We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

Laurelai contacted Emick and blurted out the allegations, told her what Housh was up to, and said that she was in a private channel called
#HQ with the HBGary hackers. Emick, sounding surprised, denied plotting anything.
“I don’t care about what’s going on in AnonOps,” Emick told Laurelai on the phone. “I have no idea what’s going on.” Laurelai took this
information back to the others in #HQ as proof that Emick was not a saboteur and that all the rumors were Housh trying to “get at me.”
Marduk and Topiary listened but were wary of the conspiracy theories. They were noise.
“Really this shit affects nothing,” Topiary concluded.
But it wasn’t over. Back on Twitter, the @FakeGreggHoush account started needling Laurelai, accusing her of being part of the group of
people who had worked with Housh in the old Marblecake chat room (which was not true). That was the final straw. Laurelai wrote back on
Twitter and said she had logs proving that she wasn’t talking to Gregg Housh and that she could provide them, privately, in exchange for
new information about Housh to help her piece the conspiracy together and exonerate Emick. “The only thing I care about is protecting Jen
and her friends,” Laurelai said. The Twitter account @FakeGreggHoush agreed.
Laurelai looked over the chat log she had been diligently keeping that noted everything said in #HQ for the past week and a half (from
February 8 to February 19). She naively believed that if she showed them to whoever @FakeGreggHoush was, she would exonerate Emick
and that no one would have to know she had leaked the chat logs. Laurelai copied the entire chat log, about 245 pages, and posted it on the
web app Pastebin. She then sent a direct message on Twitter to @FakeGreggHoush, telling the person to take a look at the logs. Within a few
minutes, Emick had copied the logs, and Laurelai, still oblivious, had deleted the Pastebin file.
“Holy shit,” Emick thought as she stared at the screen. She quickly started skimming the enormous chat log, the prize that had just been
handed to her on a plate. Bizarrely, there was nothing that truly implicated Gregg Housh but plenty to implicate Sabu, Kayla, and Topiary in
the attack on HBGary Federal. She started reading the huge log much more carefully.
Emick’s deceptions of Laurelai, as well as her alter ego as @FakeGreggHoush, were tactics aimed at outing the real people behind
Anonymous. Emick had realized after HBGary that the best way to take Anonymous down was simply to show that people in it were not
anonymous at all. All she had to do was find their real names. And thanks to Laurelai, she was about to find Sabu’s.
Part 2
Fame
Chapter 12
Finding a Voice
In mid-February of 2011, as Jennifer Emick dug into the HQ logs that Laurelai had handed her, Topiary was enjoying a newfound
popularity on the AnonOps chat network. People on the network now knew that he had been involved in the HBGary attack and that he had
hijacked Aaron Barr’s Twitter feed. For the Anons, this had been an epic raid, and Topiary was the Anon who knew how to make it fun, or
“lulz-worthy.” Now, whenever Jake signed into AnonOps as Topiary, he got half a dozen private messages inviting him to join an operation,
offering him logs from the CEO of a French security company, requesting that he intervene in a personal dispute, or asking his advice on
publicity.
This was sort of like what was happening to Anonymous itself. Over the course of February, the public channels on AnonOps were
inundated with requests from regular people outside the network asking what they thought was a group of organized hackers to hit certain
targets. The requested sites included other digital security firms; individuals; government websites in Libya, Bahrain, and Iran; and, naturally,
Facebook. None were followed up.
Most attacks came from discussions that occurred directly on AnonOps IRC, especially discussions between operators like Owen and
Ryan. There was no schedule, no steps being taken. People would often start planning an op, run into a roadblock, and shelve it. Everything
seemed to overlap. Topiary himself would rarely finish one project before moving onto another—he’d be writing deface messages one
minute and the next start reading the Aaron Barr e-mails again.
After his recent invitation into #InternetFeds, Topiary was granted unusually high status in chat channels by operators. He would
sometimes spend a whole day flitting between chat rooms, cracking jokes, then segueing into some serious advice on a side operation before
going to bed, feeling fulfilled. It was better than the buzz he’d gotten from doing prank calls back on 4chan and unlike anything he had ever
experienced in the real world, let alone in school. Operators and other hackers confirm that he came across as “charming” and “funny.” Being
a talented writer was useful in a world where you communicated in text, and Topiary’s style had hints of mature world-weariness that
appealed to Anons.
Topiary rarely interacted with people in the real world. There was the occasional visit to his family, a trip to the store, or a once-in-a-while
meeting of some old friends in his town whom he knew from online gaming. Perhaps 90 percent of all his social interaction now took place
online. And this suited him fine. He liked entertaining people, and soon he’d get to do the prank call of his life.