elimination. The 18 cities who coordinated the crackdown against OWS a month ago was a breaking point for many. So we decided it was time for us to coordinate a raid of our own,” the anon told Wired.com.
Last Thursday, an anon revealed on Twitter that Antisec had been able to use the Stratfor logins to compromise many of the top 100 U.S. government contractors. They hinted that they will be attacking them and releasing more material in the coming weeks.
It’s hard to say how the aggressive d0xing helps Occupy, and most of the occupiers don’t understand or even know of the actions of Anonymous. But the year of political strife has irrevocably changed Anonymous. “Before we attacked that first day,” said the OpTunisia anon, “it was like a lost cause. [We thought] nobody will care. But then they inspired me to hope about humanity. I never had that.”
But a little hope can be a dangerous thing.
The existential question that Anonymous still faces is this: Does it matter? And if so, how much does Anonymous matter? Will our way of life someday change because of some part Anonymous plays in history?
2011 posed the question, but didn’t answer it. Instead it showed that Anonymous changed anons. Anonymous became bolder, stranger, more threatening, and more comforting in turns. Last year, Anonymous, like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, picked a fight with the systems of society.
Perhaps in 2012 we’ll see who wins.
Photos: Quinn Norton/Wired
This post is part of a special series from Quinn Norton, who is embedding with Occupy protestors and going beyond the headlines with Anonymous for Wired.com. For an introduction to the series, read Quinn’s description of the project.
A few acknowledgments for this series: I’d like to thank several people for both their direct and indirect help in the process of learning and writing about Anonymous and its origins over the past few months: Biella Coleman, Gregg Housh, Moot, Alan Moore, Anonymous, Anonymous, Eris Discordia, Anonymous, Nate Anderson, Anonymous, Google, Anonymous, Tom Cruise & the Church of Scientology, Anonymous, Anonymous, Anonymous, and most of all, the invaluable input from my favorite anon, Anonymous.
