EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (22 page)

Pedobaiting is a popular pastime for Anonymous members. The motivation is a mix of heroic do-goodery and naked schadenfreude. It’s exciting to talk to a sicko, and the payoff is an intoxicating moralistic thrill. With a simple Google search one can find guides to pedobaiting that detail the most effective ways to entrap and report potential predators.

In late 2007, Anonymous laid their sights on 53-year-old Chris Forcand. They posed as underage girls under the name “serious,” inciting conversations like the following:

forcandchris: i adopt you

serious: Mmm then we could play everday

forcandchris: for sure

forcandchris: andsleep together every night

serious says: if we sleep that is ;)

forcandchris: true

forcandchris: cause we would have sex every night

Forcand was arrested by the end of the year, and the event was reported by several news outlets as the first time a suspected child predator was exposed by anonymous Internet vigilantes.

Just how prevalent is child pornography (aka CP, as well as Cheese Pizza, Captain Picard, and Christopher Poole) on 4chan? From my personal experience I can say “not very.” But it’s there. So why hasn’t the site been shut down? First, the moderators are pretty vigilant about removing child porn as soon as it appears. And when they catch it, they report the offending IP addresses to the proper authorities, which is really all any photo upload site can do. The “4chan Party Van” is a jokey name for the FBI van that might appear outside your home if the moderators report you for posting CP. moot claims that child pornography is automatically reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline, which acts as a clearinghouse, forwarding the content to appropriate law enforcement.

But it still happens. On February 14, 2011, a Navy man admitted to acquiring child porn at 4chan. On May 18th, 2011, a man arrested for child pornography told the feds during a home raid that he obtained child porn there as well.

There probably aren’t that many genuine pedophiles on 4chan in the same way there aren’t very many genuine white supremacists on 4chan, or in society at large. People who behave outside the range of social norms tend to attract the most attention. Furthermore, trolls like to break the rules, and one of the only rules on /b/ is “No CP.” Like the rampant racism, homophobia, and sexism seen on 4chan, the site’s obsession with child pornography is rooted in irony, for the most part.

Enter Pedobear, a cartoon bear that is the closest thing /b/ has to a mascot. He’s the most infamous 4chan meme, and was originally depicted as ASCII art.

Pedobear originally comes from 2channel. In Japan he is called Kuma, which is Japanese for
bear
, and has no association with pedophila. In 4chan’s early days, there was a lot of memetic overlap between 2channel and 4chan, and Kuma made his way to English-speaking message boards. Now he often appears in 4chan threads in the Pedobear Seal of Approval, or its converse, a depiction of the bear muttering “Too old” at images of anyone over 16. “Is dat sum CP?” he asks, peeking his head into any thread with pics of kids. His arch-nemesis is Chris Hansen of “To Catch a Predator.”

Pedobear’s appearance in a thread can be used to signal that someone is looking for child pornography. He might appear when someone posts a non-pornographic image of a kid. It’s usually used as shorthand to say, “Dude, you’re a pedophile.” The cuddly representation of such repugnant behavior encapsulates the cutesy and sinister dichotomy present on 4chan. Although meant to characterize pedophilia, Pedobear is also a mockery of pedophilia, which many Anons have successfully fought against in the real world.

But why would
anyone
joke about child pornography and child predation, two of the most universally reviled behaviors in human history? On 4chan, it’s precisely because they’re the most universally reviled behaviors in human history. /b/tards love nothing more than shocking NORPs with behavior that takes on the appearance of deviance.

The media and even police have sensationalized Pedobear. The San Louis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department released a Public Safety Information Bulletin entitled “A Seemingly Innocent Menace: An Introduction to ‘Pedo Bear,’ which detailed the perceived threat of the character.

His cute face and nonthreatening appearance negate the truth of his sinister, much darker side.

In fact, one of the things that make PedoBear popular is the controversy surrounding his licentious love of little girls. PedoBear is and should be associated with the Internet and pedophiles/sexually-preferential offenders who reportedly use him to communicate their interests in young children to each other.

At the San Diego Comic Con 2010 in July of this year, law enforcement discovered an individual dressed in a PedoBear costume, handing out candy and being photographed in contact with attendees, including multiple children. Once identified, the young man and his costume were excluded from the family-friendly event . . . Disguised as innocence, this underground community that would make victims of our children, teasingly reaches out into the light of day.

The bulletin failed to mention that 99 percent of the time, Pedobear is used in jest. Real pedophiles aren’t on 4chan for the lulz.

Project Chanology

Project Chanology is Anonymous’s anti-Scientology effort. It changed everything, bringing the collective, along with 4chan, into the limelight, and gave Anonymous’s efforts a pseudopolitical bent that would come to dominate the group’s future endeavors. That masked man I saw on the train in Europe? He was part of Project Chanology.

Of course, the broader going anti-Scientology movement goes all the way back to Usenet days. Before delving into the early anti-Scientology movement, it’s important to understand something about the ideals of hackers and even general Internet users from that era, all of whom today would be considered extremely tech-savvy given the structural barriers to entry that the Internet imposed.

Tech heads were, and still are, drawn to the Internet in part because it promises a level playing field, where all-important information is out in the open. As the WELL’s Stewart Brand famously declared, “Information wants to be free.” Enthusiasts in those days saw the Internet as a utopian future, where one could be taken at his or her word.

Usenet was home to a fervent discussion at alt.religion.scientology, started in 1991 by Scott Goehring, a regular guy who wished to expose the hypocrisies and deceptions of the Church of Scientology. It soon became frequented by ex-church members, free speech enthusiasts, and other critics who found the church’s suppression of information to fly in the face of geek principles. Among these geeks was Dennis Erlich, who joined the newsgroup in July 1994. Erlich was a former high-ranking member of the church who had been affiliated with none other than the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. The newsgroup, which was already known for controversy and flame wars, exploded in size.

On December 24, 1994, previously secret documents dealing with mysterious concepts like “Thetan Levels” were leaked to the newsgroup, and the church wasn’t happy. It hired lawyers to contact participants and demanded that the documents be removed. Subsequently the church attempted to shut down the newsgroup entirely, claiming copyright infringement.

On February 13th, 1995, church attorney Thomas Small, along with seven others, raided Dennis Erlich’s home and spent six hours seizing files from his computer. Dennis complained about the raid that night, kicking off massive outrage. Several other raids occurred throughout the year. On August 12, 1995, Usenet poster and former Scientologist Arnaldo Lerma’s home was raided by ten people from the FBI (two federal marshals, two computer techies, and several attorneys). They took his computer, backups, disks, modem, and scanner. Ten days later, two more raids took place. Even newsgroup users in the Netherlands and Sweden were investigated.

These raids infuriated the geeks, for whom technology is not so much a tool as an ideal in itself. The Church of Scientology, on the other hand, is shrouded in secrecy, and uses technology as a means to achieve an end: KSW, or Keeping Scientology Working. KSW is a church edict that declares the role of technology to be a primary tool for furthering the interests of Scientology.

Over the next few years the church spammed newsgroups with propaganda. In the early days of search engines, the church also employed web designers to build thousands of dummy web pages to flood search engines with Scientology-related information so criticisms of the church would be hard to find. The anti-Scientology movement became less about unmasking a pseudoreligion and more about upholding truth, transparency, freedom of information, and other lofty ideological goals.

Remember You’re the Man Now Dog? In 2006, Scientology lawyers threatened that site’s founder Max Goldberg, resulting in a flare of anti-Scientology sentiment among a younger, more lulz-seeking audience on the heels of a
South Park
episode that mocked Scientology.

Soon, the church became perhaps the first victim of what has come to be known as the Streisand Effect. The term was coined in 2003 by Mike Masnick of Techdirt, when actress and singer Barbra Streisand attempted to suppress the online dissemination of photos of her home, an effort which only drew more attention to the photos. Streisand unsuccessfully sued the photographer, which brought even more publicity.

Anti-Scientology sentiment continued to simmer throughout the early ’00s. Even after the threats to Max Goldberg, geeks lost interest until January 15th, 2008, when the fight against Scientology took a decidedly lulzy turn. Gossip blog Radar ran a leaked church video of normally ultrasuave Scientology member Tom Cruise looking and sounding like a brainwashed pod person. The
Mission Impossible
theme music plays in the background as Cruise gushes about the power of Scientology. The whole thing was begging to be parodied thousands of times over, and it eventually was.

Gawker founder Nick Denton smartly hosted the video himself, racking up over three million page views. In the post, Denton called Cruise a “complete fanatic,” teasing visitors with, “If Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an eight on the scale of scary, this is a ten.”

Cruise, for many people at the time, was the celebrity face of Scientology. Naturally, the church immediately attempted to suppress the distribution of the video, but the damage had been done. If deleting a few Usenet discussion threads was difficult in the early ’90s, suppressing a video in 2008 was impossible. Nothing short of a federal decree could accomplish that, and even then illicit videos could be distributed through bit torrent and other file-sharing services. Stewart Brand’s maxim about information wanting to be free had materialized on an Internet that never forgives . . . or forgets.

Why did it take so long for the anti-Scientology movement to pick up steam? Why was 2008 the year that the world took notice? Why anti-Scientology, rather than the hundreds of other causes one could rally around?

Lulz. The Tom Cruise video brought a lulzy angle to the anti-Scientology movement. Tom Cruise, and by extension his church, was seen as a buffoon who needed to be brought down a peg or two. Second, 4chan provided a platform around which thousands of activists could be quickly mobilized to take part in DDoS attacks, which required little effort from individual participants and could cause devastating damage in the aggregate.

DDoS attacks are often initiated by a piece of software affectionately called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC), named after a fictional weapon from the
Command & Conquer
PC real-time strategy game. The LOIC allows someone who has zero technical ability to participate in collective attacks. You just push a button, point the “cannon” at a particular URL or IP address, and the software does the rest. The LOIC will flood the target address with “garbage requests.” A website’s server can only handle so much traffic at a given time. When thousands of users are all using the software simultaneously, pinging the site with garbage requests, the attacks can be devastating. And here’s the best part—when they succeed, the individual attackers are virtually untraceable.

But that was just the beginning. Anonymous inundated the Church of Scientology with prank calls and black faxes. (Imagine pulling an entirely black sheet of paper out of your fax machine, soaking wet with wasted, expensive ink.) Anonymous spread the word far and wide on social networks and message boards.