We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

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
small smile and signed it.
“You’re a lucky man,” the guard said quietly as he led Jake out. “I didn’t think they’d give you bail.” The guard led Jake down a corridor
and into a small room where he met once again with his mother and another solicitor who worked with Cammerman. Knowing there were
cameras waiting outside, their small group wondered how best to leave the courthouse. The solicitor reported that members of the media were
waiting at both the front and back entrances to the building for Jake to emerge. If they went out the front, where most of the cameras were,
they would at least exit onto a main road where a London black cab was already waiting. If they went out the back, they would need to walk
around to hail a cab and would risk meeting more media. Jake’s mother decided it was best to go out the front, together as a family.
With his hands in his pockets, his book tucked under his arm, Jake walked down to the courthouse’s bright entranceway and stood in front
of the main door. Looking out the windows, he could see it was a perfect day outside, spots of sunlight dancing around the sidewalks and
through giant deciduous trees across the road. At the bottom of the front entrance steps a throng of photographers and TV cameramen stood
waiting in a semicircle, all of them stock-still in expectation. Jake’s mother eyed them warily from inside the building. Jake put on a pair of
sunglasses, which his mother had brought along, to hide his amblyopia.
“Shall we go?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He let out a breath as the glass doors opened in front of him, then stepped through the doorway. The dark mass of photographers
erupted into flashing lights, accompanied by an eerie silence. There was no shouting and almost no talking, only the passing of cars and
rustling of wind through the trees. When they all got down to street level, Jake flinched as he became engulfed by the crowd. He started
slowly shuffling toward the black cab that was waiting for him on the other side of the street. Just inches away from his face, the cameras
were exploding in flashes. The photographers soon enough were shouting to get Jake’s attention, knowing the cab was near and their time
was short.
“Jake! Jake!” It was the Guardian’s Charles Arthur, who was jostling against the photographers to get Jake’s attention. “What’s the
book?” Jake stopped to look at him, then held up the paperback for everyone to see, the one he’d been reading in his jail cell. The cameras
flashed and clicked frantically. It was called Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, about how scientists would do anything—lie,
steal, or cheat—to pursue new discoveries. For the first time, as Jake looked through his sunglasses into one of the cameras, he gave a tiny,
almost imperceptible smile.
After his court appearance, Jake took a train up to northern England to the house he would be living in with his younger brother, his mother,
and her partner. The police would fit an electronic tag onto his ankle to notify them if he ever broke his curfew. He never would, becoming
so paranoid about breaking his bail conditions that he refused to listen to a YouTube video over the telephone when someone offered it.
Photos of Jake’s face after leaving the courthouse were shared across the Internet. How did Anons react to seeing the real Topiary for the first
time? They presented him as a martyr, superimposing his face onto movie posters from The Matrix to make new propaganda images. Sabu,
Kayla, and many others changed their Twitter avatars to read “Free Topiary.” Other hackers with Anonymous who were still at large
followed the developments of Jake’s trial and wondered how he would fare. But since phone numbers were rarely given out in Anonymous,
none of the hundreds of people Topiary had chatted to on AnonOps knew how to get in touch with him after his arrest. This meant that once
he got home, Jake was met with complete silence.
Three months after his court appearance, a few letters had come through the door—some from journalists and one or two pieces of fan
mail. Jake had gone from communicating with hundreds of thousands of people every day online to opening the occasional piece of mail,
talking mostly to his immediate family, watching TV, playing computer games, and trying to use a typewriter to express his thoughts.
Then there came a chance for something different. After a few months of his new, sequestered existence, Jake was offered the unique
opportunity to talk to someone from Anonymous face to face. It was not someone he had collaborated with or even met in person. It was
William.
Like William, Jake Davis would never have found his way to the front lines of the Anonymous phenomenon if he hadn’t first found 4chan.
This seemingly innocuous website, still mostly unknown to the mainstream but beloved by millions of regular users, was at the heart of what
had driven Anonymous to get the world’s attention. Despite the headline-grabbing actions of hackers, the roots and lulz ethos of Anonymous
was still firmly in image boards.
From the time he was fourteen, Jake had been learning how to maneuver the hordes on 4chan and entertain them on other websites.
William was different. From fourteen right up until he was twenty-one, his age in 2012, William still rarely left the world of /b/, the everpopular
random thread on 4chan. There were many like him—oldfags who believed they were the true Anons. The site continued to be a
home to twenty-two million unique visitors a month, 65 percent of whom were male, ages eighteen to thirty-five, and living in North America
or Western Europe. Like many other web forums, 4chan was a place to discuss a wealth of subjects both crass and sophisticated, from
camera lenses on the photography board to Victorian authors on the /lit/ board. But thousands of visitors each day still went straight to /b/,
hoping to discover an “epic thread” that saw 4chan make its mark on the real world, anything from ruining someone’s life to raiding a
website to finding a kidnapped girl.
William was still pulling all-nighters on 4chan, terrorizing the enemies of his beloved /b/ and trying to improve his hacking skills. News of
Topiary’s arrest had been disappointing—he had liked the guy on that Westboro video—but it had also made him more determined to
become a hacker himself. William reasoned that since his emotions were so extreme, prison would be either mind-numbingly boring (which
wouldn’t matter because he was so depressed at home anyway) or “a laugh.” Either way, he did not care about the consequences.
“I won’t get caught, I am certain,” he explained.
William’s online exploits had become bolder, sometimes including a gang of others from /b/ to help him torment a wider group of people.
For example, a few days before Christmas 2011, William was browsing what he lovingly referred to as “my /b/” when he saw a thread that
started: “Post their contact info if you hate them.” These types of threads were common on /b/ and often heralded a night of fun for William.
Among the responses, one user had posted the phone number and Hotmail address of a sixteen-year-old girl in Texas named Selena,
adding, “Make this girl’s life hell. She’s a slut.” When William looked her up on Facebook, he saw she had more than three thousand friends
on the network. He decided to try to hack her account.