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The Accidental Activist: Part IIApril 2011 Issue
4chan’s Chaos Theory
Founded in 2003 by 15-year-old Christopher Poole, 4chan, the online hangout for
millions of young people, unwittingly spawned the group Anonymous, which sprang to
the defense of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange last December, attacking and taking
down MasterCard’s and Visa’s Web sites. Does the anti-Facebook ethos of one of the
Web’s largest active forums represent a movement or just mayhem? Vanessa
Grigoriadis peers into 4chan’s “hive mind,” a primordial soup of teenage-male angst
and cute cat photos.
By Vanessa Grigoriadis
Photography by John Huba
March 10, 2011
Image may contain Housing Building Indoors Penthouse Human Person Furniture Bed
Room Interior Design and Bedroom

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At 11 on a December morning, Gregg Housh, a 34-year-old computer engineer from
Boston and an Internet activist associated with Anonymous—the loosely affiliated
organization of hackers whom the media has variously called “domestic terrorists,”
“an Internet hate machine,” and “the dark heart of the Web”—takes my call as he is
preparing to make an appearance on CNN. “You’re the 35th media person to call me
this morning!” Housh booms in jubilant tones, noting I am not from “England or
Australia,” like many of the others. Though Housh disavows any illegal activity
himself, he expresses surprise that he hasn’t heard from the F.B.I., which is
currently looking to capture patriotic and well-intentioned Internet heroes such as
he—ones who might have knowledge of how, exactly, the Web sites of MasterCard,
Visa, and PayPal were brought down after they shut off any donations to WikiLeaks
processed through their organizations. “The government knows where I am if they
want to find me,” he says. “I’m here!” That’s more than can be said for most
members of Anonymous, who are, appropriately enough, staying anonymous, hiding
their I.P. addresses in Internet Relay Chat rooms and posting under deadpanned
handles like Coldblood and Tux, the latter a possible shorthand for the group’s
logo, which features a man in a tuxedo, sans head.

The Pirate Bay’s first run-in with the law (Steven Daly, March 2007)
The founding fathers of cyber-crime (Bryan Burrough, June 2000)

Julian Assange, WikiLeak’s dark master (Sarah Ellison, February 2011)

In the past couple of months, though, this group—previously best known for wearing
Guy Fawkes masks and cavorting to techno music in front of Scientology churches
while holding up signs that say things like honk if you are driving a car and don’t
worry, we’re from the internet—has become very famous indeed. The “hacktivist”
drama would end, or at least pause, with an international manhunt for 40 teenagers
and twenty-somethings by the F.B.I. and the London Metropolitan Police at the end
of January, with search warrants executed and computers seized. But before
Christmas, they were just trying to defend Julian Assange, their brother in “haxx,”
who was in jail in England awaiting extradition on possibly trumped-up charges of
sex crimes (women’s rights, in this group, not being a prime subject), while
several companies had shut off the nutrients WikiLeaks needs for survival—not only
financial ones but also server space and domains. (WikiLeaks had to register on the
Web with the Swiss Pirate Party.)

That was not cool. Anonymous needed to take care of that. “Corporations should not
bow to government pressure,” explains Housh. “Government is supposed to be there to
do simple things to make people happy, and that’s all.” Bam! On December 8 they
shut down MasterCard for 37 hours. Blam! Visa down, for 12 hours. Zop! PayPal …
well, it didn’t go down except for the blog, but at least Anonymous’s attacks made
the site run a lot slower. They also shut down the sites of a Swiss bank, Senator
Joe Lieberman (after he prodded Amazon to kick WikiLeaks off its system), and the
Swedish prosecutor investigating Assange’s alleged sex crimes. “Freedom of
expression is priceless,” Anonymous crowed on their Twitter page. “For everything
else, there’s MasterCard.”

All it took to accomplish this was spreading the word to other computer geeks to
activate a loic, or “low-orbit ion cannon,” which sounds like some sort of Star
Wars fantasy but in reality is merely a piece of software that, once downloaded,
allows Anonymous to take over control of your computer. The computer is then turned
into a volunteer zombie, making requests for access to Web sites, like
MasterCard.com, that can’t handle the amount of incoming traffic and consequently
get knocked offline (that’s called a DDoS attack, a distributed denial of service,
for the nerds out there). DDoSes aren’t the most complicated hacks—Slate tech
columnist Farhad Manjoo compares them to the “Mean Girls-esque trick of having your
friends prank-call your loser enemy all night long to tie up her phone”—but a Web
site, for most companies, is like hanging a shingle, and when someone uses a
sledgehammer to knock your sign down, it creates great discomfort and fear in the
mind of the owner.

During those heady days of early December, at least 50,000 people signed on to be
part of the Anonymous army, joining in the grand disruption of the global wheels of
commerce (er, kind of … these sites may have gone down in the DDoS attacks, but
it’s not as though actual MasterCards didn’t keep working perfectly at the
checkout). “I guess you could call it an army, but I wouldn’t,” says Housh,
unfurling another telephone monologue. “Anonymous isn’t an army, or a group, per
se. There aren’t members. Anyone who uses the loic is Anonymous, which means that
anybody at any time in their lives can become Anonymous. Anonymous is nobody and
nothing and nowhere.” He laughs a little, somewhat ghoulishly. “For all I know, you
downloaded the loic, too—you’ve never proved to me you didn’t—so you might be
Anonymous, too.”

If you’ve spent any time in Internet chat rooms, you’ve probably come across the
saying “Don’t feed the trolls.” That means that you’re not supposed to shower any
sort of attention, neither praise nor wrath, and definitely not CNN coverage, on
the Internet’s top troublemakers, those flame-throwing, drama-producing, forum-
obsessed kids with an excess of both computer savvy and time on their hands. Right
now, though, the trolls are getting really well fed, though whether they’re also
involved in a reputable practice of civil disobedience is a worthy subject of
debate.

In the Internet underworld, trolls are known for such socially and technically
juvenile high jinks as posting chauvinistic statements on feminist blogs, but some
of them are also “script kiddies” or even “elite hackers.” Anonymous is attractive
to these people, and they have participated in recent Anonymous actions like taking
down the Web sites of the governments of Tunisia, Iran, and Egypt. A high-level
attack, by someone with master’s-degree-caliber computer skills, was also directed
toward the demimonde gossip site Gawker, which experienced one of the worst hacks
ever perpetrated on a media company. Hackers stole the passwords to Gawker’s
employees’ e-mail accounts, along with 200,000 unencrypted commenter passwords,
their source code, internal e-mails, and chat logs—then dumped this information on
the Pirate Bay (the Internet’s biggest aggregator site for downloading TV shows and
movies for free). “Your empire has been compromised, your servers, your databases,
online accounts and source code have all been ripped to shreds!” wrote the group,
calling themselves “Gnosis,” in a note to Gawker. “Fuck you Gawker, how’s this for
script kids?”

For a long time before all this (at least on the Internet continuum of time), the
trolls had been relatively well contained. Their main hangout was
[MyHemorrhoids.com](">4chan.org, a heavily trafficked “image board,” which is a
regular bulletin board, like one you might use to argue about politics or trade
tips on yoga retreats, but with a few key differences. 4chan does not have archives
or searchability. It’s one of the last places on the Internet where you really can
say anything you want and it won’t come back to haunt you. Anything posted on 4chan
has generally disappeared by the end of the day, and there’s no chance of Google
finding it again. There’s also no requirement to register under your real name, as
on Facebook, or even a fake one, as on om nom nom goes the hungry cat.” They
started the “Rickroll,” a trick where you click on a link you want to see, but
instead you’re brought to a YouTube video of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You
Up” (more than 44 million people had watched the video at press time). They’ve put
a swastika on the top of Google’s “hot trends” list. They gamed an online poll that
Justin Bieber fans had set up to decide which country he should visit first on his
world tour, and voted to send him to North Korea. In 2008 they spread a rumor that
Steve Jobs had a heart attack, and the shares of Apple dropped $10. A /b/ board
member, a student at the University of Tennessee and the son of a state
assemblyman, hacked into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account during the 2008 presidential
campaign. (He’s now serving one year in prison.)

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After Poole came out with his real identity, 4channers voted him to the top of a
poll for Time magazine’s most influential person of the year, with an approval
rating of 390 percent. They also hacked the rest of the poll so that the first
letter of each of the top 21 names (Carlos Slim, Angela Merkel) spelled out
marblecake also the game, a reference to pornographic argot and to the game that
Time magazine just lost.

Still, it’s a long way from Rickrolling to taking down MasterCard’s Web site. For
trolls, the prime order of business used to be getting “lulz”—a Schadenfreude-
tastic bunch of LOLs, like what most of us experience while watching Jersey Shore.
It’s easy to get lulz when a 4chan member says that he wants to name his kid
whatever is suggested in the 77th post. (“Courage Wolf” is what the trolls came up
with.) But after a while, they were ready to take on bigger targets.
In 2008, a nine-minute Scientology internal video of Tom Cruise promoting the
religion, with great fervor, was leaked onto YouTube. (In it Cruise claims, among
other incredible statements, that Scientologists should stop at accidents, “because
you know you’re the only one who can really help.”) Scientology initially succeeded
in squelching the video by threatening lawsuits, but when 4chan caught wind of it,
“someone posted a thread about it, and it very quickly bubbled up into a big
thing,” says Poole. With their hacking expertise, 4chan organized a massive DDoS on
Scientology’s Web site, and someone reposted the video as well. And we all had some
pretty good lulz at Cruise’s expense then, didn’t we?

In any case, not everyone on 4chan wanted the fun to stop there with Scientology,
and a small group broke off from the site; this was the founding of Anonymous, a
name chosen in honor of the 4chan username they had all shared. Suddenly, Web sites
and viral videos against the church popped up everywhere, with solemn invocations
about Scientology’s “campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent, your
litigious nature.” Tens of thousands of Anonymous members started hitting the
streets I.R.L. as well, in their Guy Fawkes masks. Housh was taken to court by
Scientology after protesting outside one of their churches in Boston’s Back Bay.
(The judge ordered him to stay away from the church for one year.)

The Anonymous campaign against Scientology is a bit messy: it’s about protecting
free access to information but also about prosecuting Scientology as a fake
religion, and also about getting lulz. But it succeeded in sparking a previously
moribund ideological impulse in many trolls, which, in September 2010, they spun
into a new campaign: Operation Payback, a series of DDoS attacks against the
R.I.A.A. and M.P.A.A. following hack attacks on the Pirate Bay.

By this point, Poole was more vigorously enforcing 4chan’s ground rules, banning
the posting of personal information and calls to invasion, so 4chan wasn’t as
important to the trolls anymore. It was easy enough to recruit for DDoS attacks by
posting calls on Facebook and Twitter and a zillion other social-networking sites
around the globe where news spreads like wildfire.

By the end of 2010, the authorities were starting to catch up with Anonymous, but
they still weren’t getting far enough. A 16-year-old Dutch kid was arrested for
allegedly participating in the attacks. The F.B.I. raided a Texas server-hosting
company in Dallas, claiming that some of the Operation Payback DDoS traffic had
come through their I.P. address, along with servers in British Colombia and
Germany, where a log entry read, “Good_night,_paypal_Sweet_dreams_from_Anonops.”

But these were just minor deterrents, these government investigations, and
Anonymous was still going strong, defending WikiLeaks’ cause—after all, as they
like to say, Julian Assange is the “most successful international troll of all
time!” They executed attacks on the Web site of Ireland’s main opposition party and
even the official site of Zimbabwe’s government, after President Robert Mugabe’s
wife sued a newspaper for publishing a WikiLeaks report that she was involved in
the trade of illicit diamonds.

Anonymous felt compelled, as well, to support the revolutions in Middle Eastern

nations, and went after targets like the Tunisian stock exchange and the Tunisian
prime minister’s Web site, where they placed a note: “We will use this brief span
of attention we’ve captured to deliver a clear and present message. Like a fistful
of sand … the more you squeeze your citizens the more that they will flow right out
of your hand.” But then everything seemed to come to a screeching halt.

On January 27, the authorities tore into the homes of five young men in the U.K.,
and the F.B.I. executed 40 search warrants, including one on a student from Georgia
Tech. They took their cameras, phones, computers, and hard drives, and in the U.S.,
they claimed that each member, if found guilty of carrying out DDoS attacks against
corporations and Web sites, could receive a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

So, Housh was on the phone again, taking calls from The New York Times, while
trying to scrape the ice from another northeastern ice storm off his car. “Those
tactics might work on old-world criminals, but these arrests aren’t going to scare
anyone,” he said, a bit breathlessly. “The F.B.I., the government, the Man,
whatever you want to call them, doesn’t know what they’re doing, because nothing
they did now will change a thing. The fact is that, by today, half the people who
were arrested are back online, because they know they haven’t broken any laws!
After all, that’s the reason they acted out in the first place—to defend WikiLeaks,
which hasn’t broken any laws either.”

This is an argument we’re likely to keep having over the next few years: Are
Anonymous cyber-vandals or vigorous grassroots protesters? On one hand, Web sites
are property, and taking them down is stealing, in a way. At the same time, this is
a moment of worldwide upheaval and change, and Anonymous is part of the democratic
revolution. Just don’t piss them off. In February, in a hack much like the one
Gnosis inflicted on Gawker, they ripped apart a security firm that they believed
was planning to sell their identities to the U.S. government. According to Barrett
Brown, an Anonymous strategist, they did this because the firm’s data was mostly
bogus and could have gotten a lot of innocent people arrested, but their
retribution—exposing internal data and over 70,000 private e-mails—was merciless.

The Pirate Bay’s first run-in with the law (Steven Daly, March 2007)

The founding fathers of cyber-crime (Bryan Burrough, June 2000)

Julian Assange, WikiLeak’s dark master (Sarah Ellison, February 2011)

They’re not above turning on their own, either. Housh says that he feels
particularly bad about the arrest of Coldblood, a 20-year-old Briton named
Christopher Wood. According to Housh, Coldblood wasn’t taking part in the attacks,
though he had been part of the group before, but he had agreed to be interviewed by
the press on the topic. The trolls didn’t like what he had to say, though, and one
of the guys who was involved in the attacks “took their anger out on him,” says
Housh, by changing his handle to “Coldblood.” So the London police picked up Wood,
thinking it was the same Coldblood, and Wood lost his job as a result. “It’s really
sad,” says Housh. “He didn’t do anything. He was just Anonymous.”

Vanessa Grigoriadis
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