Show Notes

 Cold Open

The following presentation is not suitable for young children. Listener discretion is advised. 

On February 4, 2011, Aaron Barr, the CEO of the cybersecurity company HBGary released a bombshell claim: he had discovered the names of all the leading members of the hacker group Anonymous.

Anonymous had become famous ironically by being private-no one knew who they were, where they were based, or how many members they had. In video releases they’d wear Guy Fawkes-masks, and use text-to-speech filters.

SFX CUE: “WE ARE ANONYMOUS, WE ARE LEGION”

But this mysterious group had become one of the most famous hacking groups in the world, almost like digital robin hoods going after companies, people, and governments. Members, hiding behind a screen of privacy, were leaking government secrets from all over the world, from Tunisia to the United States. 

Barr, as CEO of HBGary, was on the opposite side of Anonymous-his company sold security to the very same government and banking systems they hacked into. Anonymous was a thorn in their side, and he thought he had found a way to defeat them.

SFX: MESSAGE SOUNDS

Using statistical regression and analyzing behavior of users, he could uncover the real identities of 80-90% of Anonymous members. Testing his method, he linked the accounts of three Anonymous admins to real people in California and New York.

He was ecstatic, and immediately tried to go public with it. Some of the programmers working for him weren’t so sure, they begged him to stay quiet until they had proof. They didn’t think he wanted to mess with them.

“As [leet] as these guys are [supposed] to be they don't get it. I have pwned them! He wrote in an internal email to his programmers, he was so sure he had them in his sights. This was a huge coup for HBGary, and would catapult the company to the very top of the cybersecurity food chain.

After weeks of HBGary employees asking him to keep quiet, he couldn’t stop himself, and so on February 4th, 2011 Barr gave an interview with the Financial Times saying he had the real names and addresses of Anonymous, warning them they could be arrested if they weren’t careful. He announced he’d release his findings in a few weeks.

This was his moment, he’d done what Mastercard, the Church of Scientology, and the US government couldn’t: he’d found a way into the heart of Anonymous.

Or had he?

MUSIC SHIFT

On February 5th, 2011 Barr woke up to chaos.

SFX: PHONE RINGS, MESSAGES DING, KNOCK ON DOORS

The article had been shared, and Anonymous had gone after him.

And Anonymous hadn’t held back. They broke into his email, twitter, and corporate accounts, revealing it all to the world.

SFX: TWEETS, MESSAGES, EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS

By mid-morning of February 5th, Anonymous had broken into every piece of HBGary, and revealed its secrets online: salaries, contracts, and embarrassing details about some of their underhanded corporate schemes to go after rivals. They especially went after Barr, trying to get under his skin. They released Barr’s World of Warcraft login, messages about marital problems, and even remotely wiped his iPad.

SFX: DELETING SOUND

Even though it was a cybersecurity company that worked for some of the biggest groups in the world, Anonymous had made HBGary look like rank amateurs. They even released the supposed bombshell that Barr had of their identities: and he was wrong. The people he named weren’t even part of Anonymous.

Barr had made a fool of himself and his company for nothing.

By Monday February 28, 2011, just over three weeks after Barr had crowed to the Financial Times that he’d gotten Anonymous, he announced his resignation. 

The legend of Anonymous grew stronger. 

Who was Anonymous? And what did they want?

On this episode: the most famous hacktvitist group of all time, Scientology, government secrets, and Chocolate Rain. I’m Keith Korneluk and this is Modem Mischief.

INTRODUCTION

You're listening to Modem Mischief. In this series we explore the darkest reaches of the internet. We'll take you into the minds of the world's most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We'll also show you places you won't find on Google and what goes on down there. This is the story of Anonymous.

Act One

Read any news story about people who were part of Anonymous, and the comments will be full of people saying ‘well actually THAT person wasn’t part of Anonymous, they were in something else,” no matter who the article is talking about. And they aren’t wrong either-by definition, Anonymous is… well… anonymous. It also doesn’t have a formal structure or membership directory. it’s less of an organization than a mode of being.

Hell, probably some of the people I’m going to talk about in today’s episode are going to spark some of these complaints. But these are the pit’s important to talk about, because few—if any—hackers have sparked the public’s attention like Anonymous has.

SFX: SNIPPETS OF NEWSREADERS SAYING “ANONYMOUS”

Anonymous changed how hackers were seen in the wider culture: not just as pirates, but as digital freedom fighters, with real power in the physical world. 

But who were they really? And how did they start?

SFX: MODEM DIALUP

Canadian Aubrey Cottle grew up online—his parents had gotten AOL discs in the mail, and he’d spent formative teen years on livejournal and AIM, like a lot of other kids in his generation. In elementary school he’d been told that the internet could lead to incredible changes. 

SFX: AIM MESSAGE

But by 2006, aged 19, he was working a low-level web developer job in Toronto, feeling a little aimless, having to work for pompous jerks who didn’t know what they were talking about, but who controlled his paycheck. He spent a lot of time on forums to blow off steam, especially the funny ones.

SFX: POSTING SOUND

His favorite forum was called /b [just pronounced “bee”], the random channel on 4chan, which was full of  links to crazy shit, inside joke flash videos, and other things that made him feel like he was part of an ingroup.

SFX: SCROLLING

One of 4chan’s quirks was that people could comment without making a profile. They’d just respond to something with the default name put in of… Anonymous. 

And unsurprisingly, anonymous users on a trash-talking, slightly troll-y forum, were usually the absolute worst. 

No one really remembers how or who it was that started it, but after a while the new inside joke on /b was that all these separate accounts were all the work of one person.

SFX: LAUGHTER

Aubrey thought the Anonymous joke was hilarious. It also got right at what gave people the lulz on 4chan, posting under Anonymous was flirting on the line between being a dick and being smart. It was pushing pompous assholes' buttons. Users from /b like Aubrey would go on the main 4chan site as Anonymous and prank comment on forum posts. Other people wouldn’t get it, but that was half the fun.

It gave Aubrey a way to say what he really thought, and get revenge-online at least-against power-hungry little dictators.

They made up elaborate stories about how powerful Anonymous was, and posted black and white pictures of a headless man, along with a slogan, that would sound a little creepy if it weren’t so ridiculous:

“we are Anonymous, we are Legion, we do not forgive, we do not forget, expect us"

MUSIC SHIFT

Aubrey and the others who posted under Anonymous on /b might have been trying to get a laugh, but they weren’t bad people. They wanted to make sure the targets of their jokes were assholes, so they could feel good about going after them.

SFX: ANIME CUTE SOUND

And in late June of 2006, they found an internet game called Habbo Hotel, a virtual world sort of like Second Life. The story started to spread that the moderators of this game were racially profiling users with dark-skinned avatars, and banning non-white players.

SFX: MESSAGES POPPING UP

“That’s fucked up” one Anonymous post wrote.

“We should teach them a lesson,” another wrote. 

SFX: AVATAR CREATION

So Aubrey and other /b members did what they did best: they trolled the game. On July 6th, 2006, Aubrey and a crowd of other /b members signed up en masse for the game.

SFX: SIGN UP SOUNDS

Aubrey had figured out that Habbo was using a fairly simple system for where people could walk. If one user was in a space, they could block everyone else from walking there. 

SFX: BUMPING SOUNDS

So they set their avatars to black men with afros and business suits and blocked the entrances to all the popular virtual hangouts in the game. When people would try to talk to the /b raiders, they’d just type back “Pool’s closed.” They broke the game.

SFX: LOTS OF BUMPING

Moderators kicked out the trolls, but /b members just made new characters and jumped right back in. 

SFX: RESPAWN SOUND

The difference between this and other trolling efforts, was that this was surprisingly disciplined, and easy for people to join: Aubrey made a guide for newcomers to help, and they were very persistent. 

By July 12, 2006, they had hundreds of people flooding the game servers, shouting “Pool’s closed” when Habbo users tried to play the game.

SFX: TV GOING OFF

By the end of July 12, Habbo Hotel went offline, overwhelmed by the traffic. Back on /b, Aubrey and the other Habbo raiders were exhilarated. They’d actually done something and made a difference, just by making jokes.

And when moderators from Habbo went on 4chan to ask who was behind it, without a beat, Aubrey responded: “Anonymous did it”

MUSIC CUE

After the Habbo raids, Aubrey didn’t want to stop. So he and a few of the other Habbo raiders started an IRC chat called “Anonymous” to help plan more things like that. It was fun, a lot of fun. And it felt good to target people who were assholes.

They took on a lot of what we think of as the persona of Anonymous: they liked the Guy Fawkes masks from the movie V for Vendetta that had come out a few months earlier, about a freedom fighter who stood up to the power-hungry elite, hiding behind a secret identity.

SFX CUE: CLIP FROM V FOR VENDETTA

They started referring to themselves in the plural, as “we are Anonymous”. It was just a few people, but it was kind of funny to treat themselves this way. 

Now they’d just need to find a worthy rival, someone who was just straight-up evil, like the villains in V for Vendetta, but also someone kind of stupid and pompous, who’d be fun to troll.

SFX: RADIO STATIC, YELLING

And they found a real asshole in Hal Turner, a 44-year old neo-Nazi from New Jersey who ran a white supremacist radio show and podcast. And in one of his podcasts, he talked shit about 4chan. Someone posted a link on /b, and Aubrey and the others found out about him.

“Fuck this guy” Aubrey wrote. Turner was a racist moron. And he had the gall to insult them?

“Let’s close the pool,” he said, and got to work.

SFX: PHONE DIALING

They flooded Turner’s comments page with juvenile jokes, and prank calls during his show, tying up the phone lines. 

He would get mad, and railed against them on his show. That just made it more fun.. 

They found his personal phone number so he’d get calls from blocked numbers at all times of the night, usually playing the internet meme song Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday, because they thought it was funny.

MUSIC CUE: CHOCOLATE RAIN SOUND-ALIKE.

Anonymous set denial of service attacks on his site, and took him offline for hours or days at a time. 

SFX: BUSY TONE

Turner got mad, and sued 4chan and other internet forums. But all that did was drive members to go after him even harder. They started building easy-to-use tools that anyone could use to overload his website, and take it down for days at a time.

And some of the raiders started digging up dirt on him, and trying to find a way to break into his personal files.

SFX: KEY UNLOCKING

In early 2008, one member got into his email and discovered something crazy:

Hal Turner was a neo-Nazi and a blowhard, sure. But he was also an informant for the FBI.

SFX: EMAIL SOUND

They released, first in the IRC, then on Hal Turner’s site, emails to and from his FBI handlers in New Jersey, showing that he’d been giving the FBI information for years.

“Holy shit,” one user wrote.

“We did it, we won,” another wrote back.

Turner’s credibility in neo-Nazi circles had been shattered.

Aubrey’s raids had taken down someone he saw as the enemy: an asshole who seemed to get off on power-hungry trips. He liked how that felt, and along with the other members of Anonymous, wanted to take it further

They looked for a new target, and they found one that seemed like it was full of power-hungry people who didn’t quite understand the internet, but tried to control it.

SFX: HEAVENLY CHOIR

On January 14, 2008, someone leaked an internal video from the Church of Scientology onto Youtube. 

SFX: PRESSING PLAY

Scientology had some of the best and most expensive lawyers in the world, who tried to bully Youtube and other sites into taking down the video. It seemed like a classic case of David vs. Goliath, and like Scientology would just get away with it.

SFX: DELETING SOUND

But Aubrey and the others in the Anonymous IRC chat had just taken down Turner, they felt like they could do anything. They started a specific campaign against Scientology, something they dubbed “Operation Chanology,” combining the words Scientology with 4chan. They were going to bring the power of trolling to bear on the church, and close the pool on their biggest target yet.

SFX: FAX

They flooded church numbers with blank faxes, prank-called, and made denial of service attacks on their site, using the same playbook as the Turner raids.

SFX: DOOR CLOSES

But unlike Turner and Habbo Hotel, this target had resources. The church hired security experts, and beat back their online attacks.

This almost stopped some members of Anonymous. They were up against something really big, and potentially really scary.

But Aubrey wasn’t going to let another pompous hack with power stop him. So they decided they needed to level up and bring in reinforcements.

SFX: LEVEL UP SOUNDS

On January 21, 2008, Anonymous member 31-year-old Greg Housh uploaded a video to Youtube titled “Message to Scientology” designed to draw attention to the war between Anonymous and Scientology:

CLIP: “hello leaders of scientology, we are anonymous” from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/7/73/Message_to_Scientology.ogv/Message_to_Scientology.ogv.240p.vp9.webm

The video, with text-to-speech over stock footage of clouds, was simple, a little creepy, a little jokey. In other words, exactly what Anonymous was all about. And it was going to be their coming-out announcement, saying who they were to the world at large.

SFX: PRESSING PLAY ON A YOUTUBE VIDEO

And they had no idea what it would start…

MUSIC STING

Act Two

In early 2008, Anonymous, created by Aubrey Cottle and other members of 4chan’s /b forum, had some early success trolling neo-nazis and racists, but they were about to meet their biggest test yet, in the powerful, secretive, and famously litigious Church of Scientology.

Scientology’s lawyers had tried to bully Youtube and other sites into taking down an embarrassing internal video.

SFX: DELETING SOUND

Aubrey and the others in the Anonymous IRC chat didn’t like that, on the Anonymous servers, they started what they called “Operation Chanology,” which came from combining the words Scientology with 4chan. They were going to bring the power of trolling to bear on the church.

Starting in mid-January, 2008, they declared full-on war on Scientology. They started tying up phone lines, and trying to overload traffic to its site.

SFX: BUSY SIGNAL

That wasn’t enough though, so they widened they put out what amounted to a recruitment video, made by the 31-year-old convicted software pirate Gregg Housh

CLIP: “we’ve been watching you” from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/7/73/Message_to_Scientology.ogv/Message_to_Scientology.ogv.240p.vp9.webm

He uploaded the “Message to Scientology” video on January 21, 2008, and within the week it had taken over the front page of reddit, and racked up millions of views.

Millions of people watched the video. And some of those people who saw the video, got it, and wanted in.

SFX: MOUSE CLICKS

Hundreds of people signed up to the IRC channel to join Anonymous’ Chanology escapade. Among them, 18-year-old Dmitriy Guzner of Verona New Jersey, a student at Quinnipiac University.

He’d seen what Scientology was doing: seemingly abusing members, suing critics, and loudly trying to stifle dissent. And he liked what Anonymous was doing, he especially liked that they seemed like they were getting under Scientology’s skin.

He went onto the IRC, found through going onto 4chan, and asked what he could do to help.

SFX: TYPING

Read the guide, fire the cannon, came the response.

Cannon, Dmitriy said to himself, what the hell is that about?

He opened the link to a piece of freeware made by the user Praetox, labeled a “Low Orbit Ion Cannon,” named after a weapon in the Command and Conquer strategy game series.

SFX: LASER HEATS UP

Dmitriy downloaded the cannon, and as the software loaded, art from Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars displayed, along with instructions.

Whoa, he thought to himself, as he realized what this was. If logging into the Anonymous IRC had been like enlisting in an army, this piece of software was his rifle.

The cannon turned his computer and internet connection into a distributed botnet that could launch attacks at any website, overloading it with a Denial of Service Attack. 

Users could download a Low Orbit Ion Cannon, and it would use their machines to deploy denial of service attacks at whatever target they’d like.

It was sort of like guerilla warfare, since it was a way to turn everyday computer equipment into something that could go toe-to-toe with industrial security techniques.

He pressed fire,

SFX: LASER BLAST

And within minutes, his machine had sent thousands of bots after Scientology’s website.

SFX: POWER DOWN NOISE

Dmitriy and the other guerilla fighters for Anonymous spent the next weeks battling it out with Scientologist’s cybersecurity teams. This wasn’t just hacking, this was something new: something the press was starting to dub hacktivism: hacking for a cause.

They were becoming a real problem for Scientology, but their very success started to backfire.

Scientology’s press contacts started referring to Anonymous as a hate group, picking on a poor religion. Every illegal act Anonymous did gave Scientology more cover for this story.

Anonymous didn’t know what to do-they wanted to stop Scientology, but it almost seemed like they were helping them.

SFX: UPLOAD SOUND

And then on January 26,  a video called “Message to Anonymous” was uploaded to Youtube by a guy with a big white beard and a gentle voice.

51-year-old Mark Bunker, of Clearwater Florida founded a website that criticized the Church of Scientology back in 1999, called Xenu TV. He’d been fighting with the Church for years, and knew a thing or two about how they operated. 

He’d seen what Anonymous was doing, and was excited. But also had thoughts about the pickle they found themselves in. 

CLIP: ~0:18 “I think you’re making some major mistakes” from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/6b/Scientology_-_XENU_TV_Speaks_to_Anonymous.ogv/Scientology_-_XENU_TV_Speaks_to_Anonymous.ogv.240p.vp9.webm

He said they were running the risk of just seeming like a pirate group, that Scientology could brand as some sort of internet hate machine. If they wanted to really make a difference, they’d have to move from just hacking, to more activism and real protest.

CLIP: ~6:30 “the more people who are exposed, the better” from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/6b/Scientology_-_XENU_TV_Speaks_to_Anonymous.ogv/Scientology_-_XENU_TV_Speaks_to_Anonymous.ogv.240p.vp9.webm

Back in the Anonymous IRC, they listened. So, dubbing Mark the “Wise Beard Man,” they started to plan something really radical: they were going to take their disruption to the real world.

MUSIC CUE: UPBEAT

In the IRC, then across 4chan and reddit, Anonymous sent out the call: they were going to protest Scientology, legally, and in-person. Anonymous would make an appearance in the real world as Anonymous. People were encouraged to wear Guy Fawkes’ masks, or hide their faces any way they could. It wouldn’t be Dmitriy or Aubrey out on the streets, it would be… Anonymous.

SFX: MORNING SOUNDS

On the morning of February 10, 2008, protests were scheduled for outside Scientology centers all over the world,

Dmitriy woke up, not sure what to expect. A little embarrassed to even leave the house. He put his Guy Fawkes mask that he’d bought the week earlier deep in his backpack, and didn’t make eye contact with anyone. He spent the whole subway ride to Bryant Park thinking about just not going. 

SFX: SUBWAY STOPS

But as he got off the train, he started seeing flashes of paper signs ahead of him in the crowd. And what looked like the Mona Lisa smile of the Guy Fawkes mask.

Was he imagining things, haunted by his own stupid embarrassing idea?

SFX: PEOPLE CHANTING

He made it into the park, and saw something incredible. There were hundreds of people there, all in masks, right outside the Scientology center. Anonymous was offline.

With a whoop he put on his mask and joined the crowd.

SFX: CHEERS

That day, over 10,000 people, from Tel Aviv to Los Angeles, came out as Anonymous, to protest Scientology. They were peaceful, if a little rowdy. They were also all steeped in internet culture, and a little more like a joke than your typical protest.

The sight in Hollywood was a good microcosm: below the Guy Fawkes masks most people looked young, were wearing t-shirts or hoodies, and their signs were a mix of “Stop the Lies” and “Honk if you are driving a car”. 

You could take the forum-dwellers out of the internet, but you couldn’t take the internet out of the forum-dwellers.

That day proved that online raids and goofing around could translate into real world implications. Anonymous could rally thousands of people to do something. That day drew a huge influx of publicity, and ensured that Scientology couldn’t just paint Anonymous as some sort of meanspirited hate group of trolls-it was real people. 

Operation Chanology would keep going for years, but on that day Anonymous changed forever.

And that was also the day that the big split in Anonymous came to the fore:

Originally, Aubrey and the other /b members used Anonymous as a way to have fun, and also go after assholes.

But now they’d proven that they could make actual changes in the world. They weren’t just trolls, they really were hacktivists. 

And this was an exciting time in the intersection of activism and online groups. Within a couple years the Occupy movement would start, and Wikileaks started revealing shocking government secrets (See our three part series about Julian Assange and Wikileaks for more about that!). Anonymous felt like it was part and parcel with all this. Or at least it could be.

Most members of Anonymous were happy to keep things as they were: goof around, maybe fuck with Scientology a little bit, but that was it. But some members wanted to go further, and get involved with more meaningful protests.

SFX: STREET PROTEST SOUNDS

Starting in December 2010, there were a wave of protests against the corrupt government of Tunisia, led by authoritarian president Ben Ali who’d ruled since 1987.

In late December 2010, a 33-year-old Tunisian blogger named Slim Amamou posted about it on Anonymous’s IRC, as kind of a hail mary, not sure what to expect.

SFX: MESSAGE POSTING SOUND

In New York, an Anonymous member named Hector Monsegur, code named Sabu, read Slim’s message, and got energized. This was something big: not just going after a scammy-seeming religion, but real life or death stuff.

Sabu and others came up with a plan, Anonymous would help.

SFX: MESSAGE SOUND

Slim404 woke up to a message on January 2nd from Anonymous that contained what they called a care package. Inside was a set of greasemonkey scripts to get around government censorship, and let him post whatever he wanted on Facebook, which he shared with other Tunisian activists.

Meanwhile Anonymous turned its lens on the Tunisian government, and started a cyber invasion:

SFX: AIR RAID SIRENS, BOMB SOUNDS

Sabu and other Anonymous members sent massive sustained denial of service attacks on the infrastructure, taking down government websites, police databases, and the ability of the government to spy on its population.

SFX: STREET FIGHTING SOUNDS

The Tunisian government of Ben Ali was powerless. How could they fight back against Anonymous? They didn’t know who it was, and didn’t have the tools to maintain their cybersecurity. Online, the Tunisian government got sent back to the Stone Ages.

But on the streets, they still had real power. On January 6th, they found out Slim had contacted Anonymous, and sent secret police to his home.

SFX: DOOR GETTING KNOCKED DOWN

Pulling him from his home, the police threw him into a dank jail cell, handcuffed him to a metal chair, and told he would die there.

SFX: CELL DOORS CLOSING

But Anonymous didn’t stop attacking the government of Tunisia, and the care packages Slim had shared had spread. Protestors could use the internet that the police couldn’t access any more to organize huge protests, the likes of which Tunisia had never seen.

SFX: CHANTING STREET SOUNDS

Tens of thousands of people came onto the streets. The military began deserting President Ben Ali. And on January 14, 2022, Ben Ali fled the country.  Anonymous had helped topple a government, and got Slim let out of jail.. 

SFX: CELL DOORS OPENING

They wouldn’t know it, but Anonymous had kicked the hornet’s nest, and within the year dozens of members would be in jail. Because over the last few years they’d made a lot of powerful enemies, who were readying their counterattack.

Act Three

By early 2011, Anonymous had become something like the Dread Pirate Roberts from the Princess Bride movie: a name people would use to wage war against the enemies of internet freedom. 

After the Scientology hack, Anonymous split into a few different camps, specifically between people who wanted to keep it going as a joke, and the people who wanted to take it further.

The first group included some of the original Anonymous members like Aubrey Cottle, and Michigan-native Jennifer Emick, aka Asherash. The second group was dominated by guys like 18-year-old British university student Christopher Weatherhead, aka Nerdo, and 28-year-old New Yorker Hector Monsegur, code name Sabu.

The two groups argued over IRC, each one thinking they were the real Anonymous. They started keeping secrets from each other. In late 2010, the more activist side that was unafraid to break the law, started what they called Operation Payback, which attacked groups ranging from the Recording Industry Association of America, PayPal, Mastercard, even the FBI and the US Senate.

They were the people behind Operation Tunisia, and they were the people who really freaked out the cybersecurity powers that be.

Some of them, including Sabu, splintered off further, forming a group known as Lulzsec that was willing to skirt the law and act more like a black hat hacker group.

In early 2011, Aaron Barr of HBGary tried to stop them, but instead fell on his face, just embarrassing himself, and adding to Anonymous’s legend.

It seemed like Anonymous might really shift the balance of power away from governments to decentralized collectives, and groups like LulzSec might have a lasting impact on the world..

But they didn’t know that they messed up, bad.

Asherash was an early Anonymous member who split post-Project Chanology, and started a small cybersecurity company called Backtrace. She’d been low-key feuding with the Operation Payback and LulzSec folks for years, but unlike HBGary, Asherash was smart, and had friends in the rest of Anonymous.

So when a friend of hers, Lauelai Bailey, aka “Laurelai,” sent her chat transcripts from a secret LulzSec meeting celebrating taking down HBGary, she carefully went through it, trying her best not to let any of the LulzSec people know she had an insight into what they were doing.

Most of the chat was innocuous, until she noticed something. Sabu fucked up. At a little before 3:30pm Eastern time on February 11, 2011, Sabu posted a series of messages:

SFX: MESSAGE POSTING

“I left a backdoor admin account on HBGary, anyone want to see if we still have admin?” he wrote, then typed out an address that ended with “prvt.org”

SFX: MESSAGE POSTING

A minute later he typed out “oops. Wrong domain”

SFX: MESSAGE POSTING

And posted the right link. But Asherash had got a lead. What was prvt.org?

SFX: GOOGLING

Some light internet sleuthing later, she found that domain linked to a community group for car lovers that Sabu was part of, and that he’d posted pictures and videos of his souped-up Toyota AE86 car. Which led right to the facebook page for Hector Monsegur of New York.

Checkmate, she thought to herself. 

She posted some of her findings online, hoping it might embarrass Sabu. But they weren’t the only people who were looking.

MUSIC SHIFT

The morning of June 11, 2011, Sabu was getting his daughter ready for school, when he looked outside his East Village housing project and saw something he’d never seen before:

SFX: NYC STREET SOUNDS

A Con Edison truck was parked out front of his apartment complex, talking to the mailman.

That should have been the first sign there was something going down. The utility company never came by his housing project. 

He shook it off, and walked his two kids to school. But as he came back near his apartment, he kept noticing a bunch of strangers he’d never seen before. And he was a car guy, he didn’t recognize any of the cars parked outside his building.

One guy definitely seemed like he was looking at Sabu behind his newspaper. Sabu made eye contact, and the guy threw down his newspaper and started to fidget.

SFX: PAPER HITTING THE GROUND

Something was up.

Sabu went to an ATM, pulled out some money, then picked his kids up from school.

What’s wrong? They asked, he said nothing, but he went out and used all that cash to buy them whatever they wanted from the store, before he took them to a family member down the street, and told them to spend the night.

SFX: BODEGA BELL RINGS

He went to the corner store, bought a six-pack, even though he didn’t drink, and went back home to have a last drink with his brother.

They’re coming for me, he said. He already knew. And he didn’t think there was anything he could do to change anything.

SFX: KNOCK

And around 8pm, there was a knock on his door.

Police! Open up!

Sabu looked at his brother, and told him to chill, he had this.

SFX: DOOR UNLOCKING

He looked out, and saw a dozen FBI agents waiting in the hallway.

The lead pulled out a badge, then told him: We know who you are, we know what you’re doing, and we also know you’ve got two kids in the house.

And at that, any trace of bravado Sabu might have had went out the window.

He would do anything to protect his kids, even if it meant throwing out all his ethics.

The FBI had a pretty good case against him, and knew they could pin hacking HBGary, as well as his attacks on Mastercard, and Paypal. He could be in a LOT of trouble. 

But they made him an offer: they’d be lenient, if he cooperated.

What can I do? He asked.

So the next day, Sabu went online to the Anonymous chat, like nothing had happened.

SFX: TYPING SOUNDS

Where were you? Someone messaged him. He laughed it off, and asked if it was a crime to go do his own thing.

And over the next few months he silently collected information. He made sure to ask leading questions, and investigate the people around him.

By the end of the summer, he had enough personal information on a half dozen of the main LulzSec and hacktivist side of Anonymous for the FBI to track them down.

SFX: CUFFS GOING ON

And the FBI struck: over the next year they made dozens of arrests, ranging from Lulzsec members to people who’d used Low Orbit Cannons against Scientology years ago. And when it came time for them to go to court, they were shocked to find testimony against them from Sabu.

SFX: GAVEL GOING DOWN.

By the beginning of 2012, most of the active and militant members of Anonymous had been arrested.

By the very nature of Anonymous, it didn’t cripple it—it was an idea more than an organization. But it took away some of the luster. This wasn’t some quasi-invincible group: it was a bunch of hackers who could get caught and turn on each other.

Even the people who didn’t get arrested stopped caring as much. It felt like, what was the point?

Over the next few years, use of the Anonymous boards slowed seriously. A few people would come and go, but a lot of the joy went out.

SFX: TYPING

People on the chat groups, scared by the arrests, a little more nervous about privacy, wanted to do something using the power of Anonymous’s army, but weren’t sure what.

The next few years would see the rise of a lot of coordinated online hacking and harassment campaigns. 

From GamerGate to QAnon, a lot of groups started to use Anonymous’s techniques, but for nefarious reasons. They weren’t in on the joke, they weren’t making the world a better place, but they used the tools of the internet to affect people offline.

Was there even a place for Anonymous any more? Was it even possible to be an ethical hacking group?

Act Four

Following the arrests in 2011 & 2012 of some of Anonymous’s most high-profile members, the hacktivist group’s profile lowered significantly. reasons.

By the end of the decade, Anonymous felt a little like a dated reference to the early 2010s, like Vine, or the unofficial Anonymous anthem, Chocolate Rain.

Right wing trolls started giving this kind of citizen hacking army a bad name, and a lot of Anonymous members called it quits. It didn’t seem like it could support the decade-long process of movement building that a lot of activist groups required.

But during the pandemic lockdowns, and the Black Lives Matters protests of summer 2020, Anonymous came back. On May 28, 2020, a rave promoter from outside Baltimore, John Vibes—yes that’s his real name—uploaded a video featuring the familiar text-to-speech voice and Guy Fawkes mask:

CLIP: “Greetings citizens of the United States, this is a message from Anonymous” https://www.facebook.com/anonews.co/videos/285581555919237

People started going back into Anonymous chat rooms, asking what they could do.

First someone hacked the Minneapolis Police scanners to play NWA.

SFX: SIRENS MIXED WITH 90s GANGSTER RAP

The next day someone with a grasp of Anonymous history changed it so the scanners played Tay Zonday’s Chocolate Rain.

MUSIC CUE: SOMBER BUT EPIC CHOCOLATE RAIN SOUND-ALIKE

In June 2020, Anonymous members leaked hundreds of gigabytes of data from police departments showing abuse of power at all levels. 

SFX: DOWNLOADING

Anonymous was back, like it had never gone anywhere.

And in August 2020, Aubrey Cottle, one of the original founders of Anonymous back in 2006, made a pretty wild move: he announced himself in an interview with the Atlantic as one of the founders of Anonymous. 

He wanted to set the record straight, and try to explain what Anonymous was, by, ironically, losing his anonymity. He talked about how Anonymous had changed over the years: how he’d originally tried to make it more of a joking group that happened to stand up to power-hungry bullies, but the group had evolved and grown, then shrunk down again after arrests.

And Anonymous might not always be there. It might go in and out of popularity, its members might grow into the thousands or shrink to a few dozen. But it won’t just disappear.

Because like Anonymous member, Jake “Topiary” Davis, who ran LulzSec’s Twitter before getting arrested in 2011 following Sabu’s testimony, said: you can’t arrest an idea.

And wherever power-hungry petty tyrants tried to restrict people’s rights, the idea of Anonymous was there. It’s like a Guy Fawkes mask sitting on a street corner, waiting to be picked up by whoever needed to use it.

I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.

CREDITS

Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. And another way to support us is on Patreon. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by David Burgis. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka The Anachronistic Anonymous Asshat. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!