We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

large notice board with paperwork and a calendar, and there was a thirty-eight-inch monitor to supplement his laptop. The couch in his living
room was cleaned, and next to it was a table with cables stored neatly underneath. Psychology books were stacked on top, along with a
James Patterson novel about wizards called The Gift. He had time to iron his clothes properly—no more creases that made him feel like he
was wearing crumpled paper. Some of his recently washed clothes were hanging on a rack, soaking up the heat from a radiator that was
inches away. It was spring but still bitterly cold outside.
The local college had liked his application for a preliminary psychology course and had accepted him straightaway. Having been out of the
education system for four years, Jake was looking forward to the brisk twenty-five-minute walk to his new courses and pushed away
concerns that someone in class might recognize his voice from the Westboro video. He had always known that Anonymous would come and
go, and he didn’t want it to overshadow his first real crack at college. With around seven hundred pounds now saved in the bank account that
he rarely touched, he had even started treating himself to a meal every Thursday night at the Ghurka, what he considered to be the island’s
best Indian restaurant. Its Chicken-Madras Curry, complete with french fries, garlic naan bread, and Gurkha beer, cost £13.75 ($21.80), but
he always paid with a twenty-pound note and didn’t take change. He liked the waiters and the way they chatted amiably about their lives
back under the scorching sun in India, while the cold Shetland wind blew outside. Inside, the restaurant was a haven, garnished in Asian
decor and with calming sitar music playing in the background. Jake would mostly sit and brood by himself. Over the coming months, as he
became busier again, he would visit the Ghurka more than twenty times as a form of therapy, a chance to rest his mind before climbing up the
hill to his front door and opening it to see lines of text frantically moving up the screen of his open laptop.
Kayla, Tflow, AVunit, and Q had also taken a break from Anonymous, leaving just Jake (as Topiary) and Sabu in the group’s private chat
room. Sabu would later remember the others leaving because they had “got scared,” and he and Topiary being stuck together on their “own
little island.”
The two were talking sometimes for several hours a day in between the other goings-on in their lives. They got to know each other a little
better. Topiary never dared ask Sabu what he had done in the past, but the older hacker laid it out anyway. He told stories about hacking the
Puerto Rican government, about cyber war with Chinese hackers, about his defacing spree, about going underground, and about why he had
come back to support Anonymous the previous December. Topiary found himself in awe of Sabu’s relentless drive to be a hacktivist after an
incredible eleven years, and of his long monologues about refusing to sit down to an authoritative society. Even when Sabu was tired after a
long day of work and family, he’d perk up when talk turned to politics and society.
Though Sabu loved technology and hacking, it seemed that his heart lay in social and political change. In the real world, Hector Monsegur
had come from New York City, gotten into real-life punch-ups with other men, and even done some jail time. He was deeply resentful of
people who abused positions of authority, holding a particular disdain for white hat IT security firms and corrupt police officers. Right up to
adulthood he was regularly getting stopped and searched by the police, the feeling not much different to when his high school’s head of
security had taken away his screwdriver.
Monsegur claimed in one interview that, earlier in 2011, two cops, one African American and one hailing from the Dominican Republic,
had stopped his car while he was driving through a wealthy part of town. One of the officers came to his window and claimed Monsegur had
run a red light. Monsegur suspected it was more likely because he didn’t fit in with the local area. The officer requested his license and
registration then asked what he was doing there. Monsegur showed him his papers. Then he was asked to step out of the car.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Just go to the back of the vehicle,” the officer said. Monsegur walked around to the back, where the second cop handcuffed him.
“What’s going on?” Monsegur cried as they put him in their squad car. “I got a family. Why you handcuffing me?”
“You fit the description of someone we’re looking for,” one of the policemen finally said.
“Okay. All right,” Monsegur said, trying to stay calm. “Give me the description.” The officers hesitated at first but eventually described a
man who, while slightly similar to Monsegur, had a different height, date of birth, hair color, and skin tone. They finally showed him a
picture of the suspect.
“Yo, listen,” he said after looking at it. “Look at me. We’re different in every way. He’s got tattoos on his neck. I’ve got short hair.” Then
he turned to the Dominican cop and asked in Spanish why he was being arrested.
“You do kind of look like him,” the cop replied in English.
“So…where are the tattoos?” he asked, glaring at the cop.
“You could have had them removed.”
Monsegur rolled his eyes and fell back into his seat, his mind blazing. It was true he had tattoos, but nothing on his neck. As they drove
him away, he heard one of the officers get on the radio and tell the precinct they were bringing in a “boy” that matched their suspect’s
description. He heard a crackling, disembodied voice from base ask for details and if he definitely matched. As soon as one of the cops
mentioned Monsegur’s height and date of birth, the voice asked why they were bringing him in. The cops looked at each other. “Let him go
right now,” the voice continued. They shrugged and turned the car around.
Monsegur felt relief wash over him. As they pulled up next to his car, he realized his lights and radio had been left on. The battery was
dead, and he was stranded at ten o’clock at night.
It was an especially maddening experience, but by no means the only one. Monsegur claimed that he was used to walking down the street,
being stopped, and getting frisked, the phrase You fit the description echoing in his ears. Growing up on the Lower East Side in the 1990s, he
had seen the effects of Mayor Giuliani’s order for the NYPD to concentrate on neighborhoods with high rates of drug use, and using recently
enlarged tax revenues to hire around three thousand new police officers to hit the streets, bringing the total number of NYPD cops to around
forty thousand. Monsegur saw them as the city’s biggest gang, authoritative thugs who made citizens like himself feel like animals. He
wanted to change that. In addition to his hunger for recognition and respect as a skilled hacker, he wanted people like himself who had been
brought up in the projects to know their rights.
Monsegur had not come from a family of political activists, but hacking had given him a voice. It got him noticed. Breaking into databases
and disrupting servers was how you subverted the modern world’s corrupt powers. As he grew older, he had become more cynical about the
world around him, and more temperamental when he became the target of criticism himself. Perhaps tellingly, for instance, he hated nothing
more than being called a snitch.
But his cynicism was broken for a while when Operation Payback came along in late 2010. So excited was he at its potential he couldn’t