We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

Lerwick that could lead to taking a full psychology degree. In the meantime, the government housing authority was ready to offer him a new
place to live in England. In a few months, he planned to move off the remote Shetland Islands, find a new job, maybe study at college.
He wasn’t the only one who wanted to break away. Sabu had talked to Topiary about wanting to go dark after Backtrace and get away
from all the heat. Even Tflow had recently moved away from the AnonOps network. The small clique they had formed was the one thing
Topiary wanted to take with him. He not only enjoyed their company but learned from them. Kayla taught him how to hide himself online,
and Sabu taught him about what was wrong with the world—from the rumors in Anonymous that Facebook spied for the CIA to the corrupt
practices of white hat cyber security executives like Barr. Pressure from Backtrace and other enemies had brought them closer together and
increasingly made them isolated from the rest of Anonymous.
Their group now consisted of Topiary, Sabu, Kayla, Tflow, AVunit, and occasionally the hacktivist called Q—a concentrated group of
elite Anons. AnonOps had been a gathering of the elite in Anonymous; #InternetFeds a group of even more elite; and #HQ was a distillation
of that. This was the elite of the elite, Topiary thought. Sabu had once used the phrase outside Anons to describe Anonymous supporters in
the main IRC channels and the words stuck in Topiary’s mind now.
The small group was now permanently based on a small IRC network on Sabu’s own server. They rarely went on AnonOps IRC
anymore, a network now swarming with cantankerous operators and what they assumed were undercover Feds. Besides, their team was
tight-knit. Relationships between Anons could be more important than the circumstances that brought them together when it came to deciding
how successfully they would go after big targets. It didn’t matter how popular a target was or how easily it could be attacked. If a group
worked together well, they were more likely to achieve a good hit against an outside party. If they squabbled, they might recklessly attack
one another instead, sometimes through a war of words or through doxing each other or perhaps even by trying to DDoS one another’s IRC
networks.
Much of the drama between people in Anonymous stemmed from fights about status on an IRC chat room. Organizing things on the
network was a bit like organizing a company in a headquarters building. Some rooms, like the boardroom, were designated well-known
places where executives could discuss important issues. But important, deal-breaking events were just as likely to be muttered under the
breath in the bathroom or at the local bar. It was similar on IRC, except here the entire building was constantly in flux, with rooms you could
create out of thin air and destroy in a moment, where you could decide who entered, how many people could come inside, and what sort of
speaking status each could have. There was never one channel where all the important things were discussed, and if there had been, it
wouldn’t have been around for long. Anons were always switching from one network to another to prevent leaks like Laurelai’s, and hackers
in particular rarely met on the same servers, networks, or channels for too long, lest someone snitch on them.
“I sometimes curse at the amount of channels,” said a member of the #HQ hacker team, AVunit. The hackers often needed to keep their
rooms secret for security’s sake, and there were sometimes hundreds floating around on AnonOps. Of course, this made other Anons feel
there was a hierarchy and that operations were being directed behind closed doors. (Not entirely wrongly.) Putting a +i or invited-only mode
on a channel like #InternetFeds was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. “It makes people think the weirdest things” about what was
really going on, AVunit said. And despite #HQ’s name, it wasn’t a headquarters for all of Anonymous. It was just a name one person had
picked on a whim. Making a channel was like making coffee for everyone else in the group. People took turns.
There were different ways of getting into the secret channels. One idea of Aaron Barr’s had been to infect the LOIC program and then,
under a new nickname, call out the infection to get himself into private coding channels. And you could be in multiple channels at once. By
mid-March, Topiary himself was moving between twenty-three different AnonOps channels, including Command, OpMetalGear,
OpNewBlood (for coaching new Anons), and StarFleetHQ, the channel that housed a massive botnet belonging to the AnonOps operator
Ryan. Tflow was in more than fifty. People tried pretending to be one another but it often didn’t work since nicknames were registered with a
password.
There was an array of symbols— ~, &, @, %, and +—used to show the status and power of each person in each channel; every symbol
corresponded to one of the five levels of status. These status levels were known as channel owner, super op, admin op, half op, and voice.
The sight of these seemingly innocuous icons could mean everything to people who were regularly on IRC because of what they allowed
you to do. If you were an op (% or above) you could mute the majority of users who didn’t have a symbol by hitting +m. Someone with %
could kick out anyone below their status. With @ you could edit a channel topic and ban people, while & could ban a user on sight.
The idea behind all this was to ensure IRC channels didn’t turn into a spam-fest. Unfortunately, power often went to people’s heads, and
operators would squabble and kick out people they didn’t like. The ability to threaten permanent bans gave them the power to disrupt entire
operations if they wanted.
No, the name of the female operator who had told new Anons that LOIC was legal and fine to use was known for regularly booting users
out of the informal #lounge channel if they were spamming too much. It wasn’t clear if she did this just for kicks or because she was
genuinely trying to maintain the peace. You didn’t have to own servers or have technical skills to become an Anonymous IRC operator.
Rumor had it that No had gained her status by flirting with other male operators.
Many Anons hated or feared the IRC operators—they were like the bosses who didn’t deserve to be bosses. And the operators could get
away with telling police that they were not part of Anonymous. The police came to No’s house in Las Vegas at 6:00 one morning in
February. Mercedes Renee Haefer, who was nineteen at the time, answered the door in her pajamas to find police officers wearing vests and
wielding guns. They raided her home, took two computers (one a Mac), an iPhone, and a router, all part of a sweep by the FBI to find people
involved in Operation Payback and the attack on PayPal. When they found a mock-up flyer of her little sister with revolutionary imagery,
part of a family joke, they asked with dead seriousness if it was an upcoming operation for Anonymous. She laughed and almost said yes.
Other Anons had been getting arrested too, mostly men in their midtwenties. On January 27, about a week before the HBGary attack,
British police arrested five men in connection with the Operation Payback attacks on MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal. Two of them were
alleged to be AnonOps operators: Christopher “Nerdo” Weatherhead, a plump twenty-year-old student from the city of Northampton in
England, and “Fennic,” a skinny seventeen-year-old with long hair from South London whose suspected real name could not be published
for legal reasons. By June of 2011, at least seventy-nine people in eight countries would be arrested in connection with Anonymous activities.
News of these early arrests in January, followed by persistent doxing by people like Emick, meant that Topiary’s primary concern was no
longer what would happen to Anonymous if his small group went quiet. Others would find a way to carry the movement forward. If the IRC
network collapsed, they would move back to image boards. If someone was arrested, more would join. Almost nothing had happened with