We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

There were no handcuffs, no guns; there was no shouting, just polite conversation that made the encounter completely surreal. A woman
officer from the Met’s e-crime division walked straight to Jake’s Dell laptop and started to engage the track pad. Before he could even try to
make a move, she told him not to touch it.
Despite everything that had happened, Jake had not yet wiped his laptop as he had intended. Incriminating documents, notes, and
databases were still on there, albeit on an encrypted hard drive. But that was no trouble for the police. They had only to ask Jake for his
password; he gave it to them. The woman tried to see what was on the hard drive, but she couldn’t find it. She motioned for Jake to come
over and allowed him one final interaction with his computer: a click of the mouse to reveal his hidden hard drive so the officer could get a
look inside. He had forty programs running at the same time.
Just as Barr had kicked himself for reusing the same password, Jake silently regretted not deleting everything the way Kayla had been
encouraging him to, the way he had been telling himself to.
The officers moved ahead with brittle practicality. They told Jake he had to leave with four of them, now, while the two others remained in
his home to close down his laptop and search the house for other items they could use as evidence. There was no time to pack a bag or grab a
book or call his mother. He was allowed to bring two changes of clothes. They opened his front door and led him down the steps to the car
with no ceremony. If the local druggies had been watching, they might have thought their young, hermetic neighbor was headed out to town
with a few family friends, not being arrested for helping lead one of the world’s most notorious cyber gangs.
At exactly the same time, several hundred miles south in the northern English town of Spalding, Jake’s mother, Jennifer, was across the
street from her house, chatting to a neighbor. A policeman showed up at the neighbor’s door and asked Jennifer to come home. Confused,
she did, opening the door to her house to find it bustling with e-crime detectives and other police officers who were going through the
family’s things while questioning her other son, seventeen-year-old Josh. They took all the family’s computer equipment.
Back in Shetland, as the private plane that had carried the detectives up north now sped down the tiny runway and took off for London,
Jake thought about the inevitable headlines. Till then, the Shetland Islands had been merely a blip in the British public consciousness. A
distant land of Scots with strong accents who were partial to sheep-rearing. The biggest local news until that point had occurred that very
week, with his town’s hosting of the Tall Ships Races of 2011. Many of the island’s seven thousand residents had taken part as dozens of
large sailing ships manned by young people had docked in the bay at Lerwick. Jake remembered how he had stepped out of his reclusive life
for a spell, strolling down to the harbor and watching with wonder as thousands of people bustled between tents, food, and live music.
He was brought back to reality with a jolt as the plane landed. Though it had once taken an eighteen-hour bus trip plus a ferry to get to his
home in Shetland, the flight had taken just forty-five minutes. Within another hour Jake was being driven up to the clean white stucco walls
of Charing Cross police station in central London and then led into a tiny holding cell. There was a bed with a blue gym-style mat, a thin
blanket, and a toilet in the corner. It was a warm summer’s day outside, but the cell was cold. The sounds of singing and banging by other
inmates echoed down the hall. Eventually he had a chance to speak to his mother, who was beside herself with worry. He told her he was all
right and asked if she could bring him some clothes, books, and fruit. The food being served in the custody cells was mostly take-out: fried
chicken or sausage and chips.
The following day, a woman wearing brown corduroy trousers and leather flip-flops walked up the white stone stairs into Charing Cross
police station. Jake’s mother, Jennifer Davis, had dark brown hair that had been dyed a subtle shade of red, and she was carrying a cloth
satchel with embroidered flowers along with a large blue duffel bag stuffed with clothes and fruit that she had brought down on the train from
her home in Spalding. She had been expecting to see her son in a few months’ time when he moved down to England to live with her again;
not like this. Jake’s mother was required to attend all of his interviews, since, owing to Jake’s age, an adult needed to be present.
The interviews went on for hours at a time, and Jake looked forward to them. It was a chance to get out of his cell. He was shocked at the
amount of detailed research the police had carried out on Anonymous and LulzSec. They had thorough chronologies of cyber attacks, with
exact times, and tables of suspects going back to 2006, often spread across giant sheets of paper. Thanks to recent extra funding from the
government, there was now a dedicated team of about a dozen detectives working on tracking Anonymous. They had arrested him in
connection with the SOCA attack and on suspicion of several other offenses. Eventually, the police said that based on their interviews and
what they had found on Jake’s laptop, they were planning to charge him with five specific offenses. The police were using innocuous things
as evidence: printouts of his browser window being open on a ten-minute e-mail service; another window showing Nyan Cat. Jake was
cooperative where he could be, giving the police the passwords to the LulzSec Twitter account and everything on his laptop.
Word spread that the police had arrested the person they believed to be Topiary and were questioning him in London, and the world of
Anon was in uproar. The AnonOps chat rooms were ablaze with rumors about what had happened.
Sabu quickly posted “RIP Topiary,” on his Twitter feed, which had several thousand followers, equating the arrest to a death in the world
of hacking. “I’m pretty fucking depressed,” he said in an interview that day. But that quickly morphed into anger at governments and,
perhaps, at his new overseers. “The problem is not hackers. It’s the thinking of our governments. They need to show their citizens that the
government can retaliate against civil disobedience.”
It is still unclear how the police managed to track “Topiary” to Jake Davis’s yellow wooden home on the remote Shetland Islands. Sabu
may have helped, since he had been arrested a month before. But there are other possibilities. Like Sabu, Topiary wasn’t always as careful as
he should have been. For just a few seconds, the name Jake had popped up on the AnonOps chat network. It happened just after December
8, 2010, when Anonymous was launching its pro-WikiLeaks attacks. Though Jake had layered two or three VPNs to conceal his computer’s
address, a temporary connection error to his broadband that coincided with a failed connection of one of the VPNs left him briefly unmasked.
He’d had no idea this had happened.
Then there were rumors that a friend of Jake’s from his days of hanging out on Xbox forums had recognized his voice on the Westboro
Baptist Church video and had started posting messages on Twitter that Topiary was “Jake from Shetland.”
Another more likely reason relates to the VPN company that Jake paid a monthly subscription fee to to hide his IP address. Both Topiary
and Sabu had endorsed VPN provider HideMyAss to the core and the secondary crew of LulzSec, with Topiary spending a few hundred
dollars from the group’s donations on seven online accounts. When someone needed an extra VPN, Topiary would lend him a login name
and password and cross it off his list. Some time after the #pure-elite logs were leaked, showing the world that LulzSec was using
HideMyAss, British police served the British VPN company with a court order. HideMyAss later admitted it had divulged information on
one of the LulzSec accounts in response. The company explained that it regularly logged its users’ IP addresses and login times to help weed