EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (24 page)

I read though the emails . . . ALL OF THEM . . . before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor . . .

The event was reported widely, and the hackers on steroids were making headlines again. Palin released a press release comparing the event to Watergate.

Steve Jobs Heart Attack Hoax

In October 2008, a rumor that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack appeared on 4chan. After the story was submitted to a CNN-owned website, Apple’s stock price fell by a massive 5 percent.

4chan, Friend of the Animal Kingdom

On the heels of recent successes in Project Chanology, Anonymous continued to move away from the lulz and toward great justice. On February 15, 2009, two videos appeared on YouTube featuring a 14-year-old kid from Oklahoma torturing a cat. 4chan, whose users see cats as kindred spirits, figured out where he lived and gave his information to local police. In August 2010, 4chan hunted down a woman caught on security camera footage chucking a cat into a trash bin in England. Later that month they pinpointed the location of a pretty blonde teenage girl who was depicted on YouTube gleefully tossing newborn puppies into a river.

These three cases represent 4chan’s softer side. Animal abuse is recognized on 4chan as the most sinister form of human evil, perhaps more so than child porn. 4chan users rallied, piecing together information bit by bit. With their powers combined, the efforts resemble something beyond what could even be accomplished by professional detective work.

Let’s take a closer look at the case of the puppy-throwing girl. The original YouTube video was taken down, but someone saved it and re-posted it to LiveLeak, a site that specializes in hosting video footage that no one else will host. The poster wrote:

We can determine from the picture so few things.

One, based on assumption, she probably has a facebook account, no matter what country they’re in.

Two, she is 5ft 6in-5ft 8in, blond, eye color unknown, Caucasian

She has something written upside-down on her red sweater, barely legible, might be of assistance if it’s the product of a local store.

Let’s work together on exposing this sicko! Use the comments.

From there, 4chan got to work. Someone posted the video to /b/, commenting:

Find this dumb little bitch and throw her into a river.

Another wrote:

She’s european. Sounds either Swedish or German, based on what she says at the very end. “Voit.” If anyone speaks these languages, maybe they can decipher what she’s saying.

The hunt continues:

Nope. Not German. Sounds slavic to me. Seriously, that makes me rage.

The conversation continues with cries for justice. Eventually someone provides a list of potential perpetrators’ Facebook pages.

Youtube account owners name is Martin. They live in Bugojno, use googlemaps.

[link to a YouTube account] This faggot commented their youtube account and is a possible friend.

This is the Vrbas river, the one from the video.

The thread is peppered with criticisms from those who would decry moralfaggotry.

Despite the naysayers, this crowd-sourced detective work is one of the most exhilarating things about 4chan. They are able to accomplish much in the aggregate that they wouldn’t alone. As philospher Pierre Lévy says, “No one knows everything. Everyone knows something.”

All it takes is one person to translate a bit of dialogue, recognize a style of license plate, or pinpoint a specific mountain range in the background of a fuzzy YouTube video. These detectives use Google Maps, Flickr, Facebook, WhoIs, the Internet Archive, property records, and a host of other tools to dig up a wealth of information. The work would intimidate any single /b/tard, but together, hundreds or thousands of slackers can rival a small government’s intelligence efforts.

Adam Goldstein Raid

In July 2009, a disgruntled customer posted an exchange he’d had with computer repair serviceman Adam Goldstein to Something Awful, hoping to incite the wrath of the SA goons. The customer had bought a computer monitor from Goldstein’s eBay store, and it was never delivered. When the customer complained, he swore at Goldstein, who demanded an apology, claiming that he had three lawyers in the family, implying that a lawsuit could be on the way.

When Something Awful failed to build enough momentum around the kerfuffle, a goon brought the matter to /b/’s attention.

Evening gents’

We at Something Awful require your assistance. While goondom and bee-ocity can accomplish much we have stumbled upon something so utterly delicious we couldn’t keep it away from you raving lunatics.

The meat of the matter is that Adam L. Goldstein LLC who runs a crap company called ATECH computer services decided to be a king-sized douche. After poking and prodding we found that he is a raving lunatic! So, whilst we are under the reigns of our admins and thusly cannot do much beyond making fun of him on our forums . . . we give you the information to do whatever with.

When goons and /b/tards began to spam Goldstein’s email, he discovered the Something Awful thread dedicated to his alleged poor customer service. He paid the SA membership fee in order to dispute the claims, and eventually started threatening lawsuits (or as 4chan calls frivolous legal action, “lolsuits”).

That’s when Anonymous’s wrath descended on poor Goldstein. They brought down his website, figured out where he lived by scraping his MySpace page, and created an Encyclopedia Dramatica entry for him. They bombarded his home and office with mocking phone calls, porn mags, pizza deliveries, sex toy deliveries, death threats, and black faxes. They even scheduled visits from call girls and Jehovah’s Witnesses and posted fake flyers warning the neighborhood of Goldstein’s purported pedophilic past.

But perhaps most damaging was that Anonymous discovered Goldstein was charging exorbitant prices for things like spyware removal and wireless network configuration, and posted this information to Reddit and Digg, where it was discovered by the blogosphere, destroying Goldstein’s online reputation.

Operation Payback

In mid-2010, several Bollywood producers hired a company called Aiplex Software to DDoS websites that ignored takedown notices, in an effort to mitigate the piracy that was increasingly eating up their revenue. In retaliation, Anonymous, who I doubt gives much of a crap about Bollywood films, but who seeks to fight antipiracy wherever they see it, launched Operation Payback. They targeted not only Aiplex Software, but also the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the British Phonographic Industry, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, bringing down the sites for a combined thirty hours. These efforts then bled into attacks on related law firms, antipiracy organizations, and even KISS’s Gene Simmons, who encouraged record industry execs to “Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars.”

They brought down Simmons’s website for over a day, and redirected it to a popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay. He eventually was able to put his site back online, responding:

Our legal team and the FBI have been on the case and we have found a few, shall we say “adventurous” young people, who feel they are above the law. And, as stated in my MIPCOM speech, we will sue their pants off.

First, they will be punished. Second, they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who’s been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend. We will soon be printing their names and pictures.

We will find you. You cannot hide. Stay tuned.

His impotent threats, like so many of those Anonymous has targeted, were sheepishly removed a short time later after his site was brought down again. Then Anonymous went after the RIAA because it sought legal action against file sharing site Limewire.

In December 2010, Amazon, Paypal, Bank of America, PostFinance, MasterCard, and Visa decided to stop processing donations for the global news leak network WikiLeaks, which had recently caused global controversy by posting sensitive internal documents. These payment-processing sites had bowed to political pressure, refusing to work with WikiLeaks. In retaliation, Anonymous launched DDoS attacks against several of these companies, successfully bringing down the websites for MasterCard and Visa. A 16-year-old boy from the Netherlands was arrested in relation to the attack, and the FBI is probably still investigating.

HBGary Federal Hack

In February 2011, Aaron Barr, the chief executive of the security firm HBGary Federal, announced that he’d infiltrated Anonymous and would reveal his findings in an upcoming conference.

Anonymous hacked into HBGary Federal’s website and put up a mocking message. They acquired and published embarrassing emails tainted with the hubris of someone who thought he’d beaten Anonymous. This was a company that positioned itself to its clients as a leader in computer security. A company that had contracts with the NSA. And it had been bested by a bunch of amateur pranksters. Epic fail.

Up until then, Anonymous hadn’t been able to do a ton of damage. So they brought down a few websites for a few hours. No big deal. But this was something different. They brought HBGary Federal to its knees by using basic, widely known hacking techniques that could have been stopped had HBGary Federal’s employees taken a few 101-level password protection measures. Congress is now investigating the firm’s relationship with the NSA.

Operation Sony

Anonymous’s most recent effort is ongoing as of this writing: on January 11, 2001, Sony sued George Hotz and several others for “jailbreaking” (i.e., busting through intentionally placed limitations in a piece of hardware) and reverse-engineering a PlayStation 3 console. Sony accused Hotz of violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and committing computer fraud and copyright infringement. Hotz had fiddled with a PS3, and they wanted to prevent him from telling others how to pull it off. What’s more, they acquired the IP addresses of visitors to Hotz’s blog.

On April 17, Sony was attacked by an unknown entity, leading to the compromise of seventy-seven million accounts (along with personal information and credit card details), and a devastating twenty-four-day outage of Sony’s PSN Network, where users play games against each other via the web. Some have speculated that Sony’s reputation is so damaged that it will be forced to exit the “console wars.”

Some representatives of Anonymous have denied involvement on behalf of the collective, but the coincidence is remarkable. The similarly silly and anonymous hacker group Lulz Security has claimed responsibility for the attack. On May 29, 2011, Lulz Security also successfully hacked PBS in retribution for an episode of
Frontline
that was perceived as unfair to WikiLeaks. Because they’re operating anonymously and in a lulzy fashion (for example, posting news stories about Tupac Shakur’s New Zealand whereabouts), they may as well be operating under the Anonymous banner. Their methods, motivations, and aesthetic are identical, however they don’t seem to recruit or share Anonymous’s populist ideals. And unlike Anonymous, they’re a discreet group of skilled individuals which could conceivably be dismantled.

Gabriella Coleman guesses that it’s impossible to know who is responsible for the Sony hack.

It’s just impossible to verify, because there is a very well-organized cybercrime mafia that exists in Russia and Bulgaria and other places, and they can very much exploit what Anonymous is doing. There’s a well-known security flaw at Sony, and the next thing you know they steal all the credit cards and then someone at Sony claims it’s Anonymous. Or, maybe it really was Anonymous. No way of knowing.

From the beginning, Anonymous experienced lots of infighting because there is no clear managerial structure. Multiple groups claim to be the
real
Anonymous at any given moment. AnonOps itself was attacked by Anons who felt that the site’s moderators were taking too much credit for Anonymous’s victories, and attempting to establish hierarchies of control within the ranks. The rogue group was presumably led by a disgruntled AnonOps admin named Ryan. Even worse, Ryan leaked the IP addresses of hundreds of registered AnonOps users. If the infighting has weakened Anonymous through wasted time and money spent getting servers back online, it has helped to solidify one of the group’s most cherished principles: No one’s in charge here.

I got in touch with another Anon, using the handle Anonymouse, who claims that he helped kick-start Operation Sony. Anonymouse immediately gave me a laundry list of misconceptions about 4chan and Anonymous. He too had been dealing with clueless reporters, and wanted to make sure I had a basic understanding of how his community works.