“My days are numbered”
The first week of Occupy, I returned to the camp a few times—and would later join some of the large New York City marches—but as a full-time professor with two classes, a book to finish, and a string of appointments in preparation for an approaching move to a foreign country, it was tough to be there as much as I would have liked. Sometimes other factors kept me away as well. On Tuesday, September 20, my day seemed to be miraculously free, but gazing out my window into the drizzly morning, I was prompted to contemplate all the other valid uses of my time. And call it fate, but had it not been for this lazy reluctance, I might never have met Sabu in the flesh. Of course, reflecting now on the events that transpired, I can only think that it might have been better if I had braved the rain.
Late in the afternoon that day, the rain now gone, I headed to NYSEC, the informal meet-up of security professionals. I ambled toward Swift, a Greenwich Village bar. From a distance, I spotted weev, the famous troll who had headed up Goatse Security and now lived in the Tri-State Area awaiting trial. A cigarette dangled from his mouth and he was talking to two people I did not know.
weev was tipsy and content. You could tell that he was gearing up for a good rant. He sported a pin from Trinity Church, where he regularly attended service—and the sermon he was preparing was on the subject of Occupy. It was unclear whether he supported Occupy or merely saw it as an opportunity to troll. He gave one memorable speech, managing to indict the evil financiers, call out police brutality with a nod to Oscar Grant, and speak to state threats against artisanal cheese makers, all in four minutes. But at other times, weev also held up a sign “ZIONIST PIGS ROB US ALL.”7 weev greeted me. Upon hearing my name, one of the other hackers raised his eyebrows. “So you are Gabriella who studies Anonymous?” he asked. I replied in the affirmative. weev updated us about Occupy and we headed inside. We fetched some drinks and settled into the back room with the twenty or so hackers already there. I figured that the other hacker (let’s call him Freddy) likely followed Anonymous from a distance, like many security researchers. But as it turned out, he knew a lot more than I could have imagined. As the evening wore on, Freddy and I found ourselves in a dark corner of the bar. “Are you an FBI agent?” he asked—a question that no longer rattled me the way it might have only a few months previous. I replied, in a somewhat annoyed tone, “No. In fact, I just accepted a position in Canada. Why would the FBI ship me off to a country they largely ignore if I were working for them?”
He clearly knew a great deal about Anonymous, including the secret back-channel IRC groups like #internetfeds. I was informed, also, that he was arranging a meeting between Sabu and Parmy Olson, who was in the midst of writing a book on Anonymous. (Olson says this didn’t happen, though she did acknowledge having contact with Freddy.) As our conversation unfolded, it became increasingly clear: he was deep inside Anonymous, and seemed to have known Sabu for quite some time.
Freddy also intimated that Sabu was in New York City. This aligned with hints I had gotten directly from him in our chats. But there were a lot of swirling rumors about Sabu, many maintaining, contrarily, that he lived in Brazil. It seemed equally credible; he worked closely with Brazilian hackers and often spouted off in Portuguese on Twitter.
The information flowed both ways: I spoke about a number of AntiSec and AnonOps IRC backchannels and shared details pertaining to many “black ops.” His interest was piqued. And then I mentioned that I was raised in Puerto Rico. Upon hearing this, he offered point blank: “Do you want to meet Sabu?” He could arrange it. I was totally taken aback. I told him, “Meeting him intrigues me, but, to be frank, I am skeptical.”
The conversation excited me, less due to the prospect of meeting Sabu—I truly was skeptical—and more for the taste of what many hackers experience all the time: the use of secrets as an valuable object of exchange. Those who write about secrecy commonly recount how an information seeker can, by providing a secret of his or her own, induce further disclosure from his or her interlocutor. Graham Jones, an anthropologist of magicians, describes sharing secrets as “a token of recognition, a gesture of inclusion, a microritual of initiation, and a move in a system of exchange.”8 Sharing secrets can be about revenge or about forging trust. It can be a simple display of status, or a measured revelation in the hopes of prompting a response. But whatever the reasons and whatever the mechanisms, secrets shared often do beget more secrets.
Back in the bar, my mind raced. Is this guy just a regular guy, or is he working on behalf of the government? We did meet by chance … didn’t we? Eventually, I decided to leave the bar. At home, exhausted, I transcribed every detail I could remember before passing out fully clothed.
Early the next morning, I made my way to a neighborhood cafe as usual. A couple of hours later, sipping at my second or third coffee, I was lost in work. My IRC client, as was usually the case, was running but ignored. My name flashed on the screen, signaling a private message. Deep in work mode, and allowing no interruptions, I attended to the query after forty minutes had passed. I toggled to the window:
[…]
[…]
Back at my office, there was a message and a number. I called and our first phone conversation lasted for an hour. Haughtily declaring himself “the most trusted” hacker, he asked, “What the fuck is up with the snitches?” He then launched into a three-part typology: First, there are the “infiltrators.” Second, there are “those that want fame.” And third, there are “those that are pinned to the wall and don’t want to go to jail.” Almost everything he said made me blind to Sabu himself. But just in case I had my doubts, he hammered away with statements like: “Even if the FBI was outside my door and heard what I said, there is no way they could pin the technical act on me … That is why I am not locked up.” At the time, this struck me as a perfectly plausible explanation.
The rest of the conversation largely centered on politics, with him ranting and boasting, and me listening. He railed against the NYPD, claiming they were far more corrupt than the FBI—willing to implant false information and break their own rules. He railed against Sony and AT&T, insisting that they were the criminals for the shitty state of their security. The conversation turned to WikiLeaks. He proclaimed it a “tragedy” that Assange had squandered an amazing opportunity, but ultimately expressed his love for Manning.
Finally, I had to interrupt and ask, “Why reach out?”
His reply was immediate. “My days are numbered,” he reasoned. “This story needs to get out and the media will not do the job.” The conversation wound down, leaving me to ponder just what he meant by this.
It wasn’t long before we talked again. This time he was on the street, evident from the noise of honking cars and the side conversations between him and his homies. He told me, “Cops are chasing a black kid over a bag of weed.” This second conversation centered around his defense of Anonymous’s style of hacking. “We are no skids,” he insisted, referring to the eternally derided “script kiddies.” He described LulzSec as a “proof of concept” which had done more than “any other hacker group in fifteen years.” He called AntiSec his brainchild.
I was writing at breakneck speed but, unaccustomed to taking notes longhand, my cramping wrist proved unsuited to the task. Ultimately, non
e of it was too surprising. Until, that is, the end of the conversation. “I hope I don’t sound like a dick,” he started. “But I refuse to let my politics die. This is how I feel. I will continue to push for the idea of decentralized organizing.” He paused, and then continued, “With decentralization, it is harder to infiltrate.” But, “There are snitches.” He ended gruffly. He wanted “war. I want total revenge for Recursion. He is just a college student.” Just days before, twenty-three-year-old Cody Kretsinger from Phoenix, Arizona, had been arrested by the FBI in connection with hacking Sony Pictures with LulzSec.
During these initial phone conversations, Sabu had intimated that he wanted to meet. I was growing interested in the prospect—but I was determined not to hold my breath. There was much to do in the meantime, as Anonymous’s involvement in Occupy escalated. As camps sprang up across North America and Europe, a handful of core Anonymous veterans traded days and nights online for days and nights in the field. A few even found contingents of occupiers who identified as Anons but had never logged into an IRC channel.
On occasion, the two distinct though complementary movements directly crossed streams in a more dramatic fashion. On Sunday, September 25, protesters gathered at Union Square and marched south toward the camp, until police enclosed them behind a length of orange plastic netting. Occupiers chanted, “Shame! Shame! Who are you protecting?! YOU are the 99 percent! You’re fighting your own people!” A high-ranking police officer, Anthony Bologna, whipped out his can of pepper spray without provocation and directed the chemical stream at three young women. As the liquid engulfed their faces and stung their eyes, they crumpled to the ground, pleading, “No! Why are you doing that?!”9 Bologna answered by sauntering away.
Onlookers filmed the entire incident and the video went viral. Anonymous retaliated by swiftly doxing the officer—uploading his name and address to Pastebin. It opened with this message:
As we watched your officers kettle innocent women, we observed you barbarically pepper spray wildly into the group of kettled women. We were shocked and disgusted by your behavior. You know who the innocent women were, now they will have the chance to know who you are. Before you commit atrocities against innocent people, think twice. WE ARE WATCHING!!! Expect Us!10
Bologna’s information was uploaded by a young female college student who “earned her badge” in the CabinCr3w for the effort. During an online interview I conducted with her, she explained the mechanics of her expose: “a lot of rewatching [the video], zooming, trying to get facial features, badge number, and a partial name. It turns out that when I resorted to just a simple google, I found out that he had previously been a problem with abuse, and had a case against him.” (There was a pending lawsuit against him brought by a protester at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.)
Since she did not strike me as someone who doxed for doxing’s sake, I asked where she drew the line between acceptable exposure and privacy violation: “[the police] work for the public, therefore your life … is public just as a news organisation would hound you.” She continued, “morally: I think there is a limit and boundary by which how deep the dox go,” claiming she only disclosed information that identified Bologna himself. Other Anons, however, decided to go deeper, doxing members of his family.
The NYPD defended Bologna’s actions at first, but soon retracted. An internal police review determined that the officer had indeed violated protocol. As punishment, he lost ten days of vacation and was reassigned to Staten Island (implicitly divulging the NYPD’s opinion of the city’s smallest borough).11 There was, at least, a silver lining. The incident helped catapult Occupy onto the national stage. The Guardian and other major news outlets reported on the event, quoting directly from Anonymous’s Pastebin message and cementing a nascent association between Anonymous and Occupy.12 From that day on—and especially following the mass arresting of over seven hundred people during a peaceful march across the Brooklyn Bridge—Occupy became a fixture in activist circles and the mainstream media alike.
Meeting Sabu
Thanks to a detailed FAQ published by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, we know roughly how many sidewalk payphones dot the five boroughs: “As of January 2, 2014 there are 9,903 active public pay telephones on or over the City’s sidewalks.”13 I, personally, had never even noticed them, until Sabu asked me to use one. He did not want to arrange a meeting online. It felt safer and prudent to use a payphone; key loggers are always a possibility with computers.
Our first rendezvous was scheduled for soon after Bologna’s doxing, on October 3 at the Chipotle on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. He assured me that “you will recognize me.” The one picture purporting to be Sabu floating around the web was of a wiry, yet muscular, Latino man. I arrived early. The minutes moved slowly, until suddenly, I was aware of a tall commanding figure sauntering toward me. Carrying his large body with aplomb, he seemed to be in his element. It was Sabu. He grabbed my hand and I was afraid it would shatter in his grip. I gathered my things and we went to order food. In the midst of our small talk, Sabu paused, casually nodded to the food prep worker (a tough-looking Latina), and asked, “What’s up?”
She replied, “I have not seen you here in a while.” As would become increasingly clear, whether in Chipotle, a local diner, or Tompkins Square Park, many locals knew Sabu and treated him with deference—out of respect or fear, I can’t say which, but he was clearly a known quantity in the neighborhood.
Before long, he steered the conversation toward his past. “I came from a drug family,” he divulged almost immediately, and then continued nonchalantly: “By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I carried four to five thousand dollars in cash in my wallet.” He also explained that he was the “father figure” to his adopted cousins—both younger than seven at the time—though he left the reason for taking on such massive parental responsibilities unstated until later. (When Sabu was thirteen, his aunt and father were sent to jail for dealing heroin. He was raised by his grandmother until she passed away on June 7, 2010, exactly one year before he was apprehended by the FBI. Upon her passing, he assumed parental responsibility for his cousins.)
Sabu said that he worked hard to overcome a “ghetto mentality,” an immobilizing mixture of self-hatred and anger. Later, he briefly recounted a few episodes that substantiated his everyday experience with harsh racism. Sabu attended Washington Irving High School, near East Sixteenth Street, alongside many poor students. One day, entering the school, he walked through a metal detector and, carrying a screwdriver, was stopped by a guard. He defended himself: “I am the geek that fixes your system when you forget not to execute ‘weird’ .exe’s.” The guard bought none of it and a tiff between the two ensued. Sabu, who felt disrespected, complained to the administration, but found only deaf ears. So he made some noise by penning a strident, and self-described “controversial,” missive and circulating it to teachers. The principal deemed it “threatening” and he was temporarily suspended. Sabu, reflecting later upon the incident in a Pastebin document, concluded: “Very well then, it is such a shame that one … such as myself would have to be deprived of my education because of my writing.”14
It made immediate sense, then, why Sabu found hacking—with its elevation of ideas and arguments—to be an appealing oasis. This is not to say that the zone of hacking is free of prejudice. Far from it. The white male-dominant scene, with some hackers especially prone to acting out elitist cowboy bravado, is alienating and repellent to many.15 The barriers are especially pronounced in underground quarters that are composed nearly exclusively of male (and a few transgender) participants. Nevertheless, since ideas are (in theory) exalted over social pedigree, it has functioned as a safe space, at least online, for a class of technical weirdos.16 The social boundaries erected by hackers also exhibit contradictions: while the gender gap is vast, some identities—such as transgender, queer, or disabled—are more common and accepted. (It took some t
ime, but I eventually figured out that the chatroom #lounge on AnonOps doubled at times as a gay pickup spot.) Sabu’s explanation that he “rarely hangs out with hackers in person” hints at the sort of partial freedoms provided by anonymity and technical skills online.
After we said our goodbyes, I could not help but think of Sabu as a cooler and savvier version of Oscar Wao, the lead character in Junot Díaz’s electrifying novel on the travails of being a corpulent, ostracized, “hardcore sci-fi and fantasy”–loving nerd of Dominican descent. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells the story of Oscar as he shuttles between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, bumbling through life while trying to fulfill a cherished rite of passage: getting laid.
Sabu, like Oscar, is a consummate cultural boundary-crosser, flitting easily between vastly distinct cultural spheres. Unlike Oscar, Sabu was no dud, and his machismo was overpowering. He was notorious for hitting on the ladies in #AnonOps and told journalist Quinn Norton in a chat, “I like you quinn, next time you’re in new york, you can watch me hack, naked.”17 With me, he was more restrained, alternating between calling me “mi amor” (“my love”) and “cupcake.”
After our first meeting, now mentally equipped with a picture of Sabu, I resumed my chats with him. The Guardian newspaper had asked Sabu to write an op-ed about Occupy. He asked me to give some editorial feedback. Meanwhile, I attempted to convince him to be filmed for Brian Knappenberger’s documentary We Are Legion:
More than any other journalist covering Anonymous, Brian Knappenberger had sought out a wide cross section of individuals, pouring his funds and time into a project he was wildly passionate about. I wanted to help him. That Sabu was considering doing it was great news, but I had to reassure him about my ability to be discreet and to impress upon Knappenberger the necessity of further discretion. My protocol was generally one of “silos of interaction.” When I chatted on public channels, an observer could get a sense of who I spoke with, but my private chats were largely confidential, following a protocol commonly adopted in Anonymous. Eventually, a small group of the journalist/researcher confederacy—namely Knappenberger and Olson—knew I had met Sabu, but otherwise I kept it to myself.
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy Page 32