Re: Proposal

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:07 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Here it is. Another chapter can be added at some point but things are much too ongoing for that to be done until the last moment or at least later on in the process; that should be a selling point, frankly. Send this to the agent and see what he thinks.

One would have to take a survey of Anonymous to determine whether those who comprise the anti-organization feel themselves to be engaged in greater conflict with the CIA or Soulja Boy. Of course, such a survey would be impossible to conduct, as there is no universal or even practical definition by which to determine who is Anonymous and who is not, and many of those concerned would relegate all answers to Battletoads and Fuck you regardless of what happens to be asked, and anyway the answer is Soulja Boy. It would likewise be impossible to determine whether more energy has been expended on producing combat and medical guides for Arab revolutionaries or interrupting events in Second Life with giant simulated penises, or whether the movement has been more thoroughly infiltrated by federal agents preparing indictments or furry spies hoping to discover who ruined their Second Life event by waving around giant simulated penises while playing Soulja Boy, and whether or not the CIA has had a hand in such things.

As every media outlet has now learned to articulate, Anonymous origins track back to those of the image board 4chan, where most all messages were listed as having been written by Anonymous due to the tendency of most to refrain from giving themselves any specific moniker. On every other point there is disagreement, some of which is understandable, some of which is silly, and some of which is the result of intentional yet largely uncoordinated efforts to obscure the movements nature. Some of the truth is known to most anyone who looks for it; some is obscured and known only to those who were present, physically or otherwise, at certain times and places; some is known to a certain few whose knowledge derives from having themselves put things into motion on different occasions. This book will draw upon all three sources, leaving unknown only those things that will never be known by virtue of that fact that such knowledge would lead to legal action of both the criminal and civil sort and even violence. And a bit of that will make its way in, too, probably by accident.

                        ***

Imagine yourself as an early adolescent, standing amidst an idyllic poolside setting. All manner of people dressed in every variety of clothing are discussing the latest in teenybopper news, flirting with varying levels of competence, or otherwise whiling away the virtual afternoon. The pool beckons you, and as you walk towards the ladder that will lead you in, you notice that others have had the same idea... many others. And all of them are black men with Afro haircuts and three-piece suits. You approach the ladder but they have cordoned it off with their bodies and have done so with foreboding swiftness. Nonetheless, you approach them and type out a plea:

your in the way can you move

A moment later, one of these well-dressed Moorish gentlemen deigns to reply.

sorry, the pools closed.

Another expands on this:

It has AIDS.

Yet another provides explanatory synthesis:

the pools got aids. Its closed due to aids.

And then you realize you are surrounded by dozens of black men in black suits with black ties and magnificent black Afros. And then they begin to chant what appears to be absolute nonsense.

lololololololololol
pwned
lololollllloolol lol AIDS
WHERES MY IPOD?!?!
were going back to potatos to get my fucking power wrist
/b/ up hoes down
free mumia lol
AIDS AIDS AIDS
lol pwnd
guys I really am black
no I am
ILL SUCK YOUR COCK
be an hero

Then, beyond the crowd, towards the upper edge of your screen, you happen to glance at the statue of a duck that has been present ever since the beginning of your online world of choice, your precious Habbo Hotel. But the duck is different. A man is standing behind it in such a way as to make his Afro appear to be the ducks Afro. For all intents and purposes, the duck now has an Afro. It is an Afro Duck and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop this from being the case.

Who are these people, you might ask? A better question is, who the fuck are you? You could be a 14-year-old girl looking to make friends her age, or a pedophile looking to make friends her age. We dont know. We dont care. We would never have let you get in that pool no matter who you are or what your intentions happen to be. And when the moderators ban us we will change or mask our IPs and at any rate hundreds more of us will be arriving soon. We are Anonymous, and we are here to help, or to hinder, or whatever. At any rate, the guy who just called you a faggot is not only a homosexual, but was even searing a Chilean sea bass with his boyfriend at the time that he denounced you for your faggotry, and did so on a Macbook. And the one who yelled a nonsensical stream of video game references at you, or at everyone, or at nobody? Shes now working at the State Department. And shes still Anonymous. And half of the people who were once best described as being void of human restraints, such as pity and mercy are spending their evenings on such things as providing secure communications technology to populations subject to dictatorship, are still void of human restraints even as they work for the betterment of others, and see no contradiction in any of this. And nor should you.

                        ***

There comes a point, apparently, at which the environment changes so drastically that it becomes impossible to predict what will happen over the next few months, much less a few years, and meanwhile the change of environment has led naturally to further changes and suddenly one is dealing with something that is better described as a flow than a situation. At such a time as this, plans are best replaced with contingencies and forecasts are best supplemented with uncertainty. These are the circumstances by which the Anonymous entity originated by accident, expanded in strength through a running gag, and then emerged as a geopolitical dynamic via a combination of accident, running gag, and the conscious intervention of various parties with varying agendas - a process that would have either been impossible or prohibitive even ten years ago but which, having now met the conditions by which it might arise, will repeat itself in some iteration or another over and over again, causing some unknown degree of upheaval until it is replaced with some new and even more erratic dynamic. Although such things as these were predicted long ago, they remain little understood and only rarely studied, at least until recent events began to force such an education on certain parties, particularly the federal sort.

That Anonymous and the dynamics that fuel such a thing were not sufficiently understood by those governments that have now been forced to deal with them is telling, and should be of particular concern to those who still support the institution of the nation-state. That such an entity can evolve in such a way as to expand its effective targets from online games to governments in less than five years without raising sufficient alarm from the media at large should be of concern to anyone who would prefer that threats be detected in advance rather only after they have begun to manifest. Anonymous and related subject matter demand serious study not simply because of their present activities, but rather due to what those activities portend for the chaotic future into which are now heading. The successful attacks on any number of systems, carried out as they have been by Anonymous and associated parties at this very early point in an age of accelerated change, is the best possible argument for comprehensive reform of the general system into which human affairs are currently organized. That the system is largely incapable of reforming itself is the best possible argument for pursuing such changes from outside of the system - a possibility that has lately come to be seen as necessary and even a matter of duty by many who thought otherwise just a few years ago. A massive and multidirectional revolution has broken out across the globe, and this shall continue well after the point at which Anonymous is overshadowed by whatever comes next.

                        ***

Any depiction of Anonymous as anything at all will be challenged, often correctly, by participants and observers alike. It is better, then, to get a sense of what Anonymous is and what it means in large part by way of a thorough examination of its behavior as an entity, the manner in which this behavior has changed, and the speed at which such changes come about. Even then, assessing the movements future is a difficult chore. Anonymous is, after all, an ebb and flow of relationships, devoid of formal structure and subject to the collective will of those who participate in its work and play. Likewise, Anonymous may be rightfully seen as the compilation of the actions that are taken in its name.

                             ***

In July of 2007, the Los Angeles Fox News affiliate ran a story on a nefarious group of computer hackers - promoted elsewhere in the segment to hackers on steroids - who had been treating the web like a real-life video game: sacking websites, invading MySpace accounts, disrupting innocent peoples lives, these apparently being the kinds of things that one does in an average video game. Destroy. Die. Attack, ran the menacing red letters that began the segment, in which the three imperatives are oddly described as threats in accordance with the same brand of conceptual free association for which the report has since become legendary. But an actual threat, by the English language reckoning, is soon played: an answering machine message in which some adolescent caller proclaims that he will slit the throat of some unspecified target. It is noted, or at least alleged, that Anonymous has even threatened to bomb sports stadiums, this being a reference to a message board thread in which the topic was frightening terrorist scenarios and which prompted an arrest by the Department of Homeland Security after someone wrote a clearly fictional account of several football stadiums being blown up by terrorists (Tom Clancy, meanwhile, is still at large). I believe theyre domestic terrorists, says a woman interviewed for the story, her assertion supported by subsequent stock footage of an exploding van.

Their name comes from their secret website, the narrator continues, in reference to what had long before developed into one of the most popular and best-known sites on the web, the 4chan imageboard. It requires anyone posting on the site to remain anonymous, he adds, in reference to a requirement that never existed at 4chan. MySpace users are among their favorite targets, he continues, with sudden accuracy. And then the viewer is introduced to a fellow whose profile was taken over thanks to a list of MySpace passwords acquired by Anonymous a few months before; gay sex pictures were posted on his page, allegedly prompting his girlfriend to break up with him. She thought I was cheating on her with other guys, the fellow tells Fox.

A self-proclaimed hacker, rendered the regular sort of anonymous for the purpose of the interview, explains that the agenda of Anonymous hinges on sowing chaos and discord in pursuit of lulz, a term our narrator explains to be a corruption of LOL - laugh out loud before going on to note that Anonymous gets big lulz from pulling random pranks - for example, messing with online childrens games like Habbo Hotel, an example that Fox somehow neglects to illustrate with footage of exploding vehicles. Truly epic lulz, he goes on, come from raids and invasions... like their nationwide campaign to spoil the new Harry Potter book ending. It should be noted that the sinister background music which has played since the beginning of the segment continues through this particular revelation. Of course, its needed for the next bit in which Anonymous threat to blow up several football stadiums are described in a bit more detail, although not so much detail as to relay that the scenario was intended as fiction.

The soundtrack does manage to obtain some level of appropriateness as the segment comes to explain the background of the unknown hacker. Though once a participant in the Anonymous culture, he claims to have since changed his ways, likewise attempting to convert his former associates to a kinder, gentler set of activities. Unsurprisingly, the fellow had little luck in changing anything at all and promptly became the subject of a harsh campaign of mockery and intimidation that prompted the threatening answering machine message played earlier (a more complete version is here run, revealing that the caller had not only threatened our subjects life but even called him an emo bitch, one of the cruelest insults to which one could resort in 2007). We learn that his frightened mother responded to the posting of their address and phone number by installing an alarm system; a brief clip seems to imply that she also got into the habit of closing the curtains. They even bought a dog, says the narrator, overlaying an action shot of the pet in question. Its also claimed that mom began tracking down Anonymous members herself, fearing that her calls to the FBI might not be taken seriously, and perhaps also worrying that unless she herself took them down first, some crack team of Anonymous techno-assassins might someday manage to get past the dog.

As the segment ends, it is noted that many of Anonymous victims of chance are hopeful that their antagonists will simply get bored and move on. But insiders say, Dont count on that, the narrator summarizes, prompting a final statement from the unknown hacker. Garble garble mumble never forget, the latter says, or attempts to, through the voice garbling software thats been deployed lest Anonymous discover the identity of the fellow whose identity they posted on the web. Presumably he is referencing the groups longtime motto, We do not forgive. We do not forget.

Anonymous never did forgive or forget Paul Fetch, the hacker in question, for proclaiming himself to be their leader and attempting to clean up the organization. But then one never forgives or forgets their first romantic partner, either; one moves on nonetheless. After the airing of the segment, Anonymous attacked the Fox affiliates website, preventing users from viewing the segment online. This was not done out of concern for bad press, but rather out of a sort of collective instinct. In fact, the segment was promptly re-cut into a sort of techno music video and placed on YouTube, making repetitive use of such lyrics as:

Hackers on steroids!
Anonymous has even threatened...
I believe theyre domestic terrorists
Destroy. Die. Attack.
Gay sex pictures.
Secret website!
Truly epic lulz
Even bought a dog.
She thought that... that I was cheating on her with guys.

most of which quickly established themselves among the ranks of our most beloved memes.

Things were simpler, purer in the years between 2003 and 2007, a time when the internet stretched out before us like a woman - beguiling, beckoning, possessed of a seemingly eternal and unchanging promise. But such clarity of purpose is easier obtained than maintained, a lesson history teaches us with examples going as far back as the Roman Republics slow transition to the Empire. Purity is inevitably spoiled; direction is replaced by confusion; ones initial ideals become corrupted by the poison of circumstance.

Less than a year after Anonymous denounced Paul Fetch as an emo bitch whose throat would no doubt be slit, it had developed into an ethical force intent on positive change.
                           ***

Chapter One - Habbo

There is no good explanation for why thousands of /b/tards, as the denizens of 4chans random board are known, decided to descend on the adolescent-targeted virtual world of Habbo Hotel in July of 2006. It would be impossible to determine with any certainty why it is that they were compelled to denounce the virtual swimming pools as being contaminated with AIDS, nor why they decided with near-unanimity to take on the guise of suit-clad black men with Afros for the purpose. But if one is able to accept that this is exactly what happened, the rest proceeds quite logically. Virtual or not, a pool filled with AIDS is no place for children or anyone else, and thus such a pool must be blocked off from use at all costs. And as long as one is present alongside countless like-minded individuals, one might as well block off the entrances to other facilities, too. Nor is there any good reason to refrain from typing out inside jokes that promptly appear in word balloons, or even just dismissing everyone one encounters as a latent homosexual or even an emo. And when the European moderators come to realize that their plans to allow children to infect themselves with full-blown virtual AIDS are being disrupted, and respond by banning any and all black men who happen to exercise their hard-won right to wear a suit while also maintaining the hairstyle to which every Negro is entitled, such moderators must of course be denounced for their racial intolerance - as was promptly done by way of hundreds of YouTube videos and message board posts. That most of those banned were not actually black themselves is a detail of interest only to the bourgeois; this was revolution, and every revolution must deploy its own truth. Besides, all Habbo mods are unrepentant pedophiles.

By the time of the Great Habbo Raid of July 2006, 4chan and /b/ in particular had already developed a rich and differentiated culture, one possessed of its own language and byways that could be understood only by having participated in their development or, failing that, a comprehensive regimen of study. This went beyond anything of the sort that could have reasonably been invented by Anthony Burgess or Frank Herbert. It was the product of accident, circumstance, guided evolution, and every other dynamic that one could reasonably expect from the collaboration of perhaps a million self-selected individuals whose collective interactions had occurred perpetually, throughout each day, for some thousand days; whose interactions were moreover instantaneous; and whose input was informed in large part by a peculiar combination of education, irreverence, and entirely unprecedented access to the world and its workings. If a rural village may be expected to pursue cultural evolution at a glacial pace, and if an urban trade center may be expected to pursue such things at a faster trot, and if this difference is in large part based on the extent and frequency of interaction coupled with the tendency of the creative to pursue environments of high stimulation, then one can imagine how 4chan could develop into one of the worlds most dynamic cultural nodes in a mere three years - one that would increasingly begin to impact the world around it, both virtual and otherwise, until such time as the most powerful governments in the world would be forced to study the phenomenon in preparation for the inevitable conflict between the system that rules mans affairs and the process that seeks to rearrange them.

Chapter Two - Hal Turner
Hi, youre on the Hal Turner show. Who are you, where you calling from?
Hola, Im Pedro... Diego.
Uh huh. Is that right.
Hola, Hal. Aym calling to say... aye got me a job. Aye... aye peek onions... for a leeving. Aye like it but, its so hot outside. Aye dont like.
Why are you listening to this show? This is a show for white people. Youre not white.
Aym not white.
Then youre definitely not talking on the show. Get out of here, you spic.

Hal Turner, the longtime white nationalist radio show host, may have suspected that the caller was not actually a Mexican immigrant. By this point, he had received well over a hundred prank calls from users of 7chan, a variant on 4chan where the /i/ board - designated for raids - was now in full bloom. Turner, likewise, was at the height of his influence amongst the international crackerjack community. Or perhaps he was in decline; its difficult to assess these things. At any rate, Turner decided to post the phone numbers of his antagonists. An Anon called him at home to ask that he take them down in return for a promise that Anonymous would let the matter go. Turner declined the offer. In fact, he thereafter announced on his radio show that he had reported Anonymous to the Newark office of the FBI. Another Anon called that office to check on the report, which turned out to be false, and posted the recording. Yet another - a young teenage girl - called Turner on his show to break the news.

Hello, Rebecca.
Um, I have proof that you never filed any legal action, because the FBI says youre full of, um, BS.
Oh, they really did, did they?
Yeah, they did. And its on - its on 7chan, that somebody called them and said that youre lying.
Is that right?
Yes, it is, thats what they say, but I dont know if its true or not.
Is there a reason why I should care what anybody on 7chan said?

Turners phone number, address, and other bits of private information were thereafter posted on dozens of venues, prompting hundreds of prank calls to his home,. With the likely spurring of his wife, whose understandable irritability shone through in the various recordings that were produced, Turner took down the phone numbers of his original antagonists. By this point, though, he had gained thousands more, none of whom had any interest in tamping down a conflict with such obvious promise - and some of whom were on the attack based not on the prospect of lulz, but rather in hopes of fighting an unrepentant racist. Thus it was that some large number of people who would happily spam the word nigger on anything upon which words could be written and some similarly large number of people who would react to such a thing with nothing less than tears of indignation found themselves in a sudden and bizarre alliance against a common enemy. The latter had relied on their collective ethical framework to choose the target, and the former simply attacked it because it was a target. The dynamic of the modern Anonymous movement - good and evil uniting against some second evil for differing reasons but coordinated effort - was thereby established. And increasingly, the rule of law would be superseded by the rule of lulz.

A full account of what happened to Hal Turner over the next few months would not easily fit into a summary such as this. Suffice to say that it was hilarious, and at any rate he later turned out to be an FBI informant but nonetheless managed to end up in prison.

Meanwhile, we fucked with Second Life, this huge virtual world that needed to be fucked with. In the process, we accidentally trained ourselves in ways that would prove to translate well into the real world, which also needed to be fucked with.

Chapter Three - Chanology

Although the proximate cause of the conflict was a particular incident that could have been avoided at several different points, it was inevitable that Anonymous would end up at odds with the Church of Scientology. Just as astute observers of the 19th century saw the eastward expansion of Russia and the westward expansion of the United States and concluded that the two expansion-minded nations would find themselves in conflict at some point in the future, a few of their 21st century counterparts were fully convinced that Hubbards enterprise and 4chans outgrowth could not share the same internet without going to war over their differing visions for the medium. It was a good bet; as far back as 1995, Scientology had made its tendencies known by attempting to shut down the Usenet group alt.religion.scientology, sparking a battle with the Cult of the Dead Cow, itself a predecessor to Anonymous in many respects (some members of which have since been integrated into the movement, incidentally). Scientology, then, was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to remove from the internet any materials it considered to be damaging to itself; Anonymous, of course, was happy to go to similarly extraordinary lengths to perpetuate any materials it considered to be damaging to anyone at all.

Just as the proximate cause of the possibly inevitable conflict between the U.S. and Russia was the adaptation by the latter of a totalitarian socialism, the proximate cause of the conflict between Anonymous and Scientology was the attempts by the latter to remove from the internet a leaked video in which noted participant Tom Cruise exhibited a deranged brand of triumphalism sufficient to turn off many who might otherwise have been on the fence about the nature of the pseudo-religion. The video in question was originally posted by a former member and then quickly forced down by the CoS; thereafter it was continually re-posted by a contingent of Anonymous participants who saw it as an opportunity to troll on a somewhat larger scale than usual. Upon each re-post, though, the CoS managed to have the offending video taken down on copyright grounds - at least until Gawker decided to host it on their own servers and display it prominently on their main page along with a statement to the effect that the Church could go fuck itself. That Gawker thus found itself in an ad hoc alliance with Anonymous is amusing in retrospect, as will be shown later; at any rate, its success in overcoming the practiced legal maneuvering for the CoS has long been known helped prompt the Anons concerned to up the ante, which they promptly did.

The small emergent committee of Anons who had been working to spread the Tom Cruise video decided that a formal declaration of war, properly executed, would inspire a few dozen Anons to assist with the campaign. The resulting document having been determined to be perfect for a spoken format as well, the Anons also produced a YouTube video which they hoped would receive several hundred hits. Instead, it received several million, and meanwhile the IRC network which had been set up for those who wished to participate was continually going down due to an excess of enthusiasm. The Anons responsible had accidentally forced themselves into a position of great responsibility which they quickly went about delegating as quickly as possible.

After reinforcing the IRC network to bear the unexpected load, the admins put up a message asking those who logged on to join one of dozens of channels designated as major cities and to start new channels for those that were not yet represented. As the local Anon groups began to form, a certain admin with few relevant technical skills but a nagging desire to help was asked to watch each channel and identify the participant who displayed the greatest leadership skills. This person in turn would then receive suggestions and information from the central channel (which had been named #Marblecake on the whim of a participant was then eating same), which would likewise receive similar inflow from the various regional channels. The result was a largely structureless entity capable of drawing on the respective talents and knowledge base of thousands of active participants, and thus of acting quickly and decisively while perpetually evolving its methodology in creative ways gleaned from the very best ideas of everyone involved.

Even as Chanology demonstrated the unusual extent to which the online environment is receptive to functional anarchism and emergent meritocracy, it also served as case study regarding how that same environment facilitates the act of conspiracy. From the beginning, those involved in #marblecake worked behind the scenes to better ensure that the campaign would receive widespread attention and regard; several were in touch with sympathetic moderators at 4chan and 7chan who were in turn capable of ensuring that a thread calling for action against Scientology would hold a prominent place on the boards. Comments of support for the project and criticism for those who opposed it appeared at opportune times, while back at IRC, various policies favored by Chanologys instigators would be simultaneously voiced in the various city channels by what appeared to be local Anons. This view, holding that the direction of this open-source campaign was actually determined in large part by the manipulations of a few acting behind the scenes, is often mocked due to the easy observation that those who most often voice it tend to display obsessive and often bizarre behavior in alerting others to the claim; nonetheless, it is entirely true, and the author of this book was among the manipulators. This chapter will provide the details by way of excerpts from the resulting logs, none of which have been seen by anyone other than those few who participated.

Over the next years up until the present day, the Church of Scientology had found its websites knocked out, its servers compromised, some of its most damaging documents stolen and distributed, its most notorious activities examined by a perpetual onslaught of journalists, its secret and bizarre theology revealed to millions, its physical outlets subject to continual visits by protesters with masks and pamphlets, its fax machines glutted, its tax exemptions and privileges canceled by various governments, its executives subject to particular scrutiny, and countless of its potential customers scared away by a campaign that is intended to disrupt the organization so long as it continues to exist. All concerned seem to acknowledge that Anonymous has been successful in dealing significant damage to an entrenched entity with substantial resources; only recently have any number of people come to understand what this meant for the future.

Chapter Four - Australia

Something simply must be done about this. Something major... For just a few minutes, put aside your stereotypes about people living in continents or countries other than your own. Lets say that the Ausfags have their internet censored. Whos to say the Britfags arent next? And then all of Europe? And then the United States? Canada?

Clearly, an assault against the liberty of Ausfags constituted a strike against the liberty of all fags everywhere. This case having been made on a 4chan posting to the satisfaction of newfags and oldfags alike, Anonymous promptly began a cyberwar against the Australian government, the proximate cause of this particular conflict being a series of government measures against various forms of pornography including that depicting female ejaculation and that making use of women with what the state determined to be unduly small breasts.

Operation Titstorm was launched with the intent of pressuring the Australian state to abandon these proposed measures as well as to raise awareness of that governments unusually strident assault against unrestricted access to information. Although the circumstances of Anonymous first attack on a nation-state may seem goofy in both goals and branding, the context was fortuitous for practical purposes, if nothing else; those among Anonymous who were still reluctant to engage in explicit moralfaggotry could attribute their participation to love of explicit pornography.

The advent of Chanology in early 2008 and the perpetual nature of the resulting conflict necessarily prompted the creation of a great deal of permanent infrastructure; two years later, when Anonymous took the first of many swipes at an established nation-state, it could draw upon an extended network of web sites, forums, and IRC channels overseen by an interlocking directorate of experienced Anons whod gained some degree of trust among those with whom theyd worked against the CoS. Although the ebb and flow of relationships that resulted in some winning influence was hardly a perfect meritocracy, the informal and quick-moving processes whereby some earned the respect necessary to prompt concerted action did have certain advantages over more the more structured methods employed by conventional institutions. Here was a process at war with a system. The process was evolving; the system was standing still.

Chapter Five - The North African Offensive
The most significant of human events are made possible by the collaboration of one or more individual humans. As such, those factors which limit the extent to which humans may collaborate in turn limit the possible extent and frequency of those human events, large or small, which humans are in the habit of causing. This is one of those things so self-explanatory that it must be repeatedly explained.

Similarly self-explanatory, and for similar reasons, is the fact that the 21st century is fast coming to be defined by a single aspect - that the means of collaboration have exploded into such a state that any individual may now theoretically collaborate with any other individual on the planet, and that the internets ever-increasing array of communicational sub-mediums is fast transforming the theoretical to the actual with no possibility of reversal. 2011 was the year in which the implications of this became evident to those who really ought to have been paying better attention, if only for their own sakes.

Intervention into a revolution or civil war is hardly novel. The colonial revolutionaries of North America were the beneficiary of assistance by the French largely for the purpose of hassling the English, and the United States which resulted has since been in the constant habit of intervening in the conflicts of other nations for various purposes, by various means, and with similarly varying results. Likewise, the practice of intervention by private parties was already well-established even before the Spanish Civil War. But the online apparatus that sprung up in the first decade of the 21st century provided millions of individuals across the globe with the unprecedented opportunity to intervene in most anything at all. Of course, there is intervention and then there is intervention, the internet facilitating only the indirect sort that does not allow one to stand should to shoulder with those with whom one sympathizes. But there is much that one may accomplish with a computer in an age that is largely defined by them. And when action is prompted by what is thought and said and felt, as it always is when humans are the actors in question, the ability to communicate and thus collaborate with those involved entails the ability to help define that action. Just as nations have been known to provide advisors to their foreign counterparts for various reasons, some section of the global population likewise provided advisors to their citizen counterparts in North Africa with the purpose of promoting freedom abroad - and without the participation of the various states, many of whom had no interest in seeing North Africans achieve liberty and some of whom were actively opposed to such an inconvenient shift of affairs.

On December 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself aflame in protest of his dehumanizing treatment at the hands of a dehumanizing state. Meanwhile, many within that internet-saturated nation were made aware that Wikileaks had released formerly-secret information to the effect that President Ben-Ali was even more of a degenerate, thieving tyrant than he had already made obvious to his captive population by way of doing such things as banning Wikileaks in Tunisia. As the nations people took to the streets en masse for the first time in modern memory, several Anonymous participants linked to Tunisia by way of citizenship or heritage asked their post-national associates to provide their people with whatever assistance as could be managed.
On January 2nd, Anonymous made available a press release announcing that Tunisias people must be made free. The next day, a DDOS attack organized from the IRC server Anonops took down several of the Tunisian governments websites; another was compromised and replaced with a message of support for the protesters along with, of course, threats to the government. The channel #OpTunisia was created on that same server, which itself came to serve as de facto headquarters for the first open-source revolutionary intervention in history.

Some within Anonymous hassled some of the better reporters into covering what was now a two-week stint of protests; others assembled veterans of prior revolts, including the digitally-oriented sort seen in Ukraine, to join with participants in creating a series of documents collectively entitled Guide to Protecting the Tunisian and concerned with street fighting, organization, and first aid; hundreds of Tunisian activists based in-country and abroad joined the server at one point or another for the purpose of receiving guides and encryption software for distribution to their fellows, sharing information among themselves on assorted local threats and occurrences, and conveying accounts of the revolt and pleas for its assistance, to be conveyed in turn to the international press; reporters and activists from across the world logged in to find interview subjects and those needs that needed filling, respectively. It was soon common to see such things as a 16-year-old Tunisian girl translating into French and the local Arabic dialect a treatise on how best to deal with riot police, and then leaving to print it out so that it might be taped up by her elder siblings at neighborhood gathering spots.

Much of this process was repeated elsewhere, always accompanied by attacks on a given governments online infrastucture such that the population concerned could be provided with a taste of disobedience and a reminder that even powerful institutions have weaknesses. The people of Egypt ousted their longtime dictator while still remaining some great distance away from true liberty; beforehand, Mubarak confirmed the internets utility against people such as himself by promptly turning it off, only to be stymied by efforts by Anonymous as well as groups like Telecomix in providing free dial-up access and even Ham radio use to those who needed it to organize further actions. The Libyans protested until being provoked into heavily armed revolution that has thus far left half of a nation to a liberty that it is unlikely to relinquish. Leaders of the Iranian Green movement made a home at Anonops, from which further attacks on their governments websites and online supports have been, and from which software of benefit to those who hate their government have been provided for wide redistribution in a nation where organizing may lead to beheading. Algerias sites were taken over and replaced with the usual promises and threats, but overt revolt has been dealt with. The king of Jordan preempted the spreading desire for liberty by returning some of it to those to whom it had been denied. The ruler of Yemen followed suit a few weeks after his own emirates sites were forced down via DDOS, a largely symbolic act that by this time was nonetheless capable of prompting global press attention to any target against which Anonymous wielded it, thus prompting the population concerned to realize that the world was now watching to see what it would do. There is a value in that, and this has become so evident that is now self-explanatory and will thus be explained further in the chapter.

Chapter Six - Wikileaks and the United States

In November of 2010, Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal each agreed more or less simultaneously, and presumably at the behest of that government which happens to regulate their corporate affairs, to cease processing donations by their respective customers to Wikileaks. That organization, of course, had caused a great of trouble by launching the phased distribution of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, some portion of which revealed unethical conduct on the part of certain governments and their representatives, all of whom were now arrayed by circumstance against Wikileaks and the dynamics it represented. 40 alleged Anonymous participants in the U.S. were raided by the FBI in early 2011, while five were arrested in Britain along with several more in the Netherlands. Bradley Manning, the U.S. military intelligence operative who had made it possible for the world to collectively learn a great portion of what was being done in their names and with their resources, was languishing in the prison brig at Quantico under circumstances harsher than those faced by most Guantanamo detainees, serving as a warning to others who might bring discomfort to the powerful. Neither the nation-state nor its mercantile partners would go quietly into the information age.

It was in this context that Aaron Barr, CEO of the federal intelligence contractor HBGary Federal, a subsidiary of the general information security firm HBGary, announced to Financial Times on February 4th of 2011 that he had gleaned the identities of Anonymous' "leadership" as well as those of some 30 of its "Liutenants" by way of a methodology he had developed for the purpose. On that day, Anonymous responded with a sarcastic press release to the effect that they had suffered defeat. The next day, a team of five Anonymous participants employed a combination of systems infiltration and social engineering to gain access to HBGary's servers and thus some 70,000 of the company's e-mails along with the proprietary information that's inevitably attached to such things. All of this was promptly distributed to the world at large and even compiled into a handy searchable format. That the correspondence thus presented was in many cases written to or received from members of the FBI, NSA, OSD, and firms such as Booz Allen Hamilton made the acquisition all the more valuable for those with an interest in examining conversations of the important and secret sort. A great number of journalists descended upon this frankly unprecedented feast of interesting information.

What was revealed in the aftermath prompted a Congressional investigation and any number of less formal ones, including that carried out by Anonymous, which itself had grown to include a number of journalists and other media personal, lawyers, military veterans, and even several individuals with a background in intelligence (in addition to those who were already present for the sole purpose of investigating everyone else). It soon became evident that HBGary had intended to sell its largely incorrect information on Anonymous to the FBI; that the firm had partnered with Palantir and Belrico in order to attack Wikileaks by several underhanded and potentially illegal means at the behest of Bank of America; that this same "Team Themis" had also been prompted by the Chamber of Commerce to investigate and discredit its enemies through a similarly unethical set of strategies; that the Justice Department itself had introduced many of the companies involved for the purpose of conducting the campaign against Wikileaks; and that no law enforcement agency, as they are oddly termed, was interested in pursuing any of this at all, such agencies being interested in pursuing Anonymous rather than those whose far more serious crimes Anonymous had lately exposed. Such is the rule of a law when it is left to men who rule.

But Anonymous continued to evolve.

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Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302