Chapter Five: Wikileaks and Revolution


Recall that Anonymous began as a sort of running joke on 4chan, a gag based on the idea that all of the posts on the site came from the same person - a guy named Anonymous. From that joke - one you sort of had to be there for, I suppose - there slowly evolved another shared concept, one in which Anonymous was a collective of people who were rightfully notorious across the internet for their anti-social online behavior. Just as gradually came another perception - fueled by the Hal Turner affair, media reports on Anonymous entrapment of child predators, and particularly by the campaign against Scientology - that Anonymous was a vigilante group intent on achieving some sort of general good.

Not everyone shared the latest perception. Many still saw Anonymous as the online id, and wanted it to remain as such, proclaiming that this is what it always was and always must be. 
Some number of those people seem to have simply abandoned Anonymous over the next few years, or at least re-identified themselves in association with /b/ rather than with the moralfag enterprise that Anonymous was becoming. Others stayed to fight for their cause, such as it was, doing whatever they could to detail the trend towards activism.

At the same time, I had become the poster boy for moralfaggotry - the person most closely associated with the way in which Anonymous was being perceived, and thus where it was going. Well-meaning people were now streaming into the IRC channels and message boards that constituted Anonymous sphere of influence, diluting it with good intentions. I certainly didnt start that process; I had simply played a role in it. But I had been promoting the view of Anonymous as a doer of good works to the media - first under the name Anonymous, and then under my own name after the Church had brought me to attention. Many of those I had worked with early on had gone their separate ways, or had managed to keep a low profile by changing the screen names they used. My own profile kept rising. Much of the hostility would inevitably come to center on me. As one angry Anon put it to me at the time, Stop ruining our bad name.

Luckily, the vast majority of the detractors were content to simply make fun of us for our newfound earnestness. To them, we were just a bunch of fags who wanted to feel good about ourselves and play the role of hero; I in particular was simply a media whore and probably a con artist to boot. 

The criticism wasnt limited to those who disliked the direction things were taking. The revelation that some of us had operated out of Marblecake and had sought to press our strategy in the way that we did also upset some people. A number of messages appeared on WhyWeProtest.net - a website that I and several others had built and maintained as an organizational platform for the Scientology fight - to the effect that I probably controlled a great deal of Anonymous via proxies. Even several years later, there are some who still believe this, or who at least pretend to. 

The anti-me sentiment, whatever the source, of course leads to problems. No matter how much one is able to brush off criticism, a reputation is a real thing, and very necessary to the extent that one operates in a social context. Being mistrusted or scorned causes missed opportunities. 

But there are also advantages to having enemies if ones enemies and the objections they voice are of a certain sort. When anti-activist types denounce me as a foremost do-gooder, other do-gooders became aware that theres some guy named Gregg Housh out there with whom they should probably get in touch. Likewise, when some actual activist whos upset over Marblecake runs around telling people about what we did, the sort of people who think that this was a damn fine idea are often inclined to come ask me how we did it, and whether they can help with whatever comes next.

Of course, I also made allies through the more conventional means of having nice things said about you, and in the process of having spent a year meeting and working with people Id met both on the streets and online. By the beginning of 2009, I had a sizeable extended network of contacts with whom I shared a general belief that what had worked against Scientology could also work against even more powerful institutions, and that we had the duty to give it a shot. And beyond us there were countless others within Anonymous and on its periphery who had come to the same conclusions and formed their own networks of allies. Over the next year, many of these networks continued to pursue Scientology, gaining certain unusual forms of experience in the process. 

***

Elsewhere, another entity had been sharpening its own axe. There were just a few of them, but like many within Anonymous, they were convinced that the internet was a potential force multiplier whereby a small group of people could prompt a great deal of change, if only that group of people could hit upon the right formula. The particular formula by which this entity was to act is probably best expressed by something written by one of its five original members upon the groups founding in 2006:

Since unjust systems, by their nature, induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

This entity was Wikileaks, and the man who wrote those words was Julian Assange. 

Wikileaks set about their mission slowly. It went slowly by necessity, being little-known and thus unable to draw out many of the leakers upon which it would depend. It managed to acquire and publish a few documents here and there - for example, details on the nature and extent of the corruption to be found among the longtime prime minister of Kenya and his inner circle. Each little score won it more prominence, and thus more viability as a collector and distributor of state and corporate secrets.

For instance, in 2007, Wikileaks managed to acquire a 2003 manual produced by the U.S. military spelling out procedures at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. Among other things, the guidebook made clear that, despite assertions to the contrary by U.S. military spokesman, there had indeed been a class of prisoners being held at Guantanamo to whom the Red Cross were denied any access whatsoever as a matter of policy. The revelation was noted in Wired, but otherwise made little traction.

Early next year, Wikileaks had its first encounter with what is still popularly known as the rule of law after releasing details to the effect that a Swiss bank had conducted illegal activities through its Cayman Islands branch. The bank sued, and a California judge ordered the sites internet service provider to shut down the groups website for the time being. Later, he changed his mind, and allowed to it come back. Through the duration, Wikileaks site had been mirrored - copied and made available elsewhere on the net - by some of the supporters it had begun to pick up.

Some of its new supporters were among the ranks of Anonymous, where sentiment tended to support those who made information available over those who sought to keep it out of sight. And there was little of that brand of nationalism which favors a militarys desire for pragmatic concealment of facts (and of people, in the case of Guantanamo). In short, Anonymous already formed the natural constituency of an organization like Wikileaks in March of 2008, when Wikileaks published a gaggle of secret Scientology documents, drawing further affection from the thousands of us who had committed ourselves to exposing the cults absurdity. 

The Church promptly sued, claiming copyright on the materials (which detailed methods by which an advanced practitioner could achieve cognitions by viewing the physical bodies of others). Wikileaks responded by noting that the Church had thereby confirmed the veracity of these bizarre documents. In its legal missive to Wikileaks, the Church also demanded that Wikileaks retain all communications relating to the manner in which the group had come about these papers. As The Register noted at the time, Clearly, the Church of Scientology is unaware that Wikileaks preserves almost nothing - and that it isn't frightened of the law. It was difficult not to admire the fuck out of these people.

Later in the year, someone acting within Anonymous infiltrated a private Yahoo! e-mail account that had been used by Sarah Palin during her tenure as Alaskas governor, this coming not long after John McCain had introduced her as his running mate. Aside from introducing Anonymous to another large portion of the press, the incident helped to seal the budding friendship-from-afar that many of us now had with Wikileaks - which published the contents on its website. Here was an entity that could be counted upon to make available material that might otherwise not become readily viewable via the media at large. Here also was an entity that was on a collision course with the U.S. government.

On March 23 of 2010, the Wikileaks Twitter feed produced several messages to the effect that it was currently under an aggressive US and Icelandic surveillance operation, that at least two agents of the State Department had followed one of its editors on a plane trip, that another related person had been detained for a day and had computers seized, and that all of this was quite likely to relate to a video it was planning to unveil a few weeks later.

A week before these tweets appeared, Wikileaks had published a 2008 secret/noforn report written by U.S. Army Intelligence entitled Wikileaks.orgAn Online Reference to Foreign 
Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups? and which included the line, The identi?cation, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistlblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site. It had also suggested further assessments.

To its credit, The New York Times had run a piece on that report shortly after Wikileaks published it on March 18th. Scott Horton of Harpers had also written about it on the magazines website. But just five days later, the fact that the same group which was quite demonstrably in the sights of U.S. military intelligence was now claiming to be under aggressive surveillance by the same government did not seem to strike the media as especially interesting. 

A few weeks later, Wikileaks published the video, which turned out to depict an Apache strike in Iraq that had left several Arab journalists dead, and in which a minivan that picked up a man wounded from the attack was shot up, killing the driver and a child. It brought attention to the realities of day-to-day urban combat, although many took issue with the interpretation of its contents as embodied by the title it was given - Collateral Murder.

Altogether, the release of the video and the debate that followed provided Wikileaks with a much higher profile. When the covert intelligence response stepped up - as it certainly would - those within the organization could count on the relative safety that comes with thorough notoriety. But then, based on the general strategy that some of Wikileaks more active opponents would eventually take, those opponents seem to have taken that into account as well.

And there would be plenty of opponents. Two months before Wikileaks ran a video that had clearly come from someone in the military, it had also published a U.S. State Department diplomatic cable - one dealing with Icelands financial meltdown - that must have raised some very pointed questions in very high quarters as to how that cable had gotten out, and whether others had as well. 

**

I dont remember what I was doing when I received the private message from Tux on IRC in early 2010. Whatever it was, I stopped doing it as soon as I figured out what this guy wanted - advice on how best to go up against a Western government.

Elements of Anonymous had already gone up against at least one government. After the clearly fraudulent re-election of Irans Ahmadinejad the previous July, some unknown number of Anons, including some Iranians, had teamed up with a number of other activists to create Anonymous Iran, the main purpose of which was to facilitate an ongoing and secure point of communication for Iranians who wished to put out information without danger of being detected. They had set up a website as well as more nuanced infrastructure for the purpose, and everyone involved had no doubt made useful contacts upon which future undertakings often rely. Perhaps it had been a small thing, but it was a good sign, and certainly helpful to those Iranians who are in the business of working against a regime that is relatively sophisticated in terms of tracking down and executing dissidents. 

Now, this fellow Tux wanted to do something that hadnt yet been done. He wanted to oversee a direct attack on the Australian government.

Australia had already garnered a reputation for restrictive internet policies relative to those of other Western countries. Just recently, however, the nations telecommunications minister had proposed new regulations that would have filtered Australias internet to disallow certain forms of pornography - including bestiality, female ejaculation, and women who are deemed to be small-breasted and could thereby be decided by some government official to appear underaged.

Whether or not the state has what is referred to by U.S. judges as a compelling interest in preventing the citizens residing within its borders from viewing a horse fucking a small-breasted woman who is herself ejaculating is a question for those who start with the premise that adults ought not to conduct themselves in any way they choose unless the state decides its okay - people like U.S. judges, for instance. Within Anonymous, the greater concern tends to be the states themselves, and their own behavior, and particularly that behavior which sets a precedent, as our jurisprudential friends also say, for greater and greater state authority over greater and greater matters that rarely stop with women who fuck horses to visible orgasm.

And that should explain why many Anons were itching for a fight, and were curious as how to best go about it. Tux asked me how to go about launching an information-age campaign against a brick-and-mortar opponent. I told him what I could about the peculiarities of online organizing, media interfacing, delegation of responsibility, day-to-day infrastructure - everything I'd learned since that day in early 2008 when 7,000 people joined a single IRC channel with the intent of going to war with Scientology. I also told him to let me know if he needed anything else. He didn't.

As had happened with Chanology, threads on 4chan and other venues began to appear in which the regulations were explained and the call to action put out.

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? 

Plainly, an assault against the liberty of Ausfags constituted a strike against the liberty of all fags everywhere. This case having been made on chans and IRCs to the satisfaction of newfags and oldfags alike, to moralfags with an eye to activism and trollfags with visions of unprecedented lulzs, to opponents of censorship and to lovers of bestiality, Operation Titstorm was launched.

Australian government websites started going down, one by one, and remained down for days, via DDOS attacks - a tactic that remained quite novel to most in the media, who thereby had more reason to report on what was happening. In doing so, of course, they were compelled to report on the proposed regulations themselves - and from the standpoint of Anonymous, this was the first step in drumming up awareness and then vocal opposition by more and more Australians. Even stories ran in foreign media are useful in prompting domestic outcry. And of course, there was plenty of domestic coverage as well; the stories and reports elsewhere served to amplify that local attention as well as to increase Anonymous visibility, and thereby its recruitment potential. Those interested in censorship issues and particularly internet freedom would be particularly interested in this wacky new movement, and would gradually find their way into the growing networks of which it was made up.

Not all such people were inclined to join or even support an amorphous entity whose members were breaking the law. Some of the more formal groups in Australia that had been voicing opposition to the proposed regulations publicly repudiated the DDOS attacks as a move that would discredit the opposition altogether. Certainly they have a point, as would everyone else who made such objections later. But a contrary argument would eventually arise, one that holds a DDOS attack to be akin to a digital sit-in - often illegal, but perhaps defensible in certain contexts. 

Beyond the DDOS attacks, participants also engaged in black faxing (repeatedly faxing an entirely black sheet to the enemys offices so as to deplete his toner), plus prank calls and e-mails to employees of the relevant government ministries, with the latter usually featuring pictures of small-breasted women and, of course, female ejaculation. All of these proposed methods had been suggested via another aspect of Anonymous operations that bears noting here - the online propaganda poster. 

In the early days of Chanology, the very name of that crusade was adapted from the Encyclopedia Dramatica entry that was created to serve as a sort of home base for the information and methodology that the authors wanted to propose. Thereafter the link could be easily distributed via websites or IRC or what have you, and those who took a look would be on the same general page, so to speak - they would be aware of certain ideas, and privy to the reasoning behind them, and aware of which forum or channel to visit if they intended to help carry them out. Or they might carry out some version of them by themselves or with another party, or they might simply do something else altogether, in which case they would know where specifically to find others who were clearly interested in such things. This dynamic, whereby thousands of people are in loose or sporadic contact, illustrates the multiplicity of mediums through which Anon does the necessary work of coordination, dissemination, and execution, all without any top-down control or even a single venue that could be dominated by any few people. 
Anyone may propose an idea via any of these mediums, and if it takes hold, it is likely to be transmitted to others elsewhere.

Encyclopedia Dramatica itself was not a viable mode of transmission for most operations. Pages can be deleted at whim by moderators, some of whom act entirely on whim, others of whom didnt quite cotton to moralfaggotry. Still others were disinclined to allow it to become a staging grounds for those ideas which happened to involve crime; the site had been the target of any number of legal threats almost since it was founded. The online propaganda poster became the means of choice by which to bring attention to a proposed operation or to rail against some development that seemed to require such an operation. Designed reasonably well and calling for just the right target for just the right reasons, it could mobilize thousands to action, or bring thousands to an IRC channel where action was to be decided upon, or both. The one that set the date, time, methodology, and base of operations for Operation Titstorm is a good example of a successful poster, particularly since the Australian regulations were tabled indefinitely and would only be brought up again in retrospectives dealing with Anonymous first engagement with a Western government.

***

My only role in Titstorm, other than providing advice to its instigators, was to explain to inquiring reporters why this all mattered. I helped them with a press release, sending it to the growing list of media contacts Id garnered over the past two years, and spoke to ABC, the BBC, and other outlets in order to ensure that the anti-censorship, pro-fucking shit up position got its due airtime.

And then, as usual, I sat back to monitor the coverage. Part of my duties, such as they were, involved responding to press reports, particularly those with glaring inaccuracies. Unfortunately, one of the inaccuracies I had to be on the watch for was the sort that include, Gregg Housh, spokesman for Anonymous, said that... No matter how many times I began an interview by noting that I wasnt any sort of spokesman, and that Anonymous wasnt a group and had no titles or even any formal opinions, and that I was simply there to explain something I had been involved with for a while and which I kept up with closely, I would still be referred to as a spokesman by an incredibly large percentage of the reporters I talked to. On top of that, those whom I hadnt talked to would see a quote by me and refer to me as spokesman as well.

It was bad enough that I was talking to the press under my real name; that right there is enough to get a whole bunch of Anons pissed off at you, regardless of whether or not youve been asked to do so by people who are trying to achieve something important. The perception that I was actually seeking to designate myself as spokesman for Anonymous would ensure that some large number of people who are good at fucking with people  would spend some large amount of time directing their talents at me. Even aside from that, I wasnt especially interested in being tied to a wave of cyber crime just a couple years after having gotten out of a federal prison for warez - which is why I also didnt take kindly to being incorrectly referred to as Gregg Housh, hacker in articles dealing with illegal intrusions into protected computers. All in all, I wanted to avoid having my life wrecked by the feds and Anonymous at the same time (although that would have been pretty interesting).

So I did a lot of reading in order to better ensure that Anonymous was being accurately represented and that I wouldnt be torn to digital shreds by an angry mob. And in the midst of Titstorm, I came upon an opinion piece in The Huffington Post which began as follows:

A phenomenon of great importance will not necessarily receive the attention it merits, and thus we may conclude that there is perhaps something going on this very instant to which we ought to be paying attention if we care to know what the future holds for us, in which case we should take a moment to examine what is novel today for signs that it may prove common tomorrow.

Apparently, this phenomenon of great importance was the attack on Australia. The piece concluded:

The specifics of this particular case have already been described with varying levels of accuracy by some of the more astute media outlets ranging from Wired to the BBC. Some of the details expressed regarding Anonymous will be wrong, as usual, but the details matter little as nothing is likely to come of this incident, whereas the implications for the future defy overstatement. Having taken a long interest in the subculture from which Anonymous is derived and the new communicative structures that make it possible, I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world's most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.

Id never heard of this writer before, but anyone who makes fun of the medias difficulty in reporting accurately on Anonymous had an instant place in my heart. And what he was claiming... well, it was a bit out there. But he was clearly a fan of Anonymous, and probably someone Id want as a media contact since I wouldnt have to explain much to him - just send him whatever press release wed done and then have him mention it in passing before going on to throw out ludicrous six-line sentences about how we were the most important thing in the world and DEATH TO THE NATION-STATE and all that. Probably there was something wrong with him, but whatever.

I sent the link along to some other Anons to get their reaction and then wrote him a short e-mail. We are very happy with the article you wrote. It is nice when someone actually gets Anonymous. So few journalists do. Then I sent it off and did some more interviews.

***

If you happen to come into one of the more prominent IRC servers in which Anonymous does the work for which its become known, and you ask how to join Anonymous, youre likely to be told that youre already Anonymous, or that everyone is Anonymous. What youre really asking is how to get involved with those people who have done some of the things youve heard about in the press, because you want to help. What you often get is a sort of semantic rejoinder about how Anonymous doesnt exist, or is in fact everywhere. Luckily, there will just as often be someone present who is more interested in helping you to learn about some of the ways in which an Anon can contribute to positive change, and who will direct you to certain other channels where such changes are planned and perpetrated.

There is a perpetual discussion about what Anonymous means that often ends up sounding like something John Lennon might have written if he were asked to explain what love is in a magazine catering to practitioners of Hare Krishna. The sentiments are accurate enough, insomuch as that they cannot be disproven, but they tend to be unhelpful in terms of conveying any useful information.

Having gotten to a certain point in this book, I am now going to define Anonymous in a certain way. I am going to define it as the loose network of people who identified as Anonymous, collectively acted in such a manner as to bring about certain developments, and who did so with the understanding that their acts were performed in accordance with what Anonymous either is or should be. That understanding will differ from actor to actor, but it will tend to hinge on Anonymous being a positive force. Under this definition - which tends to favor extent of action over mere identity - we will be focusing on certain populations and even certain individuals, as well as the venues in which a relatively large portion of those actions were planned, discussed, and executed. To most readers, this might seem like a pretty reasonable working definition for the second portion of a book on the subject of Anonymous - reasonable enough not to require an explanation. On the contrary, it would not strike some large number of those who identify as Anonymous as reasonable at all, which is exactly why it should be mentioned.

This is a dispute that wont be settled here, or anywhere, but that it exists in the first place will probably give you a better sense of the difficulty that is encountered by those who wanted Anonymous to serve an engine of activism. I will simply contend that the people who claim that Anonymous is everywhere and nowhere, and who say such things in IRC servers with names like Anonops and Anonnet, are perhaps not in the best position to answer such questions.

This book is not about the people who delight in defining Anonymous as nothing and everything, but about those who made it into something.

**

Wikileaks was something of a household name by November 28th, 2010, the day on which it became the worlds focal point. Previously it had released tens of thousands of U.S. military documents detailing aspects of the Afghanistan war, alarming much of the nations military, intelligence, and foreign policy establishment. Now, with the assistance of several of the worlds most prominent newspapers, it began the unprecedented release of a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables which would presumably shine a light on any number of issues and produce some unknown degree of embarrassment on the part of countless powerful institutions.

These cables had clearly come from somewhere. Indeed, the relevant authorities had already captured their suspect. It was time for the identi?cation, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers, as the Army intelligence document had put it years back. Things had changed since those days, though; Wikileaks had become a much greater threat to the secrecy on which certain statecraft depends. Now it had gone so far as to reveal a great deal about the unfortunate character of the republics foreign policy. The response would have to be more thorough than originally intended. And, like the foreign policy that been exposed, it would have to be carried out covertly.

Over the period of ten days following the beginning of the release, several financial firms began to stop processing payments to Wikileaks. Paypal closed the organizations account and stopped processing donations altogether. A Swiss bank with which Wikileaks held an account did the same thing. Visa and MasterCard announced that they would no longer allow account holders to donate to the organization. Bank of America and Western Union took similar steps. It certainly looked to me, and to pretty much everyone who was paying attention, that these steps had been carried out at the behest of the U.S. and certain of its partners. Likely there are alternative explanations, but Ive yet to hear a likely one.

Here, it seemed, was a financial blockade opposed against an organization that was working with some of the pre-eminent media outlets in the world, none of which had themselves been subject to any blockade of the sort. The New York Times had even once published an entire series of classified documents relating to the various lies that the public had been told about the Vietnam War - a move that was of course denounced by Nixon and others as a violation of national security. In this case, the cables were not even classified, but merely confidential.

Around the time that the financial blockade was going into effect, another portion of the response had also become more visible. Swedish authorities had arranged for a European Arrest Warrant for Julian Assange, Wikileaks most prominent spokesman, several months after having launched an investigation into a sexual assault Assange is supposed to have committed upon two women in that country.

The character of those charges can probably be guessed at by the fact that one of the accusers threw a party for Assage after the assault in question was said to have occurred, during which she tweeted from that party about how cool and smart were the people present before later attempting to delete all records of the message. That the Swedish prosecutors themselves admit that all of the sex in question was consensual, and that the case seems to hinge on whether or not a condom was used and whether or not its use was sufficiently discussed by both parties, is probably also worth knowing. At any rate, the prosecutors office leaked to the press that they would be prosecuting Assange for rape before eventually settling for a much lesser charge that has little relation to rape if rape is to mean what it means to the vast majority of men and women on the planet. Assange turned himself into U.K. authorities on December 7th.

By this time, Anons had begun DDOSing Paypal and other targets of opportunity as more firms announced their new stance. MasterCard and Visas websites were taken down for most of the day on the 10th. 

Which brings us back to where we were a few chapters back, when I had just gotten done explaining to the CNN anchor that the ongoing DDOS attacks against Visa and Mastercard didnt actually prevent anyone from using their cards or conducting business, as she had just erroneously claimed in front of millions of people, but simply took down the corporate websites and drew attention to a story that otherwise wouldnt have gotten much play. As Ive noted, she didnt seem too distressed at the error, and certainly didnt want to waste any time correcting it, as there was a bigger story in all of this: 

Let me ask you this. The fact is that in the last weeks and months Julian Assanges closest associates are rumored to have deserted him. Theyve called him autocratic, theyve called him capricious, theyve accused him of reneging on a promise of impartiality where hes gone after the states specifically... doesnt that make you and those youve been observing, conducting themselves in this way, feel slightly uncomfortable, that many of Assanges closest associates are reportedly pulling back from him, they dont agree with what hes doing.

It does, there are people on this site who feel uncomfortable about that. But then theres the rest of us who know that while Assange was one of the founders of Wikileaks and he had a lot to do with whats going on here, even with him behind bars - even if he were to disappear tomorrow - it wouldnt change anything. Wikileaks would still be running, all the leaks would still be coming out - the financial information theyre planning on putting out in a few months will still be coming out whether hes there or not. So, Assange isnt Wikileaks. He is a good spokesperson, in our eyes - maybe not in those people who you mentioned eyes - but to us, he seems like a pretty good spokesperson for it, and...

Okay, so how long does this go on? Because hes behind bars at the moment, theyre looking to extradite him to Sweden. So even if he were to get off out of the case that they seem to be building against him in Sweden, does this now continue? How long does this go on?

Apparently we werent done talking about Assange.

You know, in all honesty, everyone on the site has no idea. They want it to continue going until theyve won,-

Whats winning?

 - whatever that means when you have a lofty goal - freedom of information.

Whats winning, at this point?

Well, I would say the one conversation that I witnessed today that really, you know, kind of put things into perspective for me was people talking about how interesting it is that here we have all these cables and all of these other things that have been leaked over the past four years of Wikileaks, a lot of them being evidence of crimes. You know, I wont speak to specific ones, but you can find them all online in the cables. And theyre all being ignored - all the various crimes that, Heres proof, proof logged right here, you know, heres what happened, heres the name, heres even the dollar value of what was in that briefcase that this guy took. All of this is sitting there, and instead of focusing on the people who we know have committed crimes, theyre going after Julian and Wikileaks. Ignoring the Sweden case for just a moment, here in America theyre coming after him trying to find any law they can charge him with and they still havent found one yet. The person who right now we dont believe has broken a law is sitting here being persecuted while all these people who have broken many laws that we have proof of are being ignored.

But let me just put this to you again. You cant answer the question of how long this goes on or what happens next at this point, can you? Or even what the real point is?

***

You can probably imagine how much coverage was given over to countless instances of corruption on the part of the worlds most powerful institutions that were now being revealed, and how much involved reports of disputes within Wikileaks and the question of whether or not Assange thinks hes kind of a big deal.

As Id noted to little effect on CNN, the conversations that had been going on at the IRCs and message boards had indeed come to hinge on the problem of getting news agencies to pay attention to news. Certainly there were and remain a great number of fantastic journalists who have managed to swim against the prevailing current, but that wasnt going to be enough. And so a series of operations collectively known as Leakspin developed with the general purpose of making best use of the cables. One early propaganda poster called on Anons to find the most significant of these, create summaries, and then make one to two minute YouTube videos reading the leaks and to use misleading tags, everything from Tea Party to Bieber. Other techniques were more straightforward, making use of submission-based sites like reddit to bring wide attention to stories that otherwise were unlikely to be seen. Very little of the strategy hinged on actually getting mainstream news outlets to cover things of socio-political relevance to their audience; Ive met quite a few Anons who wouldnt think twice about working to overthrow a dictatorship but who would laugh off any attempt at media reform as the purview of idealistic madmen. Its hard for me to blame them.

Nonetheless, I was in a situation whereby I had the perpetual attention of an endless array of reporters, and I did as much as possible to highlight a few examples. One cable in particular struck me as both highly newsworthy and indicative of why many of us were championing the whole enterprise in the first place - the one in which Shell brags to the State Department that theyve managed to infiltrate the whole of the Nigerian government to the extent that they are aware of every key decision made therein, before going on to brag further that the nations real officials had entirely forgotten that any infiltration ever took place.

Of course, this isnt one of the cables Id mentioned on CNN that constituted proof of serious crimes by powerful people. Its perfectly legal for Shell or any firm to take as much control as it can over the machinery of any state. Apparently, its even something to boast about to those who conduct U.S. foreign policy in the region. Its not like they were going to tell anyone. 

**

Among those cables that were released in December were ten in particular in which U.S. diplomatic staff detailed some very specific instances of corruption on the part of Tunisias head of state, Ben-Ali, and his relatives. In the more than two decades during which Ben-Ali had ruled the country, the populace had certainly gotten the general impression that The Family, as it was tellingly referred to by some, had not been averse to using public resources for the development of its private economic empire. But the particular revelations set out in the newly available cables served as a rare source of confirmation in an environment where certainty was often difficult to come by. "There were a lot of specific details in the cables that the public had not been exposed to before the release, said Shiblet Telhami, the Anwar Sadat chair at the University of Maryland, when interviewed by PBS a month later. There is no question that WikiLeaks added substantial evidence to the story that people already knew.

The regimes reaction to this new development was to cut off Tunisias access to Wikileaks website. Presumably they had never given much thought to the Streisand effect. At any rate, the information itself was difficult to filter, Tunisia being a country of relatively high internet saturation. Many could locate the information one way or another and then convey it to others, and the untold hundreds of thousands of Tunisian nationals living abroad were of course beyond the reach of any such stopgap measures.

The cables, their revelations, and the regimes response were all certainly indicative, and could be said to have set a certain mood, particularly among younger Tunisians. But nothing visible came of any of it.

Then, on December 17th, a fruit vendor set himself ablaze outside of the neighborhood police headquarters in the city of Sidi Bouzid; prior to this, he had had his wares confiscated before being slapped and insulted by an officer. The story spread, and local youths began rioting. Towards the end of the month Ben-Ali himself went to visit the vendor at a hospital where he was being treated, but it was too late; demonstrations and unrest, as it is called, had spread to Tunis, the coastal capital. Luckily for Ben-Ali, none of this had gotten much attention in the outside world.

Even before any of this occurred, many Tunisians at home and abroad had been using the internet as a means to criticize the regime and otherwise promote an environment of opposition. This was made easier by the sense of economic disappointment and other factors that had already turned many against their government. It was made harder by the regimes recent moves towards modernizing its security forces, which were now getting more sophisticated in the realm of cyber, as it is usually called by those who make their living at it. Among the Tunisians who had put themselves at risk in this cat and mouse game was one, Slim Amamou, who worked out of the Anonops IRC server, where he went by the handle of slim404. And he was not the only one to have joined Anonymous by this time.

On January 1st, Anonops had a new channel, OpTunisia, where Tunisians both inside and outside of the country had assembled after having also recruited dozens of other Anons residing elsewhere. On the morning of January 2nd, I watched for a while until they had settled on a plan and written a press release. The press release would have to remain under wraps until the plan had been executed. Then, around lunchtime, it went through.

The main website of the Tunisian prime minister had been taken over by one of the hackers present and replaced with a message headed An Open Letter to the Government of Tunisia. Among other things, the message proclaimed that cyber attacks on the governments online infrastructure would continue until free speech had been implemented. Other government sites were now being taken down via DDOS attacks organized from Anonops and elsewhere.

Now, the press release was ready to go public. Already I had sent it directly to some of the journalists I considered most likely to pay attention to the matter, along with some background and instructions that this all remain under embargo until the proper time. Now I shot it out to everyone else on my increasing press list and had further conversations with others in the media who might potentially understand where all this might be going.

That a nationwide revolt was accelerating within Tunisia did not strike many in the media as worth reporting. With a few exceptions, most probably heard Arab unrest and zoned it out on the premise that there was always some degree of unrest in the Arab world. In fact, nothing like this had happened in Tunisia for 23 years - the last time the government was overthrown, that being the event that put Ben-Ali in place to begin with. Regardless of whether one expected anything good to come of this new effort, certainly it was worth reporting.

But media workers of the sort I was contacting get untold numbers of press releases thrown at them every day, each from some entity that is either convinced that its issue of choice is the most important thing ever or is simply in the business of fighting for the limited attentions of the press and public. Sometimes a journalist will indeed consider some particular thing to be worthy of attention, but what he actually writes will be determined in large part by an array of factors. The most important of these involves a complex formula of perceptions on his part as well as that of his editors. Some of those perceptions concern what readers of a given publication are expected to care about; whether or not an event or trend can be treated in some novel new way; and whether or not the finished product is likely to gain attention elsewhere. This last factor is especially important within the hyper-competitive world of new media, as online outlets were once classified, back when they were still new. All of this has to be taken account if one is to navigate the resulting system in an effective way. 

One also needs to have a strategy in place. Ours was to strengthen the revolts by forcing international focus on the revolt and its necessity, which itself would give the Tunisians the sense that they were indeed getting attention. The takeover of Tunisian government websites and the shutting down of others, which continued for much of the month, could be the means to make this happen.

Michael Hastings, the journalist who had prompted the resignation of U.S. Gen. McChrystal with his Rolling Stone piece months earlier and who had since become an editor at that publication, was the perfect vector by which to move the story forward. Aside from his time in Afghanistan, Hastings had also covered Iraq for several publications and was otherwise familiar enough with the region and its nuances to understand that a revolt of this sort in Tunisia was noteworthy. He also understood what Anonymous was and why it could potentially be a factor. He also happened to be a friend of one of several other media types whom Id already recruited to support Anonymous efforts going forward.

On the evening of January 2nd, Michael Hastings wrote the following on his Twitter feed: very interesting: Anonymous, the hacktivist group, launched attacks against the Tunisian government today. #optunisia

#OpTunisia is a hashtag; any term preceded by a pound symbol on Twitter will come up for those searching for it - an aspect of the medium that would come to play a significant role in disseminating information and tactics. That particular hashtag, and others like, would be seeing a lot of use. For now, I scanned the news results for signs that the Hastings gambit might have spurred any further attention to the Tunisian operation.

The next day, things panned out. Gawker ran a front-page piece entitled Anonymous Attacks Tunisian Government over Wikileaks Censorship. Although nothing was mentioned about the actual revolt - so underreported that even a journalist looking into Tunisia was unlikely to come across a mention of it, apparently - the article did describe the situation with the Wikileaks cables, included a screenshot of the seized-and-redone website, and quoted the press release in full. At the bottom, the author had given a hat tip to Michael Hastings and linked to his original tweet.

Now, other journalists - many of whom read Gawker in part because it tends to cover the media industry itself - would come across what was now officially a story. Some of them might even discover that the web attacks had been performed in the context of an actual national revolt that had been increasing in ferocity for over two weeks, and might be inclined to report on that as well. 

The media situation was also difficult in the Middle East itself, where most outlets are either state-run or at least subject to the pressures of local tyrants. The major exception is al-Jazeera, which provides a rare window into regional reality for the hundreds of thousands who are able to watch the channel on satellite, as well as for the millions who can access its website online. In the preceding days, it had been among the few major world outlets to cover the protests. And on January 6th it ran a long piece on the online component to the ongoing struggle between operatives of the Tunisia Internet Agency - the key component in the governments ongoing efforts to identify and thwart activists - and the activists themselves, as well as Anonymous role in that portion of the conflict. Much of the piece focused on the manner in which the agency was suspected to be behind widespread phishing of Facebook and Gmail accounts that had been used by activists to organize resistance. Also noted was the governments ability to delete in-country Facebook accounts within an hour of their creation, as well as other methods it had developed to disrupt the activist networks that were crucial to sustaining the insurrection. 

Such issues had been brought up by the Tunisians at Anonops, where solutions were being pursued. An installable script was developed that would prevent most instances of phishing. Along with several encryption methods and other software utilities and instructions that could prove helpful, this was deployed by way of a downloadable care package that was widely distributed in the coming weeks and months. Much of that distribution was arranged by the increasing number of Tunisians who had been coming into the Anonops server and who knew exactly where such links ought to be posted. The Tunisian activist slim404 played a particularly key role in getting these to the people who needed them most, at least early on - on January 6th, he was arrested by security forces.

Not all of the Tunisians who been coming to Anonops were experienced agitators. Few Tunisians had any experience even with street protesting, much less with the art-in-development of waging information warfare. This was something that several of the Tunisians present had been emphasizing as something that needed to be addressed. At the same time, we did have present some number of veteran protesters who had participated either in low-intensity events of the sort organized by Chanology or in the more tense variety that had marked previous political uprisings. The particular nature of those going on in Tunisia varied from city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood, with varying degrees of police presence and response at each particular gathering. It was proposed that a guide be created that would draw from the accumulated knowledge of those present (along with tips that a couple of us solicited from our own contacts with colorful histories) and which would cover the variety of circumstances that Tunisians were encountering as the protests intensified, as well as more extreme circumstances that might arise depending on how violent things became in the near future. The writing - a collective process to be conducted on typewith.me, a collaborative online notepad - would be overseen by Tunisians who could provide input on any specific factors and conditions that might need to be considered. It would be written in English - a language known to many Tunisians - and then translated into French, Tunisian dialect, and modern standard Arabic before being distributed via the usual means. Unlike the care package, it could even be printed out by Tunisians and posted in cafes and other venues. All of this was conceived and carried out in less than a day thanks to the combined talent and energy of those who had assembled at the server. One of the few things that I still remember was the involvement of a 16-year-old girl living in Tunis who assisted in the French translation and then afterwards went to go print out the results so that her older brothers could make more copies to be placed around the neighborhood. 

Meanwhile, more Western media outlets were recognizing the revolt as something of potential significance, and thereby giving it the oxygen of publicity, so to speak. The national strikes - including one that included almost every lawyer in the country - had contributed to that sense of inevitability that is fundamental to getting more people onto the streets and keeping them there. With the world now paying attention, Tunisians were getting bolder, knowing that Ben-Ali would now be under external pressure as well. And then, Ben-Ali fled the country.

In the midst of it all, I was sent the link to a YouTube video that had been uploaded the previous day. It was of a rally that had been held in Germany by what appeared to be several dozen Tunisians, some wearing the Guy Fawkes masks, others holding them. One of the Tunisians had a megaphone with which he delivered an address in German:

First, in the name of all Tunisian people, I want to thank Anonymous. Anonymous were the only ones to help us. Anonymous blocked all government websites because they have blocked our internet access so we may not get information. Thank you, Anonymous! We want to let you know that you have found new allies and that there are many more people living in oppression. And that you have won us to aid you in this fight against all dictators that still remain in this world.

Then, as the crowd cheered, the speaker switched to English.

We will never forget. We will never forgive. We are Anonymous. We are legion.

It was around that time that I noticed the presence of several Egyptians at Anonops. Apparently there was to be a protest in Cairo, at Tahrir Square, the following week. A channel for OpEgypt was soon created.

***

The Tunisian revolution wasnt over; it had simply proven itself viable. It would be another few months before Tunisia had a government that could be trusted to implement elections for the new parliament. For now, slim404 - Slim Amamou - was among the many activists to be released from prison. Soon he would come to serve as Minister of Youth and Sports.

The next year would be a combative one as various factions - some just as bad as those represented by Ben-Ali - vied for control; Amamou resigned after just a few months in protest of the continued censorship policies that were still being enforced by the government of that time. But parliamentary races were indeed held, and over a year later, Tunisia is now ruled by a democratically-elected coalition of three major parties, with presidential elections to be held in a few months.

The particular sorts of assistance that Anonymous could provide were refined and repeated elsewhere, always accompanied by attacks on a given governments online infrastructure 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 on the part of Anonymous as well others such as 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 left Ghadafi dead. Leaders of the Iranian Green movement made a home at Anonops and another Anonymous server, Iranserv, from which attacks on their governments websites were launched, and from which encryption software has 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 little came of it. 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, prompting the population concerned to realize that the world was now watching to see what they would do. 

The circumstances were different in each country, as was the degree of assistance and attention received from the outside world. In none of them, with the exception of Tunisia, can any revolution said to be complete. But unprecedented concessions were made in several of those countries; elsewhere, two dictators were forced to flee and then face criminal charges, and another was killed. And although Anonymous as a whole has since moved on to other things, many working within the movement have continued to assist, at least in small ways, with the ongoing campaigns by those in Syria and Bahrain who are working to move things forward in their own countries.

Anonymous itself was strengthened by the influx of competent activists from the Arab world and beyond, as well as others who had never considered activism an option before but who now saw it as worth considering. Those of us who had been telling the press that these revolts in Tunisia might be worth writing about - and who thereafter continued pestering them about what was about to go down in Tahrir - had now gained a degree of credibility that could be used as media leverage when the next big thing went down, as it would soon enough.

Our attention had already begun to shift by the end of January, when 40 Anons had their homes raided by the FBI and five others were detained in the U.K. in a joint operation that would mark the beginning of an international law enforcement response against Anonymous and its participants.