We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

“Is this a new trend :D to see who can make the worst dox file ever?” asked Kayla. The group was feeling confident. Aaron Barr’s
research had been wrong; Backtrace’s appeared to be wrong. People were trying, yet no one could catch them.
What they didn’t know was that while Backtrace had been wrong on many names, a few, including Sabu, had been spot-on. One hacker
who spotted his real name on the spreadsheet immediately stopped everything he was doing with Anonymous and lived in terror over the
next few months that the FBI was coming to arrest him.
“I still get heart palpitations,” he said during a face-to-face meeting about half a year later. “It’s the not-knowing that kills you, whether
you’ll have nothing, or twenty-five years, up in the air all the time.”
Incidentally, Emick had shown no mercy for her mole, Laurelai, who also appeared on her list under her old real-world name, Wesley
Bailey, and who was described as “transgender” and a “former soldier from Duncan, Idaho.” Laurelai still did not believe (or at least did not
want to believe) that Emick was the driving force behind Backtrace or that Emick had betrayed her. No one had proof yet of who was behind
this anti-Anonymous group. That was fine with Emick. Once the spreadsheet of names and HQ logs were leaked, she continued to offer a
sympathetic ear to Laurelai as the “former soldier” complained about the whole experience and about how deeply she regretted passing the
chat logs to the person on Twitter named @FakeGreggHoush.
It wasn’t until many months later, at the annual hacker conference DEF Con in Las Vegas, that Emick gave a speech and outed herself as
the Backtrace co-founder.
“I was so pissed off [at Emick],” said Laurelai after watching the video of Emick’s speech on YouTube. “Believe me, I think about this
daily.”
Later that year, in October, Francois Paget, an analyst at IT digital giant McAfee, would do a study on Anonymous and the effectiveness
of investigative attempts by people like Backtrace’s members, Aaron Barr, and The Jester, who set out in late December to unmask people in
Operation Payback. His conclusion was that these attempts were largely unsuccessful, even a hindrance to the police. At the time of his
study, anti-Anonymous groups like Backtrace had released about 230 names for pseudonyms, while police around the world (excluding
Turkey) had made 130 arrests. In those arrests, police came up with thirty names, yet there was hardly any overlap between the names
released by vigilante doxers and those discovered by the authorities.
“I imagine they were more confusing than useful,” Paget wrote.
Sometimes, though, you needed just one good name. A few weeks after Backtrace’s release, the FBI contacted Emick and asked for her
assistance in their investigation. They were interested in the name she had discovered for Sabu, but they needed to corroborate their evidence
with hers to see if this Hector Monsegur was definitely the right guy. What Emick had found so far wasn’t enough to make an arrest, and the
FBI wanted to make sure they didn’t scare the real Sabu away. He could prove useful.
The HBGary hackers meanwhile had some hard decisions to make about how to approach the Backtrace drop. They predicted (correctly)
that there would later be other groups trying to outdo Emick’s work, in the same way she had tried to outdo Barr’s. If they really wanted to
avoid handcuffs, Topiary and the others had to think very carefully about what they did next.
In Anonymous there were three ways to respond to a dox:
Chapter 15
Breaking Away
(1) You could outright deny it. This was a common tactic but didn’t always work. If the information was true, most people would
nonetheless deny it. It was also dangerous. The worst thing to do was state honestly what was right and wrong about the information,
since that would point an investigator in the right direction.
(2) Go back to the doxers and bombard them with a stream of false information and conspiracy theories, making them think you have
come around to their side while confusing their research. This is along the lines of what Sabu did. Not long after the Backtrace drop,
Sabu hopped over to the chat network where Emick and her colleagues sometimes hung out and pretended to offer her a private chat of
the HBGary crew. Sabu pasted all the logs of his own chat with Emick back to the crew showing how they had become friendly. The
team had a good laugh.
(3) Say nothing and exit stage left.
Topiary decided that the Backtrace drop had provided the perfect excuse for a clean break from Anonymous. Once again, he was feeling
the urge to learn and experience something new. In the three months he’d been with Anonymous, from December to February, he’d seen
every corner of Anonymous: from writing deface messages, flyers, and press releases to watching a botnet take down PayPal.com; from
humiliating a federal security contractor and watching that turn into an international exposé involving a major bank and WikiLeaks to fronting
a live-on-air hack of the Westboro Baptist Church.
Though Topiary had learned and experienced so much, he was restless. Anonymous was starting to become boring. What had begun as
one major operation had splintered into too many side operations. It felt milked. He couldn’t tell if he was growing up or getting bored with
having destroyed so much in a short period of time. And he was tired of having people expect Topiary, Sabu, or Kayla to be at the forefront
of everything.
Topiary had quit his part-time job in a bike and auto shop after tiring of his boss and had signed up for welfare checks, which he was now
fully reliant on. He was keen to get out of the house more and go back to school. He toyed with applying to a course at his local college in
Lerwick that could lead to taking a full psychology degree. In the meantime, the government housing authority was ready to offer him a new