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, shed
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 Ive told him;
at best, he will have since conveyed some portion of this to the
presenter, likely along with a few things hes been told on the subject
by some other person who is entirely wrong about all of them. Were all
set for cable.
The
hacker group Anonymous obviously likes to stay undercover. But our next
guest says that hes 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 cant 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, Im not Anonymous. Heres my name, heres my face.
Okay,
forgive me for that, but I thought when youd spoke to my producer
earlier on that you said that you thought that you could speak for
Anonymous.
I
can speak for whats going on. Im in all the chat channels, Im in all
the websites, Ive been involved in past Anonymous actions such as the
Church of Scientology. But Im personally not taking part in any of the
illegal activities. Im just trusted by these people and Im around all
their inner circles.
Tell me in your own words what you think theyre 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 wasnt 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 wasnt 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.
Theyre 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,
lets be honest, lets face it, they werent able to bring down today.
And right before Christmas! How do the ends justify the means, you
think?
Theres
a very tough balance to keep here. And Im smiling because Ive been
asked this question several times today. We dont want to interrupt the
publics 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 Visas website is down
completely, you dont go to Visas 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
werent 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 were giving them the oxygen of publicity tonight, and
there might be more by the time this story is over. I hope were not
complicit in what theyre doing.
They were.
But
1,500 - she continued, citing the number someone had made up -
doesnt sound like a lot of people to me. And they certainly werent
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 didnt go down, I conceded. Youre absolutely
correct. But your numbers - as I left for the studio, there were about
3,000 people in the chat channels doing this. so its still growing. And
the complicit line you used there - thats 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. Dads 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 sons death, his daughter died from a cocaine overdose.
Incidentally, he ended up killing himself in grandmas 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 hed
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 didnt go by that I
didnt 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 Id
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 Macys and Sears and whatnot - with video
games. This was the second heyday of arcade games, when Street Fighter 2
had just come out and ones status was determined in large part by
ones 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 Id 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 youd 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 well 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 dont 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. Ill 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. Heres 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
games 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 hadnt seen any of the mobster movies. I
didnt know anything about RICO or racketeering or anything else of the
sort. But the fundamentals of crime are universal. My friend wasnt
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 couldnt 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. Hed
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. Im 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 didnt 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 Wendys, 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
werent my thing.
School
wasnt 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, Id 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 didnt 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 sheriffs 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 Id better get a new Moped
to replace the decrepit one Id bought a few years back with my crime
money, because she sure as well wasnt 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 (BBSs)
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,
couldnt even show images yet. Meanwhile, there werent 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 Id 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 didnt 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 moms 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 wasnt 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 dads 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.