Well, thank you everybody for coming.
Booster suggested we just kind of go down the row and everybody introduce themselves.
Take a couple of minutes and just say who you are and how you're related to the film.
I'll just briefly say that I started this film, I first became aware of Anonymous when
they did the raids on Scientology.
When I first moved to L.A., I sort of lived right by this huge Scientology building.
And during those raids, those raids were particularly intense in Los Angeles.
So I became kind of interested in what was going on with this group.
Here was a group, a church created by a science fiction author wearing masks created by a
science fiction author, by being protested by people with these weird masks.
So I started following them, but this film started around the attacks on PayPal, MasterCard
and Visa when those companies cut off financial services to WikiLeaks.
And we followed it all the way through pretty much the end of Occupy.
I'm an Anon, I've been an Anon for about two years.
I first learned about it right after the Sony hack.
I learned about it before that, I met some people on the streets, random people wearing
Guy Fawkes masks and I stopped and I talked to them and asked them what they were doing
and they were protesting Scientology.
And then right as I was learning about it, the Sony hack happened and the video game
I was playing was interrupted for months.
And so I was like, well, hey, these people, they knocked down my website, let me go see
what they're about.
And that was right around the time that LulzSec happened and all of this stuff kind of steamrolled
into OpBart and OpBart, I'm assuming a lot of y'all are from the Bay Area, for eight
weeks last year, or two years ago now, damn, we had a protest that we shut down BART stations
and that kind of got me involved in activism.
And now I'm living in Oakland and being an activist and it's exciting.
Hi, I'm, sorry, John Homasaki, you might have seen me tearing briefly through the screen
there, a little cameo real quick there with my client, Keith Downey.
And I first spoke to Brian when he was making this film and we had talked about having Keith
give an interview and talk similar to Mercedes, but as the date of the actual first court
date of approach, which is where you saw outside in San Jose, the anxiety and the pressure
and the stress of the whole situation made my client withdraw a bit and I think it speaks
to a pressure that a lot of the people that have been facing these prosecutions are going
through.
I'm a criminal defense lawyer in the Bay Area and I've been representing activists, civil
rights, civil disobedience, probably some of the people you know, probably run into
each other throughout the Bay Area and Oakland, Occupy Oakland for the past few years.
And when the indictments started coming down against the individuals in this, somebody
who knew me from the community asked me to come in and represent one of the guys and
it's been a really exciting process learning about everything that goes on.
I think this movie really captures a lot of the excitement and the joy and I don't, it's
hard to watch that even coming from outside and not feel good about you know, the way
Anonymous has been existing and growing and I think that we all look forward to seeing
how it evolves and where things go from here.
Hi, my name is Ryan Singel, I used to write and edit for Wired and covered Anonymous quite
a bit and I think what still strikes me is just kind of still unbelievable is the change
that they went through from being that sort of trolling group that was out for the lulls
and it was you know, I think I was pretty hard on them early on and I still remember
there was a great moment when they were doing some of the Scientology attacks and so they
were passing around IP addresses to attack in an IRC channel and somebody posted in the
wrong IP address and it turned out to be not a Scientology center, it was a Danish like
middle school or elementary school.
So they managed to take down this Danish elementary school's website instead and so of course
to troll them back who wrote this like big story in Wired about how they had like taken
down and like hurt these like Danish school children but it's just been sort of fascinating
to watch and like they're such a different and growing animal than where they started
and I think it's going to be fascinating to watch where they go.
I'm Quinn Norton, I covered Anonymous and Occupy for Wired under the iron fist of this
man for some time and I joined in the tradition of trolling Anonymous back quite a bit.
It's one of the things I've really appreciated about Wired is that we've been willing to
get out there in front of trolling strange internet collectives as a publication but
I went ahead and lived in the camps with some of the people who did in Occupy with some
of the people who did on the ground Anonymous stuff during that time and to this day hang
out in probably more IRC channels than are strictly speaking good for me but it's been
an amazing story arc, it's intersected with my life at points and it shows no signs of
getting any more normal any time soon.
My name is Pete Fine, I'm a computer programmer and internet activist.
I got involved in around 2010 around the time of the WikiLeaks crisis and I guess helped
shift that narrative in the way you talked about, much more of the moral fag protest
organizer than the website defacer sort of type.
I retired from Anon in I guess October just because it was kind of enough in taking over
my life though I continue to work with that other group called Telecomics doing kind of
more similar sort of organizational structure but much smaller and kind of more constructive
work.
I just want to ask John since you're here, you represent Keith Downey who's one of the
PayPal 14 so I get asked this question all the time because I know this case is constantly
changing and what's the basic, what's the status of it so you're here, what is the status
of that PayPal 14 case?
Sure, the PayPal 14 case has evolved I think the, when it first started it was really,
it felt like the government was really putting a lot of pressure behind these prosecutions.
I think there was a lot of theories about the government's displeasure with WikiLeaks
and this was a target and this was a way to shut down the opposition.
As things have progressed we've been in various forms of litigation, battling with the government
back and forth throughout the past year and a half.
We actually finally are at a place where we, there may be hopes of a resolution in the
matter that doesn't involve hopefully any jail time for any of the participants in the
action that have been charged in this indictment.
Hopefully we're looking forward to trying to resolve things for misdemeanors or deferred
prosecutions.
Again, that's our hope and there's no guarantees things are going that way but we sat down
with the government and the judge and everybody got, we've had a lot of court dates where
it's been just the lawyers because there's a lot of lawyers and bringing everybody from
across the country is tough on the people, travel arrangements and what not but all the
people that have been charged in this indictment, almost all of them were brought together in
a courtroom and I think it was useful in that the government got to see real human beings,
a mother was there with her two young children, a college student, a former Marine was there
taking a break from college, my client Keith coming up from Florida and it just really
humanizing them much like this movie did and showing the government and showing the court
that these are just young people and at the worst as my colleague Stanley Cohen said in
the film, they were just, thought they were doing a digital sit in, thought they were
standing up for something, they weren't trying to hurt anybody and we're hopeful now that
we may be able to walk out of there, everybody walk out of there without having to go back
into custody.
I've been curious about that case since you heard me, I'll just ask you one more.
It seems like one of the difficulties was, so here's a group that attacked PayPal that
basically said we don't like you, we don't like what you've done, you've cut off financial
services to WikiLeaks and one of the difficulties of the case has been PayPal, how do they determine
the damages that these 14 have caused them, it's kind of a key element of the case.
What's the status, what can you talk about on that, how did they arrive at what the damages
were for this protest and how has that played into the case?
Sure and one of the many problems that I think people are coming to see with the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act, which thankfully is getting some light put on it now under unfortunate
circumstances is that not only under this act are you responsible for any actual damage,
loss of employee time, excuse me, and what not that any particular act may cause but
the company can then do whatever security upgrades they feel are necessary to prevent
anything like this in the future.
So if you had a picket fence around your house and somebody broke in, all of a sudden you
can get a Sherman tank and a Apache helicopter and that's just what PayPal did, they're claiming
at this point 5.6 million dollars in damages, I believe 4.5 of which are for upgrades to
their systems, which were apparently not up to par to begin with, so does that cover the
scope of it?
That's pretty key, yeah.
Do you want to go to questions or do you want, should we, what do you think, audience questions
or do you want to, yeah, I'm a natural questioner so I can as a filmmaker.
I found this film really effective to me, I'm Brewster Kale, I work here at the Internet
Archive and shining a light on sort of where Anonymous came from, that it came from 4chan,
I just found it hilarious and I had no idea and I guess it was sort of a framing of, is
this sort of pranks, is it kind of a sit in or is this taking down world trade centers
and it's a proportional response issue seems to be one that really is highlighted in this
movie I think in a very important way, running a large website like the Internet Archive,
if we were to put something up and it got slash dotted back in the old days we would
be brought down just because there would be so many people trying to read things on the
archive and our response is not to call in feds, it would be to beef up our wimpy servers
and we produce tools so people can download things effectively and even dealing with the
occasional denial of service attacks is to try to figure out what's going on, what's
going wrong, how do we deal with it and sometimes it's innocuous.
So I found this very interesting perspective but the introduction of the federal government
in this just seems to be often outside of, at least we folks in the traditional Internet
world, are we going to see more of this fed application in this area?
Yes, consider the math for a moment that they ran a six month operation that the FBI essentially
called anti-sec and at the end of that they got additional charges on three members of
LulzSec which was not the anti-sec activity and one arrest which was Jeremy Hammond and
there's a lot to link the recent Matthew Keyes indictment to Sabu but one indictment does
not justify a six month invention of a hacking group by the FBI, they're going to have to
come up with a lot more so I think we're probably going to be seeing stuff coming out of that
period for some time and there's a tremendous amount of aggression on the part of federal
prosecutors in the realm of CFAA, I don't see any sign, I mean the Matthew Keyes indictment
came out right after the controversy exploded and I don't see any sign that they're going
to back down off of the aggressive interpretation of CFAA.
I think that's absolutely true, we just saw Weave get a hacker, troll 41 months for embarrassing
AT&T for supposedly committing identity theft by getting a lot of email addresses, the feds
are using the CFAA to criminalize and overly prosecute lots of things and I don't see the
feds changing that unless we get a law changed.
Let me just piggyback real quick on what Ryan said, I was talking with Brewster before about
this and there has been some movement talking about changing of the terms of service portion
of the CFAA which was part of what Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted under, there's a lot
of opposition to that from corporations and big business because simply put what used
to be civil actions where companies would have to sue actors for violations of contracts,
now they can just call in the feds and the feds do all of the litigation, there's huge
punishments and there's prison time on top of it so the corporations love the CFAA because
they don't have to spend the money anymore and people that cross them now can go to prison.
So I agree with everybody, I don't think it's going to change unless there's a real ground
swell because on the other side of the people or the corporations and they love it.
Definitely one thing, they also profit after they put us in prison so there's not a whole
lot of incentive for the governments and these corporations to repeal these laws and to reform
the laws, everything is in their favor to come and punish people online.
I know way more people in jail are facing trial than I want to.
Some of them, they were arrested two years ago, they haven't even been to trial yet,
so the government comes into these people's lives, it ruins their lives, some can't hold
down jobs even though you're told you have to hold down a job, some can't hold down a
relationship, some families disown them, somebody right now is sitting in jail waiting for his
first child to be born, all for prank stuff, y'all saw the Occupy movement, out here things
were rough, people were smashing bank windows and nobody who smashed a bank window deserved
to go to prison for 15 years and that's essentially what we're doing, not we, what they're doing
online.
So the thing to keep in mind with the Sibu FBI run operation, the FBI is running this
guy who's actively encouraging and facilitating people hacking sites for upwards of six months
while the director of the FBI is testifying to Congress about the cyber threat, actively
manufacturing this threat at the same time, which is terrifying, which is terrifying,
this guy who just got 41 months, as a programmer I've written web crawlers for two different
start ups and got paid to do exactly what he did, and he's going to yell for it but
I did it for a company and for profit, so that's okay.
The Department of Defense just went to Congress a week ago and testified that the cyber threat
is now a bigger threat to the country than terrorism, right?
There's a war on hackers, there's a war on hackers and they're using this horrible law
to come after us and it's really, really scary.
I just want to mention the cyber threat is not a bigger threat to us than terrorism.
No.
No.
Not unless, you know, you mean I guess online sex chat and you really don't like that.
Well, unless of course to the federal government, which is the only, the U.S. and Israeli governments
are the only actors that have ever caused, really ever caused kinetic damage in the real
world with the Stuxnet.
So everybody else, you know, might take down a website but, you know, the government actually
destroyed machines.
Yeah.
Good point.
Any questions?
Should we open it up again?
Yeah.
Hi.
Two things.
One, just kind of a brief aside and then a question.
The brief aside is it's interesting how people like PayPal, even though they're a totally
private company, are a bottleneck that affects the entire economy and society and they kind
of have it both ways.
They, oh, we're just totally private, we can do anything we want but then we can also use
our power to shut down Wikipedia or whatever, which is clearly not just a neutral system.
Anyway, that's a comment.
The question for you is what can we do in our movement to keep the more aggressive and
slightly nuttier ones from completely, you know, allowing the media to portray the most
negative aspects as being the one?
Because I've noticed that at Occupy and I've noticed that through, you know, anonymous.
You're saying the media, how do I get that message to the media or how do you get from
the movement, within the movement?
How can we get people within the movement who are more aggressive and slightly crazier
to not be allowed to take over so much of the public view of what we are?
Well, I may give this to Pete but the, I mean, one of the most, in my time watching anonymous
and these groups, certainly Sabu was one of the craziest, nuttiest people I've seen without
a doubt and that was during the period of time after he had been arrested and was working
with the FBI.
There's no question.
I've never seen anybody in anonymous that rattle rousing.
But Pete, you're interesting to me because you're on this fence between telecomics and
for a while, and anonymous, so you are bridging this territory between these groups.
Do you want to say a few words?
Yeah, so telecomics is a similarly leaderless group, no formal members, no money, no mailing
address.
You just kind of show up on one of these chat networks and just go do things.
And much of what we did that you touched on in the film was sort of supporting people
in Egypt and Syria, staying online and communicating safely.
It's sort of the flip side of the anonymous coin.
Like if anonymous takes sites down, telecomics keeps them up.
And so this is a form of hacktivism too, I think.
The word hacker originally meant just people who play a clever technical trick or using
technology in a way its designer didn't intend.
And it has come in the media to mean people who just pop servers and bust websites and
stuff like that.
But you know, you go down in Silicon Valley and people who write really good code, like
they're talking about hacking.
And yeah, that world view, I think, has collided in politics, that sort of we can go the same
way that we're used to reprogramming our machines, can we try to do that to the world around
us?
And it's been exciting.
Something on that, like on the way that Antisec and Sabu kind of took over the narrative anonymous,
a lot of that is at the feet of people like me who wrote about it because it was just
really hard not to write about it.
And actually, to some degree, I think that was a self-healing flaw, because I think kind
of at the end of that cycle, a lot of the media was a little bit less credulous than
they had been.
And the media has become less credulous about these big actors, and they've gotten a little
less suckered in by the DDoS everything stuff.
But I do want to point out, actually, on the telecomics point, that telecomics did hack
the crap out of Syria.
And those hacks were CFA violations, should any of the people in them have been in America.
I have no reason to believe they were, and those were participants of telecomics that
did that.
But no one in America is going to prosecute somebody for hacking the crap out of Syria,
it turns out.
So it's just kind of, it's in this interesting political story.
It's in this story arc, and it's got a very specific purpose when they do these prosecutions.
And I think it's interesting to ask what those purposes are.
One of the things I learned, I mean, Quinn took the coverage at WIRE much farther than
I ever did.
And she wrote a series of great stories, but you can just look for Anonymous 101.
And I think it's ended up like a three-piece, huge thing.
That's fantastic.
But one of the things I learned from that is that the way that Anonymous kind of works
sometimes is they just announce, somebody will just announce things under the name Anonymous.
And for a while, the media would just like glom onto it.
So it's like, we're going to take down Facebook, and nobody really in Anonymous wanted to do
that.
They were going to take down, there was another one where they were going to take down a root
server.
And I think the date was like March 31st at midnight, which essentially puts you into
April 1st.
But then it became like, oh, Anonymous is going to take down the internet, which would
be, again, would Anonymous actually ever take down the internet?
Yeah, it's like burning down their own house, right?
But also to your other point, I think it was very interesting to watch that we saw MasterCard
Visa and PayPal almost simultaneously all cut off payments, the ability to donate to
WikiLeaks at the same time, on the same day, at the same time that Amazon decided that
WikiLeaks could not host documents on their giant cloud platform.
That kind of thing just generally doesn't happen unless you're getting some phone calls
very high up.
And I think beyond Joe Lieberman, Joe Lieberman was sort of the figure there, but I think
we still haven't heard the real story of how that happened.
But it's very clear that giant financial companies and the government have very close ties.
And it was sort of interesting to watch that actually sort of happen.
You asked how do we keep the media from painting all of us as the crazy people.
That's, to me, the most beautiful thing about Anonymous is no single person represents another
person.
Anything that I say or do when I'm online, that just falls on me.
Those are my words and my ideas.
There's nothing official that comes out from Anonymous.
We have ops that are widely participated in, and then we have some that nobody supports,
and that's what makes an Anonymous op.
You mentioned taking down Facebook.
Every three months somebody says they're going to take down Facebook.
It's nothing that any of us ever have any intentions of doing.
I've seen people go around the ideas of why Facebook should be eliminated, but nobody's
ever tossed around ideas on how to actually do that.
But the media will jump on that and run with it and say that that's an op that Anonymous
is behind when just one single person says that.
The media, and certain people obviously excluded from this, the media doesn't take the opportunity
to actually do research about stuff.
If you read any mainstream media article today, you can take it.
If you get it from Fox, you can probably go to CBS and find the exact same article.
They changed four words in it.
Maybe a different name for the person they interviewed, and even that said the same thing.
Like I said, that's the beauty about Anonymous is we have a system in place that regardless
of who you are, regardless of where you're from, regardless if you're rich, poor, white,
black, gay, straight, male, woman, that's not what's important.
It's just the ideas.
People will listen to those ideas if you present them in a way that people can hear them.
That's why we're all Anonymous is because he can put a guy, Fox Mask, on and it doesn't
represent me.
Even if I agree with what he says, it doesn't represent how I feel.
That's a good point.
On your point of chaotic versus sort of I guess less robust, more quote unquote legitimate
kind of actions, I sort of want to plug our website, which is www.WeAreLegionTheDocumentary.com.
In our research, we had a lot of information left over about early hacktivist kind of activity.
What we did was we beefed that up.
It was almost as much work as the documentary itself actually.
We created a hacktivist timeline.
We went back as far as we could and we just traced as much of this activity as we possibly
could find.
It's really interesting and I recommend checking it out.
I think there is precedent if you look at it for more I guess you would say quote unquote
legit organizations or activity coming out of some of the more robust activity.
I think that's not just true with online activism.
It's true with other kinds of activism too.
It's a really interesting thing.
People who may passionately agree with some of the kind of core messages but shy away
from the more kind of robust elements.
I think it's going to be interesting to see.
Maybe telecomics fits into that category, but it's interesting to see what if anything
does happen.
Yeah, I mean part of the reason you're having all these weird ad hoc collectives that are
being so influential is just it's almost easier to get things done.
It seems kind of counterintuitive but we can actually get more done with less structure.
The joke around telecomics is that we don't have a bank account not just because we're
a bunch of cipher hippies, which we are, but that means you have to have incorporation
docs and a board of directors and you have to have a bank account and you have to deal
with taking transactions, doing transactions internationally.
We'd just rather go do some stuff.
Like we'd rather just kind of pay it out of our pocket and just do it at our own time.
I think with anonymous in particular, this was the first space that people found that
they could actually be active, that they could actually participate in the political process
besides voting or maybe sending some money or maybe, maybe calling a congressperson.
Not that those things aren't important, but to be able to actually directly apply your
hands and your heart and your skills in service of what you believe is just incredibly compelling.
I'm wondering if there's evidence of widespread co-intel pro-type program of infiltration
by the government.
A few people were mentioned as being provocateurs, but whether there's evidence of a concerted
effort and also just I want to hear more about what's going on with Aaron's law and changing
that law.
Is that for Quinn?
Yeah.
I don't know.
The co-intel?
No?
I mean, he mentioned Sabu a lot in the movie and that's really important to look at what
happened with Sabu.
It wasn't just like they found somebody and they had him roll over and give them all the
information he had.
Then they've continued to use him for how long has it been since he was arrested?
Every time he's supposed to go to see his trial, they give him an extra six months to
keep ratting on people.
Because of the nature of the internet, you can mask your IP and nobody will ever know
who you are.
So Sabu can continue to, while he can't use the name Sabu and the influence he had then,
but he can still use all the knowledge that he gained of the way the circles worked to
help infiltrate them again.
Aside from Sabu, there are a lot of other people.
A lot of us, any kind of IRC channel we have, chat rooms or anything like that, everybody
just automatically assumes that there's somebody in there logging, ready to turn the information
over to the feds.
There's another case where we're fairly certain that somebody rolled over on somebody else.
It's just there are more examples than I have time to sit here and talk about of the government
infiltrating.
They did it with occupied movements and stuff as well.
The government infiltrates big social movements and they try to do whatever they can to help
marginalize the efforts that these movements are making.
Just real quick, there's also some evidence of massively uncoordinated infiltration amongst
things, an EU document that was dropped by someone else saying that there were some problems
with different law enforcement basically chatting each other up on IRC servers all the time
because the guys who run in just looking to get into some shit were probably law enforcement.
That's interesting.
Real quick, one more thing to add.
The worry of infiltration isn't just from the government.
There are countless private security companies that, I mean, Aaron Barr, as an example, took
it upon himself to infiltrate a criminal organization the way he saw it and then was going to turn
around and sell this money to the government.
If that's your cup of tea, if that's what you think you can do, then there's so much
opportunity to rat on people to turn a profit from the government, the government will probably
just hand you whatever you ask for.
To me, I would almost be willing to bet that that's just as much of an issue as it would
be with government infiltration because these people, they don't have to play by the same
rules the government does.
The government has, you have a bill of rights that protects us and stuff like that.
Well, a private security contractor doesn't, you know, so.
What I wonder, and I'm sure John can't, you probably can't answer this, or maybe it doesn't
play into the cases you're doing, but how, I mean, you just wonder how much of the discovery
and stuff comes from this, or if you can identify that from these kinds of, from someone like
Sabu or whatever, has that played into any cases that you've done, is there, can you
talk about that?
I'm assuming that's not PayPal 14, the timing's wrong, but do you understand what my question
is?
The answer is it could be.
Not really.
I mean, there was none of that in the PayPal 14, you know, you don't find out about that
until the cases end up getting filed like they did with Sabu.
But you know, I think as expressed here at the stage, it's, everybody's aware that it's
going on, everybody should be aware that it's going on, there's a lot, you know, there's
an interest in prosecuting these cases by the government.
You can see in the way that they've been prosecuted, they have expended massive resources prosecuting
these cases, millions and millions and millions of your money to prosecute DDoS attacks and
other really trivial actions, but that often have political overtones or significance.
So short answers, though, you know, the ones that we know about are the ones that are out
in public.
Any questions?
Yeah.
I'm very curious about the evolution of Anonymous as a Movement from its origins in the deeply
misogynistic b-boards where tits are get the fuck out is every bit as common as it's
over 9,000, to its current iteration defending the victims of rape and attacking the people
who perpetuate rape culture in Steubenville.
How did this happen and is it a real thing or are what we're seeing now just isolated
ops?
Go ahead.
And it's a really interesting question.
Give that one to the girl to begin with.
So I said to some controversial response that in 20 years of working in technology, Anonymous
was the least misogynistic environment I've worked in.
I do want to clarify that I wasn't merely praising Anonymous, I was punking the rest
of you, but the interesting thing about the way language is played within 4chan, and it's
something that is very interesting to me because playing with language is my full-time job,
but also really hard to kind of get a read on and probably more work than it's worth
for most people, is that the creation of space in 4chan is around being constantly a space
of offense, and in a way it kind of defangs racist, misogynistic, so on and so forth speech.
When you have to say I'm a gay fag to let everyone know that you're actually homosexual,
that word has been drained of its original meaning.
Now, ways in which it does or doesn't perpetuate cultures outside of 4chan is a separate matter.
The fact is 4chan has had a tradition of both going after and victimizing people at random
and supporting victims at random, even going back to the days of the truly offensive speech.
The truly offensive speech I've discovered in my years of watching Anonymous serves a
really, really interesting purpose that has never been quite as well accomplished with
any other techniques, which is that it allows people of disparate cultures to work together
in a way that all the sensitivity training in the world doesn't in that if everything
is already a boiling point, nobody can actually offend you.
In a weird way, one of the things that made Anonymous welcoming to women was that when
all the misogynistic speech is constant, none of it is real, so a lot of women could kind
of get in.
I have joked with so many female Anons that there's no girls on the internet.
It's actually practically a connotation of gender when I'm talking to people in Anonymous
that I'll say something about there's no girls on the internet and all the females will immediately
chime in that there's no girls on the internet.
So it creates a linguistically interesting space there, and I'm not saying that's for
everyone because it's not, but it's hard to say that the offensive speech in 4chan is
straight up normal offensive speech because it's occupying a very different role.
If everyone is always calling each other fag, then fag no longer is an insult.
It's just a fadic.
I'm not saying that's okay, but it certainly isn't the same thing as misogyny as, for instance,
I have experienced it in much of the tech world.
Just as a quick side note, it also makes it really hard as an editor when you're trying
to let your writers write this kind of stuff, because how can you write about Anonymous
without sort of quoting this and talking about how people speak?
Yeah.
It was not fun.
To answer the other part of your question is how does that transition happen?
Some of that is just people like me.
Prior to getting involved in more real-life actions than IRC, I probably spent about a
total of ten minutes on 4chan, and it was eight minutes too many.
The turnover is incredibly high.
I think that's what gets lost here, even with a given op, but over the course of a year
and really, it's just a different set of people.
There's a lot of people who have been around for four or five years working on this stuff.
It's worthwhile to know you refer to yourself as a moral fag.
Yeah, I do.
I do.
Yeah, I mean, right, exactly, like, fag just means person, like, and it's bizarre, it's
so bizarre.
We're out fighting for free speech and like right and justice and using this horrible
language, but, yeah, I just, I enjoy the lulls because I think politics is so dark and depressing
sometimes that you need to find your laughs when you can, but I was always much more in
it for, like, let's make things better, and that's change, you know, the participation
of people like me has changed the face of the beast.
This is a conversation I have probably on a weekly basis online.
I get into a lot of flame wars, a lot of activists who are outside of anonymous, who don't necessarily
understand the culture, who don't understand that.
A lot of the time we say things just to say them, just to watch your reaction, just to
watch you get offended, just to point out the absurdity that you're getting offended
at the same time that some child is being bombed in the other side of the world, you
know, you're getting offended by a word, and, you know, we kind of use that to our advantage
and it helps us create this shock value a lot of the times, and it allows us to create
a spectacle that maybe, and this is kind of a, it's a scary type of reasoning, but maybe
if we weren't as blatantly offensive, we wouldn't necessarily have this spectacle around us because
everybody looks at us as like, oh, they're the bad guys, but they're defending the rape
victim in Steubenville, or they're doxing some guy who just, you know, who posted a
video on YouTube where he killed his pit bull, you know, so it's kind of a, it helps create
a very unique element that no other movements has ever had, you know, you point to anons
and you point to anonymous, especially, you know, the anons, because not all anons frequent
4chan anymore. In fact, there are a lot of anons who have never been to 4chan, which
I don't understand, but anyways, so, you know, we have this entire culture that we've created,
we have this entire, even if we eliminated words like, you know, new fag and stuff like
that, you would still have a hard time keeping up on your first day to 4chan just because
you're not going to understand the words, and that's all we did, is we took these real
world, these harmful words that people use on a regular basis to discriminate and to
hurt people's feelings, and we've repurposed them to mean something else, and like you
said, you know, the word fag in our world just means person, you know, we have new fags
and we have old fags, you know, and it's just, it's not an offense to be either one, it's
not generally an offense to be either one, it just means you are, you know. There's an
Internet question that's a pretty good one here, I'd like to throw it to the panel, which
is, what actions besides DDoS could be considered a legitimate form of Internet protest? Okay,
I'll put it out here, whoever. I mean, there's a lot of things. Right now, Twitter storms
work really well. They tend to work more outside of the United States than they do here because
in the United States, Twitter storm, just basically getting a bunch of people online
together to tweet about the same thing using the same hash tag, you know, using the same
topics on Twitter so that way when Twitter keeps track of what's the most popular things
being talked about, people will look down and see what your cause is, and then they
can go search for your hash tag, find the news articles you're posting, stuff like that.
I mean, there are different, many ways. I know me and some friends one time, we went
into old Yahoo games, the websites that they have in the chat rooms, and we just spent
hours just sitting in the chat rooms talking to people. Like, hey, let's go play a game
of pool, and while we're playing a game of pool, let me tell you, you know, this story
real quick and this is what's happening. So, I mean, there are a lot of different ways.
DDOS, though, I think it needs to, it needs to be protected. Going forward, there needs
to be a better governing of the way protests happen online. You know, if I take the people
in this room right now and we go stand outside of a Bank of America, the Bank of America
will close its doors. Nobody will be able to go in. Nobody will be able to do any business.
And when we leave, the doors will open back up. Well, that's the same thing with the DDOS,
I can shut down a bank in real life with less people than it could take to shut down a website.
So why is one worth 15 years in prison and the other is protected, you know, by the Bill
of Rights? I think that distinction between online and off is not as important as it used
to be. Like, when you have people going out and protesting in the tens or hundreds of
thousands with signs with hashtags on them, that's an Internet action. But it's out in
the streets. And that's what's new and different here, that these things are kind of coming
out of this sort of space that we've managed to create for ourselves online because we've
run out of space to do it in the real world.
It's worthwhile. Pete here worked a bit on the anti-actor protests in Europe. And that
was online activism organized kind of emergently on Facebook that turned out to have over 100,000
people in 200 cities. 300,000 people in 200 cities across Europe bringing down some bad
legislation.
Yeah, that reminds me. Digital activism. The SOPA protests. January 18th, I want to say
it was January 18th of last year, Wikipedia, they put a censored bar over their logo and
you could only search information on SOPA and a few other websites had done this as
well.
Yeah.
Flickr users.
Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of people who took part in this and it eventually helped
defeat the SOPA, which was the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was essentially an online
censorship bill. And boycotts can work online as well. If we have a problem with Amazon,
everybody can try to, and I just use Amazon as an example, but everybody can boycott Amazon
online as well and that will affect them. So like he said, the blur between digital activism
and in real life activism, it's kind of, you can't really tell the two apart anymore. They're
so intertwined. Without one, you can't have the other pretty much these days.
Yeah. Anybody else? Yeah.
I just wanted to follow up on the COINTELPRO and the insurgency question. 50 years ago
that those issues sort of deflated the civil rights movement. So I'm wondering what you
guys think is unique about this movement that would allow it to withstand that or how it
would evolve in response to that?
I mean, the way we can, the way we won't be able to be stopped as much as say, you know,
the civil rights movement, even mind you, the civil rights movement wasn't defeated
by COINTELPRO.
Is that deflated?
Oh, deflated. Okay. I'm sorry. I misunderstood. But deflated. Yeah, sure. I mean, even now
there are times when something happens that was probably COINTELPRO that for months we're
still kind of like, God, I can't believe this person did this. And now I've got to answer
a bunch of questions about this. And there are reporters who are like, well, why did
you guys do this? Or there's just regular people who will talk to me and be like, well,
why did you guys do this? And it's like, well, we didn't necessarily do that. And I just
think because there's so many of us and because it's such a diverse movement and really when
one is arrested, 30 other people show up. So it's like, they can arrest us all they
want to. And it's just really can't stop us at this point. Information wants to be free
and we're just help facilitating that.
I think the decentralized aspect of Anonymous changes the dynamic a little bit. I've also
talked to people at the National Lawyers Guild recently about use of informants over time
and specifically how Sabu fits into previous examples of informants that we've seen. And
he fits into the picture pretty well in a lot of ways and diverges in interesting ways.
Often they look for people that are rabble rousers, right? That have something to lose
in their personal life in which they can bring some leverage against them that they're able
to turn and have control over this person.
What's different about Internet communities is that it's a different dynamic when you
meet somebody in real life. You have the kind of natural animal instincts. Your intuition
about this person is different than an online avatar which could be anything. So that dynamic
is interesting. I don't know that it's worse in Anonymous. In other words, you would be
more likely to be fooled by somebody who's an online avatar than you would in real life.
I'm not sure that's true because people are easily fooled by people in real life as well.
But that's where this dynamic changes. But I think the real difference compared to earlier
social movements is the decentralized aspect of it.
I'm going to disagree. I think that the government's done really well. Not just with infiltrating
through like Sabu, but through the prosecutions of Bradley Manning, through its fairly successful
campaign to marginalize WikiLeaks. However much I'm unsympathetic to Julian Assange.
And then the brutalization we saw of Occupy. I think the government has found that it has
some very strong tools to use against insurgents online.
I'm going to go ahead and disagree with the disagreement. And say that one of the costs
of how they've put these things down is that they've also immortalized them. And there's
a kind of... I've often said trying to kill Anonymous is like trying to kill a slime mold
with a hammer. And that's... I don't actually think that 30 rise up every time one is struck
down. But I think that when you make these things the enemy, you immortalize them and
that idea spreads. And just I'm not saying any particular side wins. I think it ultimately
just kind of creates more discord.
The two things I take from this are the number that floats around among the black hat hacker
community that something like one in four people is working for the feds. And that's
true for a very long time. And that clearly hasn't stopped people from hacking. These
things have natural ebbs and flows. And I think Sabu drama definitely was like dropping a
big rock in the middle of our placid crazy pond. But that, yeah, like it's... I mean,
there are people still hacking. Like there's people from LulzSec and AntiSec out there
and still hacking things. It's not even stop that, let alone the sort of more mainstream
just kind of speech activity social movement. So, yeah, I mean, they condemn us, but I don't
think it's going to wipe out this form of organization, whether it's a non or other
things.
Excuse me. I've actually worked with the National Lawyers Guild quite a bit. And what drew me
into this case and what drew a lot of the other lawyers into this case, like Stanley
Cohen, who like myself and some of the other lawyers are doing this case pro bono, is what's
going on online now for those of us who support a lot of these actions, have a lot of the
same political beliefs, is that there is a lot of opportunities to change and grow and
adapt that the people on stage have talked about. So while the big DDoS attack hasn't
happened in these states lately, other things have. They've evolved. And law enforcement
is only learning to deal with them, whereas with Occupy, everybody remembers how it started
and it was beautiful and magical and grandmothers and children and babies were out on the streets
and it was a beautiful thing. And then it was ground into the dirt in a lot of ways
because the government knows how to deal with these type of protests. They've been dealing
with them throughout our recent history.
So the real potential in the online, in the anonymous, is for things they're not ready
for and evolution of activism. I think a lot of the future is the coexistence between the
streets and the online world.
Anybody else? Yeah.
So all that being said, do you guys think that a Martin Luther King figure would be
beneficial to a cause like this? Or having it like... I would honestly just like your
guys' opinions on that, just in comparing the two as a social movement, as social movements.
Yeah. I'm getting a lot of head shaking here.
Fuck no. Hell no. I did not do illegal things. Like I said, I'm not one of those persons
who broke into websites or anything like that. I could have been public about the things
I was doing, the things I was saying, and I kept my anonymity not because I was afraid
of getting busted by the feds, but because when I said... I've been saying these things
for years, and it was just me, nobody listened. And I think we're tired of heroes, and I think
we're tired of having individuals to hold up as sort of our leaders, our models, that
we can all do this, and we all have a role to play. And it feels amazing to be able to
actually participate in something with that kind of solidarity. So yeah, no, I don't think
we need that at all.
Anonymous definitely gets heroes. Anonymous has a bunch of heroes. I don't think I agree
that the leadership thing is actually... It's too extra-jurisdictional. It's too diverse.
There's just too many damn people on the planet for civil rights movements to work the way
that they used to. It just doesn't scale.
I think there's actually some interesting parallels between critical mass and anonymous,
in that critical mass has evolved quite a bit since the original start, and you can
go and ride critical mass these days, and you can see Chris Carlson riding in critical
mass, and for those familiar, he was essentially the intellectual godfather of critical mass,
and it's lack of organization, and people will not know who he is. Like 95% of the riders
in it have no idea who he is. So yes, he's still around and still kind of a force, but
critical mass like anonymous has changed quite a bit, and everyone who's in it is in it for
different reasons. Some people think it's a protest, some people think it's a celebration.
So I don't know. I think if you're going to have a... And I think it's pretty amazing
that critical mass has survived as long as it's been over 20 years. So I think it's a
good model for how do you keep an organization like that going without leaders, and I think
it does actually better without leaders, without having that sort of figure that eventually
you're going to be disappointed by, and the nice thing about the assassination of Martin
Luther King is that you never got a chance to get disappointed with him, right? I don't
mean that I'm happy that he's dead, but that is the thing about a martyr, right, is you
never get that chance. When someone's martyred, they get to be this figure, but I think that
it also stunts a movement, having that leader.
Yeah, I mean, as an anon, some people will try to say we have leaders, but nobody's ever
come and told me what to do. Nobody's ever come and said, hey, this is what we're going
to do today, and if you don't like it, go home. That's not how it works. While there
may be somebody who suggests, hey, let's go do this. Let's go take down this website,
or let's go organize a protest in this city. Even then, it doesn't become about the person
who did it. It becomes about the reason why they're doing it. There are a lot of anons
who have thousands of followers on Twitter or on Facebook. There are people who are well
known. But look at the last one, who was the most well known? Sabu, he rolled over, and
we're still feeling the waves from that. And most anons, they'll be kind of leery to admit
that Sabu was a leader. He was the closest thing that anonimuses had to one. But there
are other people. Barrett Brown. There are a lot of anons who have kind of been like
a role model. And I think that's fine. But I think somebody who tries to put themselves
in a position to lead what we're trying to do and stuff, I think especially after Sabu,
that it's only going to be met with more backlash than it's worth.
So I see a general lack of trust in the authority figures that are out there in the government
and large corporations. And I'm just wondering, there's a lot of people who have made white
collar crimes and gotten away with it. And here are these people that have committed
white collar crimes but are being treated as criminals. And I'll just take your feedback.
A perfect example of that is all of the anons that are under indictment for DDOS attacks.
At the same time, Hollywood and the government, they have hired people to carry out DDOS attacks
against other websites, knocking down the Pirate Bay or knocking down WikiLeaks or knocking
down just any website that they don't agree with. Yet all my friends are under indictment
for doing it. So that's a perfect example of it's okay for them to do something and
it's okay for their bankster friends and their CEO friends to go and commit this crime. But
if we do the same thing, then they're going to throw us in prison for 15 years.
Let's just do this real quick. I, as a lot of you probably know, I was subpoenaed in
a federal case. And I also, one of my first real breakthrough moments of my career was
actually covering part of the Sony BMG rootkit story for Wired in which I worked with a researcher
to uncover that they had infected close to half a million computers around the world
creating what is arguably, what was definitely to that point and even to this point, one
of the largest botnets in the world. Sony, Sony. And after creating one of the largest
botnets in the world, there was an agreement amongst the more than 50 federal prosecutors
that could have brought a criminal investigation to do nothing in that. And I sat in the office
of one of those prosecutors some years later who was pursuing 35 years against my friend
hunting very, very much to ask him why he had chosen to try to destroy my friend's life
but not Sony for creating the largest botnet ever. And I still don't have an answer for
that.
I just need to know, is ceiling cat actually watching me masturbate? You know, the lulls
is kind of an important part of this whole culture, especially from the beginning. So
I just want to hear from the panelists. What is your all time favorite meme, each of you?
I will make this simple because I live in a hole and I just kind of don't follow popular
culture including popular internet culture. I love the walrus with the bucket. I love
that thing. How does it go? Oh, no, it's my bucket. Yeah, the guy with the walrus. I love
that thing.
I was going to say monotheism. But actually I think it's got some downsides. So I'm going
to go with Nyan Cat instead of monotheism.
This is rough. I guess I'm going to have to go with Rick Rowling, a classic. I'm one of
the few people who actually do love that song.
I'm going to leave this one to the experts. I actually love a lot of the same things.
My wife sleeps in a where's my bucket, the walrus t-shirt. Even though I'm not as enmeshed
in the culture as everybody up here. Everybody wants these memes into the broader society,
but it's a wonderful thing that you guys have done for us.
This isn't a meme, but one of the things that consistently people think is one of the funniest
things is that pool's closed. That's pretty classic.
I want to change my answer. Mine's actually over 9,000 because the Twitter bot that says
it on Twitter follows me, so that makes it my favorite.
Good. Yeah.
I think this has been tremendous. Thank you.
Do you want to show that?