She agreed and we plunged into many conversations in Las Vegas, which continued later online. Knowing that she had been party to one of the notorious raids that occurred in this period, I asked her just what it felt like to have the FBI descend upon you. It is worth conveying her story because having a mental picture of what can transpire during such visits is handy for negotiating a potential visit from law enforcement. Most people I interviewed were ill-equipped to handle the sudden and intimidating show of force; they spoke freely when they should have stayed silent except to request a lawyer. As hacker Emmanuel Goldstein put it during the infamous HOPE panel on snitching, “People panic, people panic … and the authorities count on this. The authorities live for this kind of thing so that they get as much information.” (Note that the following account of the raid is largely anecdotal, and represents her side of the story. But many crucial details match up with descriptions of events found in the FBI document known as a FD-302, a summary of interviews that was later leaked to me.)
The FBI arrived at dawn. Haefer peacefully snorlaxed away in her apartment in a working-class Las Vegas neighborhood, as five to eight agents approached quietly in the winter desert dawn. (It was difficult for Haefer to remember the exact number of agents, as she was disoriented. They “all looked alike,” she said.) They broke the silence by pounding on the doorway. Though jolted from her slumber, she was not scared—figuring simply that her father, who worked odd hours, had forgotten his keys. She dragged herself out the bed, shuffled to the front door wearing her jammies, and was greeted with “a flashlight in my face, which at six in the morning is offsetting for anyone.” The bewildering quality of the situation was magnified by her realization that a pack of rifle barrels also pointed her way.
She described how they led her out of the doorway and into the walkway that cut through the complex, then began patting her down. While performing a thorough search they asked questions, seeking to confirm her identity. Early in the questioning, her mouth woke up and bit back. “It’s me fuckwit. Piss off. I’m going inside. It’s cold.” With that formality taken care of, they all headed to the warmth of her apartment.
An agent asked if she would like to sit down. She questioned his sincerity and perceived his gesture as display of power. “You don’t ask someone if they want to sit down in their own house,” she explained to me. The assertion of power booted her into a wakeful realization: “These are not my friends. They will not help me. They’re here for their jobs.”
They searched the house, snapped pictures of equipment, confiscated her computer, and interrogated her. She had told me she was a bit of a wiseass, the following story confirmed it. As is official FBI protocol, two of the agents paired off for the interview, one asking questions, the other scribbling the answers.8 She claims they asked about 4chan. At the time, she thought to herself, “If you guys think this is about 4chan, then you’re even more incompetent than I thought.” She told me she began prattling on “about this thread I’d read about this guy who was in love with his dog and wanted to get her pregnant so he went around getting samples and stirred them in a cup and injected them into his penis and got her pregnant.”
She noted that “they stopped taking notes for that part,” and—sure enough—there is no mention of 4chan in the leaked account filed by the agents. But, given Haefer’s chutzpah and adept mastery of the lulz, it is theoretically possible—even plausible. And the quote’s exclusion may be in keeping with their methodology—the FBI (understandably) is not in the business of the lulz (much less documenting it). Based on two additional documents I was also given (covering interviews with two other Anons who were raided the same day and eventually arrested), the genre combines long summaries of interviews that stick to factual statements with the occasional direct quotation, while glossing over trivialities. There is no trace of, much less reflection upon, the tone or emotional tenor of the exchange.
And yet, in Haefer’s recounting of events for my benefit, these small acts of defiance meant a lot. In that exchange, law enforcement and Haefer applied very different criteria when it came to valuing information, as one might expect. Regardless of whether they were trolled, or aware of being trolled, or cared in either case (or whether I was trolled), the agents’ report sticks to matters of legal relevance.9 They wrote: “Haefer then asked the specific purpose of the search and the interview. Special Agent (SP) X then stated to Haefer that he believed she (Haefer) already knew the reason why the FBI was searching her home and for the interview. She then responded they were there for “DDoSing and vandalism.’”
Still, the report and Haefer’s account agree in many regards. She was asked numerous times to “explain further,” and she responded by touching on a range of topics: from her precise involvement in activities, to broader reflections on the ethics of DDoSing. At first the report recorded her stating she “was not involved that much in either [vandalism or DDoS]” but “after being told she was not being truthful” (indicated, they told her, by evidence in the IRC logs) she admitted she had full knowledge that her computer was involved in DDoSing PayPal and helped others configure LOIC. She also gave them all her usernames, which the report lists, but claimed not to remember the names of chat rooms, operators, and servers because there were too many of them (in other reports I read, the interviewees had less difficulty with recall).
Her report, as well as the two others I had access to, attempt to describe, to some limited degree, the political defenses offered for engaging in DDoS campaigns. But the presentation of this information was different coming from Haefer and the report. For her part, she told me she was asked directly about Assange. No such question was evident in the report, only the following claim, which is nevertheless interesting: “She was supportive of PayPal being a target of DoS because she didn’t like that PayPal [sic] withheld Julian Assange’s account, was money owed to Assange. She stressed she was not an Assange fan, just upset at what PayPal had done.” This was in addition to a detailed summary of her political defense:
Haefer agreed with what Anonymous is doing. When a store or real-world business is doing something that is unacceptable it can be protested in front of the property. Since VISA or Mastercard is online, they can’t be physically protested and therefore must be an online protests [sic], or in the form of a DoS attack. Haefer described such protests as a “right.”
During our interview, she elaborated on what she meant by “right”:
It was about rights. It wasn’t about supporting Assange. It was about supporting freedom of speech and government transparency. It was about telling the government that they can’t just interfere in foreign court cases. It was about telling the government that they work for us not the other way around. And that even though I didn’t like Assange, I still believed he had the right to freedom of speech and a fair trial. And that if we only supported the rights of people we liked, then they weren’t rights, they’re privileges. And that privileges can be taken away. Rights can’t be taken away. They can only be oppressed.
If it is routine for the FBI to show up at 6 am, it is also routine for them to ask for cooperation; this can mean various things, from providing information on the spot to becoming an informant. Haefer claims she was asked (and this request was in the two other full reports I read). She declined, or in her own more vivid words to me, “I told them to fuck off.”
When the special agent left, Haefer felt that despite what she had just told him, he still considered her a ruffian troll instead of an activist. According to Mercedes, he handed over his card and asked her to “please not go after his family.” “If he still thought that was an issue, then he still didn’t understand the case,” she said. Since we don’t know his side of the story, perhaps he was also cracking a very dry joke.
Reflecting back on the situation, Haefer, who, like so many Anons, was caught off guard when the Feds came, concluded, “If I got raided again, I probably wouldn’t tell them I did it.” But she was still proud then, as she still is now, o
f her small contribution to defending rights.
“How to Protest Intelligently”
Dozens of other individuals in the United States were interrogated in a similar fashion during roughly the same time period. A few people shared stories with each other or on forums soon after, but for the most part, no one had any insight into what had transpired. All the while, Anonymous kept rolling along with contributing to the hard work of ousting a regime. Throngs of Egyptians were descending on Tahrir Square in the first of the dynamic occupations that would eventually occur in Spain, then North America, and, eventually, Europe. The numbers were breathtaking. By January 31, the square held a reported 250,000 people. But the hopeful excitement was dampened by escalating violence. On the IRC channels, a number of Egyptians requested that Anonymous attack government and state-controlled media. They refused. Even though some groups of Anons were actively DDoSing government websites—a move that irked Telecomix—the general consensus, echoed in both IRC chats and publicly released statements, was to never attack the press (all pseudonyms have been changed):
ORG.EG
As part of their endeavors, Anons from AnonOps, members of marblecake, and Telecomix worked to make a stunningly detailed and well-illustrated pamphlet called “How to Protest Intelligently.”
By the end of the month, it was as if AnonOps was acting more like a human rights advocacy group than a mass of lulz-drunk trolls. Its efforts tended away from unilateral actions and toward infrastructural support that might enable citizens to circumvent censors and evade electronic surveillance. They sent a care package composed of security tools, tactical advice, and encouragement, like this note, clarifying the limited role social media plays in such uprisings, even if they are touted by pundits as a “Twitter Revolution”: “This is *your* revolution. It will neither be Twittered nor televised or IRC’ed. You *must* hit the streets or you *will* loose the fight.”
While many Anons were invigorated by their ability to support the historic toppling of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, for others, there could be no clearer evidence of the ascendancy of moralfaggotry. Indeed, by contributing to the Arab revolutions and their idealistic political ends, Anonymous had so transformed itself that it seemed as if, like AnonSnapple, the lulz had itself been banished. As it turns out, this was not the case. As the revolutions raged overseas, a small team of hackers took revenge against an American security researcher and his firm, and the lulz returned with a vengeance.
CHAPTER 7
Revenge of the Lulz
Some basic features of the political culture emerging out of anonymity are neither new nor difficult to grasp. Consider the anonymous leak that revealed COINTELPRO, a systematic and illegal spying program leveled against the American population. One Pennsylvanian night in 1971, a group calling itself the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” forced its way into an FBI field office with a crowbar. As millions of Americans tuned into their radios to listen to Muhammad Ali square off with Joe Frazier in an epic fifteen-round boxing match, the activists emptied file cabinets of more than one thousand documents. Those on the subject of political surveillance were leaked to the media and published in the March 1972 issue of WIN Magazine, a journal of the War Resisters League, and COINTELPRO was revealed to the public for the first time. The program was initiated in 1956 by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and operated successfully until 1971.
COINTELPRO’s mandate was initially narrow: to disrupt the internal operations of the Communist Party USA, which Hoover believed to be under the direct influence of Russian infiltrators. Very quickly, its scope expanded to include the disruption of home-grown political activism of all varieties, including radical, conservative, and even moderate liberal efforts. One stated goal was to
prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position … King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.1
And, indeed, the documents provide clear evidence of the elaborate steps the FBI took to monitor King in particular. The illegal surveillance lasted for years, starting in the late ’50s when the program was first authorized by Hoover. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, William Cornelius Sullivan, associate director of the FBI, wrote to Hoover, “We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro and national security.” King was considered “an unprincipled man” who had a “weakness in his character.” Sullivan wrote, “We will at the proper time when it can be done without embarrassment to the Bureau, expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain.” Soon after King was named “Man of the Year” by Time magazine, the FBI was illegally authorized to bug his hotel room; “trespass is involved,” they wrote. The resulting transcripts were presented to Hoover, who responded, “They will destroy the burrhead.” The bugs captured evidence of King’s marital infidelity, which excited Sullivan and Hoover, since the recordings could be used to destroy the “animal.”2 An excerpt from the FBI letter sent to blackmail King evinces the ugly historical truth that the US government terrorized one of the nation’s most revered and peaceful civil rights crusaders:
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.3
The government similarly targeted many other groups: Students for a Democratic Society, white supremacists, branches of the feminist movement, the radical Puerto Rican independence movement, and countless anti–Vietnam War associations. Their aggressive and multi-pronged methods included predatory infiltration strategies with the purpose of sabotage: sustained, planned, and organized disruption of political movements so as to stamp them out of existence. They seeded misinformation, blackmailed activists, took them to court over tax mishaps, and sometimes even resorted to direct physical violence. Government agents’ reckless mandates saw them feed the media false stories and forge correspondences in the name of targeted groups. Some of the most lasting damage came from agents planted in movements so deeply that their disruptions completely eroded the kernels of trust these groups were built upon. COINTELPRO agents fostered a climate of fear and demoralization, draining the vitality of what had been legitimate and deep reservoirs of political activity.
After the Citizens’ leaks hit the press, other interventions followed, including the release of COINTELPRO documents obtained through a Fre
edom of Information Act request; NBC reporter Carl Stern used these documents as the basis for his award-winning reportage on the subject. Once the full extent of 1973/1974 COINTELPRO’S tampering with legitimate, legal, and even quite ordinary political dissent became known, the public was outraged. In the chambers of the US government a small group of senators formed the Church Committee in 1975. After investigation, their conclusion was unambiguous and resolute in indicting the program: “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that … The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation” (emphasis my own).4 Numerous reforms followed, including limiting the FBI directorship to a single ten-year term.
Soon after acquiring the files, the Citizens’ Commission sent the leaks to the press along with a communiqué, which they wanted published in all news stories covering the FBI documents. The communiqué explained their motives and goals:
We wish to make these documents more widely available so that they can be used effectively by all who are working for a more peaceful, just, and open society. Our purpose is not just to correct the more gross violations of constitutional rights by the FBI within the framework of its present goals and organization. Nor is it to attack personally individual informers, agents, or administrators. It is instead to contribute to the movement for fundamental constructive change in our society, for as we said in our initial statement, “as long as great economic and political power remains concentrated in the hands of small cliques not subject to democratic control and scrutiny, then repression, intimidation, and entrapment are to be expected.”5
While their intentions were made public, the members themselves remained anonymous until January 2014, when a few individuals stepped forward.6 To expose toxic tactics, these activists broke the law and utilized anonymity to shield themselves from consequences. This dramatic exposé did not happen online; there were no Guy Fawkes masks, no boxes were popped, no mail spools Pastebinned, and WikiLeaks played no role. But the concept was the same: cloak identity for protection and to deflect attention away from the messengers, and get the incriminating word out. Had it not been for the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI stealing documents tucked away in file cabinets and desk drawers, COINTELPRO might have remained in operation, leaving an even more sickening trail of destruction in its wake.
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy Page 20