: this is better than WTO Seattle : bottom up approach : pretty appealing message imo : synchronized twitter and facebook postings, jolly rogers wherever you can on the internet, and then a manifesto about how to take to your local street corner and do something : anon can get it moving, but this is bigger than anon
A change of plans had indeed been decided by those chatting in AnonOps—but most Anons, even those in #command, had not been invited to take part in the decision-making process. As this became increasingly clear to those who were left out in the cold, many expressed dismay and confusion. “It seems many here are unaware,” wrote Fred. As blame circulated, others, dumbfounded, defended themselves: “it’s not us, we are not firing at paypal.”
Despite being an outsider, Trogo proceeded to remind the Anons how Anonymous works: the name is free to be taken by any who would take it. Someone noted the irony of raising this ostensibly well-known fact to Anonymous (and in what was perhaps the most important Anonymous IRC channel at the time, no less). And in addition to stating the obvious, the security researcher and blogger defended himself by characterizing what happened as being “nothing new.” He was well aware that the channel had already largely decided to support WikiLeaks, even if its commitment to mirror the site by duplicating its content had not yet been actualized. Recognizing that what was done was done, Radwaddie switched from a defensive stance to an offensive one, making a vigorous attempt to convince the disgruntled parties to embrace the momentum and push forward, hitting PayPal regardless of the strategy that had already been chosen:
It was a shrewd and opportunistic move—and almost immediately consensus started to favor jumping into the fray. But there were calls for due process. If they wanted to do it right, they first needed to rev up their propaganda machine. And even as some were swayed toward DDoSing PayPal, the growing anger (particularly directed at Radwaddie and Trogo for violating decision-making protocol) spread to others:
[…]
As Radwaddie attempted to push the campaign forward in spite of attacks thrown his way, semantic arguments broke out over the role of #command in general. Radwaddie yelled-typed: “ok, the fuck, WHO THE FUCK IN HERE HAS ANY IDEA AT ALL?” And as the seed germinated amid the gathered Anons, the debate slowly—perhaps inexorably—shifted from a question of whether to hit PayPal to a question of where to hit PayPal. Most participants favored the “main site.” Radwaddie then interwove pragmatic and moral arguments: “we’re trying to make a point, [that] we disagree with paypal [which is why] we do the thing we do best: ddos.” He wrote that this was what Anonymous was about, not “awesome speeches or fabulous community.” Just as support for Radwaddie’s position seemed poised to reach a consensus, someone named “lark” entered the room with a surprising nugget of information: “the [initial] attack on the paypal blog was one of our own as a side project.” So, in fact, the very first DDoS hit, which everyone thought was instigated by an unaffiliated Anon, happened to be carried out by one of their own. I guess he had just gone about his business quietly, since AnonOps at the time was primarily focused on supporting file sharing.
But despite this revelation, it seemed that the momentum could not be stopped. Given the hubbub generated by Trogo and Radwaddie’s decision to piggyback on the first DDoS hit, which everyone thought was accomplished by an outsider, it might seem incredulous that no one responded to lark. But we can imagine that the Anons were at this point so deeply immersed in their course of action—debating targets and strategy—that this single statement was easy to overlook. The conversation simply continued. Finally, an announcement came:
The propaganda team was notified and the attack commenced (with botnets being secretly deployed). Conversation naturally shifted to consider the significance of enlarging the scope of Operation Payback (aka “o:p”) to include other matters aside from copyright and piracy:
[…]
The attack, unbeknownst to all participating, was no longer just a “sideOP” initiated by the Anons in #command—instead, it was the opening salvo that would galvanize a global movement, ushering in a new age of Anonymous. This new node would boast thousands of participants, and would be borne not out of an obvious and straightforward determination, but, rather, out of confusion: a mixture of manipulation, false information, good intentions, and rampant uncertainty.
They Didn’t Seek It, They Didn’t Choose It
The answer to Trogo’s question—“Is it even possible to DDoS PayPal?”—turned out to be “yes.” (The same turned out to be true of MasterCard and many financial companies.) What had been conceived as a mere diversion metamorphized, rather quickly, into the apotheosis of AnonOps. Between December 6, 2010, and December 8, 2010, AnonOps expanded its scope, targeting not only the PayPal blog and the PayPal website, but also the Swedish prosecutor’s websites (as the Swedish government was seeking to extradite Assange on rape charges)12 and the websites of Senator Joe Leiberman, Sarah Palin, MasterCard, Visa, EveryDNS (a domain name service provider), and others. Exacting vengeance against any party complicit in the smearing of WikiLeaks, AnonOps caused all of these sites to experience some amount of downtime, though the exact hours vary depending on who you ask. By December 8, numbers on the main IRC #operationpayback channel spiked to an all-time high of 7,800.
These examples demonstrate how Anonymous’s tactics conform to Michel de Certeau’s account of “everyday tactics of resistance” whereby “a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’”13 Radwaddie and Trogo decided to act independent of the group, seizing exactly this sort of timely opportunity; this style of on-the-fly decision making is an Anonymous staple. The group is often reactive rather than proactive; to paraphrase the poem which opens the chapter: the decision was forced upon them, they could not refuse it, they did not seek it, they didn’t choose it, but it was up to them. To fully execute the operation nevertheless required considerable organization and resources, which in this case took the form of zombie and voluntary botnets and propaganda.
What made the difference was both simple and simply beyond Anonymous’s control: it was the general indignation regarding the payment blockade. The Internet was awash in articles and tweets expressing dismay; everyone was asking some version of the question posed by a UK journalist on Twitter: “Of what have either Assange or Wiki-leaks [sic] actually been convicted, that allows VISA, Mastercard, PayPal, Amazon to withdraw service this week?”14 To illustrate the hypocrisy of it all, people pointed out that while MasterCard refused to process payments for WikiLeaks, racists around the world remained free to donate to their racist organization of choice, like the Klu Klux Klan. Internet scholar Zeynep Tufekci issued the following warning:
The WikiLeaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere “quasi-public sphere,” the Internet i
s somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private.15
Everyone was indeed confronting this cold hard reality: the Internet, so often experienced as a public space, is in fact a privatized zone, with the Amazons and PayPals of the world able to shut down conversation and commerce.
The mood in certain quarters at the time was captured in the following statement by an activist who went by the Twitter name “AnonyOps” (no relation to AnonOps, even if the names bear an unmistakable resemblance):
I remember a mountain of angst building up and I didn’t realize until that day that it wasn’t a mountain. It was a volcano and the day that WikiLeaks donations were held, the volcano blew and that’s the day I searched for a way to call out the bullshit. A way for me to talk publicly, without jeopardizing my career.16
A skilled and wealthy engineer in his thirties, he created the AnonyOps Twitter account (it would eventually become one of the largest multiple-author Anonymous accounts) and, like so many others, logged into IRC.
AnonOps, because it was not some amorphous blob but rather a team with a dedicated volunteer force and resources, had erected a platform from which all kinds of people could act. Confusion and happenstance mingled with operational readiness and the deployment of resources. Droves of concerned citizens from all over world flocked to the renegade army.
“Goodnight, and sweet dreams from AnonOps”
In the fall of 2010, when AnonOps was banging out wave upon wave of DDoS attacks under Operation Payback, I had taken a leave of absence from Anonymous to finish my first book on free software hacking. I was behind on the book, and with my tenure clock ticking, the pressure was on. It was psychologically crushing me: to retain my job, I had to publish a book. So I set aside the month of December to sprint to the finish line. When Anonymous resurfaced as an activist force in early December, I trusted my Spidey sense: it struck me as too historically significant to ignore. I put aside my manuscript and gave my attention to Anonymous. To be entirely frank, the gamble felt safe; extrapolating from previous actions, I figured it would peter out, or at least slow down, after a month, and I could then return to writing. But instead I remained chained to my computer for roughly three years.
At the height of the holidays that December, I went to the West Coast to spend time with my family. While family members went hiking on rugged cliffs overlooking the shimmering Pacific Ocean and watched movies late into the night, I huddled over my laptop. I was engrossed, dumbfounded, mystified, and addicted to the wild energy and excitement coursing through the channels. I’m pretty sure my family thought I was being purposely antisocial, and for good reason. I was hands down the scrooge of the bunch, never quite as excited as everyone else about holiday cheer, eggnog, or (most especially) the board games they loved and I loathed. In any given year, a half dozen excuses were ready to roll off my tongue at the mere hint of Settlers of Catan.
For most of my family, the Internet represents the dreaded chore of email; it’s the place where they read the morning news over coffee, skim Facebook for the latest pictures of friends and their cherubic babies, and, in moments of workplace desperation, fire up those fantastic cat videos. The Internet is all these things for me as well, but also more—a place of multiple worlds, a galaxy really. For them, it is simply not a “place” where something like the anti–World Trade Organization protests, which took Seattle by surprise over ten years ago, could possibly happen. And, undoubtedly, there is an ocean of difference between tear gas and typing. Incommensurabilities aside, one thing was certain: I was witnessing the first large-scale, populist, full-bodied online protest, and I was not going to miss it for the world, especially not for the Settlers of Catan.
After a long day of research, I wanted nothing more than to describe to my relatives the passionate and rambunctious scenes I had witnessed. But I fumbled to find the adequate words and terminology. For weeks I struggled to get a handle on things and judge just what sort of “mass demo” was taking place. Questions rather than answers sprung to mind: Was it civil disobedience? Direct action? Something akin to a street demonstration? A virtual sit-in? A blockade? Did DDoS attacks violate free speech and essential liberties, as some critics claimed? Was it ethical, unethical, effective, ineffective? Who were all these people, anyway?
I had only a vague idea at the start. There were so many nicknames zinging by me on IRC. Soon I would incessantly chat with a number of them, and eventually I would meet a smaller slice in person. But, at the time, they were mysteries to me. I had no clue about the existence of secret back channels; I was primarily viewing the conversations on #operationpayback and other public channels. I also had to learn just how LOIC worked at a technical level, and I had to read up on AnonOps’ fall DDoS campaigns. The pace and the sheer number of participants made all previous conversations I had witnessed on IRC seem trivial. Even though I was expending very little physical energy—sitting all day, staring at conversations—by the end of the day my head ached. I was worn out, and torn as to my opinion on things. It took a few weeks to process the ethics of how Anonymous ran its DDoS campaigns.
The amount of information-processing required of participants was staggering. Logging into the main channel, a screen popped up displaying the topic and a terse condensation of target information: the IP address to enter into LOIC, Twitter channels you should check out for context, and other IRC channels worth visiting. Typically, it looked something like this:
(04:56:18 PM) The topic for #opb is: OPERATION PAYBACK “http://anonops.eu/” http://anonops.eu/ | Twitter:
“http://twitter.com/Op_anon “http://twitter.com/Op_anon | “http://www.justiceforassange.com/” http://www.justiceforassange.com/Hive: 91.121.92.84 | Target:
“http://www.mastercard.com/” www.mastercard.com | See: #Setup #Target #WikiLeaks #Propaganda #RadioPayback #Protest #Lounge and /list for rest | “http://808chan.org/tpb” http://808chan.org/tpb
In conjunction, Anonymous was churning out a slew of well-reasoned manifestos, videos, and posters; Anonymous had tapped into a deep, widespread disenchantment, and by providing a conduit for confrontational activism, had channeled it into a more visible and coherent form. It was as if everybody knew it was history in the making: the first popular uprising on the Internet. Strangers were reaching out to work toward a common goal. I myself was inspired.
The conversations were a whole other matter. With thousands of people logged in and up to a hundred users talking at once, it was wildly cacophonous and required every last shred of my already ADHD-addled brain to follow. Indeed, there is probably no other medium on earth as conducive to what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin terms “polyphony” (multiple voices, each with a unique perspective and moral weight) than IRC.17 And while some would come to describe Anonymous as “a microcosm of anarchy, with no morals, empathy, or agenda,”18 I witnessed something altogether different: everyone had a moral viewpoint, a reason for being there. They cared, wanted justice, wanted to end censorship (and some even were there to disagree—vehemently—with the tactics being used). Yes: Anonymous had no universal mandate as a collective, but participants had their own, often well-tuned moral compasses guiding them.
To take but one example from among dozens of issues being hotly debated: in December 2010, #operationpayback was home to a vociferous debate over the effectiveness and ethics of technological protest in general, and DDoSing in particular. Two subtopics stood out: the safety of LOIC, and the more philosophical question of whether DDoSing is an exercise of the right to free speech or an act aimed at precluding the same right for others. The excerpts from two distinct conversations below exemplify the polyphonous character of these interchanges and the multiplicity of ethical positions on these technological protests. These issues were visited and revisited throughout the course of the month.
Early in the campaign, participants grappled with the political significance of Anonymous, with most everyone expressi
ng support for DDoS:
[…]
: this attack seems pretty unorganized right now
[…]
: I think these attacks are less about hurting the businesses than drawing attention and forcing the media to cover the story
: most people I know have never even heard about WikiLeaks until I bring it up
[…]
: The point for me is that this is the technological way of mass protesting that’s actually effective so until there’s total freedom of information then there isn’t an end.
[…]
[…]
A few days later on the same channel, a few ripped DDoSing apart, as others continued to defend it:
<26>: i dont think DDoS can be in the name of freedom of speech
<26>: cause it is an act of silencing
secreta: its pretty clear how hypocritical a ddos is to me
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy Page 13