second chapter so far
Subject: second chapter so far
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 1/6/12, 18:30
To: Anonymous <greggatghc@gmail.com>

The CNN presenter, a British female, is otherwise indistinguishable from the hundreds of other anchors who collectively and haphazardly preside over something akin to news. Ten minutes before the segment began, she’d likely been reminded by the producer as to who I was and provided with a brief summary of what might allegedly be happening that made this interview desirable. The producer would have spoken to me that morning via e-mail and paid attention to random sections of what I’ve told him; at best, he will have since conveyed some portion of this to the presenter, likely along with a few things he’s been told on the subject by some other person who is entirely wrong about all of them. We’re all set for cable.

“The hacker group Anonymous obviously likes to stay undercover. But our next guest says that he’s been associated with them for years. He says he speaks for the organization and shares their views. Gregg Housh is the administrator of a website called ‘Why We Protest.’ And he joins us now live, from Boston. Prepare to show your face, Gregg!”

… she challenged, in the general direction of the in-studio feed in which I stand unmasked as usual, having done television interviews under my real name for over a year now.

“You say you speak for Anonymous. We can’t verify that, so talk me through it.”

“I have... never said that I speak for Anonymous,” I replied. “That is a very bad thing to say in the eyes of Anonymous. Simply by being here in front of you, I’m not Anonymous. Here’s my name, here’s my face.”

“Okay, forgive me for that, but I thought when you’d spoke to my producer earlier on that you said that you thought that you could speak for Anonymous.”

“I can speak for what’s going on. I’m in all the chat channels, I’m in all the websites, I’ve been involved in past Anonymous actions such as the Church of Scientology. But I’m personally not taking part in any of the illegal activities. I’m just trusted by these people and I’m around all their inner circles.”

“Tell me in your own words what you think they’re trying to achieve.”

“You know, everyone on there - so many people from so many different countries - all have their own ideas. But they all revolve around the idea that information is free. And one of the big goals is...”

I paused for a moment, deciding to change tacks. This wasn’t the proper venue in which to try to explain the bigger picture. Nor was it the proper time; December 2010 marked the beginning of a shift that is best recognized in hindsight. At the time, it wasn’t yet evident that the operation Anonymous had just conducted would lead to a war with the U.S. government that continues to escalate at the time of this writing.

In the hours before the interview, Anonymous participants had launched a distributed denial of service attack, or DDOS, against the respective websites of MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, and Amazon, taking several of these down for hours. The first three had each, within a few days of each other, announced that they would no longer process donations to Wikileaks, which itself had just begun the release of some 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Amazon, meanwhile, had ceased to provide the use of their servers to the organization. All, it seemed, had buckled under pressure from the federal government - which itself had been carrying out a secret war against Wikileaks and its principals for quite a while now. Months later, we would learn more about how that war was being conducted and how widespread the conspiracy had become; for now, I at least knew enough to get the CNN barker off my back.

“We live in a certain society where journalists have certain freedoms, the press has certain freedoms,” I began. “And from this side of the fence, it looks like Wikileaks is working as a journalistic organization. They’re working with The Guardian and all these other existing organizations. So we think they should get those same protections. And we find it very interesting that these financial organizations are cancelling their accounts or denying them charges, like MasterCard, Visa, PayPal. And listing off very clearly-”

“How, though, do the aims effectively justify the means?” she asked me, and likely no one else prior to me, “the means being disrupting me and millions of our viewers from using Visa, MasterCard - and Amazon, which, let’s be honest, let’s face it, they weren’t able to bring down today. And right before Christmas! How do the ends justify the means, you think?”

“There’s a very tough balance to keep here. And I’m smiling because I’ve been asked this question several times today. We don’t want to interrupt the public’s livelihood...”

“... but you are.”

… “because in the end we want them on our side. Some people have been affected, but in all honesty, even when Visa’s website is down completely, you don’t go to Visa’s website to use your credit card. The payment process was working perfectly fine.”

That Anonymous’ operation had not actually inconvenienced the millions of viewers she had said it had fazed the woman not a bit; nor did she seem concerned about having just grossly misinformed those precious viewers about an issue that was important enough to take air time away from Tiger Woods’ marital difficulties. Suddenly, the issue was not that we had inconvenienced everyone, but that we had failed to do so.

“There weren’t enough hackers today to bring down the Amazon site,” she noted. “I get the sense that there are about 1,000, 1,500 participants around the world - and we’re giving them the oxygen of publicity tonight, and there might be more by the time this story is over. I hope we’re not complicit in what they’re doing.”

They were.

“But 1,500” - she continued, citing the number someone had made up - “doesn’t sound like a lot of people to me. And they certainly weren’t able to hit the Amazon site. So what should we expect next?”

As it turns out, we should have expected that within a year, Amazon would actually be buying my book about how great Anonymous is, the lesson here being that the future is hard to predict, or maybe that corporations are akin to certain women in that they secretly yearn to be treated badly.

“Well, the Amazon site didn’t go down,” I conceded. “You’re absolutely correct. But your numbers - as I left for the studio, there were about 3,000 people in the chat channels doing this. so it’s still growing. And the complicit line you used there - that’s a bit tough, because the reason that DDOS are effective is not necessarily because the sites go down, but that whenever these DDOS happen, people like me and people like you end up talking about it.”

***

I was born in a town that no longer exists, it having been swallowed up by tje ever-expanding Dallas suburbs in the years since. My life began normally enough that I was able to get used to normality and thereby identify abnormality when it came along, which it promptly did when I was about three.

At that point, my dad owned a furniture store as well as a series of Dodge Chargers, Corvettes, and similar cars. My older sister had cerebral palsy, which is rare but not so rare as to be out of the ordinary. Mom was a homemaker. My dad and his friends started a gang.

Thirty years later, I still have no idea why that should have been so, or whether drug use prompted the car theft and bank robberies or if drugs just sort of seemed the natural thing to do under the circumstances. What I know is that my dad, his brother, and a few friendly accomplices either launched or lurched into a crime spree sufficient to draw the attention of the Feds. By the end of it - to the extent that it ever ended - my dad and my uncle were on the run, one of their friends was dead, and mom had quite understandably filed for divorce.

Mom and dad thereafter had a series of spirited arguments as to whether or not dad had voided his right to help raise me. Dad’s position was that he was indeed responsible enough to do so, and tried to prove it by threatening to find us and kidnap me. Lest dad win the debate with a fait accompli, mom moved the two of us around quite a bit until dad finally gave up and left us alone.
No longer at risk of having her son taken by a career criminal, mom was free to move us in with our grandmother. This was a major plus since she couldn't afford much in the way of housing; with no prior work experience, she had been relegated largely to a series of waitressing jobs even as she had to contend with the expenses involved in raising not only me, but my special-needs sister. Already, there had been a number of days on which we only had one meal.

Another advantage to moving in with grandma was the presence of a potential father figure in the person of John, an older man whose son had been the one who died in the midst of the drug-fueled crime spree. John had needed a place to stay, and grandma had needed someone else living there. Beyond that, the two had an interesting sort of friendship that seemed to fall short of love. Uncle John, as I called him, was drunk every night that I knew him, which I suppose was understandable; a few years after his son’s death, his daughter died from a cocaine overdose. Incidentally, he ended up killing himself in grandma’s backyard a few years ago.

The next few years of my childhood were uneventful. After I turned nine, dad suddenly showed up driving a Porsche. He explained to mom that he’d gotten a new job driving high-end vehicles from their original lot to another where they might sell better. This was true in a way. At any rate, I got to ride around in a couple of those cars before they were chopped or sold out of state. Then dad disappeared once again.

Childhood continued. At home, I was no help to mom. At school, I made a couple of friends with whom I remain close today. But always in the back of my mind, there was the threat - sometimes the anticipation - that dad would change his mind again and come to kidnap me. A day didn’t go by that I didn’t wonder what he was up to now.

But there were other men, some of whom I liked, some of whom I only like in retrospect, years after having given them a hard time. One of them, Rick, was a professor. Another one, Craig, was especially patient with me - which is just as well, since I gave that one more shit than I’d given to anyone previously, and still regret it to this day. But by that time I considered myself man of the house. After all, I was already making loads of money at the age of 13.
At that time, there was an arcade in the area called Tilt. They had filled up an entire abandoned mall - all of the floor space that had previously been given over to Macy’s and Sears and whatnot - with video games. This was the second heyday of arcade games, when Street Fighter 2 had just come out and one’s status was determined in large part by one’s ability to excel at it. I earned a lot of status in those days - which is good, because when you beat someone else, you keep playing, and it was rare occasion when I had more than a dollar to spend for the afternoon.

One day, a new machine appeared. Lotto Fun was something akin to the little wired machines that models operate on local news segments given over to the state lottery. Little animated ping pong balls hopped around in a see-through container, each with a number on it. The user picks six numbers, which would appear on the screen on the left. Each time you pushed a button, whichever ball is closest to the gap would fall in. The more numbers you got correctly, and in order, the more you won. And it was a sliding scale, like a slot machine; if you put in four tokens and won, you got 16 in return.

On around the fourth time I played the machine, I noticed something. Among the various animations given off by the screen was one that seemed somehow out of place - a sort of pixel that turned yellow at certain moments. Soon I’d figured out that if one happened to push the button when the pixel was flashing yellow, the ball that fell in would be that of the number you’d selected - which is to say that if you simply put in four tokens and then pressed the button only when that little yellow light flashed, you would be assured of making a profit of 12 tokens. Most likely, some programmer decided to set it up that way, unknown to his employers, for the same reason that so many other programmers have added similar back doors to other products - a reason that we’ll have plenty of occasion to discuss later. For now, I was just a 13-year-old with lots and lots of arcade tokens.

Now, the reason that games like Lotto Fun don’t legally constitute gambling is that the tokens entered and the tokens won have “No Cash Value,” as is stamped on each token. One could just as well stamp “This Does Not Exist” or “Cure For Cancer” on such tokens with equal results; cash value is not determined by imprinted proclamations but rather by the market. And in a video arcade such as this one, the market dictates that tokens are worth a quarter each, that being how much they sell for in the dispensers. Markets, though, can be undercut.

My pockets filled with tokens, I waited next to one of the token dispensers until someone came up to use it.

“Hey, man. I’ll give you six tokens for that dollar.”

“What? Do they work?”

I stuck one of my tokens into a nearby arcade game, which promptly started up.

“Okay. Here’s two bucks, give me 12.”

“Sure thing.”

It was, at that point, a week before class picture. A week later, I came to class wearing the nicest clothes I had ever owned.

There was more than one Lotto Fun machine at Tilt. I taught a friend the game’s secret tell, lectured him on the finer points of the scam - learning the pattern that the security guards walked so as to avoid having one come by when one was selling at the token dispensers, paying attention to the ceiling cameras, etc - and took a 25 percent cut of his daily take. At that point, I hadn’t seen any of the mobster movies. I didn’t know anything about RICO or racketeering or anything else of the sort. But the fundamentals of crime are universal. My friend wasn’t quite as proficient as I was but he could pull out $50 in a day. Soon I was making about $400 a week - an extraordinary amount of cash for any 13-year-old, and almost unimaginable for a kid from a poor family.

Back at home, I kept my increasing supply of cash in a tennis ball canister. One night I came home to find my mom sitting at the kitchen table, the canister open on the table. Concerned, she asked where I was getting this kind of money. I told her, no drugs, no violence. She pressed me, still not understanding how I could possibly pull off something like this. I explained the situation with the arcade. She laughed and told me that I probably couldn’t even get in any real trouble for that. Looking back, that was the moment when I realized that I could probably get away with quite a bit more. I bought a moped.

One day, I had just walked into Tilt when an employee stopped me. He was about 25 years old, a big guy with a mustache and a beard.

“We need to walk,” he said.

Out of options, I followed alongside of him.

“Am I in trouble?”

“No, no, no.”

“Are you calling security?”

“No, no.”

He took me to one end of the arcade where no one could overhear us. He’d been watching me for a while, he explained. He knew what I was doing, and he had a pretty good idea of how much money I was making. And he wanted in.

Being the dumb kid I was, I told him exactly how much I was making. As such, he ended up with about 25 percent of the overall take from then on. But he also made sure that I had a solid perimeter, free from security guards. And of all the ceiling cameras, he informed me, about five percent actually worked, and none of those were in our area - one less limiting factor in the time my friend and I could spend selling at the dispensers.

Things proceeded without event until the Tilt location finally went out of business. I’m not sure how much I contributed to the closure, but in the six months or so that I ran the operation, we probably took out something around $10,000. At any rate, my growing suspicion that the law simply didn’t apply to me had been confirmed.

As my adolescence continued and my savings dried up, I found myself in need of a real job. The first of these was at Wendy’s, where I lasted about two weeks before throwing a soda at my boss’ face. For some reason I thought McDonalds might work out better. Instead, I ended up throwing my manager onto the grill, burning his hands; this was in retaliation for him stupidly burning me with the fry basket out of sheer negligence, but apparently McDonalds policy does not take into account the occasional necessity for revenge, because I was fired. Anyway, jobs weren’t my thing.

School wasn’t my thing, either. I hassled my teachers with endless questions in order to improve their job performance, but the administration failed to appreciate my assistance. One day, when I found myself sent to his office one too many time for his liking, the principal told me that if I showed up there again, I’d be suspended. On my way out, the coach stopped me, pushed me against a wall, and made a similar threat, except this one involved taking me out back and kicking my ass.

That evening, I recruited two friends. One was actually a friend, while another was simply a kid I didn’t care for all that much but who had the virtue of being the son of the county sheriff - and therefore a sort of walking insurance policy against any police involvement were we to somehow get caught doing what it was that we were about to do. And the thing we were about to do involved crowbars.

The next morning, everyone arrived at school to find it trashed - shattered glass, broken desks, smashed lamps, and other synonyms followed by nouns of the breakable sort. No one could prove anything, nor was I necessarily even the key suspect. It seemed like we would get away with it until a few days later, when my friend decided he would brag about it to some other kid - not realizing that a teacher was standing right behind him. He, the sheriff’s son, and I were rounded up, brought into the office, and with some great degree of satisfaction, the principal announced to us that the sheriff was on his way. I tried not to smile.

At the end of it, my friend was shipped off to another school district in Illinois, where he was able to start school just in the nick of time, before the paperwork to the effect that he was a hoodlum was made available. The son of the sheriff was sent to military school. But nothing really happened to me. My mom told me I’d better get a new Moped to replace the decrepit one I’d bought a few years back with my crime money, because she sure as well wasn’t going to be driving me around all day. I never went back to school.

Not long after, when I turned 16, I got a computer, and within a few weeks I was able to code. Unlike everything else, coding came naturally to me. I started playing around on the dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS’s) that were popular at the time; I also managed to get a research account that allowed me to access the internet before it was effectively available to the public. This was 1992, and institutions like the National Center for Supercomputing Applications were playing around with some interesting browser ideas; Mosaic, then the top of the line, couldn’t even show images yet. Meanwhile, there weren’t many people who had even heard of HTML, much less knew how to program in it; at the same time, an increasing number of companies were deciding that they needed a web presence.

A neighbor of mine with whom I’d discussed programming on occasion had a friend at one of those companies - a Kansas City firm that needed a database converted to a website. Having learned that I could code HTML, my neighbor called up his friend and said that while I could do the job, I was only 16. The company said they didn’t give a shit if I was 12, that they wanted me to interview for the job. I did, and was hired to come out to Kansas City and do the specified work.

Moving to Kansas City at my age would have been difficult were it not for a happy coincidence - my dad happened to be living out there at the time. My mom’s good friend was also based in the area, and could thus report back to my mom. So I moved in with my dad. He was working for my uncle and otherwise doing well at the time - owned a house on a golf course, that kind of thing. Finally, we got a chance to get to know each other; from the age of four up until then, I had only spent a total of a few days with him.

Meanwhile, I began my career as a web developer and all-around programmer. I did a good job at the firm - good enough to automate everything they needed and thereby put myself out of work. At that early point in the history of corporate web work, there wasn’t yet a constant push for changes and improvements in online setups; just setting up a website was considered akin to pulling off a five-man theft of a high-security art museum or some such thing, and when it was all over, everyone concerned was satisfied.

But I found other companies that needed similar work done, and was thereby able to land a series of consultancies and full-time positions over the next several years. I moved out of my dad’s place and Kansas City and went to work for Ringside, the largest manufacturer of boxing equipment in the US, where I ran their computer network. The head, a guy named John Brown, was the guy you consulted with if you were making a boxing movie and wanted everything to be nice and accurate. That was an interesting job to have, as far as jobs go. I worked at American Century - the third largest investment firm in the world at that time - where I had originally been brought on to help run a massive computer migration from OS2 to NT4, and was afterwards asked to stay on for a while.

By the time I turned 18, I was living in Chicago, where I ended up staying for six years. For the entirety of my stay, I helped run the local production of Rocky Horror Picture Show, playing Brad. This was where I met my first wife, with whom I had a kid. But a few months into that, she cheated on me with an old friend of hers while visiting home, and I promptly divorced her. She took our daughter and went back home for good this time.

Bummed out about the break-up of my first family, I was thrilled when my dad suddenly showed up, broke and hoping to stay on my couch.

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302