How Hackers Changed the World: We Are Legion Storyville

This programme contains very strong language

The computer hacker group Anonymous is claiming tonight

that it took down the website of the Federal Appeals Court

in San Francisco this afternoon.

They took down senate.gov servers.

They've taken down HBGary.

Sony's claiming they did 150 million worth of damage.

So many confidential files that, tonight,

because of these hackers, can be in the hands of anyone.

Visa, MasterCard, the PayPal situation.

The criminals who hacked into Sarah Palin's private email.

The Church of Scientology says Anonymous is a cyber

terrorist group of religious bigots.

Anonymous and this other group called LulzSec,

they seem to be wanting to prove a point.

Anonymous kind of was like the big strong buff kid who had low

self esteem and then, all of a sudden, punched

somebody in the face and was, like, "Holy shit, I'm really strong!"

Anonymous calls itself the final boss of the internet

and sometimes it proves to be really fucking true.

If you are going to violate the freedoms of the internet,

you certainly better watch the fuck out.

They are kind of the rude boys of activism.

There's a real rough edge to them which I think also is one

reason why they garner so much love and hate from people too.

They represent a certain sort of chaotic freedom.

Individual young, nameless, faceless folks

are having geo-political impact.

It's both exhilarating to realise that

and terrifying to realise that.

It kind of depends on how that power is wielded.

We are legion.

We do not forget.

Expect us.

We stand for freedom.

We stand for freedom of speech, the power of the people,

the ability for them to protest against their government,

to right wrongs.

No censorship, especially online, but also in real life.

We have members throughout society

and all stratas of it worldwide.

We have no leadership.

It's one voice. It's not individual voices.

That's why we don't show our faces. That's why we don't give our names.

We're speaking as one. It's a collective. Good timing.

I got called a terrorist sympathiser.

We've been called kids, we've been called cyber bullies,

we've been called hooligans.

Sometimes those words aren't entirely unfair,

but this is a serious political movement.

No-one in the general public really seems to get it.

What they don't seem to get is that the ability for Anonymous to

be everything and anything is its power.

Anonymous is a series of relationships.

Hundreds and hundreds of people who are very active in it

and who have varying skill sets

and who have varying issues they want to advance

and who are collaborating in different ways each day.

They're a little bit like a prism or kaleidoscope.

They've got many different facets and many different sides.

Of course when you spend enough time with them,

you start to get a sort of feel or texture that's not just random,

right, yet it's very multifaceted, very rich, which does

span from the quite light-hearted to the very, very serious.

Bob Dylan had a line in a song saying to live outside

the law you must be honest.

They might do something which isn't technically correct,

maybe it's not legally correct, but they're doing it for purposes,

that, in their minds at least, are ethical.

People who know what they're doing, who share an ethos,

who have a commitment to exposing and humiliating the man who have a

very low tolerance of lies and what

they perceive as evil on the part of overweening power structures.

They share information, they share tools and techniques

and they are currently having a very good time.

The hacker culture as we know it really sprang from one place, MIT,

and it was specifically the people in the tech model railway club.

Hacking originated its humorous pranks

when the guys at MIT put a Volkswagen up on top of the dome of

the building and people woke up and saw the car up there in the morning.

Or they measured a bridge by the body lengths of somebody,

let's say his name was Brian,

and discovered the bridge over the Charles River was 822 Brians.

These are funny things.

That's where hacking originated and migrated into engineering

and computer communities.

It's witty. It's pranks.

I'm Chris Wysopal, former member of the Lopht.

We don't necessarily say "hacking group" cos it makes it sound

like we're hacking, but we used to call it a hacker's think-tank.

Hacktivism was a term coined by a group called Cult Of The Dead Cow.

The Cult Of The Dead Cow was really kind of, um,

sort of like a propaganda type of organisation.

They had a guy who was the Minister of Propaganda.

They're kind of merry pranksters.

Everything they did was completely over the top.

One of the guys there coined the term "hacktivism"

because one of the things his group were doing which

he called hacktivism was writing software that people in other

countries could use to communicate securely, even if

their government was spying on them.

So the principle was really freedom of expression.

It was everyone should have access to the internet.

Everyone should be able to communicate

and get their message out on the internet.

Even more important in countries where there was oppressive regimes,

that if you said something against the regime,

they would come and take you away and you weren't saying it anymore.

Just like in traditional activism,

it spans the full gamut from sit-ins or pickets to actually spiking

trees and pouring sand into the engines of construction vehicles.

I mean, there's real sabotage.

The same thing does fall under the hacktivism label.

There is a spectrum.

There's sometimes a strong anarchist flavour to it as well.

Its resistance to authority

and those who would impose group thinking

and group behaviour on people, which was rightly perceived to be

a consequence of the digital revolution,

as it was used by people in power to do hacking on behalf

of righteousness and to address the grievances of the world.

Lance lowered Don Quixote on his horse,

nag though she was,

flying at the windmills of modern life.

Anonymous grew out of what's known as 4chan.

Essentially, this is just a website where people can upload images.

You don't actually give your name. It's just sort of anonymous.

When you look at 4chan, you're often surprised

because it looks like a site from 1995 or something.

The idea is very simple. You post a comment and you post a picture.

You can post under your name or anonymously

and it's separated into boards about particular topics.

There's a topic on anime, there's a topic on weaponry.

There's like a 4chan board for origami

and you just upload interesting pictures of origami.

And then there was a group called the /b/ board which

essentially was for anything goes.

The first time anybody goes on /b/ it's kind of an instant

revulsion cos there's never a time that you go on there

where you don't see something horrible.

That easily puts off a lot of people.

The idea is post something that can never be unseen.

Half of the posts on /b/ are there specifically to make people

not want to come back to /b/.

It's the most vile, disgusting and funny thing on the internet.

One of the important things about 4chan is to have a thread

that really explodes and lasts for a long time.

If it doesn't, then it disappears.

It's a site that's not archived, so it creates

conditions for anything that grabs attention at some level.

And so humour and grotesqueness, as a result, are quite good for that.

You'll see something posted one day and then, a week later,

it's got 50,000 derivatives of it.

A lot of the great internet memes that we all know and love,

you know, LOLcats.

Little cats doing funny things

and then you have, "I Can Has Cheezburger?"

All that stuff seems to start in this Petri dish

that is 4chan /b/ board.

# Say it publicly and you're insane

# Chocolate rain. #

Name any meme from the last six years and I'll bet you,

either its first posting ever was on 4chan or at least

one of its earliest revisions that became what it was, was on 4chan.

-'I can see the food situation is

-BLEEP

-so we'll be on our way.'

# Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down. #

It's basically the best breeding ground for internet culture

as far as I'm concerned.

# With your neighbourhood insurance rates, chocolate rain. #

4chan is also very known for acts of trolling.

For them, it's funny

that people think the internet is serious business

and if people think the internet is serious business,

it's a troll's job to make their luck tear.

The idea of Anonymous came initially as a joke.

Somebody suggested that what if the whole site, what if 4chan,

what if /b/ was just one person?

And what if that's just one guy called Anonymous sitting

somewhere and you're just reading all these quotes by one guy?

And it kind of looked like that from the outsider's perspective.

There's no way to tell the difference.

It might as well be one guy.

Fox News did a very famous segment about it.

They call themselves Anonymous.

They are hackers on steroids,

treating the web like a real life video game, sacking websites

and baiting mySpace accounts, disrupting innocent people's lives.

And if you fight back, watch out.

Destroy, Die, Attack.

That's from a gang of computer hackers

calling themselves Anonymous.

I've had seven different passwords and they've got them all so far.

Anonymous hacked his site and plastered it with gay sex pictures.

-His girlfriend left him.

-She thought that I was cheating on her with guys.

As long as I can think back, Anonymous have done some

pretty off-colour things in the name of getting cheap laughs.

But that's part of the culture.

DISGUISED VOICE: They get what they call LULZ.

LULZ is a corruption of LOL which stands for Laugh Out Loud.

Anonymous gets big LULZ from pulling random pranks.

For example, messing with online children's games like Habbo Hotel.

Habbo Hotel was this online community where you had an avatar

and walked around and talked to other people.

It was kind of like an early version of World Of Warcraft or

Second Life or any of those virtual worlds.

What the people on /b/ did was invade Habbo Hotel,

created thousands of avatars.

They all had this one uniform of this black guy with a big afro

wearing a black suit, and so there would be thousands of these

people, black guys, black suit, huge afro, walking around this world.

They would do things like form a swastika out of themselves.

I think that was a real landmark because it was

when they were able to see that they can use their numbers to do

something really interesting and really disruptive.

Most kids love that pool. They love the shit out of their pool.

The goal was actually to offend everyone

simply because the idea that we could offend you by drawing

a little shape on the screen was stupid to the people involved in it.

They were like, "Really?

"You're going to get that mad over us just drawing this on the screen?

"Wow!

"You need to refocus a little on life cos this should not be

"upsetting you that much."

All these different organisations online, whether it's 4chan or

just any website, there's typically a community aspect to it.

This is where people have their social relationships.

This is where their friends are.

This is where they have a creative outlet,

so all those aspects are going into groups like Anonymous where

people feel like they're part of a bigger thing

and they're able to express themselves within that group.

There were certain words, certain phrases,

certain ways people respond to things,

certain images that were posted, that created a pattern

and that pattern was the origin of what is now Anonymous.

It's like Freemasons with a sense of humour in

so much as they have this common symbology

and one of their chief joys, wrapped up in power and secrecy,

was the fact that they could recognise each other

by referencing these symbols, referencing these phrases.

-Over 9,000.

-'It's over 9,000.'

I lost my iPod.

Mudkipz. Anything involving Mudkipz.

So you have this weird sort of international culture

developing with people across the world wherever they may be.

In late '06 and into early '07 there's a bit of a seachange

where, instead of just posting a bunch of content or randomly

saying we're going to go over to some website and post a bunch of

dirty comments against someone, it becomes a little more organised.

'Welcome to the Hal Turner Show.'

They went after a guy named Hal Turner.

'I am being discriminated against because I'm white.'

Hal Turner was a neo-Nazi who was big on lying and had a podcast.

'I think that the 14th Amendment was not ratified properly

'and I think therefore it is still OK

'to have negroes as slaves in America.'

-'Where are you calling from?'

-'Hola. This is Pedro.'

-'Spick.'

He was just a horribly racist radio personality who seemed to

handle it well when you called in.

He could handle being berated by Anonymous

and that made it very interesting. It made it a bit of a challenge.

It wasn't some guy who just either crumbled or stopped answering

the phone. It was a guy who would yell back.

Hal Turner wasn't the first actual person that Anonymous caused

trouble for, but the circumstances ended up being significant.

They DDoS'd his website so it cost him

thousands of dollars in bandwidth fees.

Denial of Service has been around for a long, long time.

The equivalent if you, for some reason,

wanted to disrupt a bus service,

you can hire 1,000 extras to all go and line up at the bus station

and get on the bus so anyone who is really trying to get on the bus,

couldn't do it.

It's as simple as that.

When you stop trying to visit, the website goes back up.

No permanent damage.

And then they ended up getting some real hackers to help them out.

This wasn't pranks.

They actually were able to get into Hal Turner's private servers,

in his mail servers, and find some interesting emails

that he was serving as an FBI informant which,

if you're a right wing neo-Nazi, is not a good thing to be.

And obviously, him being an FBI informant and also his douche-bag

reaction to the raids

damaged his credibility in the white nationalist scene, which is a shame.

Hal Turner's gone.

He's been prosecuted by the Feds for threatening judges.

What follows is a period of confusion

and anger in which people,

the sort who want to keep Anonymous as this nihilist ridiculous

group, are upset that now the most terrible thing on the internet

is now becoming a force for good all of a sudden.

I'm Mike Vitale and my handle's Sethdood. Now, this is January 2008.

Anonymous is strong now. We're not a little dinky fucking group anymore.

This is like millions of people worldwide and we're watching

and then Scientology stepped in with a big target on its chest.

A video came out of Tom Cruise that was supposed to be an internal

Scientology video talking about secrets of Scientology.

Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident,

it's not like anyone else.

As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it

because you know you're the only one that can really help.

He talks about you're the only one who can stop bad things

from happening and so this is widely mocked online.

It circulated like wildfire.

Instantly, the Scientologists post a DMCA,

Digital Millennium Copyright Act,

and this is a way that, if you own content,

you can go to video sites, upload sites,

and have your content pulled when someone uploads it illegally.

Scientology is always at odds with the internet.

Always trying to legally bully people out of fucking them over

on the internet. They always did that.

And here they are trying again, but, do you know what,

Anonymous saw that and said, "Oh, you guys just

"fucked around badly, like you're trying to censor our internet."

You're trying to take a joke away from Anonymous. You don't do that.

A few Anons, a few people on 4chan posted,

"Hey, we should grab that video and post it on a few other sites."

What followed was a term called the Barbra Streisand Effect.

And this video, as they're attempting to suppress it, went everywhere.

Everywhere you look on the internet,

you were going to stumble upon this video.

Actually, Gawker, the site I worked for,

was the first one to put it on the website and we got into a huge

legal battle with Scientology who wanted us to take it down.

Scientology is an interesting target because, in some ways,

it's the perfect inversion of what geeks and hackers value.

At so many different levels. Science fiction. Intellectual property.

Discourses of freedom. Science and technology.

It's very proprietary.

It's closed.

And so, in some ways, if you had something like a culture inversion

machine and you stuck geeks and hackers in there,

you'd get something that looks a lot like Scientology, so it's quite

offensive and there's a real pleasure in attacking your perfect nemesis.

People who knew what Anonymous was to begin with were like,

"Oh, my God, Anonymous is going to go to war with Scientology?

"This should be really interesting."

Especially cos it's two weird-ass groups.

I've been in Anon for a long fucking time.

I know Anonymous is really strange.

They're weird and the stuff we like is weird

and it's really not mainstream at all. Now you have Scientology.

Also really weird.

A lot of crazy shit goes down.

Anybody on the outside who sees this is going,

"Let's watch these two retards fight.

"Both their pants are going to fall down

"and it's going to hurt everybody and it's going to be hysterical."

And then, that's when 4chan kind of really reared into action

and they started to troll the Church of Scientology.

This took the form of pranking the Dianetics Hotline,

ordering pizzas.

I go to call them on the phone and it's busy, busy, busy.

That's their main fucking Dianetics Hotline. Their Dianetics 800 number.

You can't get through because Anons have completely fucking

clogged it and probably saying stupid shit.

The whole idea was just to keep them on the phone.

"What's an L Ron? How do I Dianetics my face?"

They were not expecting that. They couldn't handle it.

I'm Brian Mettenbrink.

I'd just gone to 4chan, pure happenstance,

and I saw a post about the Scientology thing and I started

looking up stuff and I'm like, "Oh, this is actually for a decent cause.

"I think I'll do this."

Anonymous members have developed a distributed Denial of Service attack

to a Low Orbit Ion Cannon, which is the name taken from a computer game.

Low Orbit Ion Cannon is what's called an endgame weapon

in Red Alert.

All you had to do was literally follow instructions step by step.

You put it on the site. You see that the IP is correct.

You make sure that all these settings are good then you

hit the button and off it goes.

And what it does, it tells scientology.org in this case,

it tells them to send their website to my computer about,

I think it was 800,000 times in a weekend

and I'm pretty sure I probably took it down myself a couple of times.

It felt like you were making a difference. You, yourself.

You didn't even have to leave your home, you know.

One of the guys said,

"We need to make a video. We have to make a video."

'Hello, leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous.'

When the video came out on January 21st,

that was one of the first times Anonymous as a culture started

referring to itself as Anonymous, as a movement.

That video probably changed everything.

'We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

'Expect us.'

It basically looked like if a computer was going to tell you that

he was going to beat the shit out of you, that's what it would look like.

That one video really galvanised that moment of innovation.

With that video, internet activism as it's known today, was born.

And you just see this consensus forming that it's going to happen

so we made the code of conduct.

Don't bring weapons. Dress accordingly.

Cover your faces cos they will try and find out who you are

and screw with your life.

'Rule number 17 - cover your face.

'This will prevent your identification from videos

'taken by hostiles.'

Scientology has a history of harassing, stalking and generally

doing horrible things to its critics

so people needed a way to hide their identities.

A lot of people had very legitimate fears.

They don't want to be followed home, stalked,

or put their families or themselves in danger.

Everyone was going, "We're going to wear a mask."

What's the only fucking mask that we already know or have a joke about?

It's the Guy Fawkes mask. You see the movie V For Vendetta,

the ending scene where everyone's wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.

That is very reminiscent of what Anonymous thinks Anonymous is.

We wanted to represent anonymity in some way

when it moved into real life.

I think that the Guy Fawkes mask was one of the most natural things

to happen. It is the idea that none of us are as cruel as all of us.

You have this massive crowd of people who are anonymous that is

going to fight against a bigger thing and win.

Even after watching the video, yeah, this is great,

but who's actually going to do it? Who's going to step up?

Are people actually going to get out of their house?

And I guess we were really affected by the stereotype of that

whole community being internet nerds,

too afraid to leave their moms' basements.

No-one thought that they were going to come out.

'This is me on the way there. I haven't slept. Very fucking tired.'

And I remember going to the park that day and it's really fucking

early in the morning, which I thought was a bad idea.

Um, I'm smoking a cigarette, looking round. Where the fuck is everybody?

There's nobody here.

'So here I am sitting in Bryant Park.

'Waiting for the other Anons to show up.'

I remember thinking, "Oh, fuck, am I going to be the only one in the park?

"Am I going to walk to Scientology with fucking six or seven people?"

which totally defeats the entire purpose of this

because now they could single me out.

Then I get up, start walking around,

and see there's a lot of green balloons over there for some reason.

On the other side of the park there was, like, fucking 200 people.

There were Guy Fawkes masks everywhere and I'm like,

"Holy shit, this is huge!"

'There's a fucking lot of us. That's pretty good.

'I had no idea how many Anons there were until we started moving. Ha ha!'

And it just fucking got bigger.

I remember walking through Times Square

and everybody in Times Square wasn't enough.

This is like a fucking 1,000-person-per-minute foot traffic

area, and everywhere I'm looking I'm seeing fucking Anon symbols.

It was fucking wild. It was really wild.

So we start getting numbers in and Sydney...

We're thinking it's going to be 50 people.

Before 10:00am, before even time, there's already 50 people there

and there's still streams of people walking down the streets.

A couple of hours into it, cos I didn't go to bed

until one in the morning, you're looking at Sydney as,

wow, there's 250 people in Sydney.

The cops are estimating higher than that for their reports.

What just happened?

Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne happened

and over 200 at each of them.

We nearly broke 1,000 leaving Australia.

Now, the next protest was Tel Aviv, which had actually

got its first Scientology building right before this.

There were Palestinians and Israelis at this protest,

both holding their flags.

At one point, they switched flags and held up each other's flags.

It was awesome to see.

I call our guy in London, BritAnon, and I say,

"Hey, what's going on there?"

And he's like, "Did you just get out of bed?"

I said, "I haven't turned on the computer. I just figured

I'd call you." He said, "We've got 600 people

"and the cops are really, really mad at me."

All the major cities were having hundreds of people come out. Massive.

Clearwater had, like, 300 people.

I don't think anyone beat out LA. I think LA had over 1,000 people.

The thing that happened was something completely different and

hundreds and hundreds of people from every city just swarmed the streets.

It was kind overwhelming, a little scary, but in a good way.

Soon we're at the 10,000 mark.

We were joking all the time, "Over 9,000",

you know, one of those memes.

It was too surreal. It was not believable.

-You go by what name?

-We are Anonymous.

It was very empowering,

especially after people saw the thousands of people showing up.

-This was it. We owned the world at that point.

-We all met each other.

The idea of an anon is you're fucking alone until you get to 4chan.

Then these people think like you.

Then, all of a sudden, you're not alone.

You are with fucking 500 others.

They all know the same jokes as you.

They all have clearly similar interests as you.

Here's your culture. You meet your own people finally.

It's perhaps a little surprising,

it's not just pre-teens or teenagers.

There's a far more even mix of males

and females than you would imagine otherwise.

You know, there were a lot of so-called guys who weren't

socially good. They were very awkward.

They still lived at home at 23. Half of them virgins.

And I'll tell you, the amount of those people who got laid

from these protests happening is in the thousands that

would not have, for years probably.

That's why those protests were so important.

There was a chance to finally meet other people that were

previously anonymous and unknown

and, hence, it was the moment of the end of their anonymity.

Scientology, they kind of fought back, so to speak.

They posted stuff online.

'While claiming they are peaceful, in less than three weeks,

'Anonymous members made or encouraged

'8,139 harassing or threatening phone calls.

'3.6 million malicious emails.

'141 million hits against church websites.

'10 acts of vandalism.

'22 bomb threats.

'And eight death threats against members

'and officials of the Church of Scientology.'

They wanted to find me. They did. They hired PIs.

They started taking pictures of us, threatening to sue us.

I did the whole Low Orbit Ion Cannon stuff

and then I pretty much went about my life after that for six months.

Then the FBI showed up here at my parents' house.

-Two men got out of the car.

-Flashed their guns.

Took their jackets off and laid their guns on the front seat

and came up to ask us if Brian was home. And, um...

..explained that they were the FBI and they were looking for Brian

and I've never been so scared.

I did the second most damage, is what Scientology said.

I sent the second most out of everybody so I got the maximum for my

category which was one year in prison and one year's supervised release.

I think, the way I feel, for what I did was one of the most,

like, lopsided punishments I've ever read about or heard of.

Yeah, I think it's ridiculous, especially the year supervised

release, where I can't touch a computer for a year.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to solve,

except to make my life difficult.

So that computer behind me back there, I could go back to prison

if I went over and touched it.

I'm very proud of what he did.

He stood up for what he believed in.

I never would even dream of hurting anybody.

It's just not me.

Prior to Anonymous,

critics of the Church still had to be very, very careful because of

the aggressive law suits that were launched against academics,

journalists and other critics.

I would say that era's over

and Anonymous, more than any other intervention,

is probably responsible for that change.

It's actually caused a decent rift in Anonymous.

There was one significant group of people who'd say,

"This Chanology stuff is cancer, it's awful, it's bad.

"It's just bringing attention to us that we don't want."

When Anon said it, well, once, "There is no leader,"

their ops have momentary leaders, de facto leaders.

Almost through meritocracy there's more respected or more

persistent participants.

Some people participate in a single operation

and are never heard from again.

Maybe a housewife who agrees with that political statement or protest.

If you had asked me all throughout 2008 and most of 2009,

is the politics of Anonymous always going to be sutured and hinged to

the Church of Scientology?

I would have said yes.

And it became unsutured, unhinged

when a different political wing was born in 2010.

It is our task to find

secret abusive plans

and expose them where they can be opposed before they are implemented.

The interesting thing about someone like Assange is that he

actually also sprang from a hacker culture.

-It's a mentality of spreading information.

-Julian was Mendax.

He was the greatest hacker that ever walked the face of the earth

when I was a kid.

I mean, they rumoured he could move satellites around in space

by hacking into NASA.

Maybe it never happened,

but it was a myth that kept

young kids like me wanting to plug

a computer into a modem and see if I could move some satellites around.

WikiLeaks is an extenuation of the hacker ethos.

Truth wants to be free and we want to liberate it.

WikiLeaks released a huge trove of diplomatic cables.

There was a lot of controversy from every quarter of society.

The WikiLeaks website released nearly 400,000 secret US files

on the Iraq war today.

It was the largest leak of classified US files in history.

There was one particular moment that really sparked the fire and this was

when PayPal, MasterCard and Amazon pulled services for WikiLeaks.

So, all of a sudden, there's no way to process donations to WikiLeaks.

Then people went and found neo-Nazi groups.

Visa and MasterCard were perfectly fine with you being able to

make donations to them.

But, WikiLeaks? No.

The numbers of participants were massive, massive.

And they managed, over the course of a couple of days,

to disable the websites of MasterCard and PayPal.

It was beautiful,

cos what you had is people finally stood up for something.

My name's Pete Fein. You can call me an interknot or a hacktervist.

Telecomix is an ad hoc cluster of volunteer net activists who

have spent much of last year to keep the internet running in the Middle East.

In the lead up to the Egyptian revolution,

we would tweet on people's behalf.

We would get people from Egypt,

who were unable to access Twitter on their own, on our network

and we would take reports from them and tweet them out using our account,

to help them get the word out about what they were experiencing.

Some of this shit is personal

and one of the things about the movement as a whole,

when Egypt rolled around, is that

Egypt broke us emotionally.

Watching in real time with live feeds that we helped set up,

Egyptians get massacred with machine guns.

It was different and I have never, in cyber activism, wept before.

It's never bothered me like that.

It's never been able to touch me the way Egypt touched me.

And then January 27th, January 28th rolls around and the Egyptian

government starts shutting down the internet for the whole country.

There's this fantastic traffic graph that you can see the traffic

coming out of Egypt. It's like this, goes like that. Just totally stops.

We were just shocked, like, "What the fuck?"

To think a country would completely cut itself off as much as it

was able to from the outside world, was pretty unthinkable.

You know, we know bad things go on in the dark places.

I put myself in their place

and I found myself in a desert of nothingness cos

he just wiped out everything that my world incorporated.

That showed me and everybody else that the same thing can

happen at any time, anywhere in any government.

Anonymous and the people on the internet stood up and said,

"Go fuck yourself."

You want to shut down their internet? Fine.

The people on the internet will show them how to turn it back on.

In Egypt, the care package we put together included some comms

information, radio and dial modem details.

In total, we helped coordinate and run about 500 dial-up modem lines.

We also Googled up treatments for tear gas and other basic

medical treatment and found folks who could translate that into Arabic.

We put this together in a nice one-page PDF, a fax, and off it goes.

-TRANSLATION:

-President Hosni Mubarak has decided to

step down from the office of President of the Republic.

We had Egyptians come thank us as we're doing this stuff.

I said, "Look, you guys just get our back if stuff goes down here."

It's a revolution that was facilitated by the internet,

by Facebook and by Twitter.

Not caused by it.

50 years of dictatorship has caused the Arab Spring

but the internet has certainly been helping.

Suddenly on February 5th,

the Financial Times article comes out that we all see.

It's quoting this guy named Aaron Barr,

who's the CEO of HBGary Federal, which is an intelligence contractor.

Aaron Barr is telling this Financial Times journalist Joseph Menn that

he's been secretly monitoring the server where all this has

been going on and has done so for several weeks

and using his own custom brand of information operations techniques,

has managed to identify the alleged leadership of Anonymous

including "25 lieutenants" of some sort.

We have to see this document. Everyone wants to know.

We don't need to destroy him.

We don't need to destroy his company, so they get it.

It was unbelievably easy to get into that network.

To put that in hacker terms, Anonymous is a hornet's nest

and Barr said, "I'm going to stick my penis in that thing."

The HBGary hack brought about 70,000 emails.

Probably the most important ones had to do with a proposal that

HBGary had already formulated.

It was packaged up as a nice PowerPoint presentation,

kind of act as privatised agent provocateurs where

they were going to discredit WikiLeaks.

HBGary was proposing submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks

and then, when discovered as fake, the error could be called out

and it would discredit WikiLeaks.

So there's a lot of specifics I can't talk about so let me

try to answer that, though, in a general sense.

First of all, it's probably no surprise to anybody I'm not

a big fan of WikiLeaks.

I think the broad purpose

of trying to get as much proprietary or

classified information from the government

and expose that is an extremely destructive and dangerous purpose.

The proposals involved conducting information war on WikiLeaks

and its supporters, creating dissension within WikiLeaks.

The US attacks.

You also wanted to launch cyber attacks on the WikiLeaks' infrastructure

to get information on document submitters.

One thing I want to make sure is clear is...

..none of those activities had actually occurred.

In business there's...

When you start proposing or thinking about an idea,

there's a brainstorming phase and somebody says, "What could we do?"

-"What's theoretically possible?"

-But still this was an idea.

-This was proposed. It was something that you thought about.

-Right.

They also wanted to go on a campaign targeting Glenn Greenwald,

who is a reporter for Salon.

He's an outspoken critic of the government

and supporter of WikiLeaks.

-It seems like you're trying to attack a journalist here.

-Yeah.

Yeah, and I, you know, I don't want to talk too much

more about Glenn Greenwald, other than what I've previously said.

You know, there was never an intent to attack journalists.

Not on my part. I should generalise that

to say I would never just outwardly attack a journalist,

other than if I felt there was a journalist, in my mind, that was acting unethically.

That is... That's fair game for having a public discussion about.

They were walking a very fine ethical line at points.

And in many cases the mass opinion is, "No, they stepped well past it."

I will not support broad theft of information released to the public,

because that's nothing but destructive.

If somebody has information that's been stolen from them,

whether or not WikiLeaks encouraged the theft of that

or whether or not it was just put in their lap,

still they're threatening to release the information

that was the private property of another organisation.

So your choices are to just allow that to happen or to try to stop it.

How offensive is too offensive?

We've certainly seen a lot of strategy coming out

of governments across the world now saying,

publicly admitting that they need to develop better offensive strategies in cyber security,

because defence as a whole isn't enough, it never is enough.

In the court of public opinion, that took HBGary quickly from

being a perceived victim to being a perceived a villain themselves.

It was becoming harder and harder

to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.

And then kind of seemingly out of the blue

there was something by the name LulzSec that sailed into the seas.

LulzSec is sort of a group mostly from Anonymous who...

a large part of the same people who hacked HBGary.

And they decide to form this little group

and carry on operations outside the purview of Anonymous for a while.

The majority of Anons are not doing anything particularly illegal.

When they are, a huge number of them

try to do that in a very specific political context.

For those people, what LulzSec was doing,

they were funny but they were attacking random targets,

they were breaking the quasi rules by attacking media.

PBS's Frontline runs a documentary mainly focused on Bradley Manning

the allegedly leaker to WikiLeaks.

And a lot of Bradley Manning supporters didn't like it.

They hacked a website putting a story that Tupac and Biggie

had escaped the world of celebrity fame and attention

and retired quietly and discreetly in New Zealand.

When they attacked PBS, that gave me the creeps, you know.

As a journalist I'm not too thrilled

with the idea of someone judging, "We don't like you to write that."

"We don't like your reporting, so we're going to shut down your website."

I'm uncomfortable with that. It could be me

and I could be writing something about a group they didn't like.

And I'm happy to sit and talk with them about it,

but don't shut my website down.

Hacktivism started to become...

..sort of almost more nasty,

using more no-holds-barred kind of attacks,

sort of more vicious attacks.

They sort of saw themselves as going out there,

breaking into anything, everything, governments, corporations,

police departments, largely for the same reason Anonymous would.

They went after Arizona for immigration policy.

A 50-day run causing mayhem, havoc... and then ended it.

The computer hacking group Lulz Security

has announced it's disbanding,

saying it had achieved its mission to disrupt government

and corporate organisations for fun.

I call this whole thing the rise of the chaotic actor.

And chaotic could be chaotic good,

neutral or evil, if you go back to the old Dungeons & Dragons charts.

And some people see Anon ops initially as kind of good.

They saw Operation Payback or they saw attacking Scientology

and they say that's good, it's like Robin Hood, right,

chaotic good, outside the system but doing something good.

Other people saw Anon as kind of evil like The Joker,

just want to see the world burn and doing potentially irreparable damage.

And the truth is, yes, it's the entire column of chaotic.

I'm actually a little less concerned about some of the things LulzSec's done

and more concerned about the next generation of LulzSec,

the next turn of the crank

of who takes it further or is more aggressive.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it

they don't themselves become one.

Really, as powerful as they seem to be, LulzSec and Anonymous

are really small potatoes compared to the bigger operations

that are going on that we don't hear about,

maybe operations funded by government.

16 people were arrested today.

Dozen of FBI agents targeted

alleged members of the loose knit hacking group.

Armed with search warrants, agents hit six homes in New York

along with locations across the country.

The people arrested yesterday were suspected of attacking

PayPal's website after the company shut off payments to WikiLeaks.

Defenders of the hackers say they're merely engaged in civil protest,

but FBI officials worry the disruptive cyber attacks

could move in a more dangerous direction.

So the FBI shows up at six in the morning. It was really obnoxious.

And I remember being frustrated and angry

because there was nothing that I had done

that would have justified an FBI search warrant.

They came and...

guns blazing and all this other good stuff,

busted down the door. I immediately just dropped down to the floor, 180.

I wasn't trying to fight nobody.

Even if you accept what the government is saying is true,

what is important is that people are participating in the process.

It is very much the process.

It is sitting-in at a counter in Selma, Alabama,

500 freedom rioters refusing to allow

people to go and sit-in at a segregated lunch counter.

They write books about that stuff.

It is demonstrating at a street corner saying no to a war.

It's just a different vehicle. It's the same result.

There's always going to be legal consequence

when you decide to break the law.

That comes with the territory.

And it would be naive not to expect that.

The question is whether the punishment

will be proportional to the crime.

And I suspect it might not be.

People will be watching very closely to see how these cases proceed,

on what grounds and whether there's any room during the trials

to think, especially of the denial-of-service attacks,

as a legitimate form of protest.

So much of our lives are now configured at least in part on the internet,

so we better start thinking about how

we claim parts of the internet as spaces we can also protest in.

There is a certain online culture that believes in certain values,

like freedom of expression, they're against corruption,

they're against governments controlling their citizens.

And when they see those values harmed in some way,

by some organisation, the hacktivists strike back.

I don't think this whole issue is a technical hacking thing,

this is more about human philosophy and psychology.

What's motivating us?

Why is there so much unrest or disenfranchisement or anger

that would lead people to want to take matters

in their own hands and join in.

Whether you think it's bad or not is irrelevant, it's not going away.

The part of me that likes the ability

to have rapid destabilisation and change loves this.

The part that knows how powerful it is,

means it's a force multiplier for good or for evil.

And how that power is wielded and how we want to self-regulate

is going to be the most deciding factor

in whether this is a menace or a benefit.

I certainly don't think most of the conversations in law enforcement

or the government are informed enough

to know how to deal with this.

I suppose the question you really want to ask is, would I do it again?

Erm... and honestly after thinking about it...

..I felt that I did what was right.

I had a belief, I still do, that what I did was the right thing.

And hopefully someone got some good out of it.

I'd love to think that maybe I stopped someone from joining a cult.

I probably wouldn't tell them myself next time,

but I don't think I would have changed a single thing other than

the whole talking to the FBI thing.

It's just that little detail.

It's just that little detail that changed everything, yeah.

I'm angry.

Occasionally, I have small breakdown moments...

-of terror.

-SHE LAUGHS

But I haven't stopped believing what I believed.

I haven't stopped wanting to fight. I haven't stopped caring.

ALL CHANT

# Tell me what democracy looks like! #

I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican

or an Independent or if you like Ron Paul.

Or if you worship pigeons or Scientology or if you're Catholic

or atheist or Methodist. I don't care about that.

Your opinion matters.

I don't care if I disagree with it. I don't care if I hate your guts.

Your opinion matters.

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