We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

voice altering or changed his accent because he’d wanted it to seem real. He couldn’t decide if the stunt had been a stupid mistake or his
ballsiest move yet.
Pakman didn’t hear from anyone in Anonymous after the show, but there was a flood of feedback from listeners, with views split on how
great it had been to see the Westboro Baptist Church get taken down and others pointing out that whomever the target, Anonymous had just
committed a crime. Pakman took it rather lightly. “I found the entire thing to be a kind of parody at the highest level,” he recalled.
“Thinking back on everything with Anonymous and LulzSec, I see many things I regret being entangled in,” Topiary later said. “But the
Westboro Baptist Church attack, well…is proud the right word? Honored. I was honored to have been involved.”
It seemed Westboro and Anonymous had some similarities. One key to Westboro’s unfathomable ability to survive and maintain itself was
its isolation. Its members knew their unique group as “us against the world.” Their pickets at funerals were not really aimed at saving souls or
spreading God’s word but at stirring up anger and hatred in others—a self-serving exercise to fuel their own sense of righteousness. This
culture of hate was one that only its longtime participants could truly understand. Profound acceptance coupled with desensitization to their
own vicious trolling. When it came to motivation, Anonymous was often the same.
Chanology and Operation Payback had shown that Anonymous could take on unsavory characters as a group, but the live Westboro hack
with Topiary signaled where Anonymous would be going next: smaller and more extreme.
Kayla had conducted her vengeful attack on Gawker; Sabu had had a revolutionary turn on Tunisia; Topiary had experienced the thrill of a
live performance. Anonymous may have been a movement that could change the world, but it existed just as much for its own members as
anything else. It gave them something to do, made them feel useful, and, while no one would admit it, let them carry out urges in a way that
seemed justified and necessary. Gawker and HBGary had shown that Anonymous could be at its most destructive when it was taking
revenge and when a small but focused group of people led operations. But it was only when a joker and public communicator like Topiary
was added to the mix that the group had the makings of an even more powerful team: Sabu with his passion, Kayla with her skills, and
Topiary with his silver tongue.
Chapter 13
Conspiracy (Drives Us Together)
A few days after the live Westboro hack, Topiary couldn’t help but feel worried that more than a million people had now heard his real voice.
One way to distract himself from those concerns was to plow through more of Aaron Barr’s e-mails. Transfixed by what was on his Dell
laptop screen, he’d come across a piece of string every few hours that seemed to lead him farther down a rabbit hole, toward what looked like
a dark and dirty conspiracy. In late February, as Jennifer Emick was creating her own theories about who Anonymous was, Topiary was
looking into theories that went beyond the Anonymous world and involved the American military. Sabu and Kayla weren’t that interested in
this subject or the e-mails anymore, but a sense of possibility kept Topiary hooked, and this was largely thanks to Barrett Brown, a blond,
twenty-nine-year-old freelance writer from Texas who was passionate about exposing government corruption.
Topiary had first heard of Brown the day before the HBGary attack. Brown had published a spoof statement from Anonymous on the leftwing
political blog the Daily Kos on Saturday, February 5, a day before the HBGary Federal attack. The title was “Anonymous Concedes
Defeat.” Rambling and comical, it claimed Barr had discovered that the true leaders of Anonymous were “Q and Justin Bieber.”
He added: “Mr. Barr has successfully broken through our over 9,000 proxy field and into our entirely non-public and secret insurgent IRC
lair, where he then smashed through our fire labyrinth with vigor, collected all the gold rings along the way, opened a 50 silver key chest to
find Anon’s legendary hackers on steroids password.” It was a word-for-word quote from Topiary on IRC, and Topiary was flattered to see
himself quoted.
Brown then published a more formal “press release” on the Daily Kos after the attack, titled “Anon pwns HBGary Federal.” Most Anon
press releases were posted on AnonNews.net, but really, who was keeping track? What annoyed many Anons was that Brown had published
the press release under his real name, and they christened him a namefag. Still, Topiary didn’t mind him; in fact, from the start, he rather liked
him. After the attack, Topiary complimented Brown on the spoof post. Brown was eager to see the HBGary e-mails, which at that time were
still being published on torrenting sites bit by bit.
“I need some more of those e-mails so I can piece some stuff together,” Brown told him.
It turned out that Brown was a big research nut. He had downloaded the first batch of Barr’s 23,000 e-mails, searching for clues that would
crack open a wider case of corruption that started with HBGary’s misinformation campaign against WikiLeaks and ended with the U.S.
military. After a few weeks of scanning, he picked up the phone and called William Wansley, one of the vice presidents of a military
contractor called Booz Allen Hamilton and a name that had popped up in Barr’s e-mails.
“Hi, is this Mr. Wansley?”
“Yes,” a small voice replied.
“Hi, Wansley, this is, uh, Barrett Brown, I’m sort of a, uh, informal spokesman for Anonymous?” Brown said, hiding his nervousness.
“The reason I’m calling is because we’re going over some e-mails and we happened to see some correspondence between yourself and
Aaron Barr of HBGary. I was curious as to what exactly the project is that you guys were working on, regarding Anonymous.”
There was a long pause.
“Oh,” Wansley said. “If you’d like to call our public affairs office, they should be able to help you.…”
“Well, I’m not sure they would be able to help me as much as you could,” Brown barked, his confidence growing, “because you were
actually more involved in those discussions. I don’t think public affairs offices are that good, in my experience, at, uh, you know providing,
uh, actual intelligence.”