We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

by Parmy Olson

  “Thinking back on everything with Anonymous and LulzSec, I see many things I regret being entangled in,” Topiary later said. “But the Westboro Baptist Church attack, well…is proud the right word? Honored. I was honored to have been involved.”

  It seemed Westboro and Anonymous had some similarities. One key to Westboro’s unfathomable ability to survive and maintain itself was its isolation. Its members knew their unique group as “us against the world.” Their pickets at funerals were not really aimed at saving souls or spreading God’s word but at stirring up anger and hatred in others—a self-serving exercise to fuel their own sense of righteousness. This culture of hate was one that only its longtime participants could truly understand. Profound acceptance coupled with desensitization to their own vicious trolling. When it came to motivation, Anonymous was often the same.

  Chanology and Operation Payback had shown that Anonymous could take on unsavory characters as a group, but the live Westboro hack with Topiary signaled where Anonymous would be going next: smaller and more extreme.

  Kayla had conducted her vengeful attack on Gawker; Sabu had had a revolutionary turn on Tunisia; Topiary had experienced the thrill of a live performance. Anonymous may have been a movement that could change the world, but it existed just as much for its own members as anything else. It gave them something to do, made them feel useful, and, while no one would admit it, let them carry out urges in a way that seemed justified and necessary. Gawker and HBGary had shown that Anonymous could be at its most destructive when it was taking revenge and when a small but focused group of people led operations. But it was only when a joker and public communicator like Topiary was added to the mix that the group had the makings of an even more powerful team: Sabu with his passion, Kayla with her skills, and Topiary with his silver tongue.

  Chapter 13

  Conspiracy (Drives Us Together)

  A few days after the live Westboro hack, Topiary couldn’t help but feel worried that more than a million people had now heard his real voice. One way to distract himself from those concerns was to plow through more of Aaron Barr’s e-mails. Transfixed by what was on his Dell laptop screen, he’d come across a piece of string every few hours that seemed to lead him farther down a rabbit hole, toward what looked like a dark and dirty conspiracy. In late February, as Jennifer Emick was creating her own theories about who Anonymous was, Topiary was looking into theories that went beyond the Anonymous world and involved the American military. Sabu and Kayla weren’t that interested in this subject or the e-mails anymore, but a sense of possibility kept Topiary hooked, and this was largely thanks to Barrett Brown, a blond, twenty-nine-year-old freelance writer from Texas who was passionate about exposing government corruption.

  Topiary had first heard of Brown the day before the HBGary attack. Brown had published a spoof statement from Anonymous on the left-wing political blog the Daily Kos on Saturday, February 5, a day before the HBGary Federal attack. The title was “Anonymous Concedes Defeat.” Rambling and comical, it claimed Barr had discovered that the true leaders of Anonymous were “Q and Justin Bieber.”

  He added: “Mr. Barr has successfully broken through our over 9,000 proxy field and into our entirely non-public and secret insurgent IRC lair, where he then smashed through our fire labyrinth with vigor, collected all the gold rings along the way, opened a 50 silver key chest to find Anon’s legendary hackers on steroids password.” It was a word-for-word quote from Topiary on IRC, and Topiary was flattered to see himself quoted.

  Brown then published a more formal “press release” on the Daily Kos after the attack, titled “Anon pwns HBGary Federal.” Most Anon press releases were posted on AnonNews.net, but really, who was keeping track? What annoyed many Anons was that Brown had published the press release under his real name, and they christened him a namefag. Still, Topiary didn’t mind him; in fact, from the start, he rather liked him. After the attack, Topiary complimented Brown on the spoof post. Brown was eager to see the HBGary e-mails, which at that time were still being published on torrenting sites bit by bit.

  “I need some more of those e-mails so I can piece some stuff together,” Brown told him.

  It turned out that Brown was a big research nut. He had downloaded the first batch of Barr’s 23,000 e-mails, searching for clues that would crack open a wider case of corruption that started with HBGary’s misinformation campaign against WikiLeaks and ended with the U.S. military. After a few weeks of scanning, he picked up the phone and called William Wansley, one of the vice presidents of a military contractor called Booz Allen Hamilton and a name that had popped up in Barr’s e-mails.

  “Hi, is this Mr. Wansley?”

  “Yes,” a small voice replied.

  “Hi, Wansley, this is, uh, Barrett Brown, I’m sort of a, uh, informal spokesman for Anonymous?” Brown said, hiding his nervousness. “The reason I’m calling is because we’re going over some e-mails and we happened to see some correspondence between yourself and Aaron Barr of HBGary. I was curious as to what exactly the project is that you guys were working on, regarding Anonymous.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Oh,” Wansley said. “If you’d like to call our public affairs office, they should be able to help you.…”

  “Well, I’m not sure they would be able to help me as much as you could,” Brown barked, his confidence growing, “because you were actually more involved in those discussions. I don’t think public affairs offices are that good, in my experience, at, uh, you know providing, uh, actual intelligence.”

  There was another long pause as Wansley took in what he was hearing, then a loud roar in Houston as a plane few over Brown’s house.

  “Uh, basically for instance I’m looking at an e-mail right now,” Brown continued, shouting to be heard over the plane. “Says you had a meeting at the offices of Booz Allen, ten thirty on, let’s see, somewhere in late January with Aaron Barr. Aaron Barr of course as you know was researching Anonymous, he attempted to dig up our leadership. He was going to sell a list with my name on it to the FBI, with the names of a lot of people who aren’t actually IN Anonymous. His methodology was a bit off, you might say…Um, and I’m assuming at this point you’re probably not working—”

  “I’m—I’m familiar with the organization,” Wansley said, sounding weary. “First of all we don’t comment on our client work at all, to protect the confidentiality of all our clients.”

  “Right.”

  “I can tell you we have no business dealings with HBGary anymore.”

  Brown paused.

  “So you weren’t in business dealings with them, you were just discussing the topic?” he asked.

  “I can’t comment on what someone else asked me to do, but we had no business dealings at all with HBGary.”

  “But you did have business dealings with them previously, right?’ Brown tried again.

  “Never.”

  “But you met with him not for social matters, but to discuss Anonymous.”

  “I have no relationship and I can’t make any comment.”

  “You have no relationship with Aaron Barr?” Brown knew the conversation was coming to an end, and he was floundering.

  “Please call my public affairs office and they’d be happy to talk to you.”

  “Thanks,” Brown said.

  “Thank you. Bye.”

  Click.

  Brown hung up, then laughed out loud without smiling. “Tee hee hee!” He quickly wrote up a blog post titled “Booz Allen Hamilton VP Caught Lying” in which he explained: “He said he had no relationship with HBGary, which is odd insomuch as that this e-mail would seem to indicate otherwise.” Brown added a link to one of Barr’s e-mails, saying, “I had a meeting with Bill Wansley over at Booz yesterday.”

  Over the next few days, Brown kept sending messages to Topiary about HBGary. Topiary soon got the hint that Brown was serious and he invited him into a private Skype group with Gregg Housh and a few others to focus on researching the e-mails mor
e deeply. Topiary kept the Skype group open at all times and found for the next two weeks that he was increasingly being pulled into its conversations, spending at least seven hours a day on the investigation into what Barr had really been working on. Brown gave it a name: Operation Metal Gear, after an old Nintendo game, and its goal, in a nutshell, was to find out how the intelligence community was infiltrating the Internet and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to spy on American citizens. Cyber security buzzwords like sockpuppets, persona management software, data monitoring, and cognitive infiltration frequently cropped up, every lead branching out from the work and research of HBGary Federal and Barr. Whenever Topiary stumbled upon an e-mail from Barr’s cache that could lead to new information on these issues, he’d send the link to Brown and let him know.

  The project was intense, largely because of Brown himself, who seemed to never sleep. Topiary would wake up in the morning in his part of the world to find the Texan had been up all night reading through the HBGary e-mail trove. Brown would then spend the next two hours explaining what he had discovered overnight, often speaking at a hundred miles a minute. One particularly long conference call with him lasted thirteen hours, and another six hours, with Brown often using overly formal phrases like pursuant to our investigation. Topiary found this irritating at first, but he couldn’t help admiring Brown’s work ethic and passion for his activism. It seemed a level above even the most die-hard moralfags in Anonymous.

  The son of a wealthy real estate investor, Brown had a penchant for pin-striped shirts and cowboy boots, as well as a knack for keeping Topiary’s interest piqued. “We’re about to unravel something big,” he’d say.

  “To begin with I felt sorry for him,” Topiary later remembered. “He was putting in a lot of hard work, but just came across the wrong way to Anon.” It didn’t help that his IRC nickname was BarrettBrown. “Everyone hated him. There were all kinds of anti-Barrett discussions in private channels, often mocking his methods and drug addiction.” Brown was widely known in the Anon community to take hard drugs. One journalist who interviewed him over lunch recalled Brown starting off by smoking a joint, drinking alcohol, and shunning food throughout the meal, then taking a dose of a synthetic form of heroin—all the while speaking with extraordinary lucidity. Topiary dropped hints when he could that Brown wasn’t so bad if they overlooked a few things, but Brown’s rambling YouTube videos and conspiracies “just made things worse.”

  Chanology and Operation Payback had shown that if they were manipulated in the right way, Anons in their hundreds would suddenly want to collaborate on a raid or project. But key to that was making a raid fun and exciting. Topiary, who was becoming Brown’s liaison with AnonOps, noticed that while Brown’s campaign to uncover corruption had sounded sexy to the Anons at first, the fact that he had to struggle to maintain their interest demonstrated how difficult it was to harness the spontaneous, unpredictable power of Anonymous. Brown wanted Anonymous to help him carry out long-term research, but it was tough getting people in a community rooted in lulz to stick to a project for weeks, even months on end. It got even harder when Brown tried to get Anonymous on the evening news.

  Between January and March of 2011, Brown’s name got passed around among journalists who covered Anonymous, as he was among the rare few in the community who would consent to be on the end of a phone line, not a confusing IRC network. Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and CNN all wanted to talk to him. Then, on March 8, NBC Nightly News broadcast an “exclusive,” a television report by Michael Isikoff, who described Brown as “an underground commander in a new kind of warfare.” The interview took place in Brown’s apartment and had shots of him typing into his white Sony netbook, his desk strewn with cigarette packets and other paraphernalia. Toward the end, Brown was seen leaning back in his green plastic chair and pontificating to an almost awestruck Isikoff as the Texan dangled a cigarette from his fingers.

  “It’s cyber warfare,” he said in a southern baritone, looking relaxed. “Pure and simple.” Brown was actually racked with pain throughout the interview, having stopped injecting himself with Suboxone four days prior. His bones ached in a way most people would never experience. (He would relapse in April on a trip to New York, where he would take heroin, and then get back on Suboxone when he returned to Texas.)

  During the interview, the camera briefly panned over the screen of Brown’s laptop to reveal a snippet of an IRC chat Brown was having with Topiary, Q, and several others, as Isikoff sat by and looked on with his TV crew. The nicknames were visible.

  “Yo,” Barrett had typed. “NBC is here.”

  “Awesomesauce,” said someone called &efg. “Welcome to the internet.”

  “They want to talk about stuff,” Brown said in the next shot. “He says he’s honored. So, what’s next for Anonymous?” The question appeared have been dictated by Isikoff.

  The feature later showed Isikoff and Brown strolling side by side down a busy road and talking, Brown gesticulating, Isikoff’s khaki-colored slacks flapping in the breeze as he listened intently. Then it was back to the apartment, and Brown once more sprawled in his chair.

  “I mean we got Stuxnet off of this,” he said, flicking his hand, referring to an attached file among Barr’s e-mails that was in fact a defanged version of the infamous computer virus that was best known for attacking Iranian nuclear infrastructure in the early 2000s. “It shouldn’t have been available by this federal contractor to get ripped off by a sixteen-year-old girl and her friends.”

  “And it shouldn’t be in the hands of Anonymous!” Isikoff exclaimed.

  “But it is,” Brown replied, waving his hand again and shaking his head somberly. “C’est la vie.”

  Brown was not happy with the interview when it aired. He had hoped it would go deeper into the information revealed by the HBGary hack—the military contracts on persona management software—but instead it had focused on him and made Anonymous look like a serious organization. This hurt his reputation in Anonymous further. Here again was another example of how difficult it was to push an agenda from within Anonymous—you had to convince not only the Anons of its importance but the media too. More people were criticizing him on AnonOps and Twitter as a namefag, moralfag, and leaderfag. Other Anons posted his address, phone number, and other personal information on Pastebin.org. They hated the way he talked up Anonymous as a force for good, a fighter against corruption and evil regimes.

  Brown ignored them all. “If I don’t respect the laws of the U.S. imagine how I feel about the non-rules of Anonymous,” he later explained. Anonymous had been born out of a half joke, after all. But both Topiary and Brown agreed Brown’s reputation was making it difficult to recruit supporters for Operation Metal Gear, and they needed another approach. Brown decided to announce the project on the airwaves. In recent months, someone on AnonOps IRC had set up a digital radio station, called Radio Payback, consisting mostly of techno music played 24-7 and interspersed with occasional chatter from anonymous DJs. Brown approached one of the DJs in the #RadioPayback IRC channel to ask if he could go on the air to announce recent findings of Operation Metal Gear, with no success. Then Topiary tried.

  “Barrett’s not so bad,” Topiary told the DJ. “We should give him a chance. It might be worth it in the end.” Eventually the host relented, and Brown, Topiary, and another man from their team, nicknamed WhiteKidney, took to the digital airwaves on the evening of March 16 and spent a good hour telling any Anon who would listen about their research. Topiary had told Brown to speak slowly, repeating the word slowly. “Voices are not bullet trains,” he tried to explain. “I don’t think it worked,” he later recalled. On air, Brown’s voice was loud, as if he were too close to his microphone.

  “Booz Allen met with Aaron Barr,” he blared, with some distortion. “His specialty was this software that used social media.”

  Topiary explained the controversial software, the soldiers who controlled dozens of fake social media profiles, the way that could subver
t democracy and warp online opinion.

  “We have informants,” Topiary added, referring to people who had offered information on Booz Allen.

  “We won’t talk about informants,” Brown said quickly. There were apparently two informants. One had reached out to Brown, and the other was someone Brown had found among Barr’s e-mails. “This is what we’ve trained for for five years,” he added toward the end of their segment, before the discussion descended into jokes about Brown’s penis.

  Still, the presentation worked. Within a couple of days, Metal Gear’s ranks had swelled to twenty regular researchers. Hundreds of people had downloaded a link to their team’s current research via the radio show, suggesting that listeners may have been in the thousands. One IRC operator who had previously mocked Brown and dismissed Metal Gear as trolling was now talking it up as a success on IRC. The investigation team retreated to their private Skype group and spent many more hours trawling through e-mails, making phone calls, and listening to Brown. Brown sometimes assigned jobs, but more often people volunteered to do things.

  “Once we explained about ‘sock puppets’ and ‘robots,’ everyone got excited,” Topiary later remembered. There was no proof at this point—only speculation. For example, the government of Azerbaijan had recently arrested online political dissidents, and Topiary and Brown stated on Radio Payback that Booz Allen’s spying software must have been used. Their reasoning: Booz Allen had an office in Azerbaijan.

  It was a credible lead, but as usual, the group would struggle to find the time and concentration to follow it up. Other Anons would pick out yet more juicy leads from Barr’s e-mail hoard. Occasionally someone would come with a completely new lead.

  Then there was a bigger distraction, this time showing how easily a person could get the mainstream press excited about a supposed Anonymous operation. A young man nicknamed OpLeakS approached Brown on the chat network, claiming that he had acquired a trove of e-mails and needed some advice. The leak, he said, involved Bank of America.