What is Anonymous 3: LulzSec vs Anonymous

Read previous: What is Anonymous 2: Are the Anonymous hacktivists really anonymous?

The final part of the “What is Anonymous” talk is dedicated to the story of how Anons ended up moving into a strictly illegal area with their activities.

Hubris: The reason why I got involved is they f..ked with the U.S. Marine Corps, and if you f..k with the f..king Marines, you f..k with me. America, f..k yeah!

a5h3r4h: …Which brings us to the next part, which was the ultimately retarded ‘Operation Manning’, which is where some half-wit person decided it would be a good idea to take retaliation against some allegations of mistreatment of Bradley Manning by digging out the personal information of all of the people that worked at Quantico¹: their families, their children – the whole nine yards; post it on the Internet and harass the families of these Marines who are doing their jobs and do not have any say whatsoever and what happens to Bradley Manning or anybody else. And personally, I found that repugnant.

So this was followed by another incredibly stupid idea which is “Let’s DDoS Quantico and get the military mad at us”. And they did, despite the fact that CIDs² at that point were out there actively looking for some people who were doxing Marines using a phonebook they acquired to their own active service.

Regarding Anonymous’ personal action against us, they did what they could do. They tried figuring out who we were, they DDoSed our WordPress, they botted everything they thought was ours or might be ours or belonged to somebody who might know us or somebody we might have bought something from at the 7-Eleven. Their tricks are the same: harass, harass, harass – lots of harassment. The average people that face that kind of behavior don’t know what to do, when 500 people are calling you at home calling you names, stuff is showing up in your mailbox, people are calling your work and saying “Did you know so and so is a pedofile?” That’s not something that most people are used to dealing with, and it’s very intimidating to most people, it’s bully behavior, it’s obnoxious. We’re not really talking about destruction of property, but calling people at home and threatening to kill their children is not activism, you know. And this is one of the reasons that we came out here and put ourselves on the line to do this.

So there was a bit of a huffle-fuffle after this, and then things got quiet for a while. One of them closed his account and wandered away, some people went missing and things got pretty quiet on the IRC. Basically, nothing’s going on. In the intervening time, some of the folks that hang around on there who have other habitual misbehavior were fooling around in some database of a company beginning with ‘S’ and ending with ‘Y’ that we won’t talk about, found some things they thought were useful and tried to sell them and found out that they were generally worthless. So they were sitting on something they felt was a pretty major accomplishment and had nothing to do with it: can’t brag, can’t make money – we gotta do something, we gotta tell the world somehow. So they come up with this idea of LulzSec. So Kayla’s bored, Sabu has some political ambitions, Topiary has a list of media contacts – they say “The hell with it, let’s go”, you know. Now the game is {enter key}, they dump everything they got saved up, they got combing through the databases they’ve been collecting and selling for years and start looking for .gov addresses they can fiddle with. The PBS³ thing that had nothing to do with WikiLeaks – somebody came in and said “Hey, I found an SQLI⁴ on PBS – you guys want it?” – “Yeah, we want it!”. They didn’t even break in themselves, somebody else gave them the keys. So they got in there, they f..ked around, they spent about six weeks screwing with everybody. Then they got a little bit of an attack of conscience, all of a sudden everybody hated them, everybody was going “What are these assholes doing? They’re breaking into everything, they’re dumping people’s private information”.

So they played this game for a little while, they were basically just combing through a lot of stuff they’ve already got and what people were giving them, and they were dumping it and having a good ol’ time, they were getting lots of attention – and then suddenly they realize that everybody hates them now. They are no longer popular in the world because they’re dumping people’s private information, credentials; they’re going on Twitter and going “Hey guys, here’s 65,000 passwords and information we got on innocent users of a site that had a security vulnerability these users were not aware of. Go see what you can do with it, go see if they got a PayPal account you can get into, get into their eBay, go on their Facebook and dump their boyfriend for them”. Anonymous had nothing to do with it, but the two core members of LulzSec did, and LulzSec was born because they wanted somewhere to dump and brag about an economically unfeasible job. They spent a lot of time getting into Sony, found nothing and they went bragging anyway. That’s what the genesis of LulzSec was. The people that broke into each big area are the same people that are members of the LulzSec, it’s the same people. So you can say they’re Anonymous, they’re not Anonymous, they’re sitting on AnonOps right now – Sabus work there on AnonOps, telling everyone “You wanna come see me? Come talk to me here”. It’s the same people, it’s the same crowd, it’s the same supporters, and they’ve been cheered on. If Anonymous and LulzSec are not the same people, why the hell are they still sitting there? Why haven’t they been escorted off the premises? They’ve all got ops on AnonOps, they’re all sitting in the IRC, they all have ops, they’ve not been disinvited, nobody said “We disavow these folks”, they’ve been welcome with open arms back into the fold. Everybody is not welcome with open arms, if you come in there with an opinion that’s contrary to one of the ten or fifteen people who have real power in that group, you will find yourself on the outskirts, or – in my experience – people will offer to dox you for free because they don’t like you. In fact, more than a dozen Anons have come to me and said “I don’t like this guy, here’s his dox”. When they don’t like you, they throw you under the bus.

I think that if Anonymous wants to be taken as a legitimate activist group, they need to excise the bullies, the jerks, the people who are dumping the personal information of thousands.

So, moving on…We start to get political again, and LulzSec realizes that nobody’s lulzing over their grandma’s email and password being spread over the Internet. They’re not thrilled with the private information of police officers and people who are risking their lives informing against Mexican cartels whose names have been splattered all over the Internet because they’re ‘snitching’.

Let’s move on to the bomb threat and let everyone see this (see image). It’s not fake, everyone can be Anonymous, right? This was re-tweeted by 75 other people who claimed to be members of Anonymous, so either there’s 75 disinformation agents out there trying to make you look bad, or 75 people thought that putting a bomb in the Orlando Airport was a good f..king idea to support food, not bombs. And yes, that’s what this was supposed to be in support of, and this guy is still out there, still tweeting insanity, and these folks are still re-tweeting everything that comes out of him. He’s not been asked to tone it down.

So, you know, the Arizona police weren’t terribly thrilled to find all their email and their names and addresses posted on a list that said ‘Off the pigs’ across the top. Now they decide to go back to politics but they’re not sure what they’re gonna do, because basically they’re just grabbing what they can grab, they’re dumping what they can dump and then they’re coming up with an excuse afterwards. And this isn’t activism, they’re not getting together and saying “What’s the issue du jour? What are we upset about and what can we do about it?”. They’re saying “We gripped this database. What political message can we put forward?” – literally, they’re having these conversations. So they basically are using every vulnerability that comes their way. People are coming in the IRC, going “Here, I found this – here’s access to the health records of health workers in Brazil”. No possible way they’ve got a problem with Brazilian health workers, but yet it gets dumped anyway, and the excuse is “Well, the Brazilian government are assholes. Everybody’s an asshole, let’s have a revolution. What are we gonna do? What kind of revolution? I don’t know, dump some more names”. At this point, we’re up to about half a million people’s credentials being spread over the Internet. If you stare too long in the abyss, the abyss looks into you. They’ve become the monsters that they were claiming to fight against. The same tactics that they decried in the Church of Scientology they apply to their own enemies – people who make them angry, people who cross them in the parking lot.

Basically what we got now is a sort of a formless mob that does what it feels like doing and just defies it after the fact. You get these guys in front of the media, and they’re boy scouts: “We love Bradley Manning, we’re all for free speech, we don’t like that Bradley Manning doesn’t have a blanket, we want to free the Tunisians”. In reality – “We’re frustrated there’s people we don’t like. We feel powerless, so let’s hurt some people to make ourselves feel better”.

Since we wrote this talk originally about three months ago, a lot of other things have come to life. We can’t really talk about a lot of what’s going on, but it looks like a lot of the movement behind the scenes began a long time ago that a lot of the things that they are couching is free speech activism is not in fact free speech activism; there are active members of the group that are looking to pull down critical infrastructure systems, they’re wanting to get into banks and drop passwords, credit card numbers, personal information.

 

¹ – Marine Corps Base Quantico, sometimes abbreviated MCB Quantico, is a major United States Marine Corps training base located near Triangle, Virginia.

² – CID (United States Army Criminal Investigation Command) investigates felony crimes and serious violations of military law within the United States Army.

³ – PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is a non-profit American public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership.

⁴ – SQLI (SQL injection) is a technique often used to attack databases through a website. This is done by including portions of SQL statements in a web form entry field in an attempt to get the website to pass a newly formed rogue SQL command to the database (e.g. dump the database contents to the attacker).