All it takes is one person to translate a bit of dialogue, recognize a style of license plate, or pinpoint a specific mountain range in the background of a fuzzy YouTube video. These detectives use Google Maps, Flickr, Facebook, WhoIs, the Internet Archive, property records, and a host of other tools to dig up a wealth of information. The work would intimidate any single /b/tard, but together, hundreds or thousands of slackers can rival a small government’s intelligence efforts.
Adam Goldstein Raid
In July 2009, a disgruntled customer posted an exchange he’d had with computer repair serviceman Adam Goldstein to Something Awful, hoping to incite the wrath of the SA goons. The customer had bought a computer monitor from Goldstein’s eBay store, and it was never delivered. When the customer complained, he swore at Goldstein, who demanded an apology, claiming that he had three lawyers in the family, implying that a lawsuit could be on the way.
When Something Awful failed to build enough momentum around the kerfuffle, a goon brought the matter to /b/’s attention.
Evening gents’
We at Something Awful require your assistance. While goondom and bee-ocity can accomplish much we have stumbled upon something so utterly delicious we couldn’t keep it away from you raving lunatics.
The meat of the matter is that Adam L. Goldstein LLC who runs a crap company called ATECH computer services decided to be a king-sized douche. After poking and prodding we found that he is a raving lunatic! So, whilst we are under the reigns of our admins and thusly cannot do much beyond making fun of him on our forums . . . we give you the information to do whatever with.
When goons and /b/tards began to spam Goldstein’s email, he discovered the Something Awful thread dedicated to his alleged poor customer service. He paid the SA membership fee in order to dispute the claims, and eventually started threatening lawsuits (or as 4chan calls frivolous legal action, “lolsuits”).
That’s when Anonymous’s wrath descended on poor Goldstein. They brought down his website, figured out where he lived by scraping his MySpace page, and created an Encyclopedia Dramatica entry for him. They bombarded his home and office with mocking phone calls, porn mags, pizza deliveries, sex toy deliveries, death threats, and black faxes. They even scheduled visits from call girls and Jehovah’s Witnesses and posted fake flyers warning the neighborhood of Goldstein’s purported pedophilic past.
But perhaps most damaging was that Anonymous discovered Goldstein was charging exorbitant prices for things like spyware removal and wireless network configuration, and posted this information to Reddit and Digg, where it was discovered by the blogosphere, destroying Goldstein’s online reputation.
Operation Payback
In mid-2010, several Bollywood producers hired a company called Aiplex Software to DDoS websites that ignored takedown notices, in an effort to mitigate the piracy that was increasingly eating up their revenue. In retaliation, Anonymous, who I doubt gives much of a crap about Bollywood films, but who seeks to fight antipiracy wherever they see it, launched Operation Payback. They targeted not only Aiplex Software, but also the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the British Phonographic Industry, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, bringing down the sites for a combined thirty hours. These efforts then bled into attacks on related law firms, antipiracy organizations, and even KISS’s Gene Simmons, who encouraged record industry execs to “Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars.”
They brought down Simmons’s website for over a day, and redirected it to a popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay. He eventually was able to put his site back online, responding:
Our legal team and the FBI have been on the case and we have found a few, shall we say “adventurous” young people, who feel they are above the law. And, as stated in my MIPCOM speech, we will sue their pants off.
First, they will be punished. Second, they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who’s been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend. We will soon be printing their names and pictures.
We will find you. You cannot hide. Stay tuned.
His impotent threats, like so many of those Anonymous has targeted, were sheepishly removed a short time later after his site was brought down again. Then Anonymous went after the RIAA because it sought legal action against file sharing site Limewire.
In December 2010, Amazon, Paypal, Bank of America, PostFinance, MasterCard, and Visa decided to stop processing donations for the global news leak network WikiLeaks, which had recently caused global controversy by posting sensitive internal documents. These payment-processing sites had bowed to political pressure, refusing to work with WikiLeaks. In retaliation, Anonymous launched DDoS attacks against several of these companies, successfully bringing down the websites for MasterCard and Visa. A 16-year-old boy from the Netherlands was arrested in relation to the attack, and the FBI is probably still investigating.
HBGary Federal Hack
In February 2011, Aaron Barr, the chief executive of the security firm HBGary Federal, announced that he’d infiltrated Anonymous and would reveal his findings in an upcoming conference.
Anonymous hacked into HBGary Federal’s website and put up a mocking message. They acquired and published embarrassing emails tainted with the hubris of someone who thought he’d beaten Anonymous. This was a company that positioned itself to its clients as a leader in computer security. A company that had contracts with the NSA. And it had been bested by a bunch of amateur pranksters. Epic fail.
Up until then, Anonymous hadn’t been able to do a ton of damage. So they brought down a few websites for a few hours. No big deal. But this was something different. They brought HBGary Federal to its knees by using basic, widely known hacking techniques that could have been stopped had HBGary Federal’s employees taken a few 101-level password protection measures. Congress is now investigating the firm’s relationship with the NSA.
Operation Sony
Anonymous’s most recent effort is ongoing as of this writing: on January 11, 2001, Sony sued George Hotz and several others for “jailbreaking” (i.e., busting through intentionally placed limitations in a piece of hardware) and reverse-engineering a PlayStation 3 console. Sony accused Hotz of violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and committing computer fraud and copyright infringement. Hotz had fiddled with a PS3, and they wanted to prevent him from telling others how to pull it off. What’s more, they acquired the IP addresses of visitors to Hotz’s blog.
On April 17, Sony was attacked by an unknown entity, leading to the compromise of seventy-seven million accounts (along with personal information and credit card details), and a devastating twenty-four-day outage of Sony’s PSN Network, where users play games against each other via the web. Some have speculated that Sony’s reputation is so damaged that it will be forced to exit the “console wars.”
Some representatives of Anonymous have denied involvement on behalf of the collective, but the coincidence is remarkable. The similarly silly and anonymous hacker group Lulz Security has claimed responsibility for the attack. On May 29, 2011, Lulz Security also successfully hacked PBS in retribution for an episode of Frontline that was perceived as unfair to WikiLeaks. Because they’re operating anonymously and in a lulzy fashion (for example, posting news stories about Tupac Shakur’s New Zealand whereabouts), they may as well be operating under the Anonymous banner. Their methods, motivations, and aesthetic are identical, however they don’t seem to recruit or share Anonymous’s populist ideals. And unlike Anonymous, they’re a discreet group of skilled individuals which could conceivably be dismantled.
Gabriella Coleman guesses that it’s impossible to know who is responsible for the Sony hack.
It’s just impossible to verify, because there is a very well-organized cybercrime mafia that exists in Russia and Bulgaria and other places, and they can very much exploit what Anonymous is doing. There’s a well-known security flaw at Sony, and the n
ext thing you know they steal all the credit cards and then someone at Sony claims it’s Anonymous. Or, maybe it really was Anonymous. No way of knowing.
From the beginning, Anonymous experienced lots of infighting because there is no clear managerial structure. Multiple groups claim to be the real Anonymous at any given moment. AnonOps itself was attacked by Anons who felt that the site’s moderators were taking too much credit for Anonymous’s victories, and attempting to establish hierarchies of control within the ranks. The rogue group was presumably led by a disgruntled AnonOps admin named Ryan. Even worse, Ryan leaked the IP addresses of hundreds of registered AnonOps users. If the infighting has weakened Anonymous through wasted time and money spent getting servers back online, it has helped to solidify one of the group’s most cherished principles: No one’s in charge here.
I got in touch with another Anon, using the handle Anonymouse, who claims that he helped kick-start Operation Sony. Anonymouse immediately gave me a laundry list of misconceptions about 4chan and Anonymous. He too had been dealing with clueless reporters, and wanted to make sure I had a basic understanding of how his community works.
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 reall
y 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.
EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS Page 21