All language subtitles for We Are Legion-The Story of the Hacktivists (2012)2997

It was 6 in the morning.

I got a knock on my door,
a really loud knock

and I thought it was my dad, who had
locked himself out or something,

so I opened it and it's the LED
flashlights and the really obnoxious,

bulletproof vests

and they're dragging
me out into the cold,

when I'm in my pyjamas.

That was not fun..

They seemed pretty shocked by the
sarcastic, belligerent, angry teenager,

that they dragged out
of bed that day.

I don't know if it's just that I
was 19 or that I was a girl but,

they didn't expect, this.

10.000 angry kids,
whoever they are,

they scared the shit out
of some people those days.

They scared the shit,

out of the powers that be

and that's why this is
being investigated.

That's why I'm under indictment.

That's it.

Because,

between the days of
December 6 and December 10,

10.000 angry people
proved to the government,

that their regulations,

their ideas,

their view of PayPal,
their view of WikiLeaks,

their view of the Afghan war,

and Egypt and Tunisia and Libya,

it didn't fucking matter.

Their opinion no longer mattered, because
someone was out on the internet,

kicking ass.

The computer hacker group Anonymous,
is claiming tonight, that it took down

the website of the federal appeals
court in San Francisco this afternoon.

They took down senate. Gov servers,
they've taken down HBGary,

SONY is claiming they did

150 million dollars
worth of damage.

So many confidential files,

that tonight, because of these hackers,
can be in the hands of anyone.

Visa, Mastercard, the PayPal situation.
The criminals

who hacked into Sarah
Palin's private email.

The church of scientology says,

Anonymous is a cyber-terrorist
group of religious bigots.

Anonymous and this other
group called LulzSec,

they seem to be wanting
to prove a point.

Anonymous was like the big, strong,
buff kid who had low self esteem

and all of a sudden,

punched somebody in the face and was
like, Holy shit I'm really strong!

And Anonymous calls itself the
final boss of the internet

and sometimes it proves to
be really fucking true.

If you were going to violate

the freedoms of the internet, you
certainly better watch the fuck out.

They are, kind of, the
rude boys of activism.

There's a real rough
edge to that,

which I think also, is
one reason why they

garner so much love and
hate from people too.

They represent a certain
sort of chaotic freedom.

Individual, young,

nameless, faceless
folks are having

geo-political impact

and it's both exhilarating to realize
that and terrifying to realize that.

It kind of depends on how
that power is wielded.

We are legion.

We do not forget.

Expect us.

We stand for freedom,

we stand for freedom of speech,
the power of the people,

the ability for them to protest against
their government, to right wrongs.

No sensorship, epecially online,

but also in real life.

We have members
throughout society

in all stratums of it worldwide,

yet we have no leadership.

It's one voice, it's not
individual voices, that's why we

don't show our faces, that's
why we don't give our names.

We're speaking as one
and it's a collective.

Good timing..

I would love to live in a country where
the government fears its citizens

and not the other way around.

Right now, plenty
of Anonymous actors

are in hiding because of fear
of reprisals by the government.

I've been called many things,
there's unpatriotic..

That we're just a bunch of children
sitting in our parents' basement.

I get called a
terrorist sympathizer.

We've been called kids,
we've been called

cyber-bullies, we've been
called hooligans and..

You know, sometimes these words
aren't entirely unfair but,

this is a serious
political movement.

No one in the general public
really seems to get it.

What they don't seem to get,
is that the ability for.

Anonymous to be everything
and anything, is its power.

Anonymous is a series
of relationships.

Hundreds and hundreds of people,

who are very active in it
and who have varying skill

sets and who have varying
issues they want to advance

and who are collaborating
in different ways each day.

They're a little bit like a
prism or a calaidoscope.

They've got many different
facets in many different sides.

Of course when you spend
enough time with them,

you start to get a sort
of feel or texture,

that's not just random,

right? Yet it's
very multifaceted,

very rich, which does span from the quite
lighthearted to the very very serious.

Bob Dylan had lined a song to
say, "to live outside the law",

you must be honest".
(Absolutely Sweet Marie)

They might do something which isn't
technically correct, maybe it's not

legally correct, but they're
doing it for purposes,

that in their minds
at least are ethical.

People who know
what they're doing,

who share an ethos,

who have a commitment to exposing
and humiliating "the man",

who have a very low tolerance of some
eyes and what they perceive as evil

and the part of over-winning
power structures.

They share information, they
share tools and techniques

and they are currently
having a very good time.

The hacker culture,

as we know it,

really sprang from one place.
There was MIT

and there was specifically
people in the model

rail road club, the tech
model rail road club.

Hacking originated
as humorous pranks.

When the guys in MIT put a Volkswagen
up on top of the dome of the building,

people woke up and saw a car
up there in the morning,

or they measured a bridge
by the body-lengths

of somebody, let's say
his name was Brian

and they discovered the bridge
over the Charles river was,

you know, 822 Brians.

These are funny things. That's
where hacking originated

and then migrated in

engineering and
computer communities.

It's, really, it's pranks.

Basically Microsoft

and Apple, both,

got their entire start
of computer crime.

Bill Gates stole

pretty much all of the MS-DOS.

Steve Jobs,

he was creating boxes to
defraud the phone company.

I always saw hacking,

as implicitly political.

Hackers, whether they're
conscious about it or not,

whether explicit
about it or not,

make a statement,

about how we should
treat information.

And some years after
my book came out,

one of the people I wrote about,

Richard Stallman,

got very publically and
explicitly political

about open software, about.. And he
believed that software should be free.

Free as in freedom, not free

as in beer, as he put it there.

Behind it, whether misguided or
not, there is a political impulse.

Hactivism was a term coined by a group
called Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc).

The Lopht had an interesting
relationship with the cDc.

Actually there was 3 members,
that were in both organizations.

And we kind of capped like, the
serious security research,

that they were doing, they
would do under the Lopht name

and if they're doing some sort
of just goofy stunt-like things,

they would do it
under the cDc name,

because the cDc was
really kind of a,

sort of, like a propaganda
type of organization.

They had a guy who was the
minister of propaganda,

they were kinda merry pranksters
like, everything they did,

was completely over the top you know,
they would dress up like Mr-T sometimes,

they would do rap songs at
DEFCON, like a rap performance.

One of the guys there, I
think his name is t-fish,

or short for tweety
fish, coined the term

hactivism, because he saw what,

one of the things, his group was
doing, which he called hactivism

was writing software
that people in other

countries could use to
communicate securely,

even if their government
was spying on them.

So what the principal was really,
was freedom of expression.

It was everyone should have
access to the internet,

everyone should be able to communicate
& get their message out on the internet.

Even more important
in countries,

where there was repressive regimes, that
if you said something against the regime,

they would come and take you away and
you weren't saying anything anymore.

A good place to start are with, what
is often been called virtual sit-ins,

Which use the tactic of a
denial of service attack.

Denial of service has been
around for a long long time.

The equilevant of, like
if you, for some reason,

wanted to disrupt a
bus service, right?

You can hire a thousand extras to all
go and like, line up at the bus station

and get on the bus, until
that anyone who was

really trying to get on
the bus, couldn't do it.

It's as simple as that.

When you stop trying to visit, the website
goes back up, no permanent damage.

And this tactic has been used by
a number of different groups.

Probably the most famous is the
Electronic Disturbance Theatre.

Another really interesting
case happened

in Germany, where a group
of activists got together,

who wanted to protest the fact
that the airline, Lufthansa,

Was using, they were using their
planes to deport immigrants

and they would
take down the site

and in fact eventually
the German courts ruled,

That this was a legitimate
form of protest.

From airports security
to subway bag checks,

there's no question, it's
a new world post 9/11.

It's worse now,

for humans, post 9/11,

because intrusion and surveillance,
which is always going to be misused

by those who can misuse it,

Has created a different
kind of society,

in which freedom, the freedom to
move unobserved, is a privilege

only of the rich, privacy is a
privilege only of the rich.

Hackers see the technology
giving them sanction

to buy their privileged
exclusion as well.

Intrinsic to the technology,

is the power to self transcend

and get out of the
hump of the Bell Curve

& move forward on par with the masters
of society and do battle with them

on an equal, level,
playing field.

That's hactivism.

Anonymous grew out of,
what's known as, 4chan.

Essentially this is just

a website, where people
can upload images

and you don't actually give your
name, it's just sort of anonymous.

When you look at 4chan,
you're often surprised,

because it looks like a site
from, like, 1995 or something.

The idea is very simple: You post
a comment and you post a picture

and you can post it under
your name, or anonymously

and it's seperated into boards
about particular topics.

There's a topic on anime,
there's a topic on weaponry.

There's like a 4chan
board for origami. You

just upload interesting
pictures of origami.

And then there was a group called /b/.
The /b/ board,

Which essentially was for
like, anything goes.

The first time
anybody goes on /b/,

it's kind of an instant..
Revulsion,

'cause there's never a
time that you go in

there where you don't
see something horrible.

That instantly puts
off a lot of people.

The idea is, post something
that can never be unseen.

Half of the posts on /b/
are there specifically

to make peope not wanna
come back to /b/.

Have you ever read
Lord of the flies?

4chan and especially /b/,

is Lord of the Flies,

except some of them aren't 16 anymore,
they're just allowed to act 16.

It's what you get when
people are allowed

to express themselves with absolutely
no restrictions whatsoever.

It's the kind of sum of
human imagination when

people can get together
and paint together

without any limits
or parameters.

It's the most vile, disgusting
and funny thing on the internet.

4chan was founded by
Chris "Moot" Poole,

When he was very
young, maybe 15,

in the early 2000's.

He started 4chan because he was a
big fan of Japanese animation.

Chris "Moot" Poole is the sweetest
kid you've ever met in your life.

He's small and he's got
these tiny features

and he runs the most disgusting
website in the world.

What I think is really intriguing
about a community like 4chan,

is just that it's this open place,
as I said it's raw, it's unfiltered,

and.. sites like it are going the
way of the dinosaur right now.

They're endangered, because we're
moving towards social networking,

we're moving towards
persistent identity,

we're moving towards, you know,
a lack of privacy really.

The /b/ board, it's the
exact opposite of facebook.

In facebook, you're
supposed to be who you are

and there's, sort of, one model,

which is that you're friends
with people. Right?

In 4chan, you're totally
an anonymous nobody.

And anonymous speech, a lot of it is
ugly, but not all of it, is (ugly).

It's actually a sort of place,
where people can be honest.

One of the important
things about 4chan,

is to have a thread
that really explodes

and lasts for a long time.

If it doesn't,

then it disappears, it's a
site that's not archived,

so, it creates conditions for

anything that grabs
attention, at some level

and so humor and grotesqueness,
as a result, are quite good for that.

I'd rather just be referred
to as anonymous I guess

in the interviews, cause I
have some dox out on me.

4chan's just where I went to.

I grew up on it and
I lived there.

That's what I did for fun.

It takes a thick skin to
enjoy it but you know,

as long as you're not
offended, you'll occasionally

come into something really cool
or really creative on 4chan.

I think the most interesting thing about
it, is how you can watch memes evolve.

You'll see something
posted one day,

that a week later, has got
50.000 derivatives on there.

A meme is, basically
just an idea.

It's kind of like a gene, but
in the realm of the idea.

A lot of the great internet memes that we
all know and love, you know lolcats, right?

You know, little cats doing funny things
& then you have "I can has cheezburger?"

All that stuff seems to start in this
Petri dish, that is 4chan's /b/ board.

"Say it publically and you're
insane, chocolate rain".

Name any meme from the last
about 6 years and I'll bet you,

either it's first posting
ever, was on 4chan or

at least one of it's earliest revisions
that became what it was, was on 4chan.

"I can see the food situation is
fucked, so we'll be on our way".

It's basically the best
breeding ground for

internet culture, as
far as I'm concerned.

"Read your neighborhood insurance
rates, chocolate rain".

4chan is also very known
for acts of trolling.

Trolling is a fucking art.

Trolling is getting the
person you are talking to

to get a pissed off
as they possibly can

and for no reason except
your own enjoyment.

Maybe you are trying to illustrate a point,
but it's mostly for your own enjoyment.

For them it's funny, that the people
think the internet is serious business

and if people think the
internet is serious business,

it's a troll's job, to
make their life terror.

The idea of Anonymous,
came initially as a joke.

I mean, somebody suggested that,

what if the whole site,
what if 4chan, what if /b/,

was just one person and what if that
just one guy, called "Anonymous"

sitting somewhere and you're just
reading all these posts by one guy.

And it kinda looks like that from
the outsiders perspective, I mean,

there's no way to tell a difference,
it might as well be one guy.

Fox news did very famous
segments about it.

They call themselves "Anonymous".
They are hackers on steroids,

treating the web, like a
real life video game,

sacking websites, invading
myspace accounts,

disrupting innocent people's lives
and if you fight back, watch out!

Destroy, die, attack,

threats from a gang of computer hackers,
calling themselves "Anonymous".

I've had 7 different passwords
and they've got them all so far.

Anonymous hacked his site and
blastered it with gay sex pictures.

His girlfriend left him.

She thought that, I was
cheating on her with guys.

As long as I can think back,

Anonymous has done some pretty off-color
things in the name of getting cheap laughs,

you know, but,

I mean that's part
of the culture.

We get what we call "Lulz".

"Lulz" is a corruption of lol which
stands for " laugh out loud".

Anonymous gets big lulz,
from pulling random pranks

for example, messing with online
children's games, like Habbo Hotel.

Habbo Hotel was this
online community,

where you had an avatar and you

walked around and
talked to other people.

It's kind of, like, an early
version of World of Warcraft,

or Second Life or any of
those virtual worlds.

What the people on /b/ did,

was invade Habbo Hotel,
created thousands of avatars,

they all had this
one uniform of a

black guy with a big afro,
wearing a black suit

and so there would be
thousands of these people,

black guys-black suit,

you know, huge afro,
walking around this world

and they would do things like,
form a swastika out of themselves

and I think that was a
real landmark, because

it was when they were
able to see that,

they can use their numbers to
do something really interesting
and really disruptive.

So we blocked the
entrance to their pool

and that just pissed them
off so fucking much.

It was fucking beautiful!

That was fucking just wonderful.

Wonderful times!

Those kids loved that pool, they
loved the shit out of their pool..

The goal was actually
to offend everyone,

simply because the idea
that we could offend

you by drawing a little
shape on the screen,

was stupid to the
people involved in it.

They were like, really
you're going to get that mad

over us doing, just drawing
this on the screen?

Wow! Well, you need to refocus
a little on life 'cause,

This should not be
upsetting you that much.

Barrett Brown, I'm the
director of project PM

and former operative
with Anonymous.

We were targeting furries,

which were just a sub-culture
of people, of course,

who, you know, a lot of people
in 4chan, find irritating,

by virtue of their
being irritating.

A furry is someone, generally a male,
who's autistic, in his twenties,

who identifies with animals and

oftentimes has sexual attraction to
other people dressed as animals.

There's diaper-furs -furries,
who enjoy wearing diapers,

baby-furs, who enjoy thinking
themselves as a baby.

We had furry infiltrators,
we were trying, you know,

we had secret groups, mine
was called the illuminati,

/I/illuminati

and our goal was to wreak
as much havoc as possible,

because it was stupid.

There was a point when I was, you know,
I'd otherwise seem a respectable writer,

in 2007, when my
first book came out,

but I spent my evenings on Second
Life, that big virtual world,

riding around in a
virtual spaceship,

with the words faggery-daggery-doo
written on it,

wearing afros

and dropping virtual bombs on
little villages and concerts

and waving giant penises around

and that was the most fun
I've ever had in my life.

All these different
organizations online,

Whether it's 4chan,
or just any website,

there is typically a
community aspect to it.

This where people have their
social relationships,

this is where their friends are, this
is where they have a creative outlet

and so all those aspects are going
into groups like Anonymous,

where people, feel like they're
part of the bigger thing

and they're able to express
themselves within that group.

There were certain
words, certain phrases,

certain ways people respond to things,
certain images that are posted,

that created a pattern
and that pattern was

I guess the origin of
what is now Anonymous.

It's like freemasons
with a sense of humor.

Not so much, as they have
this common symbology

and one of their chief joys,
which is kind of wrapped up

in power and secrecy, was the fact
that they could recognise each other,

by referencing these symbols,

referencing these phrases.

Over 9000,

I lost my ipod,

mudkipz, anything
involving mudkipz,

so you have this weird sort of

international cultural
developing with people

across the world,
wherever they may be.

And late '06 and into early '07,
there's a bit of a sea change, where

instead of just posting
a bunch of content or

randomly saying, we're
going to go over

to some website and post a bunch
of dirty comments against someone,

it becomes a little
more organized.

"Welcome to the
Hal Turner show."

They went after a guy
named Hal Turner.

"We've been discriminated
against, because I'm white.."

Hal Turner is a Neo-Nazi, who was
big online and had a podcast.

"I think that the
14th amendment"

was not ratified properly

and I think therefore
it is still OK

to have negros as
slaves in America..

The first time I heard about Hal Turner,
is he was knocking somebody on 4chan.

He was just being a major dick
to a relatively known user,

and for the fun of it
we started trolling

and then I guess we figured
we had a moral high ground

which allowed us to get
people on our side.

BUt he was a fucking Neo-Nazi.

That's not okay to be in modern society.
You're not allowed to do that

and there's a million
Neo-Nazis out there,

but he started
picking on our dude

so we had to go to our
dude's fucking defense

and it just so happened
that he was a Neo-Nazi so

that's a bigger reason that
he's a fucking dick face.

And like, yeah, screw that racist son
of a bitch, let's do this, you know?

So I joined in and I made
some of the phonecalls

and I played around on
the chat-thing on his

website and posted in the
threads and what not..

"Who are you and where
you're calling from?"

"Ola, this is Pedro,
from San Diego.."

"Spick, don't talk, don't call my radio
show anymore, you filthy spick animal"..

"..Has begun an integration program,
where they try and purposely"

lower standards, to bring more
blacks and diversify the campus

and by the end of
the next 5 years,

"they intend to
bring over 9000!"

He was just a horribly
racist radio personality,

who seemed to handle it
well, when you called in.

He could handle being
berated by Anonymous

and that made it
very interesting,

it made it a bit of a challenge.

It wasn't some guy, who
just either crumbled

or stopped answering the phone,
it was a guy who would yell back.

"I don't see really where
you're going with this."

"Where I'm going is,"

I believe Barack Obama is
genetically incapable,

of exercising the power
necessary to govern

the most complicated
nation on earth.

That's where I'm
going with this.

And I think part of the reason
he's incapable of doing it,

is because of racial,
genetic inferiority.

"Is that clear enough for you?"

"No, you changed the subject again.."
"Wait a second, you asked me.."

Hal Turner wasn't the first actual person
that Anonymous had caused trouble for,

but the circumstances ended
up being significant.

They DDoS'd his website,

something like that cost him thousands
of dollars, bandwidth fees..

We DDoS'd him, which is overflowing his
server with packets and fake information

and then we kind of
trolled him in real life.

We sent countless pizzas to his house. We
signed him up for escorts on Craigslist.

We sent a bunch of pallets of
industrial materials to his house

which he ultimately had
to foot the bill for

and basically we destroyed his
ability to pay for his radio show

and that took him
off the Internet.

He was super pissed.

And then they ended up
getting some real hackers

to help them out, like this
wasn't a sort of pranks,

they actually were
able to get into.

Hal Turner's private servers

and his mail servers and
find some interesting

e-mails that he was serving
as an FBI informant,

which if you're a right-wing
neo-nazi, is not a good thing to be.

And obviously him being
an FBI informant

and also his reaction, his sort of
douchebag reaction to the raids,

damaged his credibility within

the white-nationalist scene,

which is a shame..

Hal Turner is gone,

he's been prosecuted by the
feds for threatening judges..

It wasn't supposed to be different
but it ended up being different.

People who observe Anonymous,
see this group called.

Anonymous is going after this
white-nationalist and say:

"Oh, hey look, Anonymous must be
some kind of activist organization."

So, by virtue of these
people joining Anonymous,

Anonymous becomes more of
an activist organization.

What follows is a period
of confusion and anger,

whilst you have the
usual sort of people,

who wanna keep Anonymous
as this nihilist, little ridiculous
group, are upset that now

the most terrible thing
on the internet,

is now becoming a force
for good all of a sudden.

Project Chanology: A series of
semi-coordinated 'attacks' on the.

Church of Scientology, after its
attempts to censor the internet.

Anonymous has never been about
getting media attention,

or getting all of this attention towards
it, which means it's a community,

a pretty, sometimes,
insular community,

that is kinda kept to itself,
to make jokes and make content,

but that was of course
changed completely,

it was trully and completely out of
it's head when chanology started.

Anonymous started to become

less of a just a culture,

you know, people who
wanted to perform pranks

and more of the
internet's first army.

I'm Mike Vitale and my
handle is "sethdood".

Now, this is January 2008.

Anonymous is strong now, you know, we're
not a little dinky fucking group anymore.

This is like millions of people
worldwide and we're watching.

And then scientology stepped in,
with a big target on it's chest.

A video came out of Tom Cruise,

which was supposed to be like
an internal scientology video,

talking about secrets
of scientology.

"Being a scientologist,"

when you drive past an accident,

it's not like anyone else.

As you drive past, you know you have
to do something about it because,

"you know you're the only
one that can really help."

He talks about, that you're
the only one, who can stop

bad things from happening

and so this is kinda
widely mocked online.

It circulated like wildfire!

"There's nothing part of the way for
me, it's just..(all the way?..)"

people found it
humorous and goofy

and the church of
scientology went into

their "legal mode" and they
threatened websites with

lawsuits, if they didn't
pull down the video.

Instantly the scientologists
posted a DMCA,

(Digital Millenioum
Copyright Act)

and this is a way, that
if you own content,

you can go to video
sites, upload sites

and have your content pulled when
someone uploads it illegally.

So scientology is always
at odds with the internet,

always trying to legally bully people, out
of fucking them over on the internet.

They always did that and then here they
are trying again, but you know what,

Anonymous saw that and he said,

"You guys just fucked around badly,
you're trying to sensor our internet,

you're trying to take a joke away
from Anonymous, you don't do that."

What these people did in this case is,
Gregg Housh and these other people, was

they decided, we can
probably harness Anonymous

in this case and
target scientology.

A few anons, a few people
on 4 chan posted: "Hey, we"

should grab that video and
post it on a few other sites"

and I was one the people
on that thread, talking

about it and we got the
original source of the video

by reaching out to the person
behind the accounts and everything.

We started posting it. The
surprising thing, was

how fast they were DMCAing
it on every site.

It looked to us like, they must have
direct contact with the lawyers

and the team who actually pulls
videos off at all of these sites.

It was minutes and these things
were falling down, like, holy crap!

That's messed up!

What followed was, there's this term
called the "Barbra Streisand effect"

and this video as they were attempting
to suppress it, it went everywhere like,

everywhere you look on the internet you
were gonna stumble upon this video.

Actually gawker, the
site that I work for,

was I think, the first one
to put it on the website

and we got in a huge legal
battle with scientology,

who wanted us to take it down.

A guy joins the channel

and he says, you should
all look at gawker.

So we go over to gawker and the
strangest thing has happened.

This big media company
had the video

up on their front page
and basically had

a comment underneath it, that
stated very clearly that the FBI,

would have to come and
take their servers

to get this video taken down.

That they were sick of this
abuse that was going on.

That made us think, what have we
got ourselves mixed up in here?

Scientology is an interesting
target, because in some ways,

it's the perfect inversion of
what geeks and hackers value.

At so many different levels:

Science fiction,

intellectual property,

discourses of freedom,

science and technology,

it's very proprietary,

it's closed

and so in some ways if
you had something like,

a cultural inversion machine and you
stuck geeks and hackers in there,

you'd get something that looks
a lot like scientology,

so it's quite offensive and
there's a real pleasure in

attacking your perfect nemesis.

We're such poor opposites,

with them being secretive
and us hating secrets

and them being so inclusive
and us being, you know, anybody
can say they're anonymous

and most importantly, how fucking
self-important they were.

They thought they were
fucking untouchable.

They thought they
were like, you know,

like their own little church
mafia and shit, you know?

Anonymous will.., it's
like a play-toy now.

We're gonna make you
look, as stupid as shit.

What really kinda dared us and
set us off about scientology

is specifically the
treatment of their critics.

Anybody who says anything
bad about scientology,

is automatically some
sort of criminal,

some sort of crazy
person, a drug addict.

It's just that kind of
mentality that kind of, like,

if anybody says
anything bad about you,

we're gonna fuck you over
in the worst possible way.

It resonated like, this
feeling of disgust within us.

That was the big problem.

The sensorship aspect of it.

The audacity of
this creepy cult,

to go into our territory

and tell us that we
can't post this?

No, fuck them! No..

It's not gonna happen.

And people who knew what Anonymous
was to begin with were like,

OMG, Anonymous is gonna go
to war with scientology,

this should be
really interesting.

Especially, cause it's
2 weird-ass groups

I mean, I've been an
anon for a long time.

I know Anonymous
is really strange.

They're weird and the
stuff we like is weird

and it's really not
mainstream at all.

Now you have scientology,

also really weird, a lot
of crazy shit goes down.

Anybody on the outside,
who's seen this, is going:

"Let's watch these
two retards fight."

Both their pants are gonna fall
down, they're gonna cripple

and it's gonna hurt everybody

"and it's gonna be hysterical."

And what happened was all these
people who were geared up,

the infrastracture was build
to war with other anons.

Said: You know what? Fuck it!

Everybody is gonna get together and
pound the fuck out of scientology.

And then that's when 4chan
really reared into action,

and they started to troll
the church of scientology

and this took the form of pranking the
dianetics hotline, ordering pizzas..

Every fax number we get,
we were sharing 'em all,

every number we get, even
blank pieces of paper,

on a loop until we saw the ring.

I got to call 'em on the phone
and it's busy, busy, busy..

That's their main
dianetics hotline,

their dianetics 800-number.

You can't get through, because
anons have completely clogged it

and probably saying
just stupid shit.

The whole idea was just, you call
'em just to keep 'em on the phone.

"What's up L. Ron (Hubbard),

how do I dianetics my face?"

They were not expecting that

and they couldn't handle it.

I'm Brian Mettenbrink.

I always liked anything technical,
mechanical, anything sciency really.

Computers do what you tell 'em to,
they don't all of a sudden start doing

weird stuff and if they do
it's probably your fault and

I was like that, you know,
perfect really, in a way.

I'd just gone to 4chan, just
on pure happenstance and

I saw a post about the
scientology thing and

I started looking up
stuff and I'm like, oh,

this is actually for a decent
cause, I think I'll do this.

You started seing all the stuff in
/b/ and I saw the stuff in /b/ then.

Everyone is gonna DDoS scientology,
everyone is going to bandwidth-rape them.

Anonymous members
have developed a..

Distributed Denial
of Service attack,

to a called, Low Orbit lon Cannon,
which is taken from a computer game.

Low Orbit lon Cannon is what's called
an "endgame weapon" in Red Alert.

All you had to do was literally
follow instructions step by step.

I downloaded the program that's free and
legal for anyone to download and use

and I followed the instructions and
I typed in www.scientology.org

and I pushed "GO" and what it does is,
it tells scientology.org, in this case,

to send their website
to my computer about,

I think it was 800,000
times in a weekend

and I'm pretty sure I probably took
it down myself, a couple of times.

This tool is,

Low Orbit lon Cannon,

sometimes referred to as LOIC.

I'm actually not
breaking any laws,

by using this tool
against my own computer

at 127.0.0.1,

which is a
non-routeable address,

but of course if I were to attack one
of those other bigger sites out there,

I would have severely
been breaking the law

and I would have been doing it, in
a way that is quite easy to track.

You put on the site,

you see that the ip is correct, you
make sure all these settings are good

and you hit the button
and off it goes.

It felt like you were
making a difference

just you, yourself

and you didn't even have
to leave your home.

You just sat at your computer

and followed instructions

and you stood up for what you
believe in, so to speak, you
made your say in the world

and hopefully it turns
out better for it.

That was some really
crazy stuff to watch,

to be sitting there in front of a
monitor and you have information

just flying in front of you and
it's this unseeable internet war.

And one of the guys said,
we need to make a video.

We just have to make a video.

"Hello, leaders of scientology

we are Anonymous."

When the video came
out on January 21st,

that was one of the first
times that Anonymous,

as a culture,

started referring to itself as
Anonymous as a movement and

declare that it was
going to take down

and destroy the church
of scientology.

That video probably
changed everything.

"Knowledge is free. We are
Anonymous, we are legion."

We do not forgive,
we do not forget.

"Expect us."

It basically looked like, if a
computer was going to tell you,

that it was gonna beat the shit out of
you, this is what it would look like.

That one video, really
galvanized that moment,

that moment of innovation.

That's exactly like,

with that video internet activism,
as it's known today, was born.

What the video was
saying was: It's over.

You're not going to be able to

follow people back to their
houses anymore with impunity.

You're not gonna be able to just
issue cease-and-desist letters.

Any reporter, who wants
to write some shit about

you, that you don't
like, that's done with.

Every time you do that, Anonymous
is gonna hit you harder.

So we made a video named,
'Call to Arms'. It said:

We're going to the streets,
every major city of the world

has a scientology building.

"Be very wary of the
10th of February."

Anonymous invites you to join
us in an act of solidarity.

Anonymous invites you to
take up the banner of free

speech, of human rights,
of family and freedom.

"Join us in protest outside of
scientology centers worldwide."

and you just see this consensus
forming that it's going to happen.

So we made the 3rd video,
the 'Code of Conduct.'

Don't bring weapons,
dress accordingly,

cover your faces, 'cause
they will try and find out

who you are and screw
with your life.

"Rule number 17:."

Cover your face. This
will prevent your

"identification from
videos taken by hostiles."

Scientology has a
history of harassing,

stalking and just generally doing
horrible things to it's critics,

so people needed a way to
hide their identities.

A lot of people had
very legitimate fears.

They don't want to be followed home,
they don't want to be stalked,

they don't wanna put their
families or themselves in danger.

Everyone was all, well,
we're gonna wear a mask.

What's the only mask that we all
already know, or have a joke about?

And it's the Guy Fawkes mask.

You seen the movie
'V for Vendetta'?

You know, the ending scene where
everyone is wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.

That is very reminescent of what
Anonymous thinks, Anonymous is.

We wanted to represent anonymity in
some way, when it moved into real life.

I think that the
Guy Fawkes mask,

was one of the most
natural things to happen.

It is the idea that, non of
us are as cruel as all of us.

You have this massive crowd
of people who are Anonymous,

that is going to fight against
a bigger thing and win.

Even after watching the video it's
like, yeah this is great but,

who is actually gonna do it?
Who's gonna step up?

Our people are actually gonna
get out of their house?!

And I guess we were really
affected by the stereotype of

that whole community

their being insolent when they're too
afraid to leave their mum's basements.

I figured, maybe 50 nerds
from every city somewhere

might show up and wear their masks out
of a building for a while and leave.

No one thought that they
were gonna come out.

This is me on the way there. I
haven't slept, very fuckin' tired..

And I remember going to the park that day
and it's really early in the morning

(which I thought was a bad idea)

and I'm smoking a cigarette and I'm looking
around like, where the fuck is everybody?

There's nobody here.

So here I am. Sitting
in Bronx Park,

waiting for the other
anons to show up.

I remember thinking, like, oh fuck! Am
I gonna be the only one in the park?

Am I going to walk to
scientology with 6 or 7 people,

which totally defeats the
entire purpose of this

because now they could single me out?
You know?

Then I get up and I
start walking around

and I see there's a lot of green
balloons over there, for some reason,

on the other side of the park!

There was like 200 people!

There was Guy Fawkes
masks everywhere

and I'm like, holy
shit, this is huge!

There's a lot of us.
That's pretty good.

I had no idea how many anons there
were until we started moving..

And it just got bigger!

I remember walking
through Times Square and

everybody in Times
Square was an anon.

This is like a 1000 person
per minute foot traffic area

and everywhere I'm looking,
I'm seeing anon's symbols.

It was fucking wild!
It was really wild.

We start getting numbers in..

And Sidney:

We're thinking that, it's
going to be 50 people

and before 10am,

before even time, there's
already 50 people there

and there's still streams of
people walking down the streets.

A couple of hours
into it, you know,

'cause it could have been
till 1 in the morning,

you're looking at Sidney as..
Wow!

There's 250 people in Sidney.

The cops are estimating higher
than that for their reports.

What just happened?

Adelaide, Perth and
Melbourne happened

and you know, over
200 in each of them.

We nearly broke a thousand
leaving Australia.

Now, the next protest
was Tel Aviv,

which had actually got it's first
scientology building a week before this.

There were Palestinians and Israelis at
this protest, both holding their flags

and at one point, they actually switched
flags and held up each other's flags.

It was awesome to see.

I call our guy in
London, a Brit anon

and I say hey, what's
going on there?

And he's like, did you
just get out of bed?

I said, yeah, I didn't
even turn on the computer,

I just figured I'd call you.

And he said, we've got 600 people
and the cops are really mad at me.

All the major cities were having
hundreds of people come out.

It was massive!

Clearwater had like 300 people.

I don't think anyone
beat out L.A.

I think L.A. had over
a thousand people.

The thing that happened was
something completely different,

hundreds and hundreds of
people from every city,

just.. swarmed the streets.

It's kind of overwhelming, a little
even scary, but scary in a good way.

Soon, you know, we'd
outrun the 10.000 mark

and we were joking the whole time, over
9000, you know, one of those memes.

It was too sureal, it
was not believeable.

We go by one name.

We are Anonymous.

It was very empowering,

especially after people saw
thousands of people showing up.

This was it. We owned the
world at that point.

You've got lolcats and
you've got Rickrolling,

you've got all these other things,
that Anonymous has been involved in..

Then you know, take
us a month later and

10.000 people were
just in the streets,

in every major country in the world
and every major city in the world

and what the hell just happened?

What changed, who
flipped the switch?

The world looked very different
to me at that point.

We all met each other.

The idea of an anon is, you're
alone until you get to 4chan

and then these people
think like you.

Then, all of a sudden, you're not
alone, you are with 500 others.

They all know the
same jokes as you,

they all, clearly, have
similar interests as you.

Here's your culture.

You meet your own
people finally.

Immediately you felt like you were at home,
if you were an anon you were at home.

We all spent years in the same place
looking at the same pictures,

laughing at the same jokes,

pretty much we were already friends,
even though we've never ever met.

It was very happy.

It's perhaps a
little surprising.

It's not just pre-teens
or teenagers,

there's a far more even
mix of males and females,

than you would
imagine otherwise.

Everyone always figured Anonymous
was a very male ..thing.

But it wasn't like that, at all.

There's some hot
girls come through,

like, it's some really (..!),

you'd be surprised..

And you know there were a lot of these
guys who weren't socially good.

They were very awkward,

they still lived at home at
23, half of them virgins

and I tell you, the amount of
those people who got laid from
these protests happening,

is in the thousands, that would
not have, for years probably.

That's why those protests
were so important.

It was a chance to finally
meet other people

that were previously
Anonymous and unknown

and hence it was the moment of
the end of their anonymity.

Scientology, they kind of
fought back, so to speak.

They posted stuff online.

While claiming
they are peaceful,

in less than 3 weeks, Anonymous
members made or encouraged:

8139 harassing or
threatening phonecalls,

3.6 million malicious e-mails,

141 million hits against
church websites,

10 acts of vandalism,

22 bomb threats

and 8 death threats against members and
officials of the church of scientology.

They basically antagonized,
really is what they did,

which is really one of the
things they're great at.

They wanted to find me.

They did. They hired PI's.

They started taking pictures
of us, threatening to sue us.

People were getting followed,

people were getting
followed home,

(..) be a regular thing
for someone to say,

oh, I had to lose
someone on the subway,

I saw someone from the scientology
center and they were following me.

They would follow
us to our houses,

tried to intimidate us, send
us cease-and-desist letters.

They had a P.I. hand
deliver a cease-and-desist

letter from a very
expensive lawyer.

It was a double message there,
you know, it was a hey,

we know were you live, man, we know your
name & here's something from our lawyer.

These old tactics
that they used,

to fight the activism they faced
before the internet just..,

were completely ineffective
against chanology.

Most of the people who
received them, actually

framed them and put
them on their wall.

I've seen multiple of them
framed and put on the wall.

Mine is sitting in my
closet somewhere, in a box.

They don't care to actually
use the legal system to

get you thrown in jail, they care to use
the legal system to get you to stop.

I did the whole Low Orbit
lon Cannon stuff and then

I pretty much just went
about my life after that

for probably,

6 months & then the FBI showed up here
at my parents' house, where I wasn't,

looking for me.

2 men got out of a car and

(-flashed their guns)

took their jackets off and
laid their guns on the

front seat and came out to
ask us if Brian was home

and explained that they were the FBI
and they were looking for Brian

and I've never been so scared.

And then my parents directed
them to where I was living

and they showed up and said,

I'd like to have a friendly
conversation with you

and I had the worst friendly
conversation of my life.

We sat down at my dining room table and
they just started asking me questions

and I'm trying to figure out what they
are here for, 'cause I have no idea

and they eventually started asking
me questions about Anonymous.

I was scared to death.

I mean, my son is,

is looking at 5 years in jail

and a 100.000$ fine.

I had no idea, that
it was any sort of

dispicable crime to do what I did.
I thought

it was the kind of
'slap on the wrist',

200$ fine type crime.

So I actually told them,
that I did it at that point.

Then it went from there.

I would've never
ever believed that,

the maximum punishment for this,

was 5 years in prison.

It was a very
eye-opening experience.

I had a little bit of
trouble accepting it,

knowing that, I could go
to prison for 5 years,

knowing that, I would be imprisoned
from age 20 to 25 for this.

I thought, that was a
little bit extreme.

I tell people, that it
would be different if they

drank and drove and
killed somebody.

But he didn't do that.

It's hard to deal with,
harder to deal with,

'cause he didn't do that.

He just pushed a button
on his computer and,

as he explained it
to me at the time,

it was like pushing
the refresh button

over and over, 800.000 times

and it seems like
such a little thing.

I did the 2nd-most damages,
what scientology said I did,

I sent 2nd-most
out of everybody,

so I got the maximum,
for my category,

which was 1 year in prison and
1 year supervised release.

I think the way I
feel for what I did,

was one of the most

lopsided punishments I've ever.

Read about or heard of.

Yeah, I think it's ridiculous,

especially the year
supervised release

where I can't touch a
computer for a year.

I'm not sure what's that supposed to
solve, except make my life difficult.

So, that computer
behind me back there,

I could go back to prison if
I went over and touched it.

I can't knowingly associate
with members of Anonymous.

They just made a big deal about
scientology's religion and that

this is America and you can believe
in whatever you wanna believe.

I'm pretty sure they
actually compared me to

the KKK and the nazis and
stuff in the court room.

It's a completely
different issue.

I'm very proud of what he did.

He stood up for what
he believed in,

but that was never
ever mentioned.

I never would even dream
of hurting anybody.

Not me.

Prior to Anonymous,
critics of the church

still had to be
very-very careful,

because of the
agressive lawsuits

that were launched against academics,
journalists and other critics.

I would say that era is over

and Anonymous more than any other
sort of intervention is probably

responsible for that change.

This is actually called a
decent rift in Anonymous.

There was one big group, significant
group of people who'd say:

This chanology stuff is
cancer, is awful, is bad,

is just bringing attention
to us that we don't want.

The trolling isn't happening,
we're not getting our jollies,

now this is all really serious
and moral and somber,

that's not what I signed
up for, that kind of thing

and then there are the people who were
on the other side who were going,

I only signed up for the
serious and somber.

You guys, go away.

(..) and it became this fierce clash
of ideologies and it was alien to us.

They decided that, in
their own words, which

I was privy to 'cause
it was told to me,

stop ruinning our bad name.

So to make Anonymous look bad,
they go off and they post

animated .gifs, animated
images to epilepsy forums,

that are black and white just
strobing really quickly,

so any of the epilepsy people
on these support forums

see it and they fall off
their chairs and seizure.

You start hearing
this term, moralfag.

If you're not out there making epileptics
have seizures, then you're doing it wrong.

So you're a moral fag.

Which is what I am, a moralfag.

Those who wanna use Anonymous as

a tool for good in some sense

rather than just do what we were used to
do, which is to screw with video games.

One anon said it well once.

There is no leader,

their ops have

momentary leaders,
defacto leaders.

I like to describe this

with a picture of a bird swarm.

Everybody's flying
very, very quiet

suddenly one bird flies
in another direction

and the mass fly into the same
direction, following that person.

It's totally okay to say, "I'm
sorry, I don't take part."

When Chanology was
running full force

it was like a kid stretching
for the first time

and actually seeing
their real power.

It's the teenage
period actually..

trying Operation Titstorm.

Operation Titstorm.

Australia over the past couple
of years, has been relatively

malignant in their attitude
towards internet freedom,

compared to other
western countries.

A guy named tux, wanted to
attack the Australian goverment,

in retaliation for upcoming
internet censorship laws.

One of them involved
banning pornography with

women with small breasts,
for some reason,

so that was the first time that
Anonymous went up against a goverment.

When they did, they DDoS'd and
took down several goverment sites.

It was the first
time that Anonymous

was going up against a state.

If you'd ask me,

all throughout 2008
and most of 2009,

is the politics of Anonymous, always
going to be sutured and hinged to

the church of scientology,

I would have said yes.

And it became
unsutured, unhinged,

when a different political
wing was born in 2010.

The motion picture association (MPAA)
had hired an Indian software firm,

to DDoS the pirate bay

and Anonymous, coming out
of 4chan, DDoS'd the motion
picture association of America,

as well as other groups like the
recording industry association.

It angered people for a
lot of different reasons.

Obviously one of the
reasons was that they were

attempting to censor
the Internet.

Another of the reasons,
though, was that

people in Anonymous had
been arrested before for

taking part in such attacks,

say on the Church of Scientology

and other targets that
there had been before.

I think there was a big
sense of the hypocrisy.

This was the moment a kind of network,
a kind of architecture was born where,

there was a different
node that was unrelated.

Some people crossed over

and they were connected by
aesthetics and by ethics

and yet that was a different
ship that was sailing.

It's our task, to find
secret abusive plans

and expose them, where they can be
opposed, before they're implemented.

The intersting thing
about Julian Assange,

is that he actually
also sprang from

a hacker culture.

It's a mentality of
spreading information.

Julian was Mendax,

he was the greatest hacker that
ever walked the face of the earth

when I was a kid, they rumored he
can move satelites around in space

by hacking into NASA.

Maybe it never happened but

it was a myth that kept young kids like me
wanting to plug a computer into a modem

and see if I can move
some satelites around.

WikiLeaks is an instantiation
of the hacker ethos.

Truth wants to be free and
we want to liberate it.

WikiLeaks released a huge
trove of diplomatic cables.

There's a lot of controversy
from every quarter of society.

The WikiLeaks website
released nearly 400.000

secret US files on the
Iraq war late today,

it was the largest leak of
classified US files in history.

The diplomatic cables show the
US is spying on it's alies.

Lots of things which were
understood in private and

may have been, not even
talked about explicitly,

suddenly they're out there,
in the cold light of day

and it's going to make some goverments
and some individuals very uncomfortable.

He was showing the
world a glimpse of how

the powerful elite
actually work,

at least to some extend, I mean

these are fairly low
level diplomats

sending messages back and forth

but it's a side of government
you hardly ever see

and it's pretty eye opening and,

you know, once
it's out it's out.

I think information
wants to be free

and let's look at it,
let's analyze it.

It's important that
we know such stuff,

It's important that we know
what our governments do

and if they don't tell us,
then somebody has to.

It's time to open the archives.

There was one particular moment,
that really sparked the fire

and this was when PayPal,
Mastercard and Amazon,

pulled services for WikiLeaks.

So all of a sudden, there's
no way to actually

process donations to WikiLeaks.

Then their people
went and found like,

neonazi groups.., Visa & Mastercard were
perfectly fine with you being able to,

PayPal, being able to
make donations to them.

But WikiLeaks, No!

You can pay the KKK, you can donate
money to the Westboro Baptist church

with your PayPal and
your fucking Mastercard,

but you can't give any
money to WikiLeaks

and I think WikiLeaks
is doing a good thing.

It's a total hypocrisy that they got
their little fucking banking mafia

to fuck WikiLeaks over.

People were incredibly angry

and it was a real sense of rage.

There was, I think
it was a sense that..

WikiLeaks was exposing lies that

the government
told to the people

and now the government
was desperately trying

to make sure that those
lies weren't exposed.

And then, there was
just an intense

I can only call it fury.

If you're a hacker, it's
one of those 'John F.

Kennedy was shot' moments.

Not to actually
compare it to that,

but it's one of those moments
you always remember,

exactly where you were and
when you heard it, I mean,

I just really never dreamed
they would have the audacity.

Anonymous very quickly
moves into an attack mode.

Anonymous DDoS'd PayPal.
They were pissed!

Cyber protest, virtual sit-ins, however you
wanna look at it, DDoS is a tool that is a..,

it's like driving a finish nail in
with a sledgehammer.

The numbers of
participants were massive.

And they managed, over the
course of a couple of days,

to disable the website of
Mastercard and PayPal.

It was like watching the hack
magician finally get a trick right,

because you're not expecting it & then
it's magnificent, it was beautiful,

'cause what you had is, people
finally stood up for something.

How long has it been since we had
a huge really relevant protest.

I'm not talking Tea Party, I wanna
bring my guns in public, I'm talking,

I'm talking 10.000 angry
people said this is

not right and I wanna
do something about it.

Soon after January 2nd I believe
WikiLeaks was blocked in Tunisia

and Anonymous got into that.

They then intervened,

at first, solely for the purposes
of like, stopping the kind of
censorship that was happening.

They did some DDoSing

and this was a time and period
where they were getting involved,

with what I would call,
non-internetees.

Social movements inbuilding
lines of solidarity.

My name is Pete Fein, you can call
me an internaut or a hacktivist.

Telecomix is an ad hoc cluster
of volunteer net activists,

who have spent much of
the last year trying to

keep the internet running
in the middle east.

During that time, we saw the
Tunisian government, not only

sensoring and filtering the internet,
but also doing some kind of

technical trickery to steal
people's facebook passwords

and delete their posts and
see who is posting what,

fake posts, stuff like that.

So Tunisian hackers came to us,

they were members of Anonymous

and I didn't even know
we had members of.

Anonymous in Tunisia,
so it was a shock to me

and they had the keys to
some parts of the kingdom,

so to speak, when it came
to the dictator in Tunisia.

We went in, on behalf
of those Tunisian Anons

and we helped them get
that and extract it

and then it went to WikiLeaks.

The Tunisians overthrew Ben Ali,
who was kind of an oppressive dictator.

A revolution that was
facilitated by the internet,

by facebook and by twitter.

Not caused by it, I mean, 50 years of
dictatorship has caused the offspring.

But the internet has
certainly been helping.

There's a video where they are
thanking us for being involved.

Holding up a mask saying

we were the only ones who
stood by their side.

Thank you Anonymous.

We want to let you know that
you have found new allies..

For me it was..

awesome to hear that, and
to feel the connection.

The same group of hackers,
that target anti-WikiLeaks

sites, have now turned
their attention, to Egypt.

It could have been the lead up
to the Egyptian revolution.

We would tweet on
people's behalf.

We'd get people from Egypt,
who weren't able to access

twitter on their own,
on our IRC network

and we would trigger ports for them
and tweet them out using our account,

to help them get the word out,

about what they
were experiencing.

Some of this shit is personal

and one of the things, about
the movement as a whole,

when Egypt broke around,

is that Egypt broke
us, emotionally.

Watching in real time, with live
feeds that we helped set up,

Egyptians get massacred
with machine guns.

It was different and I have never
in cyber activism wept before,

it's never bothered
me like that,

it's never been
able to touch me,

the way Egypt touched me.

It was fucked up, that
we were watching people

killed, for no reason other
than leaving their homes,

that these people had
every right to freedom,

that they had every right
to choose their government.

And then January 27th to
28th rolls around and

the Egyptian government
starts shutting down

the internet, for
the whole country.

There's this fantastic
traffic-graph,

that you can see the traffic
coming out of Egypt.

It's like this and then..

Just totally stops.

And we're just arrrghh,
what the fuck,

to think that a country would
completely cut itself off,

as much as they were able
to, from the outside world.

It was pretty unthinkable.

We know bad things go
on in the dark places.

And suddenly it got quiet.

I remember it was somehow,
burned into my brain that

first Twitter was flooded and
suddenly everything was quiet.

That's the kinda thing
that could start riots.

I think when Mubarak
did what he did,

I think it really
upset people here,

as well as in the Middle East.

I put myself in their place

and I found myself in a
desert of nothingness,

because he just wiped
out everything,

that my world incorporated.

That just showed me and
everybody else that,

the same thing can happen at any time,
at any world, at any government.

Anonymous and the
people on the internet,

stood up and said:

Go fuck yourself!

You wanna shut down
their internet?

Fine.

The people on the internet will
show them how to turn it back on.

It's almost like the
Internet has an actual pain.

It's like the Internet
is a living thing.

It's like a conscious thing
that gets up and says,

"No, you can't do that!"

A lot of my friends
helped with encryption,

helped people on the
ground in those countries

validate SSL keys
and certficates

and really showed them how
to subvert their government

and become free.

And then Telecomix started to..

tweet connections to the
Internet, dial-up connections.

In Egypt the care
package we put together

included some kind of
our comms information,

the ham radio, the
dial modem, details.

In total we helped co-ordinate and
ran about 500 dial-up modem lines.

We also googled up

treatments for tear gas and

other kind of basic
medical treatment

and found folks who could
translate that into Arabic.

Sort of, put this together in a
nice one-page .pdf, in a fax

and off it goes.

I think the most effective thing was
shutting down government websites.

We were taking down the
dictator's webpages here.

It is cyber warfare
at that point.

When you're dealing with
a dictator like that,

that's killing people,
all the gloves are off.

We are going to not just
take your websites offline,

we are gonna destroy your
every communications.

We are gonna wreck you like, a
nation state would wreck you.

In Cairo, Egypt, the crowds
are shouting and screaming..

President Hosni Mubarak
has decided to step down

from the office of
president of the republic.

When Mubarak left, it was
a "Hell Yeah!" moment.

People can rise up.
People can make a change

and I think for a lot
of people in America

it was the first time they
had seen people rise up

and take down their
government and say,

We're sick of this shit!

We're sick of the oppression.

We're sick of living as
slaves to your power.

We had Egyptians come
thank us, as for doing

this stuff and I
said something like,

look, you guys just get our
back, if stuff goes down here.

Although it was awesome and it was
one part we were fighting for..

for me it was quite clear it's
not the end of the story.

That it's not suddenly changing into
rainbows and nyan cats, or whatever,

but that we now have
to watch even more.

The FBI is now
investigating Anonymous,

a loose collection of
rogue, tech savy hackers,

credited with bringing down the websites
of Mastercard and Visa last December.

In, sort of, 40 raids back
then, they seized computers,

cellphones, this kind
of technical apparatus,

Sometimes, in the case of a 19-year
old girl and her family,

they took her parents stuff, too.

There's always been a sort
of cat and mouse dynamic,

not just in relation to
the feds, but also to

the sort of groups, that
have appointed themselves as

guardians of the republic and there's
groups called like, backtrace security,

which may be a couple
of deranged people who,

I think for personal reasons have,
grievances against anonymous.

I've been threatened
by people who are

former secret service agents,

who now run private
security companies.

Suddenly on February 5th,

a Financial Times article
comes out, that we all see.

It's quoting this guy named Aaron Barr,
who's the CEO of HBGary Federal,

which is an
intelligence contractor

and Aaron Barr is telling this Financial
Times journalist Joseph Menn,

that he's been secretly
monitoring the..

Anon-Ops server, where
all of this is going on

and has done so for several
weeks and using his own,

custom brand of information
operations techniques,

has managed to identify the
alleged leadership of Anonymous,

including 25 "lieutenants", some sort..

We have to see this document,
everyone wants to know.

We don't need to destroy him, we
don't need to destroy his company,

we just need to see the document
and we'll decide what comes next

after looking at the document.

So they get it. It was unbelievably
easy to get into their network.

And my name was on
there, as a string name

and Gregg Housh was listed
there by string name.

The facts that matter is that, what
he told the Financial Times was,

everything he told them,
was mostly untrue

and very much hilariously so.

He had to be shut up, it had to be proven
to the world, that this guy was a retard

and that his information
was in no way valid.

And to put that in hacker terms,

Anonymous is a hornet's
nest and Barr said,

I'm gonna stick my
penis in that thing.

Into mere 24 hours he was
owned, pawned completely,

by a small group
of participants,

who basically went on
a hacking rampage.

Faster than you can say, "Get
these hornets off my penis!",

Anonymous took down
Barr's website,

stole his e-mails, deleted
the company's back-up data,

trashed his twitter account
and remotely wiped his I-Pad.

And he had just reached the "Ham
'Em High" level in Angry Birds.

The HBGary hack brought
about 70.000 e-mails.

By the most, important ones
had to do with a proposal,

that HBGary had already
formulated, it was

packaged up as a nice
powerpoint presentation,

kind of, act as privatise
agent provocateaurs,

where they were gonna
discredit WikiLeaks.

HBGary was proposing
submitting fake documents

to WikiLeaks and then,
when discovered as fake,

the hare could be called out and
it would dicredit WikiLeaks.

Right. So there are a lot
of specifics I can't talk,

but let me try to answer that
though, in a general sense.

First of all, it's probably no surprise to
anybody, I'm not a big fan of WikiLeaks.

I think that the broad purpose of
trying to get as much information,

proprietary or classified information
from the government, expose that,

is an extremely destructive
and dangerous purpose.

As Julian Assange, had a few
months before noted, that they

had information on a major bank, showing
wrong-doing and Bank of America,

somehow knew it was them.

And the proposals involved,
for Bank of America

and the WikiLeaks
problem, they entailed

conducting information war on
WikiLeaks and it's supporters,

claiming to sensor them,
within WikiLeaks.

DDoS attacks.

You also wanted to launch cyber attacks
on WikiLeaks' infrastructure, to get

information on
document submitters.

One thing I guess, I wanna
make sure is clear is,

none of these activities
had actually occurred.

In buisiness there's a..,

when you start proposing
or thinking about an idea,

there's a brainstorming phase

and somebody says, "what
if..," you know, "what

could we do, what's
theoretically possible?"

Still this was an idea, this was proposed,
this was something that you thought about.

Right.

They also wanted to go on a
campaign targeting Glenn Greenwald,

who is a reporter for Salon,

who's an outspoken critic of the
government and supporter of WikiLeaks.

It seems like you're trying
to attack a journalist here.

Yeah, you know, I don't wanna talk
too much more about Glenn Greenwald,

other than what I
previously said.

There was never an
intent to attack

journalists, not on my part.

I guess I should generalise that to
say that, you know, I would never

just outwardly attack a journalist,
other than, if I felt that there was

a journalist in my mind,
that was acting unethically.

That's a fair game for having
a public discussion about.

They were walking a very
fine ethical line at points

and in many cases, the mass opinion
is: No, they're well past it.

I will not support
broad theft of

information released to the public,
'cause that is nothing but destructive.

If somebody has, information
has been stolen from them,

whether or not WikiLeaks
encouraged the theft

of that, or it was
just put in their lap,

still, they're threatening to
release the information that was

the private property of
another organization,

so your choices are, to
just allow that to happen,

or to try and stop it.

How offensive is too offensive?

We've certainly seen a lot
of strategy, coming out of

governments across the
world now saying,

publically admitting that,
they need to become,

they need to develop better
offensive strategies

in cyber security, because defense
as a whole, isn't enough.

It never is enough.

Some of the most important things, that
have had the most far-reaching influence

and have been the most
important, in terms of

what's been dicovered,
not just by Anonymous,

but by the media,
and the aftermath,

is a result of hacking.

That information can't be obtained by
institutionalist journalistic process

or can't be obtained, or won't be
obtained, by a congressional committee,

or a federal
oversight committee.

For the most part, that information
has to be obtained by hackers.

After this had happened, although only a
small number of people had participated,

the collective mood was
exuberance, within Anonymous.

It was a moment of the lulz
being recharged, which people
were excited about,

'cause people felt like,
the lulz had been

running low, during the
middle eastern protest

and so it was a moment
of great triumphalism,

within Anonymous.

♪ OpSony

Anonymous is currently
targeting Sony's website.

We are doing this, because
Sony is currently

suing people for
making features,

the Playstation originally
had available to the public.

It started off as a denial
of service attacks,

but then someone really broke
into the playstation network

and stole all the user accounts and
all the credit card information.

Sony has confirmed that hackers broke
into it's playstation network,

exposing the personal information of
up to 77 million users worldwide.

Anonymous basically bent Sony
over and had their way with them

and the consumers were the ones,
that also got hurt in the process.

2 months, of people not being
able to use their playstations.

That, actually had real,
hard-core, end-user impact.

If they break into a site and they
pull back customer information,

do they really need to disclose
a hundred thousand customers?

No. What they're doing,
could be done a lot better.

When I say, better, I mean,

better for the end-user,
for the customers,

while still making a point.

And then, seemingly
out of the blue,

there was something
by the name, LulzSec,

that sailed into the seas.

LulzSec is a sort of
group, a couple of people,

mostly from Anonymous,

large part of the same
people who hacked HBGary.

They decided to form
this little group and

just carry on operations, but outside
the purview of Anonymous, for a while.

They hacked whatever
they wanted.

They released
whatever they wanted.

It's almost like
they had no rules.

They just said, "This is
what we're gonna do",

we're gonna stir up the cart.

We're gonna make some trouble.

"We're gonna make some waves."

And they did.

What they did was,
they put on a play.

Not high arts, not
low-brow either.

It wasn't particularly,
let's just say, grotesque.

Their symbol, was a kind of
cartoon character of the

monopoly man, with the
monocle and a cigarette.

There was a lot of
iconography of boats and

ships, pirate motifs and
then of course a cat.

Chaos and mayhem right now..

it's probably one of the
right things to do.

Some of the things LulzSec
did, in a quarter

of public opinion,
were less noble.

Private citizens
were being dox'd or,

your credit cards numbers
could have been redacted.

You can still make
your point, without

actually giving up
people's personal details.

So the quarter public opinions, swayed,
that LulzSec had crossed lines,

that, maybe, the previous
manifestation had not.

Collateral damage, such
as the release of dox

and people's personal
information who are

just caught in the crossfire
of an Anonymous confrontation

is something that a lot of
Anons don't really support.

There's a lot of in-fighting
about it because,

their way, wasn't
really our way.

We will not attack the media.

PBS's Frontline,
runs a documentary,

mainly focused on
Bradley Manning,

the alleged leaker to WikiLeaks.

And as for all of Bradley Manning's
supporters, they didn't like it.

They thought it was a
little too psychologising.

It was like looking a little bit
more at his personal life, than at

why it is, you leaked the documents
& what the documents actually meant.

They hacked a website, putting a story
that Tupac and Biggie had escaped

the world of celebrity
fame and attention and

retired quietly and
discreetly in New Zealand.

LulzSec, when they attacked PBS,

that gave me the
creeps, you know?

As a journalist, I'm
not too thrilled

with the idea of someone judging:
We don't like you to write that,

we don't like your reporting, so,
we're gonna shut down your website.

I'm uncomfortable with that. It could
be me & I could be writing something

about a group, that
they didn't like.

I'm happy to sit and talk
with them about it but,

don't shut my website down.

This is obviously about
freedom of speech

so attacking the
press would be..

would sort of be a bit
of a contradiction.

So people have said, well,
we shouldn't do that

and obviously LulzSec had a
completely different agenda

so they had no problem with it.

7~12 May, 2011: Fox Network "X-Factor"
contestant database hacked.

They sort of saw themselves,
as going out there,

breaking into, like,
anything and everything,

governments, corporations,
police departments.

Largely for the same
reasons Anonymous would.

They went after Arizona
for immigration policy.

A 50-day run, causing
mayhem, havoc..

And then ended it.

The computer hacking group Lulz-Security,
has announced it's disbanding,

saying, it's had achieved
it's mission, to

disrupt governments and
corporate organizations,

for fun..

I call this whole thing, "the
rise of the chaotic actor".

It's not like the first
time we had hacktivism,

but we're definitely seeing,
like a renaissance in it

and chaotic, could be chaotic
good, neutral or evil,

if you go back to deal with
Dungeons and Dragons terms

and some people see
Anon Ops, initially and

they'll stick with
Anonymous as chaotic good.

They saw operation payback or
they saw attacking scientology

and they say that's good,
it's like Robin Hood, right?

Chaotic good, outside the system,
but doing something good.

Other people, saw Anon as
chaotic evil, like the Joker,

that just wanna see the world burn and
potentially doing irreparable damage

and the truth is, yes, it's
the entire column of chaotic.

The Anonymous 16

16 people were arrested today.

Dozens of FBI agents targeted alleged
members of a loose-knit hacking group.

Armed with search warrants,
agents hit 6 homes in.

New York alone, with locations
across the country.

The people arrested yesterday, were
suspected of attacking PayPal's website,

after the company shut off
payments to WikiLeaks.

Defenders of the hackers say, they
merely engaged in civil protest,

but FBI officials worry,
the disruptive cyber

attacks, could move in a
more dangerous direction.

So the FBI shows up at 6 in the
morning and it was really obnoxious

and I remember being
frustrated and angry because,

there was nothing, that I had done, that
would've justified an FBI search warrant.

They came, and guns blazing
at us and all that stuff,

bashing down the door, and they just
dropped me down the floor, 180..

I weren't trying
to fight nobody.

The theory of the case
is they were, you know,

they flooded, "a number
of people flooded"

access to PayPal, thereby
creating economic

distress to a protected
corporation", end of story.

This is not a case involving
identity theft, outing e-mails,

violating privilege, theft of
services, shutting down business.

It is a pure case of
internet or cyber sit-ins.

I think when Barack Obama
gets on television and says,

flood the switchboard, shutdown
the Republicans, send a message.

That's legal and even
if you accept what the

theory of this prosecution
is, it's no different.

This is an electronic
sit-in, at it's finest.

If you're a pedophile,
the average is 11 years,

if you're a computer
hacker, the average is 15.

I think that's ridiculous.

That's ridiculous, I mean you can go
molest children & get less of a sentence

than you would, for breaking
into someone's phone.

Even if you accept, what the
government is saying is true,

what is important, is that people
are participating in the process.

It is, very much, the process.

It is sitting-in, in a
counter in Selma, Alabama.

500 freedom riders,
refusing to allow people to

go and sit-in at a
segregated lunch counter.

They write books
about that stuff.

It is demonstrating in a street
corner, saying, 'no more war'.

It's just a different vehicle.

It's the same results.

For 9 months I ran
from my indictment,

but they busted me, I went
to jail, I bond it out

and then I held a news
conference because,

as risky as that was and
against my lawyer's advice,

I wanted the world, to know some
fucking things, about what's going on.

I didn't want the feds to have
the only voice in the dialog.

This document alleges,

that, I'm the notorious hacker activist,
known to the world, as Commander-X.

I am, Commander-X.

The indictment further alleges,
that I'm in association with the

global internet freedom
movement, known as Anonymous.

I say yes,

I am immensely proud and
humbled to the core,

to be a part of the
idea called, Anonymous.

I would never compare myself to people
like Ghandi or Dr. Martin Luther King,

but they were one person and they were
willing to go out and change the world

and their messages live on
every day, through everybody

and to not take the chance of having
something like that to do, is foolish.

I only wish we had, 50
million Mercedes Haefer.

I'd feel a lot more
comfortable as a guy,

gettings towards the
tail end of his career,

if there were more Mercedes.

There's always gonna
be legal consequences,

when you decide
to break the law.

That comes with the territory

and it would be naive,
not to expect that.

The question is, whether the punishment
will be proportional to the "crime"

and I suspect, it might not be.

People will be watching very closely,
to see how these cases proceed.

On what grounds and whether there's
any room during the trials to think,

especially of the denial of service
attacks, as a legitimate form of protest.

So much of our lives
are now configured, at

least in part, on the
internet, so we better

start thinking about, how
we claim parts of the

internet as spaces, that
we can also protest in.

This is the point in
history, at which

you decide, whether or not
protesting is possible online.

You can stand up and you can say,
freedom of speech extends to online.

We've got the right, not to be monitored by
our government, because of our opinions.

It's up to you.

You're in the position of Huck Finn.
Do you remember Huck Finn
at the end of the book?

He's told he's got to take
that slave and give it back.

2 things will happen
if he doesn't:

1. Legally, he'll go to
jail, as Jim is property.

2. He'll be damned eternally
and burn in hellfire,

'cause he's in the evangelical
environment of Missouri

and so Huck smokes his corn cob
pipe all night, thinks about it

and the next morning he says, well
damn it, I'll go to hell then.

In other words, he discovered that
in order to be an expert at ethics,

you had to transcend the
legal and sanctioned

religious, appropriate
truths of the day,

in order to access the meta-truth,
of both legality & righteousness.

Well, hackers see themselves as Huck,
putting down their corn cob pipe & say:

Alright I'll go to jail,
alright I'll go to hell,

but I'm gonna do
the right thing.

I suppose the question
you really wanna ask is,

would I do it again?

And honestly, after
thinking about it,

I felt that, I did what was right.
I had a belief, I still do,

that what I did was the right thing and
hopefully someone got some good out of it.

I'd love to think, that maybe I
stopped someone from joining a cult.

Probably wouldn't tell
on myself next time but,

I don't think I would have changed
a single thing, other than

the whole talking
to the FBI thing.

It's just that little detail,
that changed everything.

I'm angry,

occasionally I have small
break-down moments,

of terror,

but I haven't stopped
believing what I believed,

I haven't stopped wanting to
fight, I haven't stopped caring.

I don't think this whole issue
is a technical hacking thing.

This is more about human
philosophy and psychology.

Let's motivate & ask, why is there so much
unrest or disenfranchisement or anger,

that would lead people to want to take
matters in their own hands and join this.

Whether you think it's bad or not,
is irrelevant, it's not going away.

I have stood upon the mountain
top known as Anonymous

and looked down on a world
inflamed with revolution.

What can you say, your spine tingles
when you are at the course of history

when you're surfing the waves
of history, your spine tingles.

There's a lot of people
in Anonymous who feel

very deeply and very
sincerely about

their contribution towards
democracy around the world.

And I think that's one
of the main things that

I'm most proud of
about Anonymous.

There are things that I'm not
proud of about Anonymous

but that we stand
against censorship

and we stand against
oppressive governments,

even our own,

is a very noble thing.

If you had power in real life
and you had money in real life,

it doesn't fucking
matter on the internet.

What matters on the internet
is your actual ideas,

how smart you are,
the quality of you

and when certain
organizations want to extend

their real life power
onto the internet,

it's not gonna fucking take,
because of Anonymous.

History teaches us that change,
simply doesn't come with flowers.

It dosn't work.

If the say I'm a
criminal, then..

well..

then I will be one.

Anonymous is an evolving thing.

It's like a phoenix.

It might occasionally catch
fire and burn to the ground

but it'll be reborn from ashes.

It'll be reborn stronger.

I don't care if you are a
democrat or a republican,

or an independant, or if you like Ron Paul,
or if you worship pidgeons or scientology,

or if you're catholic, or
atheist, or methodist..

I don't care about that.

Your opinion matters.

I don't care if I
disagree with it.

I don't care if I
hate your guts.

Your opinion matters.