In the midst of all this, a pastebin.com message titled “Anonymous is NOT unanimous” was picked up and read by many participants:
Anonymous has a perception problem. Most people think we’re a group of shadowy hackers. This is a fundamental flaw. Anonymous is *groups* of shadowy hackers, and herein lies the problem. Anonymous has done a lot of good in just the past 9 months. It has helped with other groups in providing aid to people on the ground in countries where “democracy” is a bad word.
The mainstream media needs to understand that Anonymous isn’t unanimous. I’ve yet to see wide scale reporting make this distinction. A destructive minority is getting a majority of the press, while those of us who toil in the shadow doing good work for people at home and abroad go unthanked.22
This statement captures Anonymous’s commitment to difference, plurality, and dissension—similar in form to the type of adversarial politics advocated by radical theorist Chantal Mouffe.23
Anons often disagree and engage in a strong war of words. But very little energy is spent on systematically trying to eliminate difference, or carving out some “middle ground” resolution. Instead, differences are loudly voiced, listened to, responded to, and reluctantly accepted; Anons widely acknowledge that nothing drastic or meaningful can be done to eliminate differences, and they carry on with their interventions or, if the disagreements are unbearable, break away to form a new node.
Fuck AntiSec
The OpBART hacking controversy eventually receded. But one controversy remained. As weeks turned into months, criticism of AntiSec’s defacements and hacks mounted, even as the group’s support base grew. Some Anons saw AntiSec as reckless, and many were suspicious of its motives. Rumors circulated that not only particular actions, but also the entirety of AntiSec might be a false flag operation.
AntiSec, perhaps unsurprisingly, was simultaneously respected, tolerated, and vilified. Many of AntiSec’s core members had been essential to past iterations of the Anonymous/ AnonOps/LulzSec constellation. Their significance coincided with the partial fading of WikiLeaks, which suffered from internal frictions and legal troubles. AntiSec, it was hoped, might expand to more directly challenge the powers wielded by corporations and governments—not simply by producing momentary spectacles, as is the case with DDoS attacks, but also by whistleblowing—locating and releasing hard evidence of malfeasance.
Despite constant hacks during the late summer and early fall of 2011, very little of real substance was uncovered. (Had Sabu not been an informant, it is likely that AntiSec would have delivered more. The FBI notified some companies of breaches, prompting the fast patching of holes, effectively closing doors that AntiSec had only just opened.) One Anon who had been centrally involved since the fall of 2010 quit in August 2011, largely in disgust over AntiSec. While LulzSec dumped plenty of data—such as usernames, email addresses, passwords, emails, and other documents—much of it was seen to lack political weight. And yet AntiSec managed to remain in the spotlight. People began to resent this. There were many small crews operating, most of them outside of the public eye. The possibility was raised that AntiSec had become counterproductive, funneling attention, labor, and resources into worthless activities. Another hacker who had been a core member of AnonOps IRC staff explained, “We got pissed off that AntiSec was thrown on us. We had no warning. And they’d been planning it for a while, coopting people from here.”
Worse, AntiSec began to raise hackles among some Anons for a time-honoured Anonymous taboo: fame-seeking. One Anon relayed this view on IRC in September 2011 in the course of resigning from the group (pseudonym has been changed):
Earlier in the summer, the AnonOps network had grown so critical of Barrett Brown that he decided to quit. He was adamant that he was no longer involved in Anonymous, focusing his energy on “Project PM,” a team wiki dedicated to documenting the inner workings of private contractors doing security work for the government. Later, Brown would assume the moniker of Anonymous again—to take on the Mexican drug cartels (a dumb and dangerous bluff). And he would also receive information for ProjectPM from AntiSec, when the group finally procured sensitive data from a security firm called Stratfor. But that was months away. Brown remained, at that time, a reminder that attention-seeking behavior was frowned on.
AntiSec’s attention-seeking was more ambivalent and complicated than it had been with Brown. Unlike Brown, AntiSec sought attention under a pseudo-anonymous mantle. And some Anons stood by the crews’ actions, holding out hope that their efforts would eventually produce some political, classified, or secret information impossible to procure legally.
A cohort of black hat hackers (unaffiliated with) Anonymous had had enough with AntiSec. A group of underground hackers going by the name BR1CKSQU4D, which they seem to have assumed only temporarily, released a document that included some purported doxes of Anonymous and AntiSec members. They opened by declaring:
! FUCK ANONYMOUS ! FUCK ANTISEC ! FUCK ANONYMOUS ! FUCK ANTISEC 24
Further along, they did not mince words:
And you wonder why the 90s groups you shout out (with kids and families) won’t come out of retirement to help you?
You have accomplished nothing except inflaming ‘cyber-war’ rhetoric and fueling legislation that will end up with hackers getting 50 years in prison.
The most retarded part is that you dont even realize you are the cause of the very thing you hate;
Every time you DDoS a company Prolexic or DOSarrest sign up a new customer.
Every time you SQL inject some irrelevant site a pentesting company gets a new contract.
Every time you declare cyberwar on the government federal contractors get drowned in grant money.
Other hackers and netizens also began accusing Anonymous of fortifying the cyberwar industrial complex. But it’s worth noting that long before Anonymous came to prominence, national governments around the world already aspired to control the Internet and were already developing statutes that eroded individual rights and privacies. Cybersecurity initiatives would be well funded with or without Anonymous. This is not to say that all the group’s actions are justified. Still, in the face of such a gargantuan surveillance state, what Anonymous has enabled is a flexible platform for citizens to express their dissent over long-entrenched trends.
But BR1CKSQU4D, wedded foremost to the black hat sensibility, ended the diatribe with a set of threats that harkened right back to the original AntiSec mindset:
If you support antisec in any way you will be targeted.
Journalists, musicians, laywers, webhosts, VPN providers, political commentators, profiteering businesses, you are all valid targets.
You stepped into OUR world if you don’t want to play the game get the fuck off the playing field.
[…]
We have <3 for the scene. Fuc
k the media.
—BR1CKSQU4D
CHAPTER 10
The Desire of a Secret Is to Be Told
Summer in New York City is oppressive. Soaring temperatures combine with the harsh metropolitan reality to create a dystopian urban hellion. The sun, reflected off the glass skyscrapers, blinds you. Subterranean orifices lead to the city’s viscera: the bowels of the stations and the intestines of the subway system, spitting people out. Sweat, sounds, sights, as if these were not enough: you are also enclosed by the mephitic, durian-like rot of the city—smells of deceased rats and human waste, oven-baked by subway stations. So when the cooler fall weather finally settles in, the city sighs with collective relief. The hanging leaves of dazzling burnt yellow, amber, and orange provide a complement to olfactory respite. The swing to fall feels like a new lease on life. Finally, you won’t be sweating all night long. Finally, the smell will be washed away. Finally, respite.
On September 17, 2011, I awoke to a bundle of delicate pink, purple, and red flowers protruding from a vase encased in a Guy Fawkes mask. It was my birthday. The timing was perfect: it was a day of protest in New York City. The financial collapse had seared its streak of corruption, oligarchy, and the 1 percent into the minds of an angry generation. Instead of being depressed, oppressed, and immobilized by the combination of the financial situation and the city’s heat, the day was crisp and it felt like there was a refreshing optimism that people were ready to act upon. Nobody wanted to call it hope—it was too early to declare such a thing—but the possibility was still on the table.
I grabbed the mask and made my way to Bowling Green, near Wall Street. Approaching the small grassy park, I spied out of the corner of my eye a number of young men with Guy Fawkes masks slung over their shoulders. Upon seeing me, a pair of them nodded. One gave a thumbs up and told me to “Keep up the good work.” By early afternoon, protesters had marched to what became the event’s target and nerve center, Zuccotti Park (later renamed Liberty Square). Many came and went as the day inched toward twilight and the first General Assembly, but a steady stream of younger activists continually trickled in with camping equipment on their backs and threw their gear down.
Even if Occupy was defined by its rootedness in a place, it was understood that social media could and should play a vital role. Not the nor even a central agent of revolution, online communication acted more like an adjuvant—it provided an essential boost, facilitated coordination, and allowed those unable to attend bodily to witness and become invested, and entangled, in the events. And so on that first day of Occupy, many of us were hooked to our phones even as we were present at the square. Every half hour or so, I would fetch my phone from my pocket and skim through my Twitter feed. In the afternoon, two back-to-back messages from Sabu vaulted off the screen. A month prior, on August 16, Sabu had vanished from Twitter after enigmatically tweeting, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that … he is gone.”1 These new tweets marked his reemergence with a roar:
“ATTN: I never left, I am NOT @AnonSabu or any of those posers. I wasn’t owned, arrested, hacked or any of the other rumors. Go get lives.”2 He followed with another: “They tried to snitch me out, troll me, dox every one around me, bait me into endless arguments but theres one thing they can’t do: STOP ME!”3
In an early August chat, Sabu had warned me he was going dark. “Sabu is a name that doesn’t need to exist eventually,” he wrote.
Following his exit from Twitter, and unbeknownst to myself, Sabu remained active on various secret IRC channels. Also unknown to me—and, in this case, even to those he worked so closely with online—the day before our chat, on August 15, he had appeared in court. He had pled guilty to all twelve charges leveled against him, including conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft and three counts of conspiracy to commit computer hacking. Facing 124 years, he agreed to work for the government in exchange for the reduction of his maximum sentence to one hundred years. He also assented to the “obligation to commit no further crimes whatsoever.”4
Unlike his earlier disappearance in June due to his (also secret) arrest, this time he had notified people that he was going to take some time off. AntiSec members came and went, a factor that further disabled suspicion of Sabu. He also created a permanent connection to IRC using what is typically called an “IRC bouncer,” “proxy,” or “screen session.” When he wished, he could then reattach himself to the permanent connection. This enabled him (and the FBI) to have access to all conversations on the channels, and people could send him messages, even when he was not online. Sabu’s method of connecting aroused no mistrust because it is common for hackers, many who are terminal junkies, to rely on such technical proxies.
When he initially left, I took his reasoning at face value. But he was also going dark to deflect some strong accusations that had recently come his way. Just before his public disappearance in August, a hacker named Mike “Virus” Nieves accused Sabu of being a snitch. The logs of this exchange quickly surfaced on Pastebin. It started with Sabu obliquely suggesting that someone in Virus’s crew was a rat. Virus bit back hard:
Sabu tried to defuse the accusation first by showering Virus with compliments, but when that failed, he switched strategies:
At the time, the accusations seemed plausible, but certainly not definitive. It was just as likely that the spat stemmed
from personal conflict—hacker drama—or that Mike Virus was himself a snitch, trying to deflect attention. Virus even admitted that there was little evidence to back up his accusation; he was relying on a hunch. As usual, Sabu was suave and fierce in staving off the accusations.
Regardless, his lowered profile signaled that he was being careful. During his hiatus, Anonymous did just fine. The group had gone full throttle with OpBART, and soon after, Occupy engaged its collective attention. Making ops run smoothly requires an increased amount of communication and shared time online, so it is not surprising that in these intensive moments, the rumors exploded like a backdraft—or that they burnt out almost as abruptly as they had flared up. Sabu’s return on September 17, the day Occupy started, was a shrewd move that helped nourish his mythos as a bona fide revolutionary. Like a salmon who knows to return thousands of miles upriver to where it was born, Sabu, it seemed, was programmed to show up at an important political happening. His reappearance sent the following message: the allure of a protest overrides everything else. The revolution was what mattered. And accusations that seemed justified by his disappearance quickly looked more like unfounded drama.
Sabu seemed truly excited by Occupy, and as it gained momentum he tweeted about it frequently. Other Anons became similarly preoccupied. The turnout on the first day was so meager that Nathan Schneider, who became one of the most prominent chroniclers of the movement and later wrote a book about it, recalled: “I didn’t think it would last. I didn’t think it would change anything.”6 But thanks to the persistence of the occupiers, thanks to the social media messages, and thanks to the police (who sparked mass-media attention and public outrage by cracking down against peaceful protesters and marches), in less than two weeks Occupy transformed from smoking embers into a bonfire.
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy Page 31