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

by Parmy Olson

  As people increasingly saw Anonymous and Antisec as a movement, the people arrested were painted as martyrs. The absurdity of the pranks had evolved into an exaggerated significance, even delusions of grandeur, but its shaky foundations were revealed when people like Ryan finally had to confront the grim faces of a courtroom. People like Topiary and even William had joined 4chan, Anonymous, Antisec, or LulzSec for the lulz, but stayed when it looked like they were part of something even greater that they could not put into words.

  On July 27, seven days after Tflow’s arrest, two officers from the Metropolitan Police got out of a four-seater private plane they had hired for about £8,000 and walked gingerly down its steel steps onto the asphalt below. The sun was shining and there was a slight breeze. They were met by local Scottish police officers, who rarely had much crime to deal with, let alone a chance to meet their counterparts from London. The two officers got into a car and were driven down the island’s narrow, winding roads.

  Topiary was in his gaming chair, his laptop on his knees, his mind on other things. He faintly heard a car driving near his house and the whine of brakes as it came to a stop. Then the sound of several car doors opening and shutting in a series. He stopped what he was doing, lifting his fingers from the keyboard. He looked over toward the front door, willing it to stay silent. His heart started to pound. There was a long moment of quiet and the sweet, merciful possibility that car had been for his neighbors. Then there was a knock.

  Part 3

  Unmasked

  Chapter 25

  The Real Topiary

  Call it a gut feeling or common sense, but as soon as he heard that knock on the door, Jake knew it was the police. He clung to one hope: that they had not come to arrest him. Police conducted raids around his neighborhood all the time, thanks to the druggies. There was every possibility they were just doing another sweep.

  When he opened the door, six plain-clothed people were standing on his doorstep.

  “We’re with the Metropolitan Police,” one of them said. “We’re here to search this address.”

  In the hope that they were looking for drugs, he asked, “What for?”

  “Computer equipment.”

  Jake’s heart sank. If Aaron Barr had ever hoped one of his adversaries would experience the same kind of dread he had felt less than a year earlier, Jake just had.

  “Are you Jake Davis?” one of them asked after they had all flashed badges and identified themselves. Jake nodded. “Yes.” They added that they were also there to arrest him.

  “What for?” Jake asked.

  “Conspiracy to DDoS the Serious Organised Crime Agency.” Jake waited for them to mention something else, but they did not. It almost seemed like the DDoS attack on SOCA had been the final straw that made the authorities fly all the way up to the Shetland Islands.

  There were no handcuffs, no guns; there was no shouting, just polite conversation that made the encounter completely surreal. A woman officer from the Met’s e-crime division walked straight to Jake’s Dell laptop and started to engage the track pad. Before he could even try to make a move, she told him not to touch it.

  Despite everything that had happened, Jake had not yet wiped his laptop as he had intended. Incriminating documents, notes, and databases were still on there, albeit on an encrypted hard drive. But that was no trouble for the police. They had only to ask Jake for his password; he gave it to them. The woman tried to see what was on the hard drive, but she couldn’t find it. She motioned for Jake to come over and allowed him one final interaction with his computer: a click of the mouse to reveal his hidden hard drive so the officer could get a look inside. He had forty programs running at the same time.

  Just as Barr had kicked himself for reusing the same password, Jake silently regretted not deleting everything the way Kayla had been encouraging him to, the way he had been telling himself to.

  The officers moved ahead with brittle practicality. They told Jake he had to leave with four of them, now, while the two others remained in his home to close down his laptop and search the house for other items they could use as evidence. There was no time to pack a bag or grab a book or call his mother. He was allowed to bring two changes of clothes. They opened his front door and led him down the steps to the car with no ceremony. If the local druggies had been watching, they might have thought their young, hermetic neighbor was headed out to town with a few family friends, not being arrested for helping lead one of the world’s most notorious cyber gangs.

  At exactly the same time, several hundred miles south in the northern English town of Spalding, Jake’s mother, Jennifer, was across the street from her house, chatting to a neighbor. A policeman showed up at the neighbor’s door and asked Jennifer to come home. Confused, she did, opening the door to her house to find it bustling with e-crime detectives and other police officers who were going through the family’s things while questioning her other son, seventeen-year-old Josh. They took all the family’s computer equipment.

  Back in Shetland, as the private plane that had carried the detectives up north now sped down the tiny runway and took off for London, Jake thought about the inevitable headlines. Till then, the Shetland Islands had been merely a blip in the British public consciousness. A distant land of Scots with strong accents who were partial to sheep-rearing. The biggest local news until that point had occurred that very week, with his town’s hosting of the Tall Ships Races of 2011. Many of the island’s seven thousand residents had taken part as dozens of large sailing ships manned by young people had docked in the bay at Lerwick. Jake remembered how he had stepped out of his reclusive life for a spell, strolling down to the harbor and watching with wonder as thousands of people bustled between tents, food, and live music.

  He was brought back to reality with a jolt as the plane landed. Though it had once taken an eighteen-hour bus trip plus a ferry to get to his home in Shetland, the flight had taken just forty-five minutes. Within another hour Jake was being driven up to the clean white stucco walls of Charing Cross police station in central London and then led into a tiny holding cell. There was a bed with a blue gym-style mat, a thin blanket, and a toilet in the corner. It was a warm summer’s day outside, but the cell was cold. The sounds of singing and banging by other inmates echoed down the hall. Eventually he had a chance to speak to his mother, who was beside herself with worry. He told her he was all right and asked if she could bring him some clothes, books, and fruit. The food being served in the custody cells was mostly take-out: fried chicken or sausage and chips.

  The following day, a woman wearing brown corduroy trousers and leather flip-flops walked up the white stone stairs into Charing Cross police station. Jake’s mother, Jennifer Davis, had dark brown hair that had been dyed a subtle shade of red, and she was carrying a cloth satchel with embroidered flowers along with a large blue duffel bag stuffed with clothes and fruit that she had brought down on the train from her home in Spalding. She had been expecting to see her son in a few months’ time when he moved down to England to live with her again; not like this. Jake’s mother was required to attend all of his interviews, since, owing to Jake’s age, an adult needed to be present.

  The interviews went on for hours at a time, and Jake looked forward to them. It was a chance to get out of his cell. He was shocked at the amount of detailed research the police had carried out on Anonymous and LulzSec. They had thorough chronologies of cyber attacks, with exact times, and tables of suspects going back to 2006, often spread across giant sheets of paper. Thanks to recent extra funding from the government, there was now a dedicated team of about a dozen detectives working on tracking Anonymous. They had arrested him in connection with the SOCA attack and on suspicion of several other offenses. Eventually, the police said that based on their interviews and what they had found on Jake’s laptop, they were planning to charge him with five specific offenses. The police were using innocuous things as evidence: printouts of his browser window being open on a ten-minute e-mail service; anot
her window showing Nyan Cat. Jake was cooperative where he could be, giving the police the passwords to the LulzSec Twitter account and everything on his laptop.

  Word spread that the police had arrested the person they believed to be Topiary and were questioning him in London, and the world of Anon was in uproar. The AnonOps chat rooms were ablaze with rumors about what had happened.

  Sabu quickly posted “RIP Topiary,” on his Twitter feed, which had several thousand followers, equating the arrest to a death in the world of hacking. “I’m pretty fucking depressed,” he said in an interview that day. But that quickly morphed into anger at governments and, perhaps, at his new overseers. “The problem is not hackers. It’s the thinking of our governments. They need to show their citizens that the government can retaliate against civil disobedience.”

  It is still unclear how the police managed to track “Topiary” to Jake Davis’s yellow wooden home on the remote Shetland Islands. Sabu may have helped, since he had been arrested a month before. But there are other possibilities. Like Sabu, Topiary wasn’t always as careful as he should have been. For just a few seconds, the name Jake had popped up on the AnonOps chat network. It happened just after December 8, 2010, when Anonymous was launching its pro-WikiLeaks attacks. Though Jake had layered two or three VPNs to conceal his computer’s address, a temporary connection error to his broadband that coincided with a failed connection of one of the VPNs left him briefly unmasked. He’d had no idea this had happened.

  Then there were rumors that a friend of Jake’s from his days of hanging out on Xbox forums had recognized his voice on the Westboro Baptist Church video and had started posting messages on Twitter that Topiary was “Jake from Shetland.”

  Another more likely reason relates to the VPN company that Jake paid a monthly subscription fee to to hide his IP address. Both Topiary and Sabu had endorsed VPN provider HideMyAss to the core and the secondary crew of LulzSec, with Topiary spending a few hundred dollars from the group’s donations on seven online accounts. When someone needed an extra VPN, Topiary would lend him a login name and password and cross it off his list. Some time after the #pure-elite logs were leaked, showing the world that LulzSec was using HideMyAss, British police served the British VPN company with a court order. HideMyAss later admitted it had divulged information on one of the LulzSec accounts in response. The company explained that it regularly logged its users’ IP addresses and login times to help weed out abusive users. Its customers were up in arms, but a court order was a court order, business prospects be damned.

  Among the things Jake noticed during his interviews with detectives was that the police seemed to see Anonymous as an organized criminal group, which was precisely the thing that Sabu had been worried would happen when he had railed against Laurelai for writing a user guide. When the detectives questioned Jake, they seemed to want answers that fit that point of view. Jake tried to explain that Anonymous was not a group, was not organized, and did not have a structure. It was more of a culture or an idea than a group.

  Yet in explaining that, Jake realized that the police were right in one sense. In less than a year, Anonymous had indeed become more organized. In November and December of 2010, during Operation Payback, there had been no stable chat network and more than two dozen IRC operators entangled in a bureaucratic mess. By July of 2011 there was a lean, solid chat network with about six operators far more in sync with one another. The Twitter accounts @AnonymousIRC and @anonymouSabu by then had more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers in aggregate, not as high as LulzSec’s but enough still to grab mass attention. Pastebin had been popularized as a quick and easy way to publish stolen data. More people knew which hackers to approach to get things done. There were servers around the world, and Bitcoin donations were still coming in. In fits and starts, a system was being created.

  American authorities were in agreement with the Met. In early August of 2011, the Department of Homeland Security said it expected more significant attacks from Anonymous in the coming years, and there was the possibility of a “higher level actor providing LulzSec or Anonymous with more advanced capabilities.”

  From the front lines and sidelines, Topiary, Sabu, and Kayla, along with William on 4chan, had watched Anonymous grow from nothing to a nebulous, possibly dangerous entity with pockets of significant power and influence. Like some petulant teenager, it remained volatile and misunderstood. From WikiLeaks in December of 2010 to Tunisia in January of 2011 to Aaron Barr in February of 2011, operations had popped up almost randomly. There had been no funding, no planning, and no leaders. No one knew anyone’s name or had ever met in person. Anonymous had come out of nowhere to create the mirage of a criminal organization that police were only just starting to rope in.

  Now at least they had a face to show the world. The police kept Jake in custody for as long as they could—ninety-six hours. After that, it was time to announce his real name.

  On Sunday, July 31, London’s Metropolitan Police announced on their website that they were hitting a Shetland teenager named Jake Davis with five charges related to computer hacking, including violating the Computer Misuse Act and conspiring to attack the U.K.’s Serious Organised Crime Agency. Now, for the first time, the name Jake Davis was publicly associated with Topiary. Later that day, Britain’s Daily Mail published an article headlined “Autistic Shetland Teen Held over Global Internet Hacking Spree Masterminded from His Bedroom.” It was typical British tabloid fare, now with the suggestion that Jake Davis was the “mastermind” of LulzSec (instead of Ryan Cleary) and with no explanation of how anyone knew that Jake was autistic. (He was not.) The media that Topiary had courted so successfully before, that he had almost held in the palm of his hand, was turning on him, gleefully invoking the hacker clichés of mental disorder and social ineptitude.

  The following day, Jake was driven to Westminster Magistrates’ Court for his first hearing, which was in the same brightly lit room where Ryan Cleary had stood just a month before. Outside the court, cameramen with long lenses reached up to the windows of any police van that drove in and took photos through the tinted windows. They would check what they got, then take more. About two dozen journalists were there to report on the news, including editors from the Guardian, the BBC, and the Financial Times. They huddled together to talk about what a “soap opera” the LulzSec story had been.

  “I expect he’ll be pale and windswept, skinny or fat,” said the technology editor of the Guardian, which had published the #pure-elite logs. That editor, Charles Arthur, had been the target of Topiary’s trolling at one point, getting his cell number tweeted and quickly getting two hundred voice mails before the mailbox was filled and Jake deleted the tweet. “If they had just been corporations it would have been ‘Ok, bring in some sandwiches,’” Arthur said as he mused on LulzSec, “but to hit SOCA.…” He trailed off, giving a whaddya-expect shrug.

  Inside the courtroom, people readjusted their seating as Jake walked into the octagonal dock wearing a denim shirt and holding a book, his head bowed. He glanced around as he confirmed his name and address to the judge, then took a seat and scratched his head. He looked over toward the journalists, who were straining to see the book he was carrying, then looked down again. For the most part he appeared calm and collected.

  “Sir, the picture that emerges is not a skilled and persistent hacker,” Jake’s barrister, a tall, bespectacled man named Gideon Cammerman, said, “but someone that sympathizes and publicizes, and acts as a repository for information hacked by others.”

  The government’s prosecutor, a portly woman in a dark suit, disagreed. Referring to Jake’s group as “luke sack,” she insisted he remain in police custody till further notice. When he’d heard enough, district judge Howard Riddle, a stern, red-faced man with short gray hair in a bowl cut, looked at Jake for a moment and then back at the prosecutor. This was the same judge who had ruled earlier that year that Julian Assange be extradited to Sweden.

  “Make it explicit for me if you
would,” he said, looking over his glasses, “the nature of the harm that he has caused.” Jake’s mother looked on from the public gallery.

  “Sir, he’s compromised personal information of hundreds of thousands of members of the public,” the prosecutor said softly as she looked up at the judge. “People who have used the National Health Service, the bank accounts and personal details of the users of Sony Entertainment systems.” She mentioned the ten-minute e-mail they had found on Jake’s laptop and the fact that the computer had a 100 GB encrypted hard drive with sixteen separate “small computers”—his virtual machines—operating independently of one another.

  Judge Riddle asked Jake’s lawyer what his “temperament” had been like in police custody. “He was perfectly charming,” Cammerman answered, then took the opportunity to point out that Jake’s mother and brother had just moved to Spalding, England, and still had no broadband. No Internet access at all. The lawyer suggested Jake be bailed and sent to stay with them on condition he wear an electronic tag and not access the Internet. For someone like Jake who had gone online almost every day since he was eleven, this would be the coldest of cold turkey. But it beat a jail cell.

  In just a few minutes, the judge made up his mind. “It is clear that there is strong evidence that you have been involved with a group that has committed very serious offenses,” he intoned as Jake nodded. “The objections to bail I understand. But I bear in mind the following.” He stared at Jake more intently. “You are still only eighteen. You’ve not been in trouble before.” In spite of his tough appearance, the judge granted Jake bail, with a list of conditions that included a 10:00 p.m. curfew. The guard came up to Jake with a clipboard. Jake offered him a small smile and signed it.