We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

knew that people could tear out an Anon’s true identity by simply following a Google trail that started with the name of his favorite movie.
He hated the idea of government-contracted software doing that a hundred times more efficiently.
But the stress, the stream-of-consciousness Skype discussions, the conspiracies about the military were getting to be too much. He started
thinking about his other group—Sabu, Kayla, and the others in #HQ. The hack on Westboro Baptist Church, on the Tunisian government,
on Egyptian government websites, on copyright alliance, on the Tunisian anti-snooping script, HBGary—it had all happened because of
people from that concentrated team. Topiary thought that if this group left, Anonymous, as the outside world knew it, would die. More
important than Brown’s research was this other group sticking together.
“Barrett,” he finally said in mid-March, “I have to step out of this. It’s just getting too weird and conspiratorial.”
“Okay,” Brown replied. “I can’t expect you to be as involved as you already have been.” Brown was quietly irked, but Topiary got the
feeling he understood. He closed his Operation Metal Gear documents and organized them in a folder holding about a hundred and fifty
megabytes of data—text files and audio files from Brown’s conference calls—that he would probably never look at again.
As he did so, Topiary was asked in an interview if he thought this “concentrated team” might ever break off from Anonymous to do its
own thing.
“Not really,” he answered. “I can envision it now. We could probably go on a rampage around the Web under some kind of nerdy hacker
group name, get on the news a lot, leak, deface, destroy.” It would get boring, he said. “Under the Anonymous banner it’s done with a
purpose, and a meaning, and without ego.”
A few weeks later he would completely change his mind.
Chapter 14
Backtrace Strikes
It was late February and bitterly cold in Michigan. A blizzard had followed a false spring and covered Jennifer Emick’s front lawn in several
feet of snow. Squirrels were poking in her mailbox and stealing packages in the hopes they contained cookies, but Emick didn’t consider
going outside to check. Not only was there the muscle-spasming freeze, she was now deep into the investigation into Anonymous she had
initiated. It had reached a new level after Laurelai had passed over logs from the HQ channel. Emick’s goal was to show the world what
Anonymous really was—vindictive, corrupt, and not really anonymous at all.
Back in December of 2010, when Operation Payback had really taken off with its attacks on PayPal and MasterCard, Emick had already
pulled away completely from Anonymous. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the targets—it was the cruelty she was seeing more and more
throughout the network, ever since Chanology. Emick had kept friendships with a few Anons, hosted some supporters in her home, and
joined a Skype group sometimes called the Treehouse. She described them as “just some friends who hung out and talked.” Chanology had
spawned new Anonymous cells, or sometimes just friendship groups. Some of these groups died off, and many Chanology participants went
off to college or stopped associating with Anonymous for good. There were a dedicated few, like Laurelai and Emick, who had come back
for the next wave in 2010. Except Emick had become part of a minority that wanted to stop Anonymous.
Like Barrett Brown, Emick tended to see the world through theories, and her big one about Anonymous was that it had become just like
Scientology: vindictive, reactionary, and a scam. When she watched the creation of the AnonOps IRC network, she believed operators were
trying to revive “this old spirit of being intimidating.” Emick saw young people who wanted to be part of a group of nameless bullies because
they were getting picked on at school. Suddenly, they could be part of a group that people were afraid of, she explained.
Emick was gradually creating a crusade that was part principle, part personal. She had four children, three of them teenagers, and she
resented the idea that they could fall for “some idiot story” online that romanticized bullying tactics. “Kids are dumb,” she said. They weren’t
going to question legalities. “They’re going to say, ‘Ok, cool.’”
She was right about the lack of legal awareness. When thousands of people joined the AnonOps chat rooms eager to help take down
PayPal, most didn’t realize that using LOIC could land them in jail. Emick became indignant when she went into the chat rooms at the time
and saw IRC operators telling new Anons they had nothing to fear from taking part in a digital sit-in. When Emick confronted the operators
Wolfy and Owen under a pseudonym and accused them of trying to raise a personal army, they banned her from the network.
By late February, authorities in the Netherlands and Britain had arrested five people involved in Operation Payback; the FBI continued to
follow up on its forty search warrants in the United States. Later, in July, the authorities would arrest sixteen suspects. The one thousand IP
addresses that PayPal had given the FBI were paying off. The operators had been wrong, or possibly lying, and what irked Emick more was
that they knew how to avoid arrest better than new volunteers.
Soon after learning about the HBGary attack, Emick had started spending hours in front of her computer, egged on by suspicions that the
people controlling Anonymous were criminals. She was especially interested in the nickname Kayla, and when she started searching on
forums, the name appeared on a popular site for aspiring hackers called DigitalGangsters.com.
Started by twenty-nine-year-old Bryce Case, known on the Internet at YTCracker (pronounced “whitey cracker”), DigitalGangsters was
founded as a forum for black hat hackers, and one of its users was named Kayla, a twenty-three-year-old in Seattle. Emick did some more
digging. YTCracker was a hacker himself; he’d been programming since he was four, gaining notoriety after he hacked into government and
NASA websites and defaced them. He went on to develop a taste in hip-hop music, and he founded a record label and gave concerts at the
hacker convention DEF Con. DigitalGangsters had originally been a production for his club nights and raves, but he turned it into a forum for
his hacker friends who were moving off of AOL chat rooms and onto IRC. It was a hub for old-school hackers and a proving ground for
new ones. In 2005, one of its users, a sixteen-year-old from Massachusetts, hacked into Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account and accessed her
nude photos. Four years later, an eighteen-year-old hacker got the password credentials for President Obama’s official Twitter account.