EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (25 page)

Anonymouse says he transitioned from observer to participant around August 2010. His role is PR, though he clarifies that nobody is assigned to a specific post within the ranks of Anonymous. It was just a need he felt equipped to meet. By the measure of most 4channers, Anonymouse is a newfag, having discovered 4chan after the “bincat” episode in 2010, when a woman was caught on security camera throwing a cat into a garbage bin. 4chan vigilantes harassed the woman, generating mainstream BBC news coverage about 4chan. Anonymouse’s initial fascination with 4chan culture soon gave way to a greater passion for the political efforts of Anonymous.

Anonymouse claims that ops usually start off from chatter in anonymous IRC channels, coupled with recruiting on chan boards and Twitter. When enough people have gotten behind a particular endeavor, someone will create a unique IRC channel, which serves as a virtual base of operations. Recruitment for the legal elements (physical protests rather than hacks and DDoS attacks) continues to take place on various social networks.

It’s important to remember that since anyone can claim to be Anonymous, and anyone can think of a cause to rally behind, not every operation announced by Anonymous represents anything close to an official, unified movement. The group is exceedingly amorphous, and operations live and die by the power of the word-of-mouth behind them. Movements are often announced with the distribution of poster-like images that detail the important elements of an operation, usually including a criticism of the offender, a description of the plan of attack, and a call to action, with links to appropriate IRC channels.

One poster passed around during Operation Sony reads:

Operation SONY

Do you really own your own property?

Should you go to jail for making your PS3 run your own programs?

iPhone jailbreaker George Hotz, or Geohot, altered the Sony Playstation 3 console to run homebrew applications. Sony then hit him with lawsuit after lawsuit.

Should you be sued for breaking an agreement you didn’t make?

GeoHot never signed into the PlayStation network with his PS3 and never agreed to the terms of service (that changed AFTER he already purchased the system).

Should you have your personal information revealed for watching a YouTube video?

Sony demanded social media sites, including YouTube to hand over IP addresses of people who visited Geohot’s social pages/videos, as well as his PayPal Account.

Sony thinks so.

We don’t.

Let’s not allow Sony to commit this injustice. It’s time to get pissed OFF and not pissed ON.

On the 16th of April, go to your nearest Sony outlet and protest!

Bring your friends. Be pissed. Raise some noise.

Together, we shall make History.

Get in the IRC! Coordinate your protest!:

www.irc.lc/anonops/opsony

Join the Facebook Group: http://tinyurl.com/sonyprotest

Anonymouse tells me that Operation Sony began on the AnonOps IRC channel, where we’re chatting now, as an offshoot of Operation Payback. He runs a channel called #recruit, where he answers questions from curious /b/tards who wander over from 4chan. moot and his mods try to ban users looking to recruit for raids under a policy likely put in place to disassociate 4chan with the illegal actions of Anonymous. Anonymouse and his cohorts use dynamic IP addresses in order to evade the 4chan “banhammer.” According to Anonymouse, moot announced this rule to prevent the Chan Wars, but he likely brought more attention to the ideological conflict between the chan admins, eventually igniting a chan war “of epic proportions, the likes of which had never been seen.”

Anonymouse, like many of the Anons I’ve spoken with, holds a certain nostalgia for the pre-2007 4chan, claiming that it represents an Internet “before people started putting fences all over it.”

The Internet is slowly becoming a closed system. You have to register for almost everything and free registration sites are becoming paid ones. Couple that with government attempts to exert control of what people can do or say online and you have the attempted downfall of the biggest technological revolution mankind has ever witnessed. The Internet has so much potential to make the world more free and enlightened.

Anonymouse is also quick to dispel the notion of the Dorito-munching neckbeard. He calls himself “an extremely social person” who feels that media misinformation is among the biggest threats to Anonymous.

They screw up specifically because they don’t get the concept of a “group” with no hierarchy, social structure, pecking order, or organization. The press are always looking for a “boss”, but there isn’t one. The FBI are the same.

Gabriella Coleman says that there must be a hierarchy, but it’s flat. Certain people have to run IRC channels, for instance.

Anons are creating propaganda, even the ones who aren’t tech savvy. There’s different groups of people who have authority and power but it’s fragmented. That fragmented nature helps to distribute the power. There are some who are very powerful on one operation but not others. There are some that are powerful across the network, but only technically and not politically. It’s kind of complicated, but what’s clear is that there are some groups of people that carry a lot of authority. With the big operations, where they’re DDoS’ing, there are technically people who are coordinating it.

I asked Anonymouse about a recent bit of coverage from Gawker regarding the HBGary Federal hack. Their reporter claimed that Anonymous really is a handful of legit hackers. (Incidentally, Gawker was hacked a few months prior by a group called Gnosis, exposing 1.2 million passwords. The attack allegedly had nothing to do with Anonymous.)

Anonymouse thinks that the press is asking the wrong questions, claiming that they tend to focus on the illegal hacks rather than the illegal acts that the hackers are able to expose. He says that most of the media coverage belies a “sick” acceptance of HBGary’s activities, using government power to spy on its citizens. He draws parallels to the freedom-fighting actions of Anonymous and those of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, who have also experienced a fair amount of negative press.

How about prosecuting the soldiers named in one of the Afghan war diaries as having shot a bunch of unarmed teenagers? The number one response I’ve noticed when I argue about this is “Well this is the real world, corruption happens, deal with it.” I’m left gaping. Sure it happens. Murder and rape happen too, does that mean we should just say “Oh sure we’ll just leave the murderers alone, it happens. I don’t understand it to be honest. “White collar crime” is somehow regarded as something which we should ignore.

HBGary Federal was developing software to influence public opinion polls by creating thousands of fake social networking profiles. From Anonymouse’s perspective, this is about as antidemocratic as it gets, and Anonymous should be praised as heroes.

Here’s the really frightening part in my view. HBGary were a small, obscure security company. We only went after them because they tried to dox a bunch of us. It was an act of personal revenge at first, rather than actively hoping to expose crime. But look what happened. The can of worms we opened was millions of times bigger than anyone ever expected. Same kind of situation with Operation Payback. [A leak of fifty-three hundred IP addresses collected by a UK firm because they were associated with pirating porn.] When the emails were leaked nobody expected the sheer amount of black ops which would be exposed. I guess you dream of a day when technology has empowered enough common people that it will be nearly impossible for any government entity or corporation to pull this kind of shit.

Now I put this question: Is the entire corporate world rotten to its core? If two tiny, obscure companies are involved in that level of corruption, what does it say about the bigger players?

About an hour into our conversation, Anonymouse claims that he’s the guy who “created” Operation Sony, explaining how the movement evolved out of Operation Payback. He argues that the effort is essential because Sony was attempting to acquire private information about people who had merely viewed an online jailbreaking guide.

The idea that merely reading a piece of information could make you a legal target is terrifying. Here’s an analogy: Making a bomb is illegal. But should you be arrested just for looking up the fact that gunpowder is made of Potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal in a rough 75/10/15 ratio?

When one looks at what Anonymous and WikiLeaks have been able to achieve, it almost seems possible that the utopian future of Anonymouse’s dreams is attainable. He foresees a perhaps stateless world in which large organizations behave because they have no other choice. When information moves freely, corporations and civic leaders will be relentlessly held accountable by an informed public. Anonymouse is optimistic that the efforts of Anons will contribute to the breaking down of cultural and national barriers. It’s pretty pie-in-the-sky stuff, but I can’t help but feel energized about the future when talking to him.

Middle East Activism

Most recently, some Anons have been fighting for freedom of information in the Middle East, in what is perhaps the collective’s most noble and important mission yet. In 2011, Amnesty International, the human rights NGO, focused its annual report on what could be called the “information economy.” It recognized the Orwellian truism that he who controls information controls the world. Today’s networking technology has placed new power in the hands of the people, which has enabled them to keep their governments more accountable. For one, information is more freely available. Also, social networking platforms give people an opportunity to initiate activism. Because freedom of information is an ideal all Anons seem to share, they are happy to fight censorship and promote truth across the globe, even if it doesn’t generaste much lulz.

In January 2011, Anons (some Tunisian, some not) launched Operation Tunisia long before most Western media outlets had even reported the widespread unrest there. Anonymous initially became interested in Tunisia originally because of the country’s censorship of WikiLeaks, but the protest took on a life of its own.

Anonymous accused Tunisian authorities of phishing operations (i.e., tricking users into giving away their passwords to obtain sensitive information and potentially remove criticism from blogs and social networking sites). Some journalists known for their criticism of the Tunisian government were targeted; in some cases their Facebook and Gmail accounts were hacked, and their blogs were shut down. Anonymous retaliated, successfully DDoSing eight websites, including those representing the Tunisian president, prime minister, the ministry of industry, the ministry of foreign affairs, and the stock exchange. Beyond the DDoSs, Anonymous created informational materials to guide dissidents on concealing their identities on the web. A few Anons developed a Firefox extension to protect Tunisians from phishing.

Anonymous also participated in the revolution in Egypt. They helped mirror sites that had been censored by the Egyptian government, brought down President Hosni Mubarak’s website, and, in typical lulzy fashion, sent pizza deliveries to the country’s embassies.

Go Go Go!

Anonymous has grown beyond 4chan, to the point where the media no longer mentions 4chan in reports on Anonymous. But according to Gabriella Coleman, the collective still uses 4chan as a recruiting tool. She says that there is an Anonymous that’s very much still into trolling and raiding, and is sometimes upset with Anon’s new moral dimension. But the Anons who are more politically minded, while still somewhat unpredictable, want to work with academics and journalists to get their message out.

Interestingly, Anonymous seems to care more about online offenses than, say, actual genocide. The attitude seems to be, “No way. Not on
our
Internet.” Although Anonymous’s inability to effect change off-line probably has something to do with their webby focus.

I’ve profiled just a few of Anonymous’s biggest efforts. They’ve also attacked furries, pro-anorexia support groups, bestiality enthusiasts, the Westboro Baptist Church, and countless others lolcows. Whether the target be a random tween or a multinational corporation, all of these attacks lie somewhere on the spectrum between “for the lulz” and “for great justice.” But of course, one Anon’s justice is another’s lulz.

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