We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

of the original AnonOps operators, and a botmaster or two. Most were skilled hackers.
Here they could share flaws they had found in servers hosting everything from the official U.S. Green Party to Harvard University to the
CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Sabu even pasted a list of exploits—a series of commands that took advantage of a security glitch—to
several iPhones that anyone could snoop on. They threw around ideas for future targets: Adrian Lamo, the hacker that had turned in
WikiLeaks’s military mole Bradley Manning, or defected botmaster Switch.
“If someone has his dox,” said Kayla, “I can pull his social security number and we can make his life hell.” To those who didn’t know her,
Kayla came across as someone who was especially keen to dish out vigilante justice.
As the InternetFeds participants got to know each other more, they also saw that Sabu was the one with the loudest voice, the biggest
opinions, and the strongest desire to coordinate others into action. Sabu, who was well connected to the underground hacker scene, wanted to
relive the days of the so-called Antisecurity movement and would eventually realize he could do so with an elite group of Anons like Kayla,
Topiary, and Tflow. What’s extraordinary is that, while his actions gradually betrayed the rhetoric, Sabu was gradually positioning himself as
Anonymous’s most spectacular revolutionary hero.
Chapter 9
The Revolutionary
Sabu’s dramatic involvement in Anonymous might never have happened if it weren’t for an important introduction: around mid-December
2011, Tflow invited Sabu, who in real life was a twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker with a string of criminal misdemeanors behind him, into
the #InternetFeds chat room. It was in this chat room that Sabu first met Kayla and other hackers who would help him attack myriad other
targets with the mission of revolution in his mind. Until now, Anonymous raids had reacted to circumstance: Chanology because of Tom
Cruise; Operation Payback because a few companies snubbed WikiLeaks. But Sabu wanted Anonymous to be more than just kids playing
hacker. He wanted Anonymous to change the world.
Sabu was an old-time cyber punk. He did not use words like moralfag and lulz, and he did not go on 4chan. He conquered networks, then
basked in his achievement. He was more interested in the cachet of taking over entire Internet service providers (ISPs) than pranking
Scientologists. While 4chan trolls like William were looking for random fun, Sabu wanted to be a hero by taking figures of authority down a
notch or two. He did not shy away from big targets or big talk. In his decade underground he claimed to have taken control of the domainname
systems of the governments of Saudi Arabia, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and Indonesia.
Sabu was known to exaggerate, and other hackers who dealt with him listened to his claims with some skepticism. Though he was highly
skilled, Sabu would often lie about his life, telling people things he perhaps wished were true—that he came from Puerto Rico; that his real
mother had been an upstanding member of the local political community; that in real life, he was married and “highly successful in his field.”
The truth was that he was jobless, insecure, and struggling to support his family.
Sabu’s real name was Hector Xavier Monsegur. He lived in a low-income housing project on New York’s Lower East Side, and with help
from government welfare, he supported his five brothers, a sister, two female cousins for whom he was legal guardian, and a white pit bull
named China. Monsegur would refer to the two girls, who were seven and twelve, respectively, in 2012, as his daughters. He was of Puerto
Rican descent and a stickler for left-wing activism. As a child, he listened to tales of the El Grito de Lares revolt and told his family that one
day, he would launch his own revolution.
Born in New York City in 1983, Monsegur grew up in relative poverty. His father, also named Hector, and his aunt Iris sold heroin on the
streets. When Monsegur was fourteen, they were both arrested for drug dealing and sentenced to seven years in prison. Monsegur went to
live with his grandmother Irma in a sixth-floor apartment in the Jacob Riis housing project on New York’s Lower East Side.
As he settled into his new home, he discovered The Anarchist Cookbook, the notorious book originally published in 1971 that led him to
tips for hacking phone lines to make free calls as well as directions for making napalm bombs out of soap. His grandmother could not afford a
fast Internet connection, so the young Monsegur followed instructions to get the family computer hooked up to the Internet service EarthLink
for free. As he explored the Web, he also found his way onto EFnet, a storied Internet relay chat network popular with hackers that Kayla
would join years later. Monsegur eventually came across an online essay from a notorious 1980s hacker nicknamed the Mentor. It was called
“The Hacker’s Manifesto” and spoke to Monsegur more than anything else he had read online. The Mentor, whose real name was Lloyd
Blankenship, had written the short essay on a whim on January 8, 1986, a couple of hours before police arrested him for computer hacking.
“Did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? I am a hacker, enter my
world.…”
“Oh man,” Monsegur said, recalling the event years later in an interview. “That right there is what made me who I am today.” The last line
of the manifesto was especially resonant for him: “My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.”
The idea that figures of authority, from teachers to the media, misunderstood the true talents of hackers was something Monsegur
understood all too well. As a young Latino living in the projects where his own family dealt drugs, he did not fit the description of nerdy
computer hacker. More than likely he was confronted by people who doubted his abilities. But he was eager to learn. After successfully
hooking his family up with free Internet, Monsegur wanted to find the next challenge to conquer.
He read more online, experimented, and took a few pointers from people on IRC networks like EFnet. Still at just fourteen, Monsegur
taught himself software programming in Linux, Unix, and open-source networking.
Outside of school, Monsegur was showing off his talents: he joined a local training scheme for talented young programmers called the
NPowerNY Technology Service Corps, then got work experience researching network security at the Welfare Law Center. At eighteen he
had joined mentoring program iMentor as a technology intern.