Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

The Many Faces of Anonymous

Gabriella Coleman

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781689837
• eBook ISBN: 9781781686898
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Here is the ultimate book on the worldwide movement of hackers, pranksters, and activists that operates under the non-name Anonymous, by the writer theHuffington Post says "knows all of Anonymous' deepest, darkest secrets."
Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and dangerous disruption (before Anonymous shot to fame as a key player in the battles over WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street). She ended up becoming so closely connected to Anonymous that the tricky story of her inside-outside status as Anon confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece forms one of the themes of this witty and entirely engrossing book.The narrative brims with details unearthed from within a notoriously mysterious subculture, whose semi-legendary tricksters - such as Topiary, tflow, Anachaos, and Sabu - emerge as complex, diverse, politically and culturally sophisticated people. Propelled by years of chats and encounters with a multitude of hackers, including imprisoned activist Jeremy Hammond and the double agent who helped put him away, Hector Monsegur, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy is filled with insights into the meaning of digital activism and little understood facets of culture in the Internet age, including the history of "trolling," the ethics and metaphysics of hacking, and the origins and manifold meanings of "the lulz."

CHAPTER 1

On Trolls, Tricksters, and the Lulz

Prior to 2008, when Anonymous unexpectedly sprouted an activist sensibility, the brand had been used exclusively for what, in Internet parlance, is known as “trolling”: the targeting of people and organizations, the desecration of reputations, and the spreading of humiliating information. Despite the fame Anonymous accrued in its mass trolling campaigns, it was certainly not the only player in the game; the trolling pantheon was then, and remains today, both large and diverse. Trolling is a multifarious activity that flourishes online and boasts a range of tight-knit associations (such as the Patriotic Nigras, Bantown, Team Roomba, Rustle League), a variety of genres (differentiated mostly by target—for example, griefers target gamers, RIP trolls target the families and friends of the recently deceased), and a small pantheon of famed individuals (Violentacrez, Jameth). Its originary point extends far before the alpha of the Internet, taking root in the vagaries of myth and oral culture. Despite this diversity, contemporary Internet trolls are united in an almost universal claiming of lulz as the causal force and desired effect of their endeavors. Our story can begin with one of the most notorious pursuants.

One day, completely out of the blue, I received a phone call from one of the most famous trolls of all time: Andrew Auernheimer, known to most simply as “weev.” He reached out to me on August 28, 2010, in a sixty-second phone message:

Yes, Ms. Coleman. This is weev. That is W-E-E-V and you might be familiar with my work. I see that you are giving a presentation on hackers, trolls, and the politics of spectacle. And I just want say that I am the master of the spectacle. This is my art, ma’am. And also you have given some sort of presentation on the lulz and I was in the room when the lulz was first said. So I want to make sure that you’re interpreting and representing my culture, and my people, correctly. I don’t want some charlatan that is telling lies about my history and my culture. So I would like to talk with you some and understand what you are doing to make sure that you not just another bullshit academic. So hit me up, my email is [email protected]. That is G-L-U-T-T-O-N-Y at XXX dot com. I expect a response, Ms. Coleman. It is extremely important.

After listening, I was so startled I actually dropped the phone. I was overcome with excitement. But also fear. I picked the phone up, rapidly punched in a seemingly endless stream of numbers, listened to the message three more times, recorded it, and promptly went home, only to spend the rest of the evening brooding. I wished he had never called.

weev’s reputation obviously preceded him; despite my rudimentary research on trolls and my ongoing research on the activism of Anonymous, I had avoided him like the bubonic plague. Although trolling is often experienced and disguised as play, it is also shrouded in mystery, danger, and recklessness. weev is a past president of one of the most exclusive trolling cliques still in existence today, the offensively named Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA). (Affiliates quiz prospective members on trivia about an obscure porn film called Gayniggers from Outer Space, which inspired the group’s name.) Reaching out to such a revolting troll might spell trouble. Trolls are notorious for waging so-called “ruin life” campaigns, in which they spread humiliating stories (regardless of truthfulness) about a chosen target, and leak vital information like addresses and Social Security numbers. The effect is akin to being cursed, branded, and stigmatized all at once. The psychological effects can be terrifyingly long lasting.¹

But since I also ran a risk by ignoring his request—he did, after all, flag it as extremely important—I sent him an email a few days later. And, since I had already taken the plunge, I also figured it might make sense to acquaint myself with another genre of trolling. In contrast to weev’s boastful, elitist, self-aggrandizing style, Anonymous had historically demonstrated a far more self-effacing and populist mode of trolling. Like two sides of a coin, both belonged to the same “tribe” while also countering one another. For about two minutes I even entertained, with faint excitement, the prospect of detailing a troll typology. Just as my anthropological ancestors once categorized tribes, skulls, and axes, perhaps I could do the same with trolls and their horrible exploits, trollishly playing, all the while, with my discipline’s historical penchant for irrelevant and sometimes racist categorization. Quickly the excitement faded as I contemplated the ruinous reality this could bring down upon me if I got on the wrong side of these notorious trolls; I remembered that I had already decided to focus on the activism of Anonymous and not its trolling heyday for a very good reason. In the end, I hoped weev would ignore the email from me sitting in his inbox.

But, when he emailed me back, I realized there was nothing to do but commit. We finally connected via Skype chat. His handle was “dirk diggler,” after the porn star protagonist of the 1997 film Boogie Nights. Later, when we switched to IRC, he used “weev”:

<dirk diggler>: how are you?

<biella>: good and you?

<dirk diggler>: coming down off of some vile substance

<biella>: you are up early

<dirk diggler>: methylenedioxypyrovalorone i think it was called

<dirk diggler>: its late, technically

<dirk diggler>: as i havent slept

<biella>: i woke up at 3 am but that is not all that usual for me

<dirk diggler>: i am working on my latest shitstorm right now

<dirk diggler>: disruptive technological developments are gr8

<biella>: you are pretty adept at that as well

<dirk diggler>: yes i am switching from the mdpv to the coffee

<dirk diggler>: i am hoping this will smooth the downward spiral long enough for me to ship this motherfucker live today

<biella>: no chance you will be in nyc in the near future, is there?

<dirk diggler>: probably not

<dirk diggler>: its a vile city

<biella>: haha, really?

<dirk diggler>: disgusting place

<biella>: how come?

<dirk diggler>: the only decent people in NYC are the black israelites

<dirk diggler>: nyc is a city founded on the repulsive order of the financiers

His denunciation of “the repulsive order of the financiers” had the ring of truth, given the recent financial mess their recklessness had engendered, so I found myself, only minutes into my first bona fide conversation with a world famous troll, in agreement with him:

<biella>: that is true

<dirk diggler>: it is a sinful and decadent place

<biella>: there are less and less spaces for the non-rich

<dirk diggler>: and wherever immoral people are in control, i find that everyone tries to emulate them

<biella>: Detroit is like the only city were there is possibility imho (big city)

<dirk diggler>: nah slab city has the best potential in all of the USA

<dirk diggler>: part of god’s war is going on right there right now

<biella>: never been

It is true: I had not spent time in Slab City. It was, in fact, the first time I had even heard about it. And so, as we chatted, I was also googling “Slab City,” which actually exists and is a fascinating Wild West campground/squatter haven in Colorado. I soon came to learn that even if weev often lies, he also often speaks the truth, and his knowledge of the strange, fantastical, and shocking is encyclopedic—he is a natural ethnographer of the most extreme and vile forms of human esoterica.

By dedicating much of his teenage and early adult years to hacking and trolling—and the consumption of large quantities of drugs, if he is to be believed—weev had amassed a vast catalog of technical and human exploits. His most famous coup, which won him a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence, was directed at AT&T, a beloved target among hackers because of its cozy information-sharing practices with the US government. (AT&T’s well-known activities in room 641A, a telecommunication interception facility operated by the NSA, now seem quaint given the news that most major telecommunications providers and Internet companies provide the US government generous access to customer data.) weev targeted AT&T with Goatse Security, the name given to GNAA’s impromptu security group. They discovered in June 2010 that the giant American telco had done something stupid and irresponsible: AT&T’s iPad customer data was posted on the Internet unprotected. Typically, a company with good security practices will encrypt things like customer names, email addresses, and the unique ID numbers associated with these iPads. But AT&T had not, at least in this instance, encrypt anything.

While they didn’t exactly leave the customer data sitting on a doorstep with a sign saying “Come and Get It,” the data was still unusually easy to access. Indeed, Goatse Security figured out an easy way to “slurp” the data using a script (a short, easy-to-use computer program), which was written by GNAA/Goatse member Daniel Spitler, aka “JacksonBrown.” The gray hat security crew called it, with uncanny precision, the “iPad 3G Account Slurper” and used it to harvest the data of 140,000 subscribers. The opportunity to expose shoddy security of this magnitude is irresistible to any hacker—even one like weev who, as he told me over dinner when we finally met in person, is not even that talented of a technologist (or, perhaps more likely, he is just too lazy to do the grunt work since he certainly grasps many of the finer technical points pertaining to security).

Whatever the case, Spitler wrote the script itself and has since pleaded guilty in court. And yet weev was also convicted in November 2012 for “hacking” AT&T’s system: a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). But the fact remains: since there was no security to speak of, there was nothing, technically, to “hack.” Daniel Spitler’s script did not compromise an otherwise secure system, and weev—who contributed minor improvements to the script—mostly acted as the publicist. He offered the vulnerability to news outlets for free. He was interested in exposing AT&T’s shocking lack of security in the public interest and boosting his public profile. The CFAA, it must be said, is a decidedly blunt legal instrument—so broad that it affords prosecutors tremendous power in any legal proceeding that relates, in virtually any way, to the vague notion of “unauthorized computer access.” The activities need not be hacking at all. Some courts have interpreted “unauthorized access” to mean computer use that simply violates the terms of service or other rules posed by the computer’s owner.²

After his CFAA conviction, weev’s case attracted a trio of topnotch lawyers: Orin Kerr, Marcia Hofmann, and Tor Ekeland. They appealed his case, seeking to overturn what they, along with many security professionals, deemed a dangerous precedent capable of chilling vital future security research; the security industry relies on hackers and researchers discovering vulnerabilities, using the same methods as criminal hackers, in order to expose weakness and strengthen infrastructure for both private and public good. Finally, in April 2014—and only after he had served roughly twelve months of a forty-one-month sentence—his case was vacated. But not due to the the CFAA portion of the appeal—instead due to the question of venue. The court determined that New Jersey, where the original case was tried, was not the state where the offense was committed. Tor Ekeland explained the importance of this legal ruling to the Guardian: “If the court had ruled the other way, you would have had universal venue in … computer fraud and abuse cases, and that would have had huge implications for the Internet and computer law.”³ Still, although weev’s supporters were thrilled that he was now free and pleased that questions of venue had been clarified, many were disappointed that the proceedings left the broader CFAA issue untouched—the dangerous precedent remained.

By taking this information to the media, weev demonstrated an intent beyond mere trolling. Any self-respecting hacker will cry foul in the face of terrible security; taking it to the press—which will generate a huge fuss about it—can be a responsible thing to do. Of course, to hear weev tell the story, it was clear that he also did it for the lulz. He would giggle whenever Goatse Security was mentioned in news reports about the incident. He imagined millions of people Googling the strange name of the security group, and then recoiling in horror at the sight of a vile “anal supernova” beaming off their screen.⁴ Goatse is a notoriously grotesque Internet image of a man hunched over and pulling apart his butt cheeks wider than you might think is humanly possible. Those who view it are forever unable to unsee what they have just seen—unable to forget even the smallest detail, their minds seared by the image as if the gaping maw, adorned with a ring, were a red-hot cattle brand. The immaturity of the joke would escalate weev’s giggles into tears, which spilled out the sides of his pinched eyes; he would hunch over, holding his stomach as his shoulders shook, his laugh like a demonic jackhammer.

Clearly, weev offended everyone, including law enforcement. The ultimate testament to his incendiary nature is, perhaps, the judge’s rather stiff sentence. After all, he was not even party to writing the script. The night before his sentencing, he wrote on reddit, a popular nerd website, that “My regret is being nice enough to give AT&T a chance to patch before dropping the dataset to Gawker. I won’t nearly be as nice next time.”⁵ To justify the sentence, the prosecution cited his reddit comments not once, not twice, but three times.

For weev, such incendiary behavior is par for the course. He has recorded hateful speeches railing against Jews and African Americans—“sermons,” as he calls them—which can be viewed on YouTube. They are so hateful that they even disgust other trolls.

We started chatting soon after his legal troubles relating to AT&T began. During the next five months we chatted often. There were some moments that can only be described as strange. Take, for instance, a conversation that occurred on December 12, 2010:

<weev>: hello there

<weev>: how are you

<biella>: pretty goo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: “And Now You Have Got Our Attention”
• Chapter 1: On Trolls, Tricksters, and the Lulz
• Chapter 2: Project Chanology—I Came for the Lulz but Stayed for the Outrage
• Chapter 3: Weapons of the Geek
• Chapter 4: The Shot Heard Round the World
• Chapter 5: Anonymous Everywhere
• Chapter 6: “Moralfaggotry” Everywhere
• Chapter 7: Revenge of the Lulz
• Chapter 8: LulzSec
• Chapter 9: AntiSec
• Chapter 10: The Desire of a Secret Is to Be Told
• Chapter 11: The Sabutage
• Conclusion: Daybreak
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Sources
• Notes
• Index