by Parmy Olson
Topiary popped into #InternetFeds and noticed that one of the participants had some interesting news. The first, fake threat against Westboro had gotten him curious enough to poke around in the church’s computer network, and he’d found a vulnerability. Two other hackers had found a way to exploit the security hole. If they wanted, they could take down several of Westboro’s key websites, including its main GodHatesFags.com site, and deface them too.
“We might as well do something now,” they said. Most of the dozen or so people in #InternetFeds, including Tflow and the AnonOps operator Evilworks, began talking about hitting Westboro, revving one another up for what could be another spectacular attack. Free speech aside, it would at least bring closure to the confusion.
“So what should we do now?” someone asked. The people in #InternetFeds were good at hacking but terrible at publicity. That’s when Topiary piped up. “We should do this as an event, not just the usual defacement,” he said. Then he had an idea. “Gonna check something out. Be right back.”
Topiary wanted to confirm it before getting people’s hopes up, but in all the talk of Westboro, he had remembered hearing about a YouTube video of a recent radio show in which Westboro spokeswoman Shirley Phelps had been talking about the alleged Anonymous threat. What if he could get on that radio show and confront Shirley himself?
The David Pakman Show was a current affairs program recorded at Greenfield Community College in Massachusetts. Set in a studio with full lighting and multiple cameras, the show was recorded for TV and radio simultaneously. At twenty-seven, Pakman was one of the youngest nationally syndicated radio hosts in America; he had gotten into the business when he started his own talk show in college. Over the subsequent six years, Pakman had invited people from the Westboro Baptist Church to be on the show about half a dozen times. Pakman knew that confrontational oddballs brought listeners, whether it was a pastor who wanted to burn the Koran on 9/11 or an anti-gay former navy chaplain who claimed he had performed a lesbian exorcism. Pakman justified giving these people airtime because he felt it was right to expose what they preached.
Westboro Baptist Church had about eighty-five members and had been founded by Fred Phelps, a former civil rights lawyer. For years, Phelps had ruled his family with an iron fist. His one estranged son, Nate, claimed the preacher abused his children, even though most of them had gone on to follow his teachings. Shirley Phelps (Fred’s daughter) became something of a regular guest on Pakman’s show whenever Westboro picketed a soldier’s funeral or did something equally unpleasant. She would tell Pakman that he was going to hell because he was Jewish and his people had killed Jesus. He found it amusing.
“Things are gonna happen to those little cowards,” she said on his latest show about the Anonymous “threat” to Westboro; she was smiling, and her face was devoid of makeup. “And it’s going to cause the ears of them that hear it to tingle. They’ve made a terrible mistake.”
After the show, when Pakman got a Twitter message from Topiary stating he was from Anonymous and wanted to talk, Pakman was skeptical. Then another thought came to his mind: “This could be a compelling piece of interview.” Bringing two controversial groups onto his show at the same time seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.
Topiary e-mailed Pakman, telling the radio host that Anonymous had access to the Westboro sites and suggesting that hacking might take place on the show. According to Topiary, Pakman replied cryptically with “If something like that were to happen, it would be my obligation to bring immediate attention to it.” It dawned on Topiary that Pakman was very interested, since he later brought the subject up again, asking if the “event” was still going to take place. Pakman, who later denied that he had had any idea ahead of time that Anonymous was going to hack the Westboro websites live on the air, then arranged for Topiary to go on the show the next day. He would make sure, he added, that the show got plenty of online attention by posting links on popular forums like Reddit and Digg.
“Good job,” someone on #InternetFeds said when Topiary came back into the chat room and reported that the group had a forthcoming appearance on the Pakman show, giving them the chance to do a live hack and deface of the Westboro sites. He asked around to see if anyone else wanted to do the live call, since he’d already thrown his voice around on TV news network Russia Today. But people wanted to hear Topiary versus Shirley. Many on AnonOps thought he was good at public speaking, even though his speech could deteriorate into stuttered sentences and what he considered a goofy British accent.
Resigned to his part in the verbal showdown, Topiary started writing a deface message for the Westboro website. Then he noticed something odd: most of Westboro’s main sites were already down. Not defaced—just offline. It looked like someone had noticed the buzz around the fake Anonymous threat and taken the sites down himself. Topiary realized it was The Jester. He hopped over to Jester’s chat room, approached the hacktivist, and asked if he could let the sites back up for at least a couple of hours. He didn’t give Jester any times or say that it was for a radio show, just in case someone from his crew tried to sabotage it. He stayed vague.
Jester confirmed his involvement by refusing, adding mysteriously that he was “under extreme pressure to keep them down.” A little bewildered and irritated, Topiary gave up and went back to #InternetFeds. They would have to make do with an attack on a minor web page.
He set to work writing up a defacement message in the simple program Notepad++, the same way he had done all ten deface messages for Anonymous in the last month or so. After writing the release he’d paste it into a text box on Pastehtml and write the HTML code around it. All the deface pages were plain text on a white background. Topiary had tried more complicated layouts but they never had as much impact as stark black and white, a complete contrast from the busily designed websites that were supposed to be there. Often he would explore the different chat rooms on AnonOps IRC and note down any philosophical things people said about Anonymous or the world in general, and then he’d try to incorporate them into his messages. Anons were already starting to realize their opinions mattered, as journalists quoted random comments made in AnonOps chat rooms.
Topiary was doing this partly for his own good. Leading up to Westboro and particularly after the Pakman show, his nickname became more public. “I didn’t want all that attention,” he later said. Deep down he didn’t want his “voice” in text and audio to become familiar to the public and authorities. When he wrote a press release, he took to posting it on Pirate Pad and imploring other supporters and Philosoraptors to edit it. “I’d leave it for 10 minutes and no one would touch it,” he said. “People kept saying, no it’s fine. I don’t know if they were nervous or didn’t want to tell me it was a bit wrong.”
The next day, just before the show, Topiary asked a friend on AnonOps how he should handle the Westboro Baptist spokeswoman.
“Just let her ramble,” the friend replied. “You don’t need to make her look bad. She’s going to make herself look bad.” Topiary then spent a few minutes listening to music to try to calm his nerves, a song by the mellow techno artist World’s End Girlfriend. It always left him more relaxed. Thirty seconds before the show was to start, Pakman called Topiary, who could hear Shirley Phelps-Roper in the background, grumbling in a southern drawl about camera issues.
Pakman immediately recognized Topiary’s voice from the interviews he had done with Russia Today and from the Tom Hartman program. At the eleventh hour, Pakman breathed a quiet sigh of relief that he was speaking to a genuine spokesperson for Anonymous.
Soon enough, Phelps-Roper was on the line too, and the video segment showed three images: Pakman in a black blazer with his microphone; Shirley with a home printer and bookshelf in the background, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her eyes ablaze; and a picture of a giant shark being attacked by Batman wielding a light saber—that was Topiary. Whenever Topiary spoke, his own picture glowed blue.
“Well, today we have everybody
here,” Pakman said, introducing Topiary as a “source within Anonymous” and then referring to him as simply “Anonymous.” Did Anonymous issue a threat to Westboro Baptist Church? he asked.
“No, there was no talk of it, uh…” Topiary’s deep baritone voice almost growled out onto the airwaves. He had an unusual accent—a Scottish lilt blended with a Nordic twang. He’d set his laptop on a table and turned away from it. Every prank call had been like this—he looked at simple focal points, like the ceiling or a book spine, or out the window.
“Shirley, is it your belief that Anonymous cannot harm the Westboro websites in any way?” Pakman asked.
“No one can shut these words that are…ROARING out of Mount Zion!” she cried. “I mean I’m talking to a little guy who’s a Jew.” David looked over at his producer and smiled.
“OK.” Pakman suddenly grew serious. “So, Anonymous, can you address that? I mean, aren’t all of Shirley’s websites down right now?” Shirley let out a surprised laugh.
“Yeah right now,” replied Topiary. “Um, GodHatesFags.com is down, YourPastorIsAWhore.com is down.” He listed several more snappily named sites and explained, disappointed, that credit had to go to The Jester and not, technically, to Anonymous.
“Potatoe, potahto!” Phelps-Roper said, drowning him out for a moment. “You’re all a bunch of criminals, and thugs.…And you’re ALL facing your imminent destruction.”
“Anonymous,” David ventured, “is this riling you up to the point where you will actually take action?”
“Please do,” Phelps-Roper deadpanned.
“Well…” said Topiary
“Hold on, Shirley,” said Pakman.
“Our response to the ‘cry-baby hackers’ letter was mature,” Topiary said. “Our response was we don’t want to go to war with you—”
Phelps-Roper’s eyes widened. “Did you just call criminals and thugs… ‘MATURE’?”
Topiary balked and decided to switch tacks.
“You say the Internet was invented just for the Westboro Baptist Church to get its message across, right?” he asked.
“Exactly,” she said.
“Well, then how come God allowed gay-dating websites?”
“Psh. Silly.” Phelps-Roper laughed. “That’s called your proving ground.”
“Am I going to hell?”
Phelps-Roper suddenly looked concerned. “Well, hon, I only know what I’m hearing because you’re”—she raised her eyebrows—“Anonymous…and…you sound like a guy who’s headed to hell I’m just sayin.’”
“Well in my lifetime I’ve performed over 9,000 sins,” Topiary said. “So…”
“OH! And you keep track! What, you have a tally sheet?”
“Yeah over 9,000 sins. I keep track.”
Pakman was smiling to himself. Topiary glanced back at his laptop and for the next thirty seconds he observed a window in AnonOps IRC, where a handful of people were watching a live stream of the show on Pakman’s site. They were laughing. Pakman seemed to be waiting for Phelps-Roper to get riled up and say that nobody could hack the Westboro site before bringing things back to Topiary for the hack.
Phelps-Roper was explaining why being proud of sin did not “fit into a box with repentance.…Of course you’re going to hell.”
“Hmm.” Topiary sighed. “Internets is serious business.”
“Let me bring things back to a central point,” said Pakman. “Is there a next step? Does Anonymous intend to prove that they can in fact manipulate the Westboro Baptist Church network of websites? What can we expect going forward, Anonymous?”
If anything was going to happen, now was the time. Phelps-Roper tried to pipe up again but Topiary kept going.
“Actually,” he said, smacking his lips, “I’m working on that right now.” Topiary turned back to his laptop, clicked on a tab on his IRC windows to enter the private room #over9000, and quickly typed in gogogo, the signal. Tflow was ready and waiting with Topiary’s HTML file.
Phelps-Roper’s sarcasm went into overdrive. “He’s working on that RIGHT NOW! Oh yay!” she yelled. Then her face darkened. “Hey, listen up, ladies.…”
“Hold on, let’s hear from Anonymous please, Shirley,” said Pakman.
“No, no,” Shirley said.
“No I have something interesting, I have a surprise for you, Shirley,” said Topiary.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “You save it for a minute!” The other voices fell silent. “This is what you’ve accomplished. You have caused eyes all over the world to look. All we’re doing is publishing a message…a HUGE global explosion of the word of God.” The others stayed silent.
With no live hack, the segment was coming to a close, and Pakman needed to steer things back to Topiary. “Anonymous, go ahead.”
“I was just going to say in the time Shirley started blabbing her religious preach I actually did some business, and I think if you check downloads dot Westboro Baptist Church, I think you’ll see a nice message from Anonymous.”
Phelps-Roper looked unmoved. “Nice,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Dot com is it?” Pakman asked. Pakman’s team already knew the exact URL for the site that was going to be hacked, as Topiary had sent it in an e-mail beforehand. “That’s how his producer found it so fast,” Topiary later said.
“Yes, we just put up a nice release while Shirley was preaching there,” Topiary said on the show.
“Just while we were doing this interview.” Pakman chuckled in apparent amazement. He looked to his producer and pointed to something offscreen.
“Yeah, we’d had enough! We’d responded maturely, saying we don’t want a war. Then Shirley came on the radio, started, well…thinks I’m going to hell, so we’ve given her something to look at.”
“So hold on,” Pakman said, nodding off camera again, “I am getting a thumbs-up from my producer that there has been a message posted that appears to be from Anonymous.” A screenshot of Topiary’s earlier written message suddenly filled the screen: a simple white backdrop topped by the Anonymous logo of a headless suited man who was taking up what was supposed to be Westboro Baptist Church’s main web page for downloads.
“Anonymous, are you taking responsibility for this?” Pakman asked again.
“Yep,” Topiary said. “We just did it right now this very second.”
“That is so special,” Phelps-Roper suddenly interjected. “So special.”
Topiary tried to explain. “You told us we can’t harm your websites and we just did,” he said. “I mean—”
“What I told you,” Phelps shot back, “is you cannot shut us up. Thank you.”
That was the end of the segment.
It wasn’t the smack-down of Westboro that Topiary had been hoping for, but he was relieved he had avoided screwing anything up. Sure, Phelps-Roper had been surprised by the live defacement, but years of shooting down even the most reasonable arguments gave her a knack for barbed comments laced with sarcasm. She was a tough one to troll.
“I’ve encountered some nasty trolls and counter-trolls in my days, but Shirley came across with a sort of new-wave supertrolling that caught me off guard,” said Topiary.
Her most withering put-downs even had some truth in them. In the end, Anonymous’s main weapon wasn’t all that destructive. They were defacing a little-known page on the church’s network—“so special”—with the anticlimax further dampened by The Jester’s confusing side campaign.
None of this mattered in the first few days after what came to be called the live Westboro hack because Topiary’s face-off with Shirley Phelps-Roper quickly became one of the most popular videos on YouTube that week. Topiary watched the numbers rising each day, initially with excited fascination, then with some dread. First it was ten thousand, then two hundred thousand, and after five days, more than one million people had watched the video.
By this point Topiary had learned there was a fine line between success and failure when it came to the public side of Anonymous. “
There had to be humor, so a meme or two, but definitely not too many,” he later remembered. “There had to be something inexplicable—a kind of what-the-fuck-am-I-seeing.jpg, so Batman attacking a shark with a light saber.” Finally there had to be something blatantly obvious to pick on: Shirley. “She’s like that lady from The Simpsons that throws cats around, except she’s talking about Mount Zion and dead soldiers.” It was hard for Topiary not to look like the good guy when talking to her. “I was so, so happy I never stared into her crazy eyes,” he added. “The first time I saw her face was when I clicked on the YouTube video. What the fuck, man.”
A more serious thought had gripped his mind at the time, though: “More than one million people have heard my voice.” Mixed in with the pride was a terrible unease—if only one person who knew him personally saw the video, his identity would be revealed. He hadn’t used voice altering or changed his accent because he’d wanted it to seem real. He couldn’t decide if the stunt had been a stupid mistake or his ballsiest move yet.
Pakman didn’t hear from anyone in Anonymous after the show, but there was a flood of feedback from listeners, with views split on how great it had been to see the Westboro Baptist Church get taken down and others pointing out that whomever the target, Anonymous had just committed a crime. Pakman took it rather lightly. “I found the entire thing to be a kind of parody at the highest level,” he recalled.