We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

one of the LulzSec accounts in response. The company explained that it regularly logged its users’ IP addresses and login times to help weed
out abusive users. Its customers were up in arms, but a court order was a court order, business prospects be damned.
Among the things Jake noticed during his interviews with detectives was that the police seemed to see Anonymous as an organized
criminal group, which was precisely the thing that Sabu had been worried would happen when he had railed against Laurelai for writing a
user guide. When the detectives questioned Jake, they seemed to want answers that fit that point of view. Jake tried to explain that
Anonymous was not a group, was not organized, and did not have a structure. It was more of a culture or an idea than a group.
Yet in explaining that, Jake realized that the police were right in one sense. In less than a year, Anonymous had indeed become more
organized. In November and December of 2010, during Operation Payback, there had been no stable chat network and more than two dozen
IRC operators entangled in a bureaucratic mess. By July of 2011 there was a lean, solid chat network with about six operators far more in
sync with one another. The Twitter accounts @AnonymousIRC and @anonymouSabu by then had more than a hundred thousand Twitter
followers in aggregate, not as high as LulzSec’s but enough still to grab mass attention. Pastebin had been popularized as a quick and easy
way to publish stolen data. More people knew which hackers to approach to get things done. There were servers around the world, and
Bitcoin donations were still coming in. In fits and starts, a system was being created.
American authorities were in agreement with the Met. In early August of 2011, the Department of Homeland Security said it expected
more significant attacks from Anonymous in the coming years, and there was the possibility of a “higher level actor providing LulzSec or
Anonymous with more advanced capabilities.”
From the front lines and sidelines, Topiary, Sabu, and Kayla, along with William on 4chan, had watched Anonymous grow from nothing
to a nebulous, possibly dangerous entity with pockets of significant power and influence. Like some petulant teenager, it remained volatile
and misunderstood. From WikiLeaks in December of 2010 to Tunisia in January of 2011 to Aaron Barr in February of 2011, operations had
popped up almost randomly. There had been no funding, no planning, and no leaders. No one knew anyone’s name or had ever met in
person. Anonymous had come out of nowhere to create the mirage of a criminal organization that police were only just starting to rope in.
Now at least they had a face to show the world. The police kept Jake in custody for as long as they could—ninety-six hours. After that, it
was time to announce his real name.
On Sunday, July 31, London’s Metropolitan Police announced on their website that they were hitting a Shetland teenager named Jake Davis
with five charges related to computer hacking, including violating the Computer Misuse Act and conspiring to attack the U.K.’s Serious
Organised Crime Agency. Now, for the first time, the name Jake Davis was publicly associated with Topiary. Later that day, Britain’s Daily
Mail published an article headlined “Autistic Shetland Teen Held over Global Internet Hacking Spree Masterminded from His Bedroom.” It
was typical British tabloid fare, now with the suggestion that Jake Davis was the “mastermind” of LulzSec (instead of Ryan Cleary) and with
no explanation of how anyone knew that Jake was autistic. (He was not.) The media that Topiary had courted so successfully before, that he
had almost held in the palm of his hand, was turning on him, gleefully invoking the hacker clichés of mental disorder and social ineptitude.
The following day, Jake was driven to Westminster Magistrates’ Court for his first hearing, which was in the same brightly lit room where
Ryan Cleary had stood just a month before. Outside the court, cameramen with long lenses reached up to the windows of any police van that
drove in and took photos through the tinted windows. They would check what they got, then take more. About two dozen journalists were
there to report on the news, including editors from the Guardian, the BBC, and the Financial Times. They huddled together to talk about
what a “soap opera” the LulzSec story had been.
“I expect he’ll be pale and windswept, skinny or fat,” said the technology editor of the Guardian, which had published the #pure-elite logs.
That editor, Charles Arthur, had been the target of Topiary’s trolling at one point, getting his cell number tweeted and quickly getting two
hundred voice mails before the mailbox was filled and Jake deleted the tweet. “If they had just been corporations it would have been ‘Ok,
bring in some sandwiches,’” Arthur said as he mused on LulzSec, “but to hit SOCA.…” He trailed off, giving a whaddya-expect shrug.
Inside the courtroom, people readjusted their seating as Jake walked into the octagonal dock wearing a denim shirt and holding a book, his
head bowed. He glanced around as he confirmed his name and address to the judge, then took a seat and scratched his head. He looked over
toward the journalists, who were straining to see the book he was carrying, then looked down again. For the most part he appeared calm and
collected.
“Sir, the picture that emerges is not a skilled and persistent hacker,” Jake’s barrister, a tall, bespectacled man named Gideon Cammerman,
said, “but someone that sympathizes and publicizes, and acts as a repository for information hacked by others.”
The government’s prosecutor, a portly woman in a dark suit, disagreed. Referring to Jake’s group as “luke sack,” she insisted he remain in
police custody till further notice. When he’d heard enough, district judge Howard Riddle, a stern, red-faced man with short gray hair in a
bowl cut, looked at Jake for a moment and then back at the prosecutor. This was the same judge who had ruled earlier that year that Julian
Assange be extradited to Sweden.
“Make it explicit for me if you would,” he said, looking over his glasses, “the nature of the harm that he has caused.” Jake’s mother looked
on from the public gallery.
“Sir, he’s compromised personal information of hundreds of thousands of members of the public,” the prosecutor said softly as she looked
up at the judge. “People who have used the National Health Service, the bank accounts and personal details of the users of Sony
Entertainment systems.” She mentioned the ten-minute e-mail they had found on Jake’s laptop and the fact that the computer had a 100 GB
encrypted hard drive with sixteen separate “small computers”—his virtual machines—operating independently of one another.
Judge Riddle asked Jake’s lawyer what his “temperament” had been like in police custody. “He was perfectly charming,” Cammerman
answered, then took the opportunity to point out that Jake’s mother and brother had just moved to Spalding, England, and still had no
broadband. No Internet access at all. The lawyer suggested Jake be bailed and sent to stay with them on condition he wear an electronic tag
and not access the Internet. For someone like Jake who had gone online almost every day since he was eleven, this would be the coldest of
cold turkey. But it beat a jail cell.
In just a few minutes, the judge made up his mind. “It is clear that there is strong evidence that you have been involved with a group that
has committed very serious offenses,” he intoned as Jake nodded. “The objections to bail I understand. But I bear in mind the following.” He
stared at Jake more intently. “You are still only eighteen. You’ve not been in trouble before.” In spite of his tough appearance, the judge
granted Jake bail, with a list of conditions that included a 10:00 p.m. curfew. The guard came up to Jake with a clipboard. Jake offered him a