Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy Read online

  4chan was ground zero for a robust anti-celebrity ethic, a value system opposed to self-aggrandizement and the apparatus of the mainstream media (one of the cancers killing /b/, as Anonymous likes to say). This ethic carried over to the activist incarnation of Anonymous. It is in these alternative practices of sociality—upending the ideological divide between individualism and collectivism—that we can recognize trolling’s development into a principled weapon against monolithic banks and sleazy security firms. Collectivity is growing its market share: from the counter–corporate-controlled globalization movement of a decade ago, to Anonymous and the recent explosion of leaderless movements like Occupy. This is often entirely lost on the mainstream media, which can’t—or won’t—write a story that does not normalize the conversion of an individual into a celebrity or leader, complete with individual heroism or tragic moral failings. This, of course, is not the proclivity of journalism and journalists alone. Most of Western philosophy, and in turn, much of Western culture more generally, has posited the self—the individual—as the site of epistemic inquiry. It is hard to shake millenia of philosophical thinking on a topic—intellectual thinking that is also cultural common sense.

  It is for this reason that Anonymous, whether in its trolling or activist incarnations, acted as a jujitsu-like force of trickery, its machinations incommensurable with the driving logic of the mainstream corporate media and dominant sensibilities of the self. It drove journalists a bit batty—which I got to witness first hand as I brokered, a bit trickster-like myself, between Anonymous and the media. I often helped the media cross the deep chasm in baby steps, as they tried to locate a leader, or at least a character, who might satisfy the implicit demands of their craft.

  It is perhaps due to this very resistance to journalistic convention—to the desire to discover, reveal, or outright create a celebrity leader—that journalists were compelled to cover Anonymous. The hunt for a spokesperson, a leader, a representative, was in vain—at least, until the state entered the fray and began arresting hackers. But, for the most part, media outlets were offered few easy characters around which to spin a story.

  What began as a network of trolls has become, for the most part, a force for good in the world. The emergence of Anonymous from one of the seediest places on the Internet is a tale of wonder, of hope, and of playful illusions. Is it really possible that these ideals of collectivity and group identification, forged as they were in the hellish, terrifying fires of trolling, could transcend such an originary condition? Did the cesspool of 4chan really crystallize into one of the most politically active, morally fascinating, and subversively salient activist groups operating today? Somewhat surprisingly, yes. Let’s see how.

  CHAPTER 2

  Project Chanology—I Came for the

  Lulz but Stayed for the Outrage

  Various contingencies converged to awaken the trickster-trolls from their unsavory 4chan underworld. But if we were to single out one event most responsible for this, it would be the leaking onto the Internet of a Scientology video featuring Tom Cruise, Scientology’s celebrity of celebrities. “Streisand was in full effect,” quipped one Anon. “The Streisand Effect” is a well-known Internet phenomenon wherein an attempt to censor a piece of information has the inverse effect: more people want to see it in order to understand the motivation for the censorship, and thus it spreads much more widely than it would have if left alone. The phenomenon is named after Barbra Streisand’s attempt in 2003 to bar, via a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, aerial photographs of her Malibu home from being published. The photographer was only trying to document coastal erosion. Before the lawsuit, the image of her home had been viewed online only six times, but after the case went public, more than 420,000 people visited the site. The Tom Cruise Scientology video was subject to a similar dynamic; its circulation was unstoppable.

  In the video, Tom Cruise epitomizes Scientology’s narcissistic worldview: “Being a Scientologist … when you drive by an accident, it’s not like anyone else,” he says, chuckling with self-satisfaction. “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.” Internet geeks (along with almost everyone else) viewed the video as a pathetic (not to mention hilarious) attempt to bestow credibility on pseudoscience via celebrity. As Tom Cruise cackled to himself in the video, the Internet community cackled—albeit for very different reasons—with him.

  The video initially reached the Internet not through the efforts of Anonymous, but through (fittingly enough) an anonymous leak. The video was originally slated to appear on NBC to coincide with the release of Tom Cruise’s unauthorized biography, but at the last minute the network got cold feet. However, critics of Scientology worked swiftly to ensure that the video found its way onto the web. Former Scientologist Patty Moher, working alongside longtime critic Patricia Greenway, FedExed a copy to Mark Bunker, who uploaded a video and sent a link to investigative journalist Mark Ebner, who in turn sent it to other news sources. Gawker, Radar, and other sites picked it up on January 13, 2008, linking to a video Bunker had posted—he thought—with password protection. He was wrong. “I woke up a few hours later to discover that the one chapter that had Cruise’s monologue was accidentally not set to ‘private,’” he said later. “It had been viewed about 20,000 times while I slept and was downloaded and mirrored multiple times on multiple accounts by people who had read the Gawker and Radar stories and other coverage of the video.”1 YouTube subsequently removed Bunker’s videos hosted on the channel “TomCruiseBook”—along with the entire channel—likely at the behest of a Scientology copyright notice.

  On January 15, Gawker republished the video with a short, punchy description fit for millions of eyeballs: “Let me put it this way: if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.” The Religious Technology Center—the arm of Scientology dealing with matters of intellectual property—took immediate action, threatening publishers with lawsuits if they did not remove the video. Gawker ended its article boldly: “it’s newsworthy; and we will not be removing it.”2 The cat was out of the bag, Scientology was furious (and about to furiously unfurl lawsuits), and then all hell broke loose when the “hive,” as Anonymous was then often called, decided to get involved.

  On January 15, at 7:37:37 pm, the gates of the underworld opened with a historic thread regarding Scientology-oriented activism:

  File : 1200443857152.jpg-(22 KB, 251x328, intro_scn.jpg)

  Anonymous 01/15/08(Tue)19:37: 37 No.51051816

  I think its time for /b/ to do something big.

  People need to understand not to fuck with /b/, and talk about nothing for ten minutes, and expect people to give their money to an organization that makes absolutely no fucking sense.

  I’m talking about “hacking” or “taking down” the official Scientology website.

  It’s time to use our resources to do something we believe is right.

  It’s time to do something big again, /b/.

  Talk amongst one another, find a better place to plan it and then carry out what can and must be done.

  It’s time, /b/

  Technically—and geeks make it a habit to geek out on technical specificities—a call-to-arms post came earlier on 4chan as well as on 711chan (apparently at 6:11 pm, I was told). Nevertheless, this seemed to be the post that spurred the largest number of trolls into action. While the general mood of the thread was one of (hyperbolic) confidence and exuberance, others were understandably skeptical about taking on—much less taking down—this extraordinarily powerful organization. They were well aware that targeting the Church of Scientology might be (invoking Tom Cruise’s blockbuster movie series) “mission impossible”:

  Anonymous 01/15/08(Tue)19:46:35 No 51052578

  mission impossible

  a random image board cannot take down a pseudo-religion with the backing of wealthy people and an army of lawyers.

  even if every person who has eve
r browsed /b/ ONCE joined in on a mass invasion it would still amount to nothing.

  plus if anyone got found out they would have 500 lawyers up their ass before they could ssay “litigation”

  scientologists are famous for hounding critics.

  ad 04/01/07(Fri)01:02:07 No.12345678

  Anonymous 01/15/08(Tue)19:50:22 No.51052862

  »51052482

  »51052578

  Then don’t get involved if you don’t think it’s possible.

  The next day, a prescient message on /b/ issued the rallying cry for all Anonymous-related anti-Scientology activities—gathered under the slogan “CHANOLOGY”—and outlined the events to come:

  File : 1200523664764.jpg-(22 KB, 251x328, 120046751294.jpg)

  Anonymous 01/16/08(Wed)17:47:44 No.51134054

  On 15/1/08 war was beginning.

  Scientology’s site is already under heavy bombardment, it’s loading quite slowly.

  But this is just the tip of the iceberg, the first assault in many to follow. We’re winning a minor victory, but without the united support of the chans, Scientology will brush off this attack - and it will be doomed to nothing more than an entry in ED.

  4chan, answer the call! Join the legion against Scientology, help in its demise, in its long awaited doom! For decades this tyrrany has existed, corrupting the minds of the weak- although hilarious, it’s rather pathetic. We must destroy this evil, and replace it with a greater one - CHANOLOGY For when we are victorious, the chans will stand united in a new chapter of anonymous existence and batshit insanity, we will have begun our world take over. If we can destroy Scientology, we can destroy whatever we like! The world will be but our play thing.

  Do the right thing, 4chan, become not just a part of this war, become an epic part of it. The largest of the chans, you hold the key of manpower, what the legion is in desperate need of.

  FORWARD ANONYMOUS! UNITED, WE, THE LEGION ARE UNSTOPPABLE

  tl;dr we’re taking down Scientology, join up or gtfo.

  No Scifags allowed in this thread.

  http://711chan.org/res/6541.html

  Faster than anyone could say “Hail Xenu” (Xenu being the dastardly, evil alien overlord of the galaxy, at least according to Scientology’s version of history), these trolls—followed by myself shortly thereafter—headed to the Partyvan IRC network (an Anon hangout) to watch the trolling festivities “explode.” Or, at least, that’s how a core participant described it in a lecture to one of my university classes:

  The unified bulk of anonymous collaborated through massive chat rooms to engage in various forms of ultraco-ordinated motherfuckery. For very short periods of time between January 15th and the 23rd, Scientology websites were hacked and DDoS’ed to remove them from the Internet. The Dianetics telephone hotline was completely bombarded with prank calls. All-black pieces of paper were faxed to every fax number we could get our hands on. And the “secrets” of their religion were blasted all over the Internet. I also personally scanned my bare ass and faxed it to them. Because fuck them.

  Watching this epic raid take shape in real time, it was easy for me to understand why the geeks and hackers making up the ranks of Anonymous targeted Scientology: it is their evil doppelgänger. I did not end up in this IRC channel by accident—I was already immersed in the cultural tensions between geeks/ netizens and Scientologists. One year earlier, I had been living in Edmonton, one of Canada’s coldest cities in (what felt like) the furthest reaches of North America, culling and collating material in the world-class Scientology archive assembled by Stephen Kent, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta. I was there to research an epic battle between geeks and the Church of Scientology that began in the early 1990s and spanned two decades, starting after the Church of Scientology targeted its critics, especially those who leaked secret scripture. Humorously dubbed “Internet vs. Scientology,” the battle was waged both offline and online between netizens—wholly committed to free speech—and the Church of Scientology—wholly committed to stamping it out by using any means necessary (legal or illegal) to censor criticism and prevent leaked documents from circulating online. I had arrived with a cultural hypothesis: hackers and Scientology stand in a diametrically opposed relationship to each other. This is not only because they are different, but because they are so precisely different. They are mirror images of each other, the perfect foils.

  Consider the central doctrine espoused by Keeping Scientology Working, a publication of the Church’s Religious Technology Center. The prose functions like a rusted first generation robot that has lurched into a corner and, finding itself unable to turn around, continues plodding forward while monotonously droning:

  ONE: HAVING THE CORRECT TECHNOLOGY.

  TWO: KNOWING THE TECHNOLOGY.

  THREE: KNOWING IT IS CORRECT.

  FOUR: TEACHING CORRECTLY THE CORRECT TECHNOLOGY.

  FIVE: APPLYING THE TECHNOLOGY.

  SIX: SEEING THAT THE TECHNOLOGY IS CORRECTLY APPLIED.

  SEVEN: HAMMERING OUT THE EXISTENCE OF INCORRECT TECHNOLOGY.

  EIGHT: KNOCKING OUT INCORRECT APPLICATIONS.

  NINE: CLOSING THE DOOR ON ANY POSSIBILITY OF INCORRECT TECHNOLOGY.

  TEN: CLOSING THE DOOR ON INCORRECT APPLICATION.

  Reading these maxims in 2007, I knew that any hacker or geek who laid eyes on them would be simultaneously entertained and offended. Where Scientology is shrouded in secrecy, steeped in dogma, and dependent on the deployment of (pseudo)science and (faux) technology to control people, hacking lives in the light of inquisitive tinkering and exploration enables, and is enabled by, science and technology. Hackers dedicate their lives and pour their souls into creating and programming the world’s most sophisticated machines. They are quintessential craftsman—motivated by a desire for excellence—but they abhor the idea of a single “correct technology.” In fact, hacking is where craft and craftiness intermingle: make a 3-D printer that prints a 3-D printer; assemble an army of zombie computers into a botnet and then steal another hacker’s botnet to make yours more powerful; design a robot solely for the purposes of mixing cocktails and showcase it at Roboexotica, a festival for cocktail robotics held since 1999; invent a programming language called Brainfuck designed to, well, mess with the heads of anyone who tries to program with it. You get the picture.

  A religion which claims a privileged access to science and technology, to the extent of declaring themselves “the only group on Earth that has a workable technology which handles the basic rules of life itself and brings order out of chaos,”3 is deeply offensive to hackers whose only demand on technology is that it should, at minimum, actually do something—a task they leave not to some transcendent discovery of truth but, instead, to their personal ingenuity in discovering solutions to technical problems, with the help of shared tips, swapped ideas, and reams of borrowed code.

  So it made a lot of sense that Anonymous, composed of geeks and hackers, would rise against Scientology. But something was unclear: was Anonymous simply trolling for its own lulzy amusement or was it earnestly protesting? Even if I was pretty certain these were not deliberate acts of activism, a political spirit was clearly wafting through IRC. People were undeniably, and royally, pissed off that Scientology dared to censor a video on “their” Internet—especially such a hilarious one. Anons were phone-pranking the Dianetics hotline and sending scores of unpaid pizza to Church centers, sharing their exploits in real time across 4chan. At first any political aim seemed incidental. And then, weeks later, one particular act of “ultracoordinated motherfuckery” gave way to an earnest—though still, undoubtedly, irreverent—activist endeavor.

  As Chanology grew in popularity, its bustling IRC channels #xenu and #target became unsuitable working environments for the publicity stunts and outreach to which it aspired. Three people broke away and started and IRC channel #press. Soon after, it grew to include eight members who worked one evening until daybreak to create what still qualifies as Anonymous’s best-known work of ar
t. (Eventually, the team grew in size, #press became chaotic and members split off yet again. They called themselves marblecake, after one of their own found inspiration in the baked item he was eating.)

  If the Tom Cruise video struck a chord both humorous and hyperbolic, this team harmonized to create an ironic video whose tone embodied a trickster-like ambiguity: simultaneously hilarious and serious, playful and ominous. Much to everyone’s surprise, the video catapulted Anonymous onto a new plane of existence.

  In the video, a drab corporate glass building stands against a backdrop of ominously racing dark clouds. A speech begins which, while delivered by a robotic voice, is poetic and inspirational:

  For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment, we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet, and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form.

  We recognize you as a serious opponent, and do not expect our campaign to be completed in a short time frame. However, you will not prevail forever against the angry masses of the body politic. Your choice of methods, your hypocrisy, and the general lawlessness of your organization have sounded its death knell. You have nowhere to hide, because we are everywhere. You have no recourse in attack, because for each of us that falls, ten more will take his place.

  We are cognizant of the many who may decry our methods as parallel to those of the Church of Scientology, those who espouse the obvious truth that your organization will use the actions of Anonymous as an example of the persecution of which you have, for so long, warned your followers—this is acceptable to Anonymous. In fact, it is encouraged.