EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (23 page)

On January 21, 2008, the following manifesto, entitled “Message to Scientology,” was uploaded to YouTube, narrated by a digitized text-to-speech voice:

Hello, leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous.

Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; your suppression of dissent; your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders, has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—and for our own enjoyment—we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. We recognize you as a serious opponent, and we are prepared for a long, long campaign. You will not prevail forever against the angry masses of the body politic. Your methods, hypocrisy, and the artlessness of your organization have sounded its death knell.

You have nowhere to hide because we are everywhere. We cannot die; we are forever. We’re getting bigger every day—and solely by the force of our ideas, malicious and hostile as they often are. If you want another name for your opponent, then call us Legion, for we are many.

Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.

Thus began Project Chanology, kick-started by anonymous users of 4chan and other chan-style boards where anti-Scientology discussions were held following the release of the Tom Cruise video.

I got in touch with “c0s,” an Anon who claims to be the guy who created and uploaded the “Message to Scientology” video, in AnonOps, an anonymous IRC channel devoted to Anonymous’s operations. I was immediately struck by how polite he was, and how willing he was to chat. Previously I’d only dealt with random /b/tards, who are a particularly different breed than those who are interested in the hacktivist strain of Anonymous found at AnonOps.

After chatting with c0s for a bit I got the impression I was dealing with someone who’d spoken with the press before. He eventually revealed his name, Gregg Housh, a guy who has appeared on countless radio and TV shows, often positioned by producers as a “spokesman” for Anonymous. Housh is quick to clarify that he doesn’t speak for the collective, and that he has no personal role in any of Anonymous’s illegal activities, but he was heavily involved in their anti-Scientology efforts.

Housh started off our conversation by reiterating that the political efforts of Anonymous should be distinguished from the earlier trolls conducted by anons (lowercase
a)
, who have even attacked Housh personally for his “justicefaggotry.” When Housh went public with his identity, these “armchair assholes” doxed him, digging up his social security number, his bank account information, home address, and more. Housh suspects the /b/tards got hold of his information by looking up property records and going from there.

Housh claims that he and a small group of Anons basically started Project Chanology. He had hung around 4chan before, taking part in the Hal Turner and Habbo raids, before pursuing great justice.

I asked Housh to name a few things that the press consistently gets wrong regarding Anonymous.

#1 talking about moot in any way for the last 4 years, since he has had nothing to do with it since then, and has actively avoided everything Anonymous has done (yet reaped the benefits with VC and jobs.)

#2 is of course the use of the words group and member. ugh.

#3 would probably be any attempt made to paint them as politically one way or another, since it is quite obviously apolitical

Housh recently gave a speech on the steps of New York’s City Hall with a handful of other Anons, journalists whom he feels are responsible for the media climate marked by lazy and fearmongering characterizations of Anonymous.

Housh is hardly the angst-ridden teenager that many journalists would like you to believe makes up Anonymous. He’s in his mid-30s, and he’s been online since ‘93, when he used a text browser. He remembers Usenet’s eternal September, which he, perhaps jokingly, calls “the worst thing that ever happened to the Internet.”

Usenet before eternal september? Very few stupid questions, mostly just good chat and sharing interesting files. it was quite a good community of pretty intelligent people

Like the folks I spoke with at the WELL, Housh insists that in the early days the web wasn’t a chaotic Wild West. The low number of active users prevented people from being “lost in the numbers,” so antisocial behavior was more easily pinpointed and punished.

Anonymous released a second message, in similar style to the letter aimed at the Church of Scientology, a week after Housh’s initial video. This time, Anonymous lashed out at the media.

Dear News Organizations.

We have been watching your reporting of Anonymous’s conflict with The Church of Scientology.

As you said, the so called Church of Scientology have actively misused copyright and trademark law in pursuit of its own agenda. They attempt, not only to subvert free speech, but to recklessly pervert justice to silence those who speak out against them.

We find it interesting that you did not mention the other objections in your news reporting. The stifling and punishment of dissent within the totalitarian organization of Scientology. The numerous alleged human rights violations, such as the treatment and events that led to the deaths of victims of the cult such as Lisa McPherson.

This cult is nothing but a psychotically driven pyramid scheme. Why are you, the news media, afraid of discussing these matters? It is your duty to report on these matters. You are failing in your duty. Their activities make them an affront to freedom. Remember, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. This information is everywhere. It is your duty to expose it. It is easy to find. Google is your friend.

This is not Religious Persecution, but the suppression of a powerful, criminal, fascist regime. It is left to Anonymous. The Church has been declared fair game. It will be dismantled and destroyed.

We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not Forgive. We do not Forget. This is only the beginning. Expect us.

Anonymous continued harassing the Church of Scientology websites through the spring. They also engaged in Google Bombing techniques. A Google Bomb occurs when Google search results are successfully manipulated by spamming the search engine with specific keywords. For example, 4chan once bombarded Google with the key phrase “Justin Bieber syphilis.” Within hours, Gawker and even the
San Francisco Chronicle
had run stories about the pop star’s alleged STD. In the Scientology Google Bombing, Anons manipulated the church’s search engine rankings so that certain keywords such as “dangerous cult” linked to the Church of Scientology website.

In February 2008, the anti-Scientology movement jumped off the flickering screen. Another video appeared, encouraging Anons to participate in physical protests at church headquarters around the globe. The protests were small, maxing out at a few hundred participants in English-speaking cities, but they occurred.

The protestors often wear Guy Fawkes masks—now the international symbol of Anonymous. The mask had previously become a vague symbol of faceless rebellion, popularized in 2005 in the film adaptation of Alan Moore’s
V for Vendetta
, in which a masked anonymous figure incites a massive anarchic rebellion against an oppressive police state. The masks allow Scientology protestors to remain anonymous during real-life protests, and also grant them a perceived heroic flair.

By the summer of 2008, Anonymous had grown beyond the confines of 4chan. Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist and leading scholar specializing in the documentation of hacker culture, emphasizes the diversity of the group. She tells me that although there are many young people involved in Anonymous, the perspective of “angst-ridden teenagers with no lives is a misconception.”

I think there’s a kind of hypersociality among these people. A lot of them have very interesting lives. Some are PhD students, some are Dutch squatters, some are system administrators. Some are landscape artists. Some are very sophisticated political activists.

Nonetheless, the protests have uniformly taken a lulzy tone. Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” blares from boomboxes. Protestors dress up like meme characters and wear outlandish costumes. In one photo, four protestors stand behind a sign reading “Truth is Free.” Among them they wear a skeleton mask, a hockey mask, a
Star Wars
stormtrooper mask, and a nondescript alien mask. This motley crew is here for a cause, but more importantly it’s here to have fun. The aesthetic isn’t only for fun, however. The masks and costumery afford a distinct tactical advantage: they allow Anonymous to attack the church, and when the church retaliates it just makes them look silly. Protestors have mostly steered clear of the law, but a few were detained here and there. By 2010, Chanology protests took place in over one hundred cities across the globe.

The lulzy nature of the protests is best illustrated by Operation Slickpubes. On January 8, 2009, a teenage protestor covered his body with Vaseline and pubic hair, presumably gathered from several friends. He ran into the New York Scientology building and rubbed his body on as much church property as he could. The entire affair is documented on YouTube.

Coleman says that Project Chanology is still active, even though it no longer gets any press.

It doesn’t have the kind of same support it used to, but there’s definitely a core group of people who are dedicated, and in some odd way they’ve achieved some of their major goals. Prior to Chanology, I was very scared of being public about my work on the Church of Scientology. Now I’ve given 25 talks on Chanology and geeky protests against Chanology, so in many ways it was very effective.

Old time anti-Scientology activists from the Usenet days are mostly unimpressed by the activities of Project Chanology. They see the effort as counterproductive. Andreas Heldal-Lund, founder of the anti-Scientology website Operation Clambake, says, “Attacking Scientology like that will just make them play the religious persecution card. They will use it to defend their own counter actions when they try to shatter criticism and crush critics without mercy.” However, some critics have formed alliances with Anonymous when they agreed to stop DDoSing.

Gabriella Coleman argues that Anonymous’s attacks have done some real good.

Scientology has received so much negative attention that they’ve refrained from legal intimidation tactics. If I had released some of the papers I’ve released recently six years ago, I would have been embroiled in legal battles. Anonymous really changed the landscape.

Sarah Palin Email Hack

On September 16, 2008, 20-year-old /b/tard David Kernell, the son of a Democratic state representative of Tennessee, hacked into Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email account. The hack was as simple as pie. Most password-protected websites will ask users a security question like “What was the name of your first pet?” or “Where did you go to high school?” If a user can’t remember his or her password, they can change their password by confirming their identity through correctly answering the security question.

Kernell got his hands on Palin’s email address, then googled her widely available personal info in order to access her emails, which he then posted to /b/. Kernell had hoped to find incriminating information, but came up dry. He posted the account and password to /b/, and then another 4chan user changed the password and tried to alert a friend of Palin’s. The account was eventually locked by Yahoo! when a bunch of /b/tards tried to access it at once. Epic fail, as far as 4chan was concerned, but Kernell faced graver consequences: a year in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

Kernell, going by the name “rubico,” recounted the tale on /b/, which was then published at Gawker and elsewhere.

Hello, /b/ as many of you might already know, last night sarah palin’s yahoo was “hacked” and caps were posted on /b/, i am the lurker who did it, and i would like to tell the story.

after the password recovery was reenabled, it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)

the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college.

I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower . . .