We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

experience. (He would relapse in April on a trip to New York, where he would take heroin, and then get back on Suboxone when he
returned to Texas.)
During the interview, the camera briefly panned over the screen of Brown’s laptop to reveal a snippet of an IRC chat Brown was having
with Topiary, Q, and several others, as Isikoff sat by and looked on with his TV crew. The nicknames were visible.
“Yo,” Barrett had typed. “NBC is here.”
“Awesomesauce,” said someone called &efg. “Welcome to the internet.”
“They want to talk about stuff,” Brown said in the next shot. “He says he’s honored. So, what’s next for Anonymous?” The question
appeared have been dictated by Isikoff.
The feature later showed Isikoff and Brown strolling side by side down a busy road and talking, Brown gesticulating, Isikoff’s khakicolored
slacks flapping in the breeze as he listened intently. Then it was back to the apartment, and Brown once more sprawled in his chair.
“I mean we got Stuxnet off of this,” he said, flicking his hand, referring to an attached file among Barr’s e-mails that was in fact a defanged
version of the infamous computer virus that was best known for attacking Iranian nuclear infrastructure in the early 2000s. “It shouldn’t have
been available by this federal contractor to get ripped off by a sixteen-year-old girl and her friends.”
“And it shouldn’t be in the hands of Anonymous!” Isikoff exclaimed.
“But it is,” Brown replied, waving his hand again and shaking his head somberly. “C’est la vie.”
Brown was not happy with the interview when it aired. He had hoped it would go deeper into the information revealed by the HBGary
hack—the military contracts on persona management software—but instead it had focused on him and made Anonymous look like a serious
organization. This hurt his reputation in Anonymous further. Here again was another example of how difficult it was to push an agenda from
within Anonymous—you had to convince not only the Anons of its importance but the media too. More people were criticizing him on
AnonOps and Twitter as a namefag, moralfag, and leaderfag. Other Anons posted his address, phone number, and other personal information
on Pastebin.org. They hated the way he talked up Anonymous as a force for good, a fighter against corruption and evil regimes.
Brown ignored them all. “If I don’t respect the laws of the U.S. imagine how I feel about the non-rules of Anonymous,” he later explained.
Anonymous had been born out of a half joke, after all. But both Topiary and Brown agreed Brown’s reputation was making it difficult to
recruit supporters for Operation Metal Gear, and they needed another approach. Brown decided to announce the project on the airwaves. In
recent months, someone on AnonOps IRC had set up a digital radio station, called Radio Payback, consisting mostly of techno music played
24-7 and interspersed with occasional chatter from anonymous DJs. Brown approached one of the DJs in the #RadioPayback IRC channel to
ask if he could go on the air to announce recent findings of Operation Metal Gear, with no success. Then Topiary tried.
“Barrett’s not so bad,” Topiary told the DJ. “We should give him a chance. It might be worth it in the end.” Eventually the host relented,
and Brown, Topiary, and another man from their team, nicknamed WhiteKidney, took to the digital airwaves on the evening of March 16
and spent a good hour telling any Anon who would listen about their research. Topiary had told Brown to speak slowly, repeating the word
slowly. “Voices are not bullet trains,” he tried to explain. “I don’t think it worked,” he later recalled. On air, Brown’s voice was loud, as if he
were too close to his microphone.
“Booz Allen met with Aaron Barr,” he blared, with some distortion. “His specialty was this software that used social media.”
Topiary explained the controversial software, the soldiers who controlled dozens of fake social media profiles, the way that could subvert
democracy and warp online opinion.
“We have informants,” Topiary added, referring to people who had offered information on Booz Allen.
“We won’t talk about informants,” Brown said quickly. There were apparently two informants. One had reached out to Brown, and the
other was someone Brown had found among Barr’s e-mails. “This is what we’ve trained for for five years,” he added toward the end of their
segment, before the discussion descended into jokes about Brown’s penis.
Still, the presentation worked. Within a couple of days, Metal Gear’s ranks had swelled to twenty regular researchers. Hundreds of people
had downloaded a link to their team’s current research via the radio show, suggesting that listeners may have been in the thousands. One IRC
operator who had previously mocked Brown and dismissed Metal Gear as trolling was now talking it up as a success on IRC. The
investigation team retreated to their private Skype group and spent many more hours trawling through e-mails, making phone calls, and
listening to Brown. Brown sometimes assigned jobs, but more often people volunteered to do things.
“Once we explained about ‘sock puppets’ and ‘robots,’ everyone got excited,” Topiary later remembered. There was no proof at this point
—only speculation. For example, the government of Azerbaijan had recently arrested online political dissidents, and Topiary and Brown
stated on Radio Payback that Booz Allen’s spying software must have been used. Their reasoning: Booz Allen had an office in Azerbaijan.
It was a credible lead, but as usual, the group would struggle to find the time and concentration to follow it up. Other Anons would pick
out yet more juicy leads from Barr’s e-mail hoard. Occasionally someone would come with a completely new lead.
Then there was a bigger distraction, this time showing how easily a person could get the mainstream press excited about a supposed
Anonymous operation. A young man nicknamed OpLeakS approached Brown on the chat network, claiming that he had acquired a trove of
e-mails and needed some advice. The leak, he said, involved Bank of America.
Intrigued, Brown invited him into his secret Skype group with Topiary and WhiteKidney for a conference call. OpLeakS came on with a
thick New Jersey accent and monotone voice. At first Brown and Topiary were excited by what they were hearing. OpLeakS, a staunch
Anonymous supporter, said he had been contacted by a former employee of Bank of America, someone who had worked there for seven
years and who had joined when the bank bought Balboa Insurance. OpLeakS and the ex-employee talked by e-mail for several days.
Whenever OpLeakS asked a question about Bank of America, he was met with increasingly damning responses about how the lender had
been hiding loan mistakes or how managers practiced favoritism. It all pointed to fraudulent mortgage practices, he told Brown and the others
on Skype, stuff that could bring down Bank of America.
“Why don’t you send them over so we can take a look,” said Brown, who by now had become skeptical. OpLeakS sounded out of his
depth with the subject matter.
“I can probably help you with getting the word out,” Topiary offered, thinking any kind of leak involving Bank of America would
generate interest after the WikiLeaks affair. He added they could host OpLeakS’s e-mail correspondence on the new AnonLeaks site.
OpLeakS wasn’t interested in either offer, but he forwarded a handful of e-mails in the hope of some validation. Now Brown was
definitely unimpressed—the claims by the ex-employee sounded embarrassing to Bank of America, but OpLeakS had nothing that could