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. Comments of
support for the project and criticism for those who opposed it appeared
at opportune times on sites like 4chan and 7chan, 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.