Anonymous supporters wearing Guy Fawkes masks hold
a banner as they take part in a protest outside Britain's Houses of
Parliament in London, Monday, November 5, 2012. The protest was held on
November 5 to coincide with the failed 1605 gunpowder plot to blow up
the House of Lords.
Two
weeks ago today, a line was crossed. Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz
was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because
he was forced into playing a game he could not win—a twisted and
distorted perversion of justice—a game where the only winning move was
not to play.
That message greeted visitors to the United States
Sentencing Commission website the evening of January 25. The words were
part of a ten-minute video manifesto embedded on the homepage of the
commission, responsible for writing the sentencing policies and
guidelines for federal courts. The death of the Internet savant and
information activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life due at least in
part to the outsize charges he was facing at the hands of the U.S.
justice system, was still an open wound for most tech-literate net
dwellers. No group took the news of Swartz’s passing more personally
than Anonymous. The hactivist collective swore vengeance, citing the
"highly disproportionate sentencing" of Swartz and others like him, and
commenced the darkly named Operation Last Resort, hijacking numerous
Department of Justice websites and sending “nuclear warheads” packed
with stolen DOJ records hurtling across the Internet.
By Saturday night, the government reclaimed the
USSC.gov
domain, only to have another website come under siege hours later. This
time, it was the U.S. Probation Office for the State of Michigan, and
if you tapped out a certain combination on your keyboard, you got the
vintage arcade game Asteroids, ready to play. Twice in one day,
Anonymous had hacked government websites of the most technologically
sophisticated nation on earth. Its first strike was a passionate,
political call to arms—its second, shenanigans. This seeming
contradiction, between crusading morality and adolescent hijinks, is at
the heart of Anonymous.
What exactly is Anonymous?
The group’s name can be traced back to a website, 4chan. If you’re not familiar, 4chan was and is the
Mos Eisley
of the Internet, a lawless message board operating on the fringes of
Internet society with a dedicated and passionate following. Officially
billed as an “image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments
and share images,” nearly every enduring meme of the post-millennial web
found its roots in 4chan, from
LOLCats to
RickRolling. Anonymous emerged from deep within the site, inside a particular subheading known as “/b/.”
Notorious even among 4chan’s milieu, /b/ truly is
the id of the Internet, a wild west of pornography, cat pictures, and
staggering amounts of scatological humor. There, like all 4chan message
boards, posting without an identity gets you labeled “Anonymous.” Those
early nameless users were the primordial ooze the movement crawled out
of, anonymity serving to embolden and unite. During this formative
period, the citizens of /b/ set about to collectively prank the
Internet. Their capers, from
organizing online flash mobs, to persecuting bullies, to being bullies themselves, broke ground for the sort of hive-mind hyper-democracy that followed.
It went like this: A user would suggest a worthy
or amusing target on the message board, and it would either be echoed by
the ever-growing voices of the site’s chorus, like a game of
cyber-telephone, or otherwise ignored into irrelevance. Early members
picked their targets purely for “the lulz”—something like “laughs,” but
closer to schadenfreude. Calling Anonymous a group was to miss the
point; it was defined by its participation at any given moment,
and like any crowd, the range of interests varied wildly. An early
refrain from those days was “none of us are as cruel as all of us,” and
one member likened the whole enterprise to being part of an epic inside
joke. They hijacked the forum of the Epilepsy Foundation and replaced
its content with brightly flashing gifs. All for the lulz.
All that DoJ stuff doesn’t sound very funny. Are you sure we’re talking about the same Anonymous?
In 2008, something changed. An unauthorized “
orientation”
video for the Church of Scientology featuring Tom Cruise was publicly
leaked to Youtube. The video was bizarre enough to be Kubrickian
parody—with the theme to
Mission: Impossible looping endlessly
in the background, Cruise, fresh from jumping on Oprah’s couch, made his
case: “Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know
absolutely that you can help them.” The video was first met with
disbelief, then bemusement, then derision. Scientology was accused of
brainwashing its followers, and millions of views later, the Church’s
army of litigants marched off to harass and pressure websites into
removing the content—an effort that was largely successful.
Gawker became embroiled in a public struggle to keep the video alive, and amidst the chaos, Anonymous struck.
The campaign kicked off with a threatening video
titled “Message to Scientology,” and quickly escalated to prank phone
calls, faxing black pages to Scientology offices
en masse, and
the infamous Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS). DDoS harnesses
the might of thousands of would-be activists by pointing them all at a
website at the exact same moment, overloading servers and rendering the
site temporarily inoperable. Because DDoS attacks can be carried out by
anyone—all that’s required is a click of the mouse—and because the flood
of users creates its own anonymity, the method has become an Anonymous
calling card. The fight eventually jumped offline, with thousands
picketing Scientology centers in Guy Fawkes masks, keeping their
anonymity intact à la
V for Vendetta.
“For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—and for our
own enjoyment,” droned the computerized voice from the Anonymous video,
“we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically
dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form.”
It’s impossible to say for certain why Anonymous
crossed the threshold from merry pranksters to activists, but the
movement could not have found a better target for its first political
lambasting than Scientology. The organization’s zealous litigating had
made critical investigation difficult for a news media uneager to risk a
court battle with the church’s stacked coffers. Scientology represented
what Anonymous despised: a group hiding behind the First Amendment to
protect its questionable religious status, simultaneously trampling it
to protect its reputation. The hypocrisy was too ripe—the lulz too
great—to ignore.
So how do these crazy operations get planned? Sounds hard.
4chan will
always play host to some part of Anonymous, but the gathering has
long-since left its humble first home, and now operates across various
websites and services. The meat of Anonymous activity—targeting and
planning—happens over Internet Relay Chat. The details of IRC aren’t
important except that it’s simple, lacks unique names, and allows for
huge numbers of simultaneous users in the same conversation. While it’s
opaque to the majority of the Internet public, it provides a relatively
open platform for discussion.
Anonymous is
collaborative, with dozens or even hundreds or thousands of users on
IRC, and while individual ‘ops’ might have prominent organizers, the
gathering itself is leaderless. Issues are proposed, voted on, and
developed into targets by the crowd. Those who seek a leadership mantle
are quickly shamed, banned from IRC, and called things we wouldn’t
print. Users drop in and out, spectating, debating, organizing, and
volunteering, from penning PR stunts to hacking the most secure servers
of the U.S. government.
Hold up. There are thousand and thousands
of people who know how to hack super-secure websites? Wait just a sec
while I go cancel all my credit cards…
Not all
‘anons’ are capable of that sort of operation—only a handful of élites
can muster the serious hacking, which brings us to the difference
between the hackers and the geeks. Hackers are the heavy-lifters, the
big guns, The Girl(s) with the Dragon Tattoo.
Geeks are the rank-and-file—savvy, but far from experts. When the
hackers write a tool to DDoS or deface a website, the geeks are the ones
who put it to use.
So … what are they? Hackers? Criminals? Activists? Terrorists?
The U.S.
government and the government of the U.K., along with almost every
corporation and governing body ever targeted by Anonymous, have
unsurprisingly treated the banner and its users as a criminal, terrorist
group. Our government, as well as law enforcement across the pond, has
charged dozens of anons, threatening decade-long prison terms—or worse.
Anonymous
is neither a terrorist organization nor a criminal gang. Yes, its users
have transgressed the law, but mostly in the interest of a political or
cultural message, and rarely for personal gain. If the collective has
any overarching goals, they are to safeguard the freedom of information,
to bring low the haughty, and to amuse itself.
From Operation Titstorm’s defense of uncensored
porn in Australia, to the Hal Turner Raids’ takedown of a proud white
nationalist, virtually everything Anonymous has done to date can be
traced to those three guiding lights. Anonymous’s support for Wikileaks
wasn’t lent for the sheer joy of spreading state secrets—as the
authorities have intimated—but in the interest of spreading all
information, all the time, and especially when exposing perceived
injustice. The gathering’s biggest operations have been in support of
the Arab Spring—users were "on the ground" early, getting the word out
about Tunisia and arming residents there and in Egypt with the tools to
circumvent government restrictions on communication and the Internet.
Anonymous helped ferry stories and videos out of the region, and even
mass-faxed relevant Wikileaks documents to machines all over Egypt, all
the while hacking, defacing, and disabling government websites. And of
course there is the movement’s enduring role in the Occupy
protests—Anonymous has been pivotal less in organizing than in getting
the word out to its sympathetic and technologically savvy participants.
Anonymous tactics like DDoS have been met with
harsh responses and harsher prison sentences by those governments tasked
with policing our cyber frontiers, but anons—and an ever-increasing
proportion of Internet users—see these acts more as 21st
century sit-ins. Anonymous may shut down a business with a mass influx
of "customers," but without any permanent damage done, how is that any
different from the Greensboro lunch counter?
Where are they going with this? Is it still just for the lulz?
There will always be potential for opportunists to
co-opt and exploit an amorphous idea. All that’s required is someone to
fly the flag, as was the case in the recent proclamation of war against
Facebook, which was quickly disavowed by “official” Anonymous channels,
if that makes any sense. Last year, when it was discovered that a
former high-ranking member had turned FBI-informant, fingering many
other top hackers, it was generally assumed the operation had been
gutted, the party over. Then came the recent hacking of the DOJ, and
it’s clear that Anonymous is still alive and well.
The reality is that we live in a world of
ever-increasing cyber threats. Stuxnet and Flame, the astonishingly
complex computer viruses that wreaked havoc on Iranian nuclear
centrifuges, were the work of U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. It
is estimated that China’s industrial espionage costs U.S. businesses a trillion dollars a year, and it doesn’t stop there: The New York Times
reported that over a four-month period, its newsroom computers were
infiltrated dozens of times by hackers, while reporters worked on an
investigation into the business dealings of China’s prime minister.
Russian mobs steal thousands of credit card numbers a day. Anonymous
supported Wikileaks, which may have put U.S. agents and service members
at risk, but in doing so it exposed the injustices of wars that the
mainstream media was remiss in covering, and arguably had a hand in
bringing those wars to an end.
Anonymous’ threat to detonate the “nuclear
warheads” stolen from DOJ servers is a serious one, both for the
government and for its own future legitimacy. The warheads would
purportedly expose sensitive information about those unconnected with
the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. As Anonymous stated on the DOJ’s hacked
website, “We have not taken this action lightly, nor without
consideration of the possible consequences. Should we be forced to
reveal the trigger-key to this warhead, we understand that there will be
collateral damage. We appreciate that many who work within the justice
system believe in those principles that it has lost, corrupted, or
abandoned, that they do not bear the full responsibility for the damages
caused by their occupation. It is our hope that this warhead need never
be detonated.”
Such an extreme act risks alienating those
sympathetic to the cause, never mind the guarantee of government
retaliation. But our legal system is broken when it comes to cases like
Swartz’s, and action must be taken to distinguish—both morally and
legally—the types of cybercrime that are only bound to increase as we
become ever more dependent on an economy of information. The morality of
Anonymous may be ambiguous, its structure may lend itself to
manipulation and abuse, and its members may not always agree to do the
right thing, but hacktivism has been an effective tool in battling the
Internet’s injustices. Anonymous represents the future of
activism—online and off.
If Christian’s 
The newly-published 
Some might argue that this is last year's story, as nowadays the Blackhole exploit kit dominates.