Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
First reviewed March 2015
Bro, bro, c’mon, bro, why are you writing this much? Don’t you know I’ve (you’ve?) got to edit this in eleven years later!? Let’s go see what I said, I guess.
[time passes]
This was peak semicolon for me. I left most of them in this time, but there were more originally, if you can imagine. Damn dude also lay off the off-set m-dash aside. No wonder AI loves an m-dash, most hack writers (me) proffering countless personal essays to the machine use it like a crutch. Some of the points in here are cute, but I sure love to beat around the bush getting to them.
book by Gabriella Coleman
Federal testing requirements are being challenged throughout New York State in what has been blandly named the opt-out movement. “Opt-out” has the slick polish of an ungraspable term, one with all the language-bending signifiers unsubtly employed by the “pro-life” movement; it vilifies the other side simply for existing. I am not a middle schooler—nor do I have one—but the test idyll revolves around results as metric, not label. Tests are practice for the real world, a consequence-free way of discovering your weaknesses and talents. That test results have a tendency to elide into pejorative shorthand labels for students is a not a per se fault with the tests, but the way they are applied: as a characteristic, a “C” students become a noun and is summarily dismissed.
While I agree the whole system needs a change—because students, much like anything else, cannot be reduced to numbers—not having tests at all seems counterproductive. The reduction of people into data is the Zeitgeist; we require information to feed the algorithms that run the modern information economy, and machines can only process inputs of ones and zeroes. But a useful testing environment would make a perfect score unobtainable; there is room for growth in all things, including—especially—in knowledge. Removing the gleaming pedestal that is pointless perfection would do wonders for the self-esteem-focused learning that is currently in place: if you’re the type of person that ties achievement to identity, any result that falls short of perfection is world-shattering. You as a person become worth less than you were before receiving tarnishing results. So it is better to avoid—not to try—something at which you don’t know you will succeed. If you’re never striving, and never improving, eventually natural talent will fizzle. What modern testing teaches is not to try if you cannot be perfect, to opt-out if you think you won’t like the results.
What a cult of perfectionism does not teach is owning one's own mistakes. Allowing space for ignorance is an even more difficult skill, as it strips away any excuse that you are not at fault for your own actions. Even admitting that you didn’t know something—a cool bar, a new band, a type of food—can be a lesson in ego. DUMBO, besides being an adorable baby elephant, is an acronym for a New York City neighborhood— “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” It is the little triangle between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, on the Brooklyn side. For whatever reason, I have always thought it was the portion of Chinatown that is situated literally beneath the Manhattan Bridge itself, on the Manhattan side. Simply, factually, wrong.
While I was reading Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous I had to remind myself of the fact that, though we all strive for perfection, ain’t none of us gonna make it there:
He was one of the first individuals from AnonOps I met “afk” (“away from the keyboards,” in IRC parlance), a pleasure I have since enjoyed on multiple occasions.
As far as I know, AFK means “away from keyboard,” as in, “Hey, I’m afk getting a sandwich.” In this aforementioned instance, I would have chosen “IRL” (“in real life”). This little blip caused me to look askance at the whole book; I viewed the misstep as a signifier of the author’s non-native status in the world of online nerdery. Which, I have to say, is seriously fucked up of me.
To begin with, I could very easily be incorrect. “AFK” means my version of “afk” in Everquest or AIM. It might not mean that in IRC chat, which I admittedly don’t use. Or on 4chan, where I’ve never been. Just because I think “AFK” implies temporary absence (“afk, using the toilet”) rather than physical locationality (“I like paper books, so I do most of my reading afk.”) doesn’t make it so. Additionally, even if I am technically correct, it doesn’t negate the intense and amazing amount of work the author put into this tome.
And while the book itself lacks the erudition of The Coming Swarm—which felt like a technical book for a technical audience—it hits a lot of the a lot of the same notes:
Anonymous remained hyperactively involved with the Steubenville assault on Twitter, until two teenagers were found guilty of rape in May 2013. One defendant received the minimum sentence: one year in a juvenile correctional facility. The other was sentenced to two years. In November 2013, four Steubenville residents, including the school superintendent, were subsequently charged for covering up evidence of another, earlier rape case, according to the New York Times. The FBI raided Lostutter in June 2013, and he is facing indictment under the CFAA; Noah McHugh was allegedly arrested earlier in February. If convicted, they face much longer prison sentences than the rapists.
Those notes remain rather sickening. What differentiates Hacker Hoaxer is the humanization element—Swarm presents DDoS actions and internet protesters as, well, a swarm; Hacker Hoaxer dissects the mass movement, nearly de-anonymizing Anonymous. The two books are the inverse of the same issue; one takes individuals and presents them as a political movement while the other takes a movement and breaks it down into individuals.
When Hacker Hoaxer began its technical chatter, I remember balking: if the author doesn’t know what “AFK” means, why should I trust her breakdown of a botnet?
In the botnet world there is an ongoing struggle over who has the most bots, the most bandwidth, and the best-infected machines (university, corporate, and government computers tend to be on better bandwidth).
This competition is so fierce that botnet herders will often try to take over other botnets. On the other side of the fence, law enforcement agencies and individual organizations that are fighting spam also struggle to take over botnets in order to neutralize them. This is not a trivial thing to do. One has to first identify the C&C. If you can figure out where the bots get their commands from, you can join the IRC channel, masquerading as a compromised machine, and wait to receive a command from the botnet herder. If the botnet herder sends an authentication alongside the command, you may have the password necessary to issues commands to the entire botnet yourself.
This is, again, simply poor reasoning on my end. My pushback was unfair, and I injured only myself by not accepting the knowledge as proffered. I should not extrapolate; being skeptical or using critical thinking doesn’t mean being dismissive of unrelated information because of a rather pedantic usage differentiation. I have, on more than one occasion, told both clients and friends that the large digital clock on the south end of Union Square in New York is a string of random integers—an art installation representing the random fiat nature of how we label and break down time in the modern era. And while I like my interpretation of the Metronome—as that clock is named—it is, in fact, a clock and there is nothing arbitrary about the digits. C’est la vie. [note from 2026: the digital numbers next to the analogue clock changed to some sort of carbon emission counter around 2020.]
it was a clock!
The government monopoly on force is still taking shape in cyberspace, and that unique horror is getting more and more mainstream coverage and attention:
Thanks to Edward Snowden’s NSA mega-leaks in 2013, we know that in the summer of 2011, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) targetted AnonOps’ communications infrastructure. A GCHQ special unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG)—which also engages in COINTELPRO-type meddling—launched DDoS attacks against Anonymous, calling it them [sic] “OpWealth” and “Rolling Thunder.”
This was the first known instance of a Western government secretly using DDoS—criminalized in the UK and the US—as a tactic against its own citizens. GCHQ claimed that its operation was a success; the leaked slides boast that as a result of its DDoS os AnonOps’ IRC, “80% of those messaged where [sic] not in the IRC channels 1 month later.” By this time, UK government had already arrested British participants for the same act. One of those arrested, Chris Weatherhead, aka “Nerdo,” was a central and much beloved AnonOps operator. Eventually, he would receive an eighteen-month sentence for his role in the DDoS campaign “Avenge Assange/Operation Payback.” He was not found guilty of engaging in an actual DDoS itself, but of aiding in the operation by running the IRC server. The British government, on the other hand, has faced no sanction for DDoSing activists. The law, clearly, is not applied equally. As Weatherhead put it on Twitter when he read the news: “My government used a DDoS attack against servers I owned, and then convicted me of conducting DDoS attacks. Seriously, what the fucking fuck?”
Onlookers might, at first blush, call the vigilantism of Anonymous too harsh or unproductive or simply wrong. As a movement they are not choosing to opt-out but instead are facing the mistakes and injustice and unbalanced nature of State authoritarianism:
By telling these characters’ stories, lessons emerge, not through dry edicts but, instead, thought fascinating, often audacious, tales of exploits. Trickster lore may be patently mythic, but it bears remembering that, at one point, it was spun by human hands. My role has been to nudge forward this process of historical and political myth-making—already evident in the routine functioning of an entity constituted by adept artists, contemporary myth-makers, and concocters of illusion.
The Guy Fawkes mask—the mask that can cover the hacker, the hoaxer, the whistleblower, or the spy in equal measure—is the modern equivalent of why Robin Hood and his merry men chose to wear gaudy green. Our modern economy is driven by the buying and selling of information about individual preferences, habits, and tastes; choosing to be anonymous—to don the mask—is the same as cloaking yourself in luxury.