We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

flickering black candles. The idea was to spook Scientologists who were deeply suspicious of black magic and the occult. He joined other
Anons in offering Scientologists cake if they would come join the protest. This was a nod to the “delicious cake” meme. They also played an
audio version of OT3, confidential documents that are believed by Scientologists to lead them to a spiritual state known as Operating Thetan.
Adherents are not supposed to listen to or read them until they are ready. Bailey found it hilarious.
“But then,” he remembered a few years later, “they stopped coming out to play.” By the end of 2008, Scientology stopped responding, and
the demonstrations and cyber attacks stopped altogether. Bailey and Emick wound up in the middle of the infighting that followed.
There were dramatic rows between the IRC network operators and admins on Partyvan, between the people who ran Anonymous forums,
and between protest organizers. There was discord among the original anti-Scientologist campaigners who had been there long before the
Anonymous flood came along. Emick recalled a spat between two organizers, with one supporter accusing another of cheating with her
husband, then “freezing out” mutual acquaintances to create a rift. The war of words escalated to lofty heights of machismo—this was the
Internet, after all.
“You have no idea who you’re fucking with,” Emick remembered one person saying. “Just wait and see what’s coming.”
If 2008 was the year Anonymous burst into the real world with well-organized demonstrations, 2009 was when it started unraveling into the
chaos of e-drama. The biggest rift was over what Anonymous was about. Activism? Or lulz? And it was to be fought between moralfags like
Emick and trolls like Bailey.
In late 2008, just before being deployed with the army to South Korea for a year, Bailey had set up a new website called
ScientologyExposed.com. The protests were dying down, but Anons were still communicating online, albeit more chaotically. His idea was
to create an alternative to Gregg Housh’s more popular Enturbulation.com (which turned into the slick-looking WhyWeProtest.net). Housh
had by now given many interviews to newspapers and television reporters about Anonymous after being outed by name, and Enturbulation
was his baby. He told journalists that he was absolutely not an Anonymous “spokesman,” since no one could speak for the collective, but
more of an observer. By then, he’d gotten burned in the courts. The Church of Scientology had sued Housh for trespassing, criminal
harassment, disturbing an assembly of worship, and disturbing the peace. When the protests were at their peak, a Scientology spokesman told
CNN that the church was “dealing with six death threats, bomb threats, acts of violence,” and vandalism from Anonymous. Housh didn’t
exactly fit the stereotype of an activist, but Bailey didn’t like him or his site.
Bailey believed the people surrounding Enterbulation were too earnest, too “moralfaggy” to be effective. Housh’s site had become the de
facto meeting ground, and there needed to be an alternative. Bailey designed his site to encourage pranks and trolling over peaceful activism
against the church. The site contained hidden forums, a section of “fun stuff” like WiFi-router passwords used by Scientology organizations,
and tips for pranks. One was to send an official-looking letter of warning to each of the highest-ranking leaders of Scientology to freak them
out.
Bailey was dedicated to maintaining his site even while stationed in South Korea, working on it for four to six hours in the evening and on
weekends. It was a tough schedule. He would work on the site until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, then get up at 5:00 a.m. to do an hour of
jogging and physical training with the other soldiers while it was still dark outside. Bailey hated all the running and developed shin splints,
but he looked forward every evening to getting back on his laptop in his dorm. He had fully embraced the goal of destroying Scientology and
made new friends along the way. One of them was Jennifer Emick.
Bailey and Emick first began talking on an online forum. Bailey liked Emick’s chutzpah and invited her to be an administrator on his site.
Over time, though, he realized the two had starkly different views about Anonymous. Emick didn’t understand the darker side of chan culture
and seemed to think Anonymous should focus on peaceful protest. The two hard-talking individuals began to have blazing public arguments.
The final straw came one day when the pair was fighting on the site’s anonymous forum, and Emick suddenly said, “I know it’s you,
Raziel.” By outing Bailey’s regular online nickname, Raziel, Emick had betrayed an important custom on forums like this: that hiding your
online identity, or nickname, could be just as important as hiding your real-world identity. Enraged, Bailey removed Emick’s administrative
access and the two stopped talking.
Looking back, Bailey said Emick had realized that Anonymous was not a peaceful protest group but “full of hackers and people on the net
who don’t do nice things for fun.…It broke her,” Bailey added. “She had invested so much personal pride in it.”
Years later Emick also found it hard to talk about why she broke away from Anonymous. “The group itself was losing sight of…I don’t
want to pinpoint exactly,” she said. “In 2008 and 2009 there was a group ethos. You weren’t confrontational with the community, you didn’t
yell at cops, you were a good example. You fight an evil cult you can’t be evil yourself. Then at some point they said, ‘Well, why not?’”
Emick seemed to revel in the drama and gossip, but she hated the threats and real-life mischief. What had happened to the well-behaved
ethos at those first protests? Anonymous was becoming increasingly vindictive not only toward Scientology but to other Anons who didn’t
agree with its methods. This nastiness was nothing new for people like Bailey, who had found Anonymous via the netherworld of 4chan, but
for Emick it was a crushing betrayal.
“We tried to tell her Anonymous isn’t nice and it isn’t your friend,” Bailey said. “We tried to tell her these aren’t good people. They are
doing fucked-up things because it’s funny.” Eventually, Emick became a target herself. The more she tried telling other Anons that they were
being irresponsible bullies, the more they threw insults and threats back at her. People found out her real name and address and posted it
online, along with her husband’s details. People from various schisms in Anonymous began harassing her stepdaughter. There was talk of
SWATing her house—calling up the FBI to send a SWAT team, a surprisingly easy prank to carry out. Soon Emick got her family to move
to Michigan and started going online from a fake server that hid her true IP address. Though she was breaking away, Emick would come
back more than a year later, having honed her skills in social engineering and “doxing,” helping to nearly rip Anonymous apart.
Military man Bailey had meanwhile become fascinated by a subset of Anonymous that everyone wanted to join but few could understand:
the hackers. He had noticed that a small contingent of skilled hackers had checked out Chanology early on in the project but had left. As
Anonymous descended into a chaotic civil war between moralfags and trolls, Bailey set out to find the hackers. He wanted to be able to do
what they could do: track down an enemy, steal someone’s botnet, or hack their servers. It bothered Bailey that he didn’t have these skills
already. First, however, he had to make a drastic change to his personal life, after leaving the army in 2009.
Since childhood, Bailey had harbored deep, secret feelings that he was really female. Even as he and his wife pursued a polyamorous