Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy
Page 29
In fact, tflow, who was sixteen years old at the time, encouraged the crew to disband LulzSec. It had only been alive for fifty days, but that is a lifetime on the Internet. Surprisingly, everyone, even Sabu, initially agreed. But then, without warning, Sabu changed his mind. tflow explained it to me: “In the fallout he was just outraged that we all wanted to quit despite him not wanting us to and he generally gets what he wants through manipulation.” Ryan Ackroyd (aka Kayla) also recalled one of Sabu’s more manipulative—and deeply ironic—tactics: “I remember him saying something like (not word for word) something about him risking his kids coming this far and stuff and that it was unfair to give up.”
Despite Sabu’s exhortations, tflow’s camp ultimately prevailed. LulzSec retired at the end of June 2011. Of course, they couldn’t help but go out in style, and so on June 25 they unveiled a final mega-release, including the text of an internal AOL networking manual, half a gigabyte of AT&T internal data, and the emails, usernames, and encrypted user passwords for sites ranging from HackForums.net to NATO’s online book shop. Even more interesting than the data itself—at least from the perspective of trickery and myth-making—was LulzSec’s final statement, again drafted by Topiary:
For the past 50 days we’ve been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. All to selflessly entertain others—vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love. The raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy. It’s what we all crave, even the seemingly lifeless politicians and emotionless, middle-aged self-titled failures.11
The press release passed the LulzSec mantle to the nascent AntiSec movement. These hackers wanted, as tflow put it to me, LulzSec’s “legacy of hacks to continue.” The final statement continues:
behind the mask, behind the insanity and mayhem, we truly believe in the AntiSec movement. We believe in it so strongly that we brought it back, much to the dismay of those looking for more anarchic lulz. We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us … Please don’t stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve.
In jail, Hammond counted down the days until he could return to his newfound community of uber-political hackers. Upon release, he was, as he put it to me, “ready to rock again.” He had no trouble finding willing comrades.
Still, AntiSec’s future success was uncertain until three factors converged. First, Sabu, now working full time as an informant, made it his personal mission to keep AntiSec afloat. Second, Hammond functioned as the perfect confederate. A talented hacker who believed in the AntiSec mission, he became its unflagging workhorse, eventually dedicating most of his free time to the project. The third crucial factor was the existence of a broader team. Despite some LulzSec members having bid permanent adieu a number of them joined the new team. The fully constituted AntiSec crew would consist of roughly eight to twelve core participants—larger than LulzSec ever was. Composed of hackers and a few strategists, the team ensconced itself on a secret channel (with the not-so-secret name “#antisec”) on a server called “cryto.” Many had previously collaborated during the Arab and African Spring ops. I myself knew a number of them from this period, when I hung out on #freedommods, one of the invite-only social channels for the revolutionary ops.
Sabu, so often pegged as the leader of AntiSec, did not actually mastermind the operations or bark orders (in fact, he seemed quite scattered during this period, although later we will see that he went to Hammond with specific hacking requests). The entire AntiSec core team would sometimes work in unison, but more typically they splintered into smaller groups for different operations. For instance, a spin-off channel was created for the hack against the security firm ManTech. Some of the breakaway operations never included Sabu, and his contributions were rarely technical.
Still, Sabu played two vital roles. He was the point man for most exploits and intelligence passed to the team, and he became its public face. Whereas Topiary functioned as a trickster in his handling of PR for LulzSec, Sabu functioned for AntiSec as a seemingly authentic stable representative. Take the following tweet from June 20, a few weeks after his arrest: “Operation Anti-Security: pastebin.com/9KyA0E5v– The Biggest, unified operation amongst hackers in history. All factions welcome. We are one.”
A few members of AntiSec also encouraged Sabu to take on a separate, public profile as an individual. Influenced both by AntiSec’s prodding and direct pressure from the FBI, that summer Sabu used Twitter with full force, launching a stream of spitfire revolutionary rhetoric. Wielding his charisma, he acquired a cult-like status. With the demise of LulzSec, the mythic tricksters were gone. And while Sabu certainly became mythical, his style of public presentation was by no means that of a trickster. He occupied, instead, the archetypal role of revolutionary hacker outlaw. In the lead-up to this period, I had largely avoided him. But finally, in the middle of the summer, as he rose to prominence, I decided it was about time I reached out.
Sabu
It was American Independence Day: July 4, 2011. Sitting in a boiling room with no air conditioner in San Juan, Puerto Rico—the city where I grew up—I struggled to finish reading an interview with Sabu (the first with this notorious hacker) as beads of sweat trickled down my forehead.12
Conducted by Samantha Murphy for the New Scientist, the piece offered the first public interview with Sabu. I was feeling lame because I, one of the world’s experts on Anonymous, had not even managed a single conversation with the kingpin himself. I had kept my distance from him because, to be frank, I found him intimidating. His disposition was not exactly warm and fuzzy. Prior to being flipped, he had kept a much lower online profile, and he exuded a sort of badass revolutionary attitude; he wasn’t someone you simply chatted with. Sabu’s calls for people to rise up were routinely directed towards his “brothers” and “sisters.” During chats on IRC, he would drop the word “nigger” and, unlike the trolls, he seemed to be using it without a hint of irony. Instead of a rich, alienated, white, basement-dwelling teenager, Sabu sounded like a street-hardened brother. Was it possible that his alienation and anger were borne not of middle-class anomie, but instead of poverty, racial marginalization, and torn families?
The interview recounted a 1999 escapade in which Sabu defaced websites in an effort to call for the end of the US military presence on the small Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Done with the piece, I worked up the courage to send him a private message:
I waited for what felt like an eternity for his response. To me, it seemed like the world had stopped, the sweat drops freezing halfway down my back. But in reality, he responded almost immediately:
Then:
My thoughts swirled. In a scene where reputation counts for so much, Sabu’s intimation stung. I now understand that his accusation was a smart move; he erected a frame that would make it hard for me to see him as a possible snitch. At the time, I could not even fathom that he might be working for the FBI. The question of how I might fend off his accusations eclipsed any other consideration:
A millisecond after typing, I realized how stupid that probably sounded. Anyone with a basic knowledge of snitches knows that there is a well-documented history of anthropologists working as covert CIA agents. I tried to regroup:
&nbs
p;
That did not seem good enough either:
And then I said something that now makes me cringe:
I explained that I did not want to uncover “crimes.” Rather, I was interested in understanding social dynamics. Although our first conversation went rather poorly, much to my surprise—and relief—our chatting became both more regular and friendlier. I thought that either I’d convinced him of my noble intentions, or he had asked other AntiSec members about me. By this time, I was certain that informants were implanted in AnonOps, but in June and July very few rumors tagged Sabu as a rat, whereas other core Anonymous members were often plagued by accusations. My conversations with Sabu only fueled my paranoia. On July 23 he asked:
Much like my first conversation with Sabu, when I praised him in the hopes that he would talk to me, he instead began to butter me up, even thanking me:
He also started dropping hints that the FBI was watching me:
He was clever: I was the potential problem, not him. He would point this out repeatedly and then continue on with his revolutionary rhetoric. He made it hard to see him as anything other than a passionate activist, unwaveringly committed to the cause.
The Pleasures of Secrecy
A few weeks after my first conversation with Sabu, I was invited to a secret IRC channel for a one-time conversation among AntiSec members. The participants included a handful of IRC operators from AnonOps and Emmanuel Goldstein, the publisher of hacker zine 2600 and host of a hacker radio show called Off the Hook. They convened to gauge whether Goldstein would be interested in lending his support to the AntiSec subproject oriented around propaganda and artistic creation, called “voice.” Here I was, invited to the inner sanctum. I watched intensely as the group of roughly twenty participants debated the merits of direct action and the purpose of the voice project.
Sabu set the agenda: “so gentlemen we’re going to bring in Emmanuel. He’s going to be the voice of anonymous and antisec on the radio and really wants to help push #voice over.” As it turned out, Goldstein had made no such promises, and while many seemed open to his participation, others objected immediately. Some accused him of being a snitch. Now, one must understand that rumors of snitching constitute part of the everyday background noise among hackers, and this noise itself becomes one of the main roadblocks against substantiating the claims. During the chat, a critic noted that “2600 has a history of condemning attacks, including when Anonymous ddosed mastercard and others for wikileaks.”
Adrian Lamo, the hacker who snitched on Chelsea Manning, had at one point been active in the 2600 scene, with access to an account on 2600’s mail/shell server. According to some, Lamo had not been sufficiently purged. Many were upset about these things, as well as about the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) convention, organized by Goldstein and a large team, which featured Lamo on a panel.
I was particularity intrigued by what a figure named Anarchaos was writing in the chat room. He wasn’t anyone I had seen online before, and it would still be another few months before I would converse with him for the first time, under a different handle. Goldstein began questioning tactics like DDoSing and street-based black bloc organizing, and Anarchaos staunchly defended their legitimacy. “I’ve got personal and political reasons for taking direct action against the forces that oppress us. Don’t be thinking those that fight with force aren’t doing it with brains.” Anons on the channel admitted that “we are more than capable of higher sophisticated attacks but regardless, when we are in the trenches firing upon our enemies, we don’t need other so-called hackers to be undermining our efforts.” Later, someone added that “a diversity of tactics is the most effective way to win campaigns.”
What started as a fascinating conversation about diversity of tactics quickly burst into a flame fest. At a certain point, someone asked Goldstein whether he had ever met me (he had not). I used the attention suddenly directed my way to share with him my thoughts on the HOPE panel that included Adrian Lamo. I wrote that it was “mind blowing,” and that I was “glad you organized that.”
“You wouldn’t believe the pressure I was under NOT to do that,” replied Goldstein. Some in the chat room took the opportunity to affirm that they were still pissed: “Lamo should not be welcome at any hacker gathering and just another nail in the coffin for many people to write off 2600 as sellouts.”
The conversation briefly returned to whether 2600 could contribute to the voice project, before devolving into “lame-ass flaming,” as one participant put it. Goldstein decided to exit: “sorry to cause a bitter tone in here so I will split. But we’re open to dialogue.” The voice project launched soon after on a public IRC channel, without Goldstein’s help. Though the mission of the meeting had failed, it did confirm what I had suspected: the AntiSec team contained a number of hackers, like Anarchaos, who were active but hidden. Who were these people? Why had I never seen them before? The core LulzSec participants, like Topiary, tflow, and Sabu, were for the most part well-known figures. It was clear that Anonymous, already so elusive, was blanketed under even more layers of secrecy.
And, increasingly, I was also being swept into this orbit of secrecy. I had tried to keep my distance from channels where illegal activity was organized. When I talked to Anons privately, I frequently requested that they spare incriminating details (knowing that they might be itching to brag about some epic security compromise). I made it clear to everyone that my role as an anthropologist meant that I was often taking notes, saving some portion of logs, and otherwise gathering data. Even though I encrypted my data, I maintained no special privilege that would preclude me from being regarded as an accessory to crime. As a result, I was not invited to secret channels and I (mostly) avoided the boastful stories about illicit hacks. My attitude was also plainly honest, and I think this helped people understand just what it was I was up to—a rarity in a culture of mistrust, suspicion, rumors, and fear. But now things seemed to be changing. I was slipping into deeper, darker recesses of this labyrinth, given fleeting access to private conversations, and becoming increasingly worried that this could devolve into a problem.
Aldous Huxley once wrote: “To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.”13 For the hackers participating in Anonymous, secrecy was, without a doubt, a major source of what kept them coming back for more. Secrecy provided a sort of sustenance for
this underground community. And while “ecstasy” might be too strong a word when applied to my case, I can’t deny it: acceptance into this esoteric society gave me a thrilling contact high.
Where Art Thou, Anonymous?
As exciting as it initially was to stand in the shadows with Anonymous, by early August 2011, my mood had soured. The frenetic pace of Anonymous activity had mutated into something new through the sheer militancy of the operations. I began to wonder when the FBI or another government agency was going to nab more Anons, or even pay me a visit. AntiSec, like LulzSec, had settled into a rhythm of near-constant hacking, generating taunting releases that simply begged for a reaction from the state: #FuckFBIFridays, #ShootingSherrifsSaturday, #MilitaryMeltdownMonday.
AntiSec doxed sheriff’s offices, defaced and destroyed police organization websites like that of the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association, and leaked the personal information of New York police chiefs. In July alone they attacked the websites of seventy-seven different law enforcement agencies (all hosted on the same server). They dumped a gigabyte of data from Vanguard Defense Industries acquired by hacking the email account of one of its senior vice-presidents. They revealed to the world documents that they had “procured,” including a proposal to the FBI from defense contractor IRC Federal for a project called the “Special Identities Modernization (SIM) Project,” which aimed to identify people who “might” present a criminal or terrorist risk in the future. They claimed to have infiltrated various internal networks of the US Department of Energy, where they sent messages urging employees to work against the government rather than for it. They hacked the federal contractor ManTech International, publishing over four hundred megabytes of content that detailed its dealings with NATO and the US Army (alongside all its employees’ emails). They struck at the mega-security contractor Booz Allen Hamilton; while they were unable to obtain actual documents—though one of Booz Allen Hamilton’s employees at the time, Edward Snowden, eventually would—they managed to download ninety thousand military emails from the company’s site, which they threw up on the Pirate Bay with a long analysis noting “key facts” about the company, such as its funding breakdown. Things had taken a very serious turn.