We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

This was the beginning of a new chapter of Anonymous. The OP had continued on her second post: “If we can destroy Scientology, we
can destroy whatever we like!” She reminded 4chan that its users had to “do the right thing” as the largest of the chans, holding the
manpower that the “legion” needed. The new thread was as popular as the previous day’s, getting 587 responses, including the repeated
instructions for using Gigaloader and comments like “I’M IN.”
Soon the Anons were DDoSing other websites affiliated with Scientology: rtc.org, img2.scientology.org, and volunteerministers.org. As a
result, Scientology.org shut down for twenty-four hours before the church moved its servers to an outside company called 800hosting. There
were about ten different software tools that Anons could choose from to help take down the Scientology sites, but the most popular was
Gigaloader.
By now, #xenu was teeming with so many people it was becoming impossible to organize anything. Then almost out of nowhere on the
second day, a male Anon who was also an administrator on Encyclopedia Dramatica yelled, ALL CAPS: “YOU GUYS NEED TO TALK
TO THE PRESS. PUT A PRESS RELEASE TOGETHER. THIS IS BIG.” No one so far had organized a group of people to deal with
publicity, and hardly anyone in the channel wanted to step up. But a few did. With a few clicks, one person created a channel called #press,
announced to the #xenu channel that it was there, and five people joined it. At the top of the channel they had set a topic: “Here’s where
we’re going to talk to the press.”
One of the people joining the #press channel was a round-faced man in glasses sitting in his bedroom in Boston. The room doubled as a
home office for his freelance software work. Gregg Housh would become instrumental in helping organize the Anons over the next few
months, though like others in Anonymous, he would eventually fade into the background as a new generation of figureheads like Sabu and
Topiary later emerged. Originally from Dallas, Texas, Housh loved trolling and organizing pranks and was a regular on the Partyvan IRC
network. He had a commanding, talkative personality that belied any outward appearance of being a computer geek. He’d done some jail
time for his part in coordinating illegal file sharing in his late teens, his term helpfully cut short after he agreed to cooperate with the FBI,
according to court documents, and the judge considered his tough upbringing. Housh’s father had left when he was four, and his mother was
a housecleaner who also cared for a grown daughter with cerebral palsy. Having now been out of jail for a while, Housh was looking to stay
out of trouble, since he also had a young daughter. But he couldn’t help feeling intrigued by what was happening to Scientology. He jumped
into #press and, together with a few others in the chat room, wrote a press release called the “Internet Group Anonymous Declares War On
Scientology,” listing the tongue-in-cheek source as “ChanEnterprises.” They published it.
When the #press channel’s participants read over the press release, it sounded so dramatic and ominous that they decided something similar
should be narrated in a video, too. A member of the group, whose nickname was VSR, created a YouTube account called
Church0fScientology, and the group spent the next several hours finding uncopyrighted footage and music, then writing a video script that
could be narrated by an automated voice. The speech recognition technology was so bad they had to go back and misspell most of the words
—destroyed became “dee stroid,” for instance—to make it sound natural. The final script ended up looking like nonsense but sounding like
normal prose.
When they finally put it together, a Stephen Hawking–style robotic voice said over an image of dark clouds, “Hello, leaders of
Scientology, we are Anonymous.” It climbed to new heights of hyperbole, vowing to “systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in
its current form.…For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—for the laughs—we shall expel you from the Internet.” Housh
and the group of publicity reps weren’t taking any of this seriously. But as they were putting finishing touches on the video and joking about
how this “war” would be one of the funniest trolling events of all time, lasting a few days at most, a French PhD student in the group
suddenly got serious with them.
“Guys, what we are doing today is going to change the world,” he said.
The others in the group stopped for a moment and then laughed, Housh later recalled.
“Gtfo,” wrote one. “Quit your jibber jabber.” But the French Anon was unrelenting. Tens of thousands of people were going to watch the
video they were making. This was the start of something major, “and we just don’t know what it is yet.”
Housh and the others shrugged and carried on, according to Housh. They called the video Message to Scientology, published it on January
21, and posted links all over the chans and Digg. Having worked on the video through the night, most of them went to sleep.
The next morning, Housh’s girlfriend at the time nudged him awake. “You need to get back onto your computer,” she said. “Stuff is
blowing up.”
Housh fell out of bed, fumbled for his glasses, and stared at his screen. The Partyvan IRC network was crashing as thousands of new
people tried piling into #xenu.
“We had DDoS’d ourselves,” he later recalled in an interview. The video had been picked up by Gawker and another tech site called The
Register, and thousands had seen it. Later that day, around ten thousand people were trying to get into #xenu, and the IRC network hosts on
Partyvan kicked everyone off the network. Housh and the others tried to get everyone to move to another IRC network, which immediately
went down. Fortunately, the Partyvan admins came back, saying they had added five more servers so that the horde could return. Most
communication for Anonymous was now taking place on Partyvan IRC servers.
It was a whirlwind for Housh and the others. Waking up and realizing that thousands of people wanted to take part in this prank, they
suddenly had it dawn on them that people were paying attention and they couldn’t just do something silly.
Over the next forty-eight hours, #press began filling up with a few more people who liked setting agendas. Realizing that the chat room
was starting to turn into an organizational hub, the group, who hadn’t known one another before these last few days, changed the channel’s
name to #marblecake. By picking a random name, their room was more likely to remain private, allowing them to avoid the distraction of
visitors and focus on organizing. For the first couple of days they were stumped on what to do next and argued about how the masses should
proceed.
“We had no clue what we were doing,” Housh remembered. Should they hit Scientology with more DDoS attacks? Prank them in some
other way? They decided the first port of call was to stop #xenu from collapsing. They asked the IRC operators to limit the channel to a
hundred people so that any more than that would be automatically kicked out. They then directed people to join channels based on the city
nearest to them, such as #London, #LA, #Paris, or #NY. Over the next six hours, the legion self- segregated.
The first DDoS attacks on Scientology had been carried out using simple Web tools like Gigaloader and JMeter. Within a few days,
though, they were usurped by what would become the two most popular weapons in the Anonymous arsenal: botnets and the Low-Orbit Ion