We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

“extreme version of Calvinism” and “extreme physical punishments and abuse.”
The February 18 press release announcing that Anonymous was going to hit Westboro—the first such announcement—appeared on
AnonNews.org. The detail about an IRC operator running a search of the network’s chat channels to find the organizers was sourced
from interviews with Topiary. IRC operators, both within AnonOps and in other networks, regularly ran searches to keep an abreast
of any odd operations that no one knew about, such as conspiracies to take down the network or improper discussions about child
porn. Sometimes trolls would create a child porn channel to try to make AnonOps look illegal. This was the only topic of discussion
that was banned on AnonOps IRC; everything else was fair game. Similarly, talk of hacking was banned on other networks, which
was why Tflow and the other supporters of Operation Payback migrated from networks like EFnet, Freenode, and Quakenode in late
2010—these IRC operators did not like the heat.
The follow-up press release about attacking Westboro, written by five writers in #philosoraptors, originated when one person started
writing it on his computer and then uploaded it to Pirate Pad so others could edit it. “Dear Phred Phelps and WBC Phriends,” it
began. This release was much more in line with the irreverent, clownish tone of Anonymous. It went on to say, “Stay tuned, and
we’ll come back to play another day. We promise,” and added a reprimand: “To the Media: Just because it’s posted on AnonNews
doesn’t mean every single Anon is in agreement.”
Details about The David Pakman Show, Pakman himself, and the live Westboro hack are sourced from a phone interview with Pakman
that took place on November 18, 2011, as well as from interviews with Topiary. Comments made by Shirley Phelps-Roper on
Pakman’s show are sourced from YouTube videos. All dialogue from the show regarding the live Westboro hack was sourced from
the main YouTube video of the program. Pakman’s and Topiary’s accounts differ about how much Pakman knew of what was going
to happen to Westboro’s website during the show. Pakman denied ever knowing that Topiary or anyone else from Anonymous was
going to hit the Westboro site in the middle of his show. “No. Absolutely no,” Pakman said in the phone interview, conducted about
eight months after the event. “They basically said, ‘We’ll come on your show to talk about this.’ It was very vague. I said, ‘I’m
interested. Would you be able to come on with Shirley?’ and they said yes. I reached out to Westboro.…They both said yes. The
timing worked out.” Today the number of hits on the video of the live Westboro hack has approached the two million mark and it is
the most popular video ever posted for The David Pakman Show.
Regarding Topiary’s deface messages: he wrote all of them in a very simple text-editing program called Notepad++. Every PC has
Notepad in its Accessories folder, but Notepad++ is a free program that one-upped the original Notepad by allowing users to organize
their documents in tabs, enabling them to have multiple open files. Topiary only had to hit the left arrow key on his laptop to get
different text formats, a list of links to vulnerable websites, or other Anonymous press releases he hadn’t read yet. He would make all
his deface messages compatible with the Web language HTML by converting them at a website called Pastehtml.com. If Topiary
copied and pasted a two-hundred-word message directly from Microsoft Word, it would likely show up in Pastehtml.com with the
Anonymous logo too far to the left, or with odd spaces within the text, which he’d have to then tinker with in the so-called source
code, the complicated programming commands behind the text. Writing it in Notepad++, on the other hand, meant it was
automatically “cleaned up,” so that when it was converted into an HTML file it looked exactly the same online as it did offline on his
computer. No tweaking required. In total, Topiary produced approximately ten deface messages using this method for Anonymous,
and helped others to produce an additional ten. The use of a simple program, combined with Topiary’s basic knowledge of HTML,
are the reasons that all his messages, which made up the majority of defacements reported by the news media in the spring of 2011,
appeared as plain text on a white background.
Chapter 13: Conspiracy (Drives Us Together)
The opening paragraphs of this chapter are sourced from interviews at the time (and then months afterward for hindsight) with Topiary.
Sabu and Kayla had moved on from the HBGary attack and were not involved in reading through Barr’s e-mails. Both also claimed
to have busy lives outside of Anonymous and the Internet. In my phone interviews with Sabu, for instance, he was often being
interrupted by people in his household and by other phone calls.
Details about Barrett Brown’s experience delving through the HBGary e-mails, forming a team of researchers, and his personal life are
derived from my phone interview with Brown, conducted on November 24, 2011. Further details about his dealings with Topiary and
other Anons have come from interviews with Topiary. I also sourced an audio recording of Brown’s phone interview with William
Wansley, which he uploaded to the media-sharing site MediaFire.com. I had been alerted in advance to the Radio Payback
appearance of Brown, Topiary, and WhiteKidney and was taking notes as it happened, before I downloaded the audio file itself. The
description of the NBC Nightly News broadcast with Michael Isikoff was taken from my viewing of the video online. The note that
Brown’s “bones ached” because of withdrawal from Suboxone, along with the point about his relapse in New York in April of 2011,
were sourced from my phone interview with Brown. Some extra details about Operation Metal Gear and its research were sourced
partly from Brown’s Project PM wiki, http://wiki.echelon2.org/; partly from the Metal Gear website, http://opmetalgear.zxq.net/,
before it became disused; and partly from the Booz Allen Hamilton website.
Descriptions of the general opinion among Anons toward Brown were sourced from discussions with a handful of Anons, including
William, as well as from my observation of relevant comments on AnonOps IRC. Brown thought he saw a connection to HBGary’s
interest in bidding for a contract to sell the U.S. military personnel management software, a technology that essentially allowed the
user to spy on others over the Internet and social media.
Details about the young man nicknamed OpLeakS and his offer of apparently explosive information from Bank of America were
sourced from interviews with Brown and Topiary, with further details coming from the bankofamericasuck.com website, OpLeakS’s
Twitter feed, and a variety of news reports. E-mails posted on OpLeakS’s website clearly showed the name of the disgruntled Bank
of America employee who was “leaking” information, Brian Penny.
When he used the term “nerdy hacker group,” Topiary was referring to the hacker groups of the eighties and nineties, some of which
used skull-and-crossbones imagery and generally took themselves too seriously.