When I was a kid, I loved making prank calls. My friends and I would spend entire evenings drinking soda and rooting through the phone book, trying to come up with the most viable targets. 

Our idea of who did or did not constitute a viable target for a prank call would evolve as we grew more experienced and got a better feel for what worked and what didnt - what sort of institution you could call with what particular ploy in order to deceive the person on the other end and thereby prompt the most hilarious reaction. At least, that was the philosophy to which I and two other of my friends ascribed: that the best prank call was the one in which you tricked a stranger into doing or believing something. How else, we argued, could anything hilarious occur? 

But there was another friend of mine, this kid named Jordan, who disagreed. Instead of trying to think up convoluted scenarios, he would simply call up Dominos Pizza and say, in his best grown-up voice, that his name was Bobby Bone and he wanted to order penis pizza. Generally, the guy on the other end would just hang up, because it was clearly some stupid 12-year-old making a stupid prank call of the sort that stupids 12-year-olds make. The rest of us were not at all entertained, except by Jordans consistent use of the name of Bobby Bone, which he actually intended as a realistic pseudonym (and which he pronounced Boooooooone, stretching the o beyond all reason), and by his assumed voice, which he seemed to have modeled on a cross between an old money WASP and a flamboyantly gay Dracula. But the calls themselves yielded no real results. 

But then, none of our own calls were particularly successful, either - most of them resulted in hang-ups after about five or ten seconds, that being how long it takes the average person to realize that the caller is 12. Sure, we were putting real effort into it, but its not like we were yielding different results. So we had no justifiable reason to deny Jordan his turns at the phone, even if he was kind of a dumbass. 

One night, Jordan decided to call up a random residence from the white pages. Asking some homeowner for a penis pizza would have been a little abstract even for him, so he decided to come up with a new ploy, which he demonstrated to us when the answering machine picked up.

Helloooooo, Jordan said. This is Bobby Boooooone, with the Internal Revenue Service. Im calling to tell you that youre being audited. Call us back immeeeeeeediately.

And then Jordan hung up, perfectly satisfied with a prank that could not have conceivably fooled anyone.

The next afternoon, when all of us woke up, our friend had a message on his own answering machine. It turned out to be a cantankerous-sounding old man screeching, IRS! IRS over and over again with a sort of sarcastic intonation, as if to make clear that he had seen through the ruse of Bobby Bone, fake IRS agent. Apparently, the codger had dialed *69 - a newish feature that would call back the most recent incoming phone number - and settled for leaving a message when what he really wanted was a confrontation.

All of us were thrilled. Here, finally, was a reaction worth getting. Some crazy old man had actually gotten upset over some kid trying to trick him, and rather than just delete the message and move on with his life, he had gone so far as to seek out contact with the pre-adolescent perpetrator in order to let him know that he had seen through the whole plot. Oh, if only we had written down his number! We would have had Jordan calling him up every evening, leaving stupider and stupider messages in his gay WASP vampire voice, or even maybe getting the old man on the line so that we could listen to him scream at us.

Alas, we had no way of getting back in touch with him. And having Jordan call up other random phone numbers and say similarly idiotic things to other random homeowners and their answering machines never did reproduce those results. The limiting factor, it seemed, was actually locating a target who was sufficiently unstable that he would seek out a confrontation.

Thanks to the internet, that problem has since been solved. And those targets are now known within the chan culture as lolcows, being as that they give forth lulz just as reliably as a cow does milk.  

As the LA Fox segment famously noted, the term lulz is a corruption of lol. It can be used to denote amusement of any sort, but is often specifically associated with the delight that derives from the confusion or consternation and others. It can be mean-spirited, but it doesnt have to be. The same is true for trolling.

The term troll is much older and in more widespread usage than its counterpart lulz, which itself is often billed as something a troll seeks to generate by means of his trolling. Outside the chan culture, it tends to refer simply to someone who communicates on the internet with unproductive intent. Within the culture, it denotes a far richer variety of actions and purposes ranging from petty to profound - from prank calls to other, more significant undertakings.

To be a troll was both a badge of honor and ethically amorphous in terms of its end purpose - which is to say that honor could be achieved by anything, so long as that thing was done well. It could even be achieved by doing something that happened to be good. 

**

I had totally forgotten the IRS incident until one day in late December of 2006, when I came upon a thread at 7chans /i/ board. /i/ stood for invasion (the board was intended for organizing raids, and had become the preeminent venue for such things in the months since 4chans founder instituted a policy against any activity that could be legally construed as harassment). The fellow who had started the thread had done so to notify his comrades that a certain white supremacist radio personality and former political campaign adviser named Hal Turner was ending his streaming call-in program, ostensibly because he wasnt bringing in enough money from donations to make it worth his while - but hed be doing one last show that very evening. Pretty much everyone who had replied to the thread agreed that this was a splendid trolling opportunity. 

So did I. Although I didnt know much about Turner at the time, I was vaguely aware that he had been involved in a number of ridiculous public incidents in the past and that he was particularly fond of making violence-laden declarations on the air. It would be difficult to imagine a target more likely to respond in the lulzy and self-destructive manner that every good troll wants in exchange for his own efforts. 

***

Hi, youre on the Hal Turner Show. Who are you, where you calling from?

Hola, Im Pedro... Diego.

Uh huh. Is that right?

Hola, Hal. Aym calling to say... aye got me a job. Aye... aye peek onions... for a leeving. Aye like it, but its so hot outside. Aye dont like.

Why are you listening to this show? This is a show for white people. Youre not white.

Aym not white.

Then youre definitely not talking on the show. Get out of here, you spic.

In most situations, getting someone to denounce you as a spic over the air on his own radio show would constitute a massive troll victory. But this was a guy who handed out ethnic slurs like Halloween candy. 

Worse still, he was keeping his cool (again, relatively). And that was our fault. There is a certain methodology of trolling within Anon that seeks not to irritate the victim, but to talk to him in such a way as to use popular Anonymous memes without the person realizing it, to the delight of other Anons who happen to be listening in. Some memes are easier to drop into a natural conversation than others - over 9,000, which derives from a Japanese cartoon, can be thrown in with ease, whereas its usually difficult to announce that imma chargin my lazer without the other party realizing that something is up. (The most incredible instance of this game in action occurred in 2008, when an Anon decided to give it a shot on the official Oprah internet forum while the legitimate users were discussing child molesters. A few days later, Oprah herself addressed her television audience thusly: If you still dont understand what our children are up against, let me read you something that was posted on our message board by someone who claims to be a member of a pedophile network. He says he does not forgive, he does not forget, his group has over 9,000 penises and theyre all raping children. So I want you to know, theyre organized, and they have systematic ways of hurting children. The resulting sound clip served as raw material for several catchy remixes set to various electronic dance beats.)

After having fielded some large number of calls from young-sounding males whose anecdotes about the failings of blacks and Mexicans all seemed to include strange phrasing, and having also received a couple of calls that were clearly pranks, Turner started to get wise to the situation. But he handled himself reasonably well under the circumstances. Id already made my own call and felt little reason to go again. Bored and mildly disappointed, I turned off the stream and went to go do something else.

The next time I checked 7chan, there was once again a thread about Hal Turner. Apparently, he hadnt taken the flood of prank calls too well at all, and after having determined the source of them, had taken some retaliatory measures. Many of those who called had done so from landlines or cell phones, thus making them visible to Turner, who posted them on his website and bragged of this on his next broadcast. Perhaps his farewell show had merely been a bid for donations and publicity, or maybe the chance to do e-battle with a gang of online pranksters had renewed his waning vigor. Either way, our troll instincts had been correct after all - this was a man who could be drawn into fruitful conflict. 

Turners phone number, address, and other bits of private information were posted on dozens of venues, prompting hundreds of prank calls to his home. With the likely spurring of his wife - whose understandable irritability shone through in the various recordings that were produced from these calls - Turner took down the phone numbers of his original antagonists. By this point, though, he had gained thousands more, none of whom had any interest in tamping down a conflict with such obvious promise. And then his website was hit with a distributed denial of service attack, costing Turner some considerable sum due to a setup whereby he had to pay his provider for hits to his site - and the nature of a DDOS attack is such that the hundreds of thousands of page requests entailed are perceived as hits, and draw upon the same resources as would be required if those page requests were legitimate attempts by real people to enjoy the offerings of, say, Hal Turners website.

Turner brought colleague Artie Wheeler on to his show to assist him in mocking his adversaries; Wheeler had been looking at Encyclopedia Dramatica, where Turners wacky behavior was being continually documented, and sympathetically explained to the host that the encyclopedia outfit you mentioned is a FAG encyclopedia company. They are FAGGERY DAGGERY DOO! A new and fantastic meme was born. 

Turner wasnt finished quite yet. He claimed to have reached out to some fellow white nationalists who had tracked down one of the 7chan raiders and beaten the kid to a pulp; as evidence, he posted a picture of a teenage boy with a bloodied face. Back on 7chan, this picture was quickly shown to have been taken several years earlier in another context entirely; it was among the first results if one searched Google images with the term bloody face. Turner reconfigured his website so that it would lead to a page with text to the effect that the user was being re-directed to the FBI; this barely required a refutation. Turner claimed that he was being extorted; that the e-mail addresses and passwords of his subscribers were being used by 7chan for nefarious purposes after having been hacked from his site; that 7chan had contacted his data provider, claiming to be him, and had asked for his server to be rebooted; that he had received death threats; that 7chan had burned down his mothers home. All of this was duly recorded at Encylopedia Dramatica, which by this time had become not just a chronicler of chan activity, but also one of our most important weapons. 

Unsurprisingly, Turners natural constituency - white supremacists frequenting message boards such as Stormfront and belonging to organizations like National Vanguard - were gotten increasingly irritated with Turners behavior, particularly those portions of his behavior that entailed getting caught in repeated lies and otherwise discrediting the entire hooray-for-honkey movement of which he was an unfortunately prominent representative.  Turner probably couldn't help but be aware of the downward swing in his hard-earned popularity, and so when 7chan.org suddenly disappeared for a few days - redirecting in the meanwhile to another page that purported to be something on the order of law enforcement - he proudly proclaimed that he himself had been 7chan's undoing, and that his antagonists had indeed been defeated forever.

And then 7chan.org came back up, functioning as usual. At the top, there was a message from the site's administrators which read as follows:

As many of you know, a certain "raid" that was started here has gained lots of attention over the past few weeks. This "raid", targeted at Hal Turner of Hal Turner Radio, was actually a plan that was devised by Buri-chan, former 7chan admin, and Hal Turner himself. The details of the plan are that 7chan offered Hal Turner notoriety with the *chan communities [as most of them are filled with white supremacists anyway], and, unknown to us, donations, in exchange for an extra server to ease the pressure on our current, overtaxed servers.

As the community is open to pretty much any type of discussion, we couldn't exactly stop this so-called raid from happening, so we decided to play along. Couldn't hurt, right?

What we didn't count on was the few "out of the loop" raiders attacking other sites, such as Bill White's [aka overthrow.com owner]. Apparently, Bill White took offense and ordered his own fans [ps3 hueg numbers] to take down our site, which, as you know, has happened.

Apologies to all parties unintentionally harmed by this mixup. We are no longer in this with Hal [since, apparently, this is a scam on his part, since he received over $1,000 in donations].

-Matt

Now, the white supremacists were infuriated. Turner could never be trusted again. 

Of course, there had been no such agreement. The post by the 7chan admins was a disinfo operation intended to finish Turner off, to the extent that any such person can really be "finished off." And aside from making Turner look bad in front of the other crackerjacks, the post had the effect of alienating those of 7chan's readers and posters who didn't immediately see it for what it was. This was a fine thing because such people would now get upset and leave.

But things weren't over quite yet. Because Turner wasn't lying when he claimed that his computers and e-mail accounts had been infiltrated by hackers associated with 7chan. And among those e-mails was found correspondence between himself and his FBI handler, and these were eventually posted online.

Turner had served as an FBI informant for a number of years, likely providing the law enforcement agency with tips on individuals who were likely to commit violent acts. This was confirmed a few years later, when Turner was arrested and charged with incitement to injury after having called upon his listeners to go after several judges and politicians. When the allegations regarding  were first made, Turner denied them in the strongest possible terms. At such time as he found himself facing a prison sentence, his lawyer provided the court with documents proving this relationship and summarized it all thusly:

My client was trained by the FBI as an agent provocateur. He was told where the line was  what he could say. His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest.

Various documents to this effect were produced by the defense, confirming a log yet strained relationship in which Turner would throw the FBI some actual criminals every once in a while and the FBI would agree not to kill any prominent rappers and frame Turner for the deed (or something to that effect; I didnt really follow the case). But none of this saved Turner from being sentenced to 33 months in prison for inciting to violence. The FBI has never publicly commented on the matter.

***

As Turner himself would eventually note, My entire existence - short of my physical presence on this planet - has been utterly wrecked, by people I never met from places Ive never been.

The Hal Turner affair would serve as something of a prototype for the methods by which Anonymous would conduct its future conflicts, even as their scope expanded and their opponents increased in stature. But beyond all that, there is something else in all of this that contributed more than any other factor to the change in circumstances. 

When Anonymous was seen going after a prominent racist, many got the idea that it was a force for good. A protest organized by Anons in front of Hal Turner's residence purely for the sake of fucking with the guy further was heavily attended by members of several anti-racist organizations who believed that they were joining a crusade against hate. What they didn't realize was that the individuals who began the crusade did so for entirely non-ideological reasons having nothing to do with opposition to racism and everything to do with something else entirely.

And how were these anti-racist activists to know? There was, after all, no easy or surefire method by which to discern what Anonymous is, what it is doing, of who it is composed, what the personal and political agendas of those people might be, and whether or not these agendas can even be said to be political. 

When articles and message board postings started to appear across the internet proclaiming that a heroic group of internet denizens had taken on one of the nations most prominent white nationalists and driven him to insanity, and that this had been done out out of entirely noble inclinations, many within Anon were scandalized. They were even further scandalized when other reports began to appear regarding the fine work Anonymous had done of identifying child predators and reporting them to the police. After having spent several years building a collective reputation as the internet hate machine, a great number of people who wallowed in their own bad character were now being depicted as heroic defenders of minorities and children. This was very upsetting to such people.

But there were others within the Anonymous culture who considered all of this to be a hilarious development, and sought to troll these more committed trolls by encouraging the false narrative. Whenever some online article appeared to the effect that Anonymous was a force for good, the comments section would consist of angry denials that Anonymous is a force for good (written by the scandalized trolls) alternating with pleasant reaffirmations of Anonymous inherent goodness (written by people like me) and much angrier denials (again, from the uber trolls). 

I dont recall having ever suspected in those days that Anonymous might someday become a force for good, or that the false perception that some of us were encouraging for fun would help contribute to this. Maybe I should have. After all, in the absence of any regulations or mission statements or constitutions or membership rosters, an entity can become anything.

This is doubly true when that entity defines itself largely in terms of trolling - which, as we had all seen for ourselves, can indeed be used for good.  

***

About a year after 4chan banned the practice of raiding, 7chan's raid board was likewise shut down over similar concerns of legal liability. Other, lesser-known chans rose and fell, but no single one of them managed to attract the same relatively large number of trolling practitioners that 7chan had in its heyday. An ever-migrating population of online barbarians moved to and fro across the net, launching raids from where they could and sarcastically recording their plight on Encyclopedia Dramatica. Some large number of them, including myself, eventually found a homeland at an IRC server called Partyvan.

It was January of 2008, and I was in a fine mood. The prison stint was behind me, work was going well, I had a fridge full of Pepsi in the little plastic bottles I like, and I wasnt so busy with coding that I couldnt spend some quality time with my precious internet. I had about a dozen tabs open on my web browser - tech news feeds, regular news feeds, an Encyclopedia Dramatica article detailing how the authors had taken over someones MySpace account and sent out a creepy romantic overture to several hundred random females, and /b/. I had a my IRC client up and tuned to a couple of different servers, including Partyvan.

Having such a variety of informational junk food at my fingertips, I wasnt paying much attention to the IRC proceedings until someone posted a YouTube link of what they described as having something to do with both Scientology and Tom Cruise. That sounded like a winning combination to me, so I clicked the link.

The video link was compiled of clips from a sit-down with Cruise, whom I already knew to be the Church of Scientologys most prominent adherent. And here he was, giving an increasingly surreal monologue on the Church and its glories.

I think its a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist. Its something you have to earn. Because a Scientologist does.

Oh, this is good stuff.

He... or she... has the ability to create new and better realities and to improve conditions. Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them.

Jesus.

So for me, it really is KSW.

Thats probably some sort of wacky Scientology acronym. Kaleidoscope Sans Wormhole.

Its something - I dont mince words with that. With anything!

(The next 30 seconds or so is difficult to transcribe as Cruises monologue becomes heavily dependent on these little noises he makes, like whooo, phoo and hzt-pha. Then things get more coherent, relatively.)

When you drive past an accident, its not like anyone else. As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it, because you know youre the only one who can really help!

Magnificent.

Orgs are there to help, okay, but we as, as else with the public, we have a responsibility, its not just the orgs, its not just Dave Muscaivage, its not just, its not just me, its you, its everyone out there, just re-reading KSW and seeing what needs to be done, and say, Okay! Am I gonna do it or am I not gonna do it? Period! And am I gonna look at that guy or am I too afraid because I have my own out ethics to put in someone elses ethics? And thats all it comes down to. Because I wont hesitate to put ethics into someone else. Because I put it ruthlessly in on myself.

Solid fucking gold.

We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the authorities on improving conditions. Crimanon. We can rehabilitate criminals. Way to happiness. We can bring peace, and, uh, unite cultures.

Holy shit.

Because now is the time. Now is the time, okay? It is - being a Scientologist, people are turning to you. So you better know it. You better know it. And if you dont - you know - go and learn it! [Laughs] You know? But dont pretend you know it, for, whatever. Its like, were here to help. 

And then it just goes on like that. 

I switched back to Partyvan. Everyone was talking about the video. It was already a hit. Over the next few hours, people kept posting the link for the benefit of those who were just coming in or hadnt been paying attention - until finally, one of the newcomers noted that video wasnt there.

I went to the link again. It took me to YouTube, but there was no video. Instead, at the top of the page, there was a line of text noting that the video had been removed due to a Digital Millenium Copyright Act notification by the Church of Scientology.

**

The Church of Scientology and the internet had something of a history. Back in the mid-90s, when Usenet message boards were still the rage, the organizations lawyers had pursued legal action against one particular board, alt.religion.scientology. This came after someone had posted documents that the Churchs lawyers claimed to be trade secrets. Among other things, those documents spelled out the pseudo-secret doctrine taught to members only after theyd reach a certain level within the Church. And although this doctrine had been leaked before, it wasnt commonly known - at least, not yet.

A funny thing happens when an attempt is made to forbid access to online information. Rather than preventing exposure, such an act tends to guarantee it.

This phenomenon is now commonly referred to as the Streisand effect. In 2003, Barbara Streisand got upset over pictures of her beachfront residence having been posted on some obscure corner of the internet as part of a web-based project documenting coastal erosion. So she got her lawyers involved. By the time the ensuing case was dismissed a few months later, hundreds of thousands of people had viewed this entirely innocuous picture after having learned of the dispute from media reports and online gossip. Prior to all of that, the picture had been accessed exactly four times.

The Church of Scientology didnt have much more luck than Barbara Streisands attorneys did in suppressing the info they wanted suppressed. The Churchs secret doctrines were freely distributed from a number of venues after 1995. Whats more, Scientology had made itself a lot of enemies and done a significant degree of damage to its public image. Of course, they didnt get a whole effect named after them, like poor Barbara Streisand did. But they did face one significant problem that Streisand didnt. Whereas the picture of the beachfront property didnt damage Streisand simply by getting out, the semi-secret doctrines that Scientology hoped to censor were a bit more problematic by virtue of being insane. 

**

The Church of Scientology had no legal basis for prompting YouTube to take down the Tom Cruise clip. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) allows an entity to file a takedown notice only on copyrighted clips of more than ten minutes long. The Cruise clip was only nine minutes long. But the semi-automated manner by which YouTube handles those notices provides for a shoot first, ask questions later sort of setup that certain people - particularly the sort of people who are willing to do legal representation for Scientology - are happy to take advantage of. Its quick and easy, requiring only that a short form be filled out and submitted to YouTube. And then, poof! The offending information is gone.

Back in Partyvan, those of us who were inclined to pursue this matter were gathering info. The clip had come from a former Scientologist who sought to expose the organizations more bizarre and malicious side, and derived from a two-hour DVD set that seemed to have been provided to some members. And that clip was still floating around - it just wasnt easily accessible to the public, as anyone who tried to post it on YouTube would quickly see it shot right down via DCMA. Scientologys legal team was clearly on the case, and they had quite a bit of experience in keeping their employers out of trouble.

Well, we had quite a bit of experience in causing trouble. A few people split off from the main channel and created a new one, named Xenu for the evil galactic dictator who plays a huge role in Scientologys pseudo-theology - the same classified doctrine that the Church had been so adamant about keeping from the public lest potential customers be disinclined from getting involved in a corporate cult that likes to bill itself as something else entirely.

When I joined Xenu, there were only five people. But we had access to plenty of other trolls with varied talents; it was merely a matter of recruiting them. So someone would go into Partyvans main channel, where a couple hundred were logged in at any given time, and invite everyone to join us in Xenu for the purpose of fucking with Scientology. So as people came in and out of the channel, bringing with them updates and ideas, we discussed how best to approach the situation. Clearly part of the response would involve us posting the Tom Cruise video ourselves, which we began to do. There was a good deal of talk about how efficient Scientology's lawyers appeared to be, and how quickly they managed to locate and DMCA the video each time we posted it on YouTube. We discussed how to best edit copies of the clip in such a way as to make it more difficult for those lawyers to find them; adding black space and other random material to the end before posting them solved the problem of YouTube preventing the upload of duplicate clips en masse, but somehow they were always found and promptly DMCA'd by the legal folks. Periodically we gathered for short and scattered debates on tactics, timing, and a dozen other considerations. But no one spoke of activism. The goal was to piss off Scientologists, because pissed-off Scientologists are even more amusing than the regular sort. No other justification was necessary. 

Finally, the video found a permanent home. Over the past few days, Gawker had been embedding the YouTube versions of the video on its front page; each time the particular clip from which the outlet had embedded was taken down, Gawker would quickly re-embed using the next version that was posted thereafter. Finally, Gawker founder Nick Denton decided to go for the gusto, uploading a clip to the company's own servers, embedding it once again on the main page, and posting a message to the effect that Gawker would not take the clip down for any reason unless the FBI itself came to seize its server.

Shortly after Gawker made its move, someone posted a new page on Encyclopedia Dramatica. This entry, titled Project Chanology, chronicled the events of the past few days and provided basic information for the use of Anons, some of whom were now declaring war on the Church of Scientology. Between an already-notorious cult's attempts to censor a wacky video featuring a major star and the growing efforts by participants in a similarly-notorious non-group to screw with that church as a result, the media had quite understandably begun paying attention. Anderson Cooper at CNN, who covered the growing conflict early on, did a fine job of explaining a relatively inexplicable situation. But most journalists were still at something of a loss.

Xenu, meanwhile, had expanded to include about 150 people. This was as advantage in terms of our access to raw talents but a disadvantage in terms of organization. Then someone new showed up and suggested that a press release should be written so that the media could be better informed as to why all of this was going down.

A couple of us took his suggestion to heart and started a new channel called Press. There were about eight people, including myself - and minus the guy who had suggested press release, who disappeared - but not a single one of us had any real idea as to how to write a press release.
So we took a look at sites like PR.com. 

So, let's see, you put 'For Immediate Release' at the top, then I guess the date, then... 'Anonymous'? We got the gist of the format, and then a few of us started collaborating on what it was that we wanted to say, exactly. A few paragraphs in, someone noted that we had so far read more like a voiceover to a video than it did a traditional press release. We could have started over. Instead, we completed it with the intention of turning it into a voiceover. And then we went about making a video.

Some of us scoured archive.org and other sites for free music and a video background. The track we ended up with was suitably ominous, whereas the video clip itself  clouds quickly rolling through the sky above a modern glass office building  would have been as non-threatening as can be were it not for the track and, of course, the message, itself read by a text-to-speech bot and the gist of it all being that a mysterious and far-flung collective of vindictive trolls was threatening to destroy a word-spanning institution.

That message read as follows:

Hello, Scientology. We are Anonymous.

Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; suppression of
dissent; your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who trust you, who call you leader, has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind--for the laughs--we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. We acknowledge you as a serious opponent, and we are prepared for a long, long campaign. You will not prevail forever against the angry masses of the body politic. Your methods, hypocrisy, and the artlessness of your organization have sounded its death knell.

You cannot hide; we are everywhere.

We cannot die; we are forever. We're getting bigger every day--and solely by the force of our ideas, malicious and hostile as they often are. If you want another name for your opponent, then call us Legion, for we are many.

Yet for all that we are not as monstrous as you are; still our methods are a parallel to your own.

Doubtless you will use the Anon's actions as an example of the persecution you have so long warned your followers would come; this is acceptable. In fact, it is encouraged. We are your SPs. Gradually as we merge our pulse with that of your "Church", the suppression of your followers will become increasingly difficult to maintain. Believers will wake, and see that salvation has no price. They will know that the stress, the frustration that they feel is not something that may be blamed upon Anonymous. No--they will see that it stems from a source far closer to each. Yes, we are SPs. But the sum of suppression we could ever muster is eclipsed by that of the RTC.

Knowledge is free.

We are Anonymous.

We are Legion.

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

Expect us.

We were pretty satisfied with the whole thing, which we uploaded to YouTube under an account we created called Church0fScientology. Happy with our work, we put up a couple more links on 4chan while also distributing instructions on joining an IRC server for those interested in getting the truth out about how the Church operates. With luck, we figured, the video might receive several hundred views and perhaps a few hundred Anons would assist in whatever actions we decided to take. One of those involved predicted that this video we'd just made would receive widespread media attention, that it would in fact forever change the way global action was taken by the public. We told him to shut the fuck up and stop talking nonsense.

The next day, I was running some errand when I got a call from my then-girlfriend, who had been
keeping an eye on the IRC server from which we had been operating.

You need to go home, she told me.

I'll be back in a little while. I've got

No. You need to go home now.

I sped back to my apartment and tried to log on to Partyvan. I couldn't get in. I tried again. Still no access. Finally, after an hour of login attempts, I managed to eek my way on  as had tens of thousands of other people who had seen the video and subsequently come to the channel which we'd listed at the end of video. And many of those people were trying to talk at once, with the effect being that anything anyone typed would shoot past the top of the screen within a fourth of a second of being posted as some hundred others likewise tried to get their messages across.

It took me a few minutes, but I figured out what had happened. Our video, rather than attracting
dozens, had already been viewed over 100,000 times. The next day, Gawker would embed it on their own server along with the Tom Cruise clip, prompting another huge wave of participants as other outlets filed suit and the phenomenon of the viral video acted its unpredictable magic. CNN aired it, generating even greater interest - and more questions.Those of us who had made the video, and particularly the fellow who had correctly gauged its impact, were now glowing with that brand of triumph one is lucky to experience a few times in one's life, if ever, and this feeling continued for the several glorious minutes that passed until we started getting bitched at by the server's regulars over what we had done.

WHAT DA FUCK WHY DID YOU BRING A MILLION NEWBS HERE, read one of dozens
of messages I received soon after logging on, from various Partyvan regulars who knew what we had been up to.

The server was indeed in a state of chaos. Hardware struggled, repeatedly and often unsuccessfully, to contend with thousands of unexpected volunteers in an entirely disorganized cyberwar; even when the server wasn't crashing and regulars could get on to their favorite channels, they often found themselves contending with dozens of those new folks who had managed to leave our channel to explore others  and to ask questions that the regulars
found irritating. It didn't help that many of the regulars were particularly irritable, and in some cases proudly mean-spirited. We were told to take our horde of newfags and get the fuck off PartyVan IRC.

So we searched for another server, which wasn't easy insomuch as that few admins were interested in accommodating countless thousands of new users, many of whom had no experience with IRC. Finally we found one that would allow us and our makeshift internet legion to dwell on his own server, a welcome setup that lasted all of two hours before we were thrown out again. Thankfully, the folks who ran PartyVan had a change of heart, perhaps having realized the pure trolling potential locked up in thousands of people who, for whatever variety of reasons, were ready to attack the Church. We moved back to our original server and set about the complicated task of managing the online army that we had accidentally summoned.

Our little core group of less than a dozen people - those of us who had been working out of Xenu early on and who had thereafter engineered the Message to Scientology video, plus a couple of others who had proven themselves useful - needed a place where we could continue our efforts in relative peace, away from the streams of text that come with hundreds or thousands of people all sitting in one channel. By this point, we had a sense of each others abilities and resources, and each of us knew that each other person was committed to doing... whatever it was that we were doing. Plus, Partyvans moderators expected us to come up with a way by which to handle the perpetual flood of newcomers that we had brought on to their server. 

So we made a new channel. Technically, it was open to anyone who knew it existed and wanted to enter - but it wasnt advertised in other channels or otherwise made known. If one were to pull up a list of the channels that existed on the server, one could have seen it there, along with dozens of others - but there was little reason to visit. It was called marblecake, after a dessert that a girl from our little group happened to be eating at the time. 

***

Excuse me, but what the fuck are you doing? came the question from the ether.

Lol wut I responded.

Why are you guys doing this?

The number of private messages one gets from strangers on IRC is a function of how well you are known. Word was getting out about our little crew and our adventures thus far, and now I was starting to get inquiries. Most I didnt bother responding to, unless it was from someone I happened to know, either personally or by reputation. But when I got this one, I had been up for two days straight. And I suddenly felt the need to explain myself.

I dont keep logs of IRC conversations. And when someone has thousands of them over a period of years, one tends to forget all but a very few. But I remember the gist of what followed.
Mostly I remember that I hadnt even really thought about my motivations at this point. I mean, it all started as a troll - which is to say that it started as a novel and amusing way to kill time by causing problems for an institution. But things had gotten complicated in the days that followed.

Id already known that Scientology is a scam - that it charges an ever-increasing amount of money for its services; that it makes bizarre and unfounded claims; that founder El Ron Hubbard was a con man with a largely made-up biography; and, of course, that the church has a tendency towards malicious litigation and a fondness for censorship. Lately, Id learned more.

Some of the people who had come into the IRC, or who had sent messages to us via the YouTube account wed set up to post the original video, had formerly been Scientologists, or had loved ones who had been Scientologists. Its hard to get through to someone like me - someone who had spent his life not giving a shit because it was clearly dangerous to do so, and who had lately adopted a subculture in which not giving a shit was the standard of value. The stories I was told - child labor camps, forced separation of family members, widespread psychological torture - were enough to get through to me, at least partly. They were unbelievable, but they could be verified. The evidence was there, and in some cases these things had even been reported on. They just werent common knowledge. Scientologys army of lawyers and public relations people and media handlers were there, in large part, to ensure that such things dont become common knowledge. And its easy to keep things from getting out when most people just dont give a fuck. I didnt want to be one of those people any more.

Anyway, it wasnt easy to be one of those people anymore, not when so many others were coming in to the IRC server because they wanted to use their spare time to fight something that they knew to be wrong. Most of them had no personal grievances against Scientology - it hadnt wronged them or anyone they knew personally. But they wanted to help do something about it, because it represented something they despised. Among our Anons, meanwhile, there were many who were intrinsically opposed to any form of censorship. 

Of course, there were other Anons who were still where I had been not long before - people who just wanted to tear shit up. Well, so be it.

This, more or less, is what I told the stranger who asked me why we were doing what we were doing. But apparently I had misunderstood her question, because after I had talked for a while - typing it out line by line as it came to me, and mildly surprising myself at what I had written because I knew it to be true - she stopped me and said that what she had actually wanted to know was why we had created a channel from which we were clearly intending to run the growing operation, away from prying eyes. Some unknown number of people already knew about it, and many of these were offended that we would aspire to anything resembling a leadership role within any portion of Anonymous. This girl was among them. I told her that I could only care about so many things at once.

***

What happened in Marblecake could be described as leadership. It can even be denounced as leadership, and has been, quite a number of times. At that early point, though, few people within Anonymous even knew about it, as was our intent. In our view, we had the right to work together and to choose who was going to be privy to what we were up to. In the view of the channel operators and others who were still dealing with the constant stream of new people, we had the responsibility to fix the mess wed created.

Soon, one of us - a fellow who went by the user name of antihero - proposed a solution to that particular problem. We would set up an IRC bot that would prompt the user, upon logging on, to go to a channel named after the city nearest to him or her (London, Chicago, Moscow, and others were given as examples). Now, instead of thousands of people being unable to communicate efficiently in a single channel, those thousands were now self-segregating by region, with each channel holding somewhere between ten and a few hundred people.

Another guy who had been with us - a fellow who desperately wanted to be of use but had been unable to contribute anything to the process thus far - was deployed to assess the new situation. A while later, he returned and noted that the server now held 143 new channels, each for a single city, with 42 countries represented altogether; he also made up a list of these, and was thereafter charged with maintaining it. 

But what to do with all of these people? We had no fucking idea, at least until one of us came across a video of someone standing outside of a Scientology center with a boom box held above her head, dancing and otherwise drawing attention to herself in order that she might tell onlookers about the Church's deficits.

At once, we knew what had to be done. Now we faced the problem of ensuring that the assembled multitudes would do it.

We had other problems, too. The majority of those who had logged in had no knowledge of or experience with Anonymous culture  a culture in which the term fag is thrown around both as an insult and as a term of endearment (and as a suffix - Britfags, Amerifags, and even straightfags identify as such); a culture in which no joke is considered to be in poor taste; and in which a hundred memes and linguistic corruptions comprise what now amounted to a common language, inscrutable from the outside. 

Of course, even if every participant had been an Anon oldfag - someone who has been involved in the culture long enough to know the origins of some of its earliest memes  conflict would have arisen anyway. Certainly there were many Anons who thought in the same terms as I, and were coming to the same conclusions about how we should proceed; there were also quite a few who had predated us in hoping to see all of this do some good. Those who viewed such a possibility as blasphemy against a culture that had previously been known for chaotic entertainment at the expense of others were, of course, unhappy with the prospect; as the campaign against Scientology gradually took on a benevolent flavor, many Anons actively worked to make things difficult for us, the moralfags.

But here and now, we knew that if we were going to direct this unprecedented constituency into a cohesive force with anything close to a single direction  something capable of working effectively  we would need some way by which to exert influence over each and every channel without spreading ourselves thin. 

The problem of delegation was something with which Id had some experience, having worked out of IRC channels years before while trying to better organize the warez networks. This was a larger problem, and structured somewhat differently, but the solution in this case wasnt difficult to come by. In every channel, theres going to be someone whos leading the conversation, someone whos accumulated at least some portion of social capital. It doesnt take long to identify that person; you just have to watch the channel long enough to get a sense of the dynamics. Its not an exact science; maybe the best person for the job is laying low at the time you happen to be watching. Maybe the guy you pick ends up being prone to drama. But youre not appointing a Senator to fill in for the remainder of someones term; the person will have no real authority over anything. And If your ideas are sound, the job wont be that hard - as the job, in this case, is to push your ideas.
 
As we picked each channel leader, we would private message them and tell them to join us in Marblecake. Usually the orientation fell on me; I had experience with that, too - again, from my warez days, back when I had to convince people at various tech firms to hop on board the piracy train. Here, I would explain the plan, and ask them to promote it back in their respective city-designated channels. Tell them that people are planning to organize demonstrations in front of Scientology centers in all of these cities, all on the same day. Its going to be nice and effective if we can get everyone in on this. And we can. But, uh, dont tell them how. The last thing we needed was for our suggestion to take the apparent form of a directive from some secret cyber-chamber. 

Of course, we werent really in control of anyone, which is why the various actions taken against Scientology took so many forms. There were other little groups of people scattered among Anon who had their own ideas and either carried them out themselves or encouraged others to do them. Some organized DDOS attacks on Scientologys websites, denying them one avenue by which to sell their goods and also creating a very novel media event which in turn sparked more attention in what was going on and why (Hal Turner had been dealt with likewise, but the press generally had no way of knowing). Others managed to secure various Church documents through hacking and whatnot, afterwards disseminating them by a number of means. Other tactics were discussed, argued over, and adopted in the Partyvan channels as well as other venues. 

All of that was well and good, but Marblecake was committed to getting these protests off the ground. And with over a hundred leaders having been recruited to represent us in over a hundred channels representing over a hundred major cities, we now had in place a system that could make it happen. We also had the YouTube account wed set up - our Message to Scientology video had received well over a million hits already - and so we also had the option of making another video that would be recognized as having come from the same source. So another script was written, this time spelling out our intention to launch a massive protest campaign, to be held in cities across the globe, each beginning at 10:00 am, February 10, 2008. 

Now, we just had to see if people would actually turn out. If they did, it would be an unprecedented opportunity to bring attention to the truth about a global cult. If they didnt, it would be a massive public failure for a movement that had barely begun. And Anons werent really know for spending time outside.

***

A week before the protests, someone new appeared in Marblecake. This wasnt too out of the ordinary; there were a number of people, particularly journalists wed spoke to, who by this time knew where the organization of the upcoming protests was taking place, even if most didnt know what IRC was or how to get on; any reporter who sent an e-mail to the account wed set up would receive an answer from a nameless person, either myself or another fellow. But this guy wasnt a journalist. He was with Greenpeace, the environmental activist group.

Whos in charge here? he asked.

Someone explained to him that Anonymous wasnt really like that, that its a collective without structure or titles or authority, that-

Whatever. Whos running these protests?

Well, we kind of were. 

I want to give you guys some hints about things you probably havent considered.

And he proceeded to do just that. He noted that we were sending people out to the front lines, so to speak - people who will have mostly never protested before in their lives. We would have to give them some rules to follow.

We told him we couldnt really make any rules, much less enforce them. Perhaps we could put out some sort of code of conduct, though; if we could get people out on the streets, we could probably convince them to listen to reason as well. Assuming the reason was reasonable.

Tell people not to throw bricks through windows, he wrote.

Well, that was reasonable.

No matter what the cops do, be nice to them.

Whys that?

So that they dont start arresting people for the stupid little things that they have the option of arresting people for. Things that are always going to happen, like people stepping out onto the street because the sidewalk is packed. Things like that.

Clearly this guy was worth listening to. He made suggestions as to what not to bring - nothing that could be conceivably used as a weapon, or anything that could either be mistaken for one or just mistaken for one by a dishonest cop whos had his feelings hurt. Dont even bring pocket knives. We made notes, wrote up a text file made up of 22 different tips, and put it out as the third video. 

But the Greenpeace guy wasnt through yet. 

The Scientology people - they have a navy, right?

We confirmed that they had a couple of ships, and one notorious cruise ship in particular - good for sailing into international waters where various child labor laws wouldnt cramp their good time.

You want us to go blockade them, surround them with boats? Weve got plenty of boats, and guns, just in case.

What? No, thats probably-

We could blockade them at a port. We just crowd in the boats so that they cant get out.

We probably dont want to get into any of that. But thanks for the offer.

This was only the first of many bizarre offers that I and others would receive throughout our careers as online activists. Some of them were accepted, and turned out to be useful.

There was one particular suggestion that we decided upon ourselves, and which bears explanation. We were familiar by this time with Scientologys tendency to identify, track, and retaliate against those who opposed them (and we would learn more about it soon). Photographs were often taken of the many protesters who had passed out fliers and whatnot near the grounds of Scientology centers. Those who showed up at protests were going to need to hide their identities as best they could. And they were going to have to wear masks.

There was a great deal of discussion about the matter. Surely we should advise people to wear masks, but was there somewhere else we could take this? A mask can hide ones identity, but it can also serve other functions. Besides that, we were still committed to lulz.

A while back, someone at 4chan had started posting a series of short, crudely-drawn cartoons about a stick figure called Epic Fail Guy who got into various mundane non-adventures in which he was forever failing. In one of these, he found a mask in a trash can - a Guy Fawkes mask that had come back into popular recognition due to the movie V for Vendetta, which itself stemmed from an earlier graphic novel. Epic Fail Guy continued to wear the mask thereafter. Now, these masks were now being sold by Warner Brothers, which owned the film. After having considered our options, we determined that no other particular mask was as ubiquitously available as this one, and of course they could be ordered over the internet as well. Being associated with 4chan and being the most practical option, we decided to encourage people to wear the Guy Fawkes masks if they could, and put forth the suggestion in the Call to Arms video. 

The masks would soon become one of Anonymous most iconic features, being bought by the tens of thousands by moralfags such as ourselves. Later, Warner Brothers would become one of Anonymous most consistent enemies by virtue of the copyright wars that were soon to come, and here we had engineered a nice little revenue stream for the company. 

Activism is complicated.

**

Speaking of epic failures, it wasnt until the day before the protests that we realized that the protests were already going on.

When wed set them all for February 10th, 10:00 am, wed totally forgotten about time zones. It was incredibly stupid of us. But we didnt have time to dwell on that - it was tomorrow in New Zealand and Australia.

Dude, we can see into the future! said someone.

Shut the fuck up, said someone else.

Each of us in Marblecake scrambled across the net, checking YouTube and news sites and IRC channels and other, more obscure venues, trying to determine if anyone had showed up in the first cities. And they had.

There was a video up from the protest in Sydney, held in front of the local Scientology . 10 minutes into the protest, there were already 50 people. An hour later, there were 150.

Other reports started coming in, along with videos that people had uploaded at nearby internet cafes; this was before the 3G phone and more or less instant streaming capability). Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide - each had upwards of 250 people present. We had been hoping for at least ten at each one. 

The videos that appeared up were amazing. The people were excited to be there, to be taking part in something new and big and different. They were having fun. Some wore the Guy Fawkes masks, others wore ski masks, others chose to show their faces. There were signs pointing out Scientologys various deficits, people were passing out fliers, motorists were honking, protesters were giving interviews. It was all a great burst of productivity, done in service to a movement that barely existed as such, and which some of us had only recently come to believe in. Thats exactly what made it promising - not just in terms of what could be done with this campaign, but on other fronts as well.

But still, we knew that Scientology had a considerable presence in Australia, and could thus be expected to attract considerable opposition. It could be a regional fluke.

A video from the Japan protest was found. There was one lonely protester, holding a sign and passing out fliers. Yep, Australia had been a fluke. Or maybe Japan just wasnt the kind of place where people did weird things? Except for, you know, all the weird things that Japanese people did? We debated the point for a while. The general consensus was that nothing was assured, and that we had to be ready to attend our own protests, even at the risk of ending up like that poor Japanese guy who had nonetheless stuck around, brave enough to act alone. We all got some sleep.

In the morning, our hopes were confirmed. Protests had come off successfully in several dozen other cities as 10:00 am struck across the globe. Hundreds had turned out at each one, and the couple of clips I had time to view were practically indistinguishable from those made in Australia and New Zealand. It was time for me to drive to downtown Boston, where several hundred more showed up in front of the citys own Scientology center. Many of them were dancing.
As the events winded down in each city, each of the channel representatives carried out the latest instruction we had given them - something we had worked out after having talked to the splendid Greenpeace fellow. He had advised us to ensure that every event ended with something for the protesters to look forward to, to capitalize on the energy that comes with a successful mass action and leverage it so as to carry the campaign further. And so we had already decided that, if the protests were a success, we would invite the attendees to come to yet another one, one for which the date had already been chosen - the upcoming birthday of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. It was to be called Party Hard; participants were advised to bring birthday cakes and wear party hats; the weirder and more inexplicable, the better to ensure that passerby ask questions and that protesters have a chance to answer them. All of these ideas were likewise presented at the Chanology page on Encyclopedia Dramatica, the chans, and at other scattered online venues.

Altogether, the first round of protests had brought out well over 10,000 people in some 143 cities. It couldnt help but spawn countless media reports which were of course obligated to say a few words about why so many people were hanging out in front of buildings wearing masks and shouting memes and distributing leaflets, and what those leaflets said, and why these people cared enough to say it, and what this all might mean.

***

As well-suited as Anonymous turned out to be to launching a multi-front attack on the Church of Scientology, the Church itself was no slouch in unconventional civic warfare; this was, after all, the same organization that coined the term fair game to refer to its policy of dealing with critics by any means necessary, and which back in the '70s had managed to infiltrate a staggering 136 U.S. government agencies in an effort to better position itself against its enemies. That operation, which had been code named Snow White, led to the arrest and conviction of Hubbards wife and several other church officials.

Giving a complete rundown of the reasons why Scientology hardly qualifies as a church would be difficult; suffice to say that the practice of Church operatives photographing those who showed up at protests is only one of the many unconventionally creepy habits with which a detractor must contend. But it was central to the Churchs overall response to our campaign.
Those who were successfully identified - sometimes from license plate numbers of cars that had been driven to and from protests, and thereafter followed in some cases - tended to receive threatening letters from the Church's attorneys. A few were actually taken to civil court. I was one of them.

In the seven months or so since our campaign began, several of us had continued to operate out of Marblecake, coordinating further activities with other parties with which we were in contact and helping to organize the protests that were still going strong. Here, we could work together outside the scrutiny of internet-savvy Church operatives, as well as those Anons who were unhappy with the activist direction in which the movement was suddenly being taken. Secrets and the internet don't mix, of course, and it wasn't long before the existence of this channel and even logs of the conversations held within were leaked by someone who took issue with what we were doing. The Church was thus able to link my role in the ongoing onslaught with my real name, which was registered on at least one protest permit I had secured in the Boston area. The Church also had a video which they claimed proved that I had entered Church property during one event (and which turned out to show nothing of the sort). I was initially charged with disturbing an assembly of worship, criminal trespassing, and criminal harassment; their lawyers made it known to me that they had the means to keep this in the courts for years even after the DA dropped the trespassing charge.

It was just over a year since Id gotten out of prison. As I was in no particular hurry to repeat the experience or anything similar, I agreed to the DA's proposal to have the judge issue a continuance without finding, which in this case effectively meant that for the next year I would stay away from Scientology and Scientology would stay away from me  I would refrain from protesting near their property, and they would refrain from making demonstrably false charges that would nonetheless complicate my life and bankrupt me. That year went by a lot quicker than did the three month stint in federal, and today I still manage to organize and attend several anti-Scientology protests each year, as do countless others across the globe. 

Ironically, Scientology's mini-campaign against me, which resulted in the outing of my real name, provided me all sorts of additional opportunities to work against them. Already I had been dealing with inquiries from journalists and activists who reached out to us through various channels. But suddenly, it was a lot easier to find me - and the civil case had of course attracted a new round of media attention.

I was soon being contacted almost daily by a press corps through which I could now speak out to a different audience about the church's decades of misconduct. We had missed a lot of opportunities to do this previously due to the nature of the media. Some outlets have a policy against using entirely anonymous sources - people who are unknown even to the reporters doing the asking. And pretty much all of them want to prove to their readers that theyve been talking to someone with direct knowledge of the subject involved. Obviously, I had a thing or two tell them about the great Scientology crusade, and I could explain some of the peculiarities of Anonymous in general when those came up as well. 

And Anonymous itself was to come up quite a bit more as the movements purview expanded, as it quickly began to do.