NTERNET GOVERNANCE PAPERS PAPER NO. 3 — SEPTEMBER 2013 Anonymous in Context: The Politics and...

8/12/2019 NTERNET GOVERNANCE PAPERS PAPER NO. 3 SEPTEMBER 2013 Anonymous in Context: The Politics and Power

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INTERNET GOVERNANCE PAPERSPAPER NO. 3 SEPTEMBER 2013

Anonymous in Context:The Politics and Power behind the Mask

Gabriella Coleman


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INTERNET GOVERNANCE PAPERSPAPER NO. 3 SEPTEMBER 2013

Anonymous in Context:The Politics and Power behind the MaskGabriella Coleman


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57 Erb Street West

Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6C2

Canada

tel +1 519 885 2444 fax +1 519 885 5450

www.cigionline.org

Copyright 2013 by The Centre for International Governance Innovation

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do

not necessarily reflect the views of The Centre for International Governance

Innovation or its Operating Board of Directors or International Board of

Governors.

This work was carried out with the support of The Centre for

International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

(www.cigionline.org). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives License. To view

this license, visit (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). For

re-use or distribution, please include this copyright notice.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CIGI gratefully acknowledges the support of the Copyright Collective of

Canada.

The author would like to thank Mark Raymond, Christopher Prince, Darin

Barney and Maya Richman for their generous and valuable comments.


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CONTENTS

About Organized Chaos: Reimagining the Internet Project 1

About the Author 1

Executive Summary 2

Introduction 2

The Formation and Mutations of Anonymous 4

20052010: From Trolling to Irreverent Activism 4

20102012: The Explosion of Digital Direct Action 5

The Logics of Anonymous12

Weapons of the Geek 14

Conclusion 18Works Cited 21

About CIGI 22


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ANONYMOUS IN CONTEXT: THE POLITICS AND POWER BEHIND THE MASK

GABRIELLA COLEMAN 1 CIGIONLINE.OR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gabriella Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scienticand Technological Literacy at McGill University.Trained as an anthropologist, she teaches, writesand researches on the ethics of computer hacking, with a focus on open source software and the digitalprotest ensemble Anonymous. She is the author ofCoding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (published in 2012 by Princeton University Press) andis currently working on a second book on Anonymous.

ABOUT ORGANIZED CHAOS:REIMAGINING THE INTERNETPROJECT

Historically, Internet governance has been

accomplished en passant. It has emerged largely fromthe actions of computer scientists and engineers,in interaction with domestic legal and regulatorysystems. Beginning at least with the 20032005 World Summit on the Information Society process,however, there has been an explicit rule-makingagenda at the international level. This strategicagenda is increasingly driven by a coalition of states including Russia, China and the Arab states thatis organized and has a clear, more state-controlledand monetary vision for the Internet. Advanced

industrial democracies and other states committedto existing multi-stakeholder mechanisms have adifferent view they regard Internet governance asimportant, but generally lack coherent strategies forInternet governance especially at the internationallevel. Given the Internets constant evolution and itseconomic, political and social importance as a publicgood, this situation is clearly untenable.

A coherent strategy is needed to ensure that difculttrade-offs between competing interests, as well asbetween distinct public values, are managed in aconsistent, transparent and accountable manner thataccurately reects public priorities. Guided by theseconsiderations, CIGI researchers believe they can playa constructive role in creating a strategy for statescommitted to multi-stakeholder models of Internetgovernance.

In aiming to develop this strategy, the project members will consider what kind of Internet the world wantsin 2020, and will lay the analytical groundwork forfuture Internet governance discussions, most notablythe upcoming decennial review of the World Summiton the Information Society. This project was launchedin 2012. The Internet Governance Paper series willresult in the publication of a book in early 2014.

ACRONYMS

ACTA Anti-Counterfeiting Trade AgreementBART Bay Area Rapid TransitDDoS distributed denial of serviceEDT Electronic Disturbance TheatreEFF Electronic Frontier FoundationIRC Internet Relay ChatLOIC Low Orbit Ion CannonNSA National Security Agency PR public relations

SOPA Stop Online Piracy Act


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INTERNET GOVERNANCE PAPERS: PAPER NO. 3


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Since 2010, digital direct action, including leaks,hacking and mass protest, has become a regularfeature of political life on the Internet. This paper

considers the source, strengths and weaknessof this activity through an in-depth analysis of Anonymous, the protest ensemble that has beenadept at magnifying issues, boosting existing usually oppositional movements and convertingamorphous discontent into a tangible form. It hasbeen remarkably effective, despite lacking thehuman and nancial resources to engage in long-term strategic thinking or planning. Anonymous hasneither the steady income nor the scal sponsorshipto support a dedicated team tasked with recruitingindividuals, coordinating activities and developingsophisticated software. Wherein, therefore, lies thepower of Anonymous? How has it managed tostrike such fear into corporations, governments andother groups? This paper answers these questions byexamining the intersecting elements that contributeto Anonymous contemporary geopolitical power:its ability to land media attention, its bold and

recognizable aesthetics, its participatory openness,the misinformation that surrounds it and, inparticular, its unpredictability. Anonymous signalsthe growing importance of what I call weapons ofthe geek,a modality of politics exercised by a classof privileged and visible actors who are often at thecentre of economic life. Among geeks and hackers,political activities are rooted in concrete experiencesof their craft administering a server or editing videos skills channelled toward bolstering civilliberties, such as privacy.

INTRODUCTION

In 2012, Obamas re-election campaign teamassembled a talented and dedicated groupof programmers, system administrators,mathematicians and data scientists to develop

software that would help the incumbent presidentsecure a second term. Used for fundraising and votertargeting, the system also crunched and analyzeddata to ne-tune voter targeting with the hope ofgiving the campaign a critical edge over Republicanpresidential candidate Mitt Romney. Amid muchfanfare after Obamas victory, journalists praised hisstar-studded technology team, detailing membershard work, success and travails heralding thesystem a stellar success.

One of the teams major concerns, however, wasnot reported in the media. At all costs, the Obamateam wanted to avoid attracting the attention of Anonymous, a banner used by individuals andgroups to organize diverse forms of collective action,ranging from street protests to distributed denial ofservice (DDoS) campaigns to hacking. The Obamacampaign team treated Anonymous as (potentially)being even more of a nuisance than the foreign statehackers who had inltrated the McCain and Obamacampaigns in 2008.1 If Anonymous had successfullyaccessed servers or DDoS-ed the campaign website,it would have ignited media attention and potentially

battered the campaigns reputation. Although thisalone would not likely have jeopardized Obamaschances for re-election (since his team was condentthat there was no controversial information to leak),a visit from Anonymous was considered a realpossibility and liability.

Unlike Anonymous, many hackers worksurreptitiously. Organizations that have been hackedusually get to decide whether or not to disclose

their situations to the public. This was the case, forexample, with The New York Times , which made the

1 See Brian Todd (2008), Computers at the Headquarters of

the Obama and McCain Campaigns Were Hacked CNN Conrms,

CNN, November 6, available at: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

2008/11/06/computers-of-obama-mccain-campaigns-hacked.


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decision to go public after allegedly being targetedby Chinese state hackers for months. Anonymous,on the other hand, seeks publicity before and afterevery successful action.

There is a paradox at work here: state-supportedhacking is generally much better organized andfunded and, in some respects, far more powerfulthan actions undertaken by Anonymous. Stuxnetis a perfect example. Developed by the Israeliand American governments, this state-of-the-art malware was used to disable Irans capacity toproduce enriched uranium. While Anonymous onceclaimed to have created Stuxnet, its statement wasimmediately identied as a hoax. Anonymous lacksthe human and nancial resources to engage in thelong-term strategic thinking or planning requiredto code military-grade software. It has neither thesteady income nor the scal sponsorship to supporta dedicated team tasked with recruiting individuals,coordinating activities and developing sophisticatedsoftware.

Anonymous is difcult to pin down. Some Anons work independently, while others work in smallteams or join a swarm of demonstrators during alarge-scale campaign. Anonymous tends to ride andamplify the wave of existing events or causes. Evenif it magnies and extends the scope of an event sometimes so signicantly as to alter its nature orsignicance the campaign eventually ends as the wave hits the shore. Sometimes Anonymous missesthe wave, especially when the mainstream mediafails to jump on board to report on its operations.

Wherein, therefore, lies the power of Anonymous?How has it managed to strike such fear intocorporations, governments and other groups, suchas the Obama campaign team, and accomplish itsobjectives?

This paper showcases various intersecting elementsthat contribute to Anonymous contemporarygeopolitical power: its ability to land media attention,its bold and recognizable aesthetics, its participatoryopenness and the misinformation that surrounds it.One feature stands out: Anonymous unpredictability.

Take, for example, its birth as an activist endeavour.Before 2008, the name Anonymous was deployedalmost exclusively for trolling, which in Internetparlance means pulling pranks targeting people andorganizations, desecrating reputations and revealinghumiliating or personal information. Trolling wascoordinated on the Internet, often on the imageboard 4chan.org, for the sake of the lulz, that is,the laughs.Anonymous accidentally althoughdramatically enlarged its repertoire of tacticsin 2008, when it sprouted an activist sensibilityduring a full-edged pranking campaign againstthe Church of Scientology. By 2010, distinct andstable activist nodes of Anonymous had emerged.The name Anonymous was increasingly being usedto herald activist actions, often in ways that deedexpectations.

Mutability and dynamism continue to be a staple of Anonymous activism and historical development. As a result, it is difcult to forecast when or why Anonymous will strike, when a new node willappear, whether a campaign will be successful andhow Anonymous might change direction or tacticsduring the course of an operation. A by-product ofthe Internet, Anonymous rises up most forcefullyand shores up the most support when defending

values associated with this global communicationplatform, such as free speech. As one Anonymousparticipant phrased it during an interview, free


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face of chaos that laughs at the face of tragedy(Anonymous, 2007) and captured trollings terrifyingpotential, especially for those who are not in onthe joke.

Six months after being labelled the Internet hatemachine, other individuals, largely from 4chan,used the name Anonymous and its associatediconography (headless men in black suits) totroll and subsequently organize earnest streetdemonstrations. Trolling against the Church ofScientology began in January 2008, catalyzed by theinfamous internal recruitment video of Tom Cruisepraising the churchs efforts to create new and betterrealities.The video, leaked by critics of the church,promptly went viral.

When the Church of Scientology threatened Webpublishers such as Gawker with legal action if theydid not remove the video, Anonymous initiated what even today is considered by Anonymous tobe one of their most legendary raids. Impelled bythe lulz, Anonymous launched DDoS attacks to jam Scientology websites, ordered unpaid pizzasand escorts for Scientology churches across North America, faxed images of nude body parts tochurches and relentlessly phone pranked the church,in particular the Dianetics hotline (where callers canget advice about the rst truly workable technologyof the mind). Within a matter of weeks, trolling gave way to Project Chanology, a prolonged and earnestpolitical campaign against the Church of Scientology, which continues to this day.

Various forces and factors unexpectedly convergedto ignite this metamorphosis. One inspiration wasa viral video calling for the systematic dismantlingof the Church of Scientology (Anonymous, 2008). Although the video was intended as a joke (that is,for the lulz), it prompted a debate about whether Anonymous should more purposively protestthe church or remain faithful to its madcap roots.

Enough individuals were willing to move forward with the proposed experiment, and on February 10,2008, over 7,000 individuals protested in 127 cities.Many demonstrators sported plastic Guy Fawkesmasks in order to conceal their identities. Since then,the mask has remained Anonymous signature icon.

Although the protests were well organized andhailed as a triumph by participants, many of themknew very little about the Church of Scientology andits abuses, at least outside of pop culture references. A combination of mischief and exploration drovemany of them to streets. Since the image board4chan is anonymous and discourages even the use ofpseudonyms (persistent nicknames and identities),many Anons went for the rare opportunity tomeet their brethren with no intention of engagingin further activism. Nevertheless, a large enoughnumber of rabble-rousers carried on with thedemonstrations to constitute Anonymous as anactivist enterprise; copious media coverage (which isa common feature in the history of Anonymous) alsosecured the ongoing life of Anonymous as a mediumfor directed political organizing.

Although many participants, especially trolls,contested Anonymous newfound political will,enough Anons stayed on to sustain a nascentpolitical movement. The seeds of unpredictability,irreverence and deviance had also been sownamong these politically minded Anons. Somedegree of pranking and trickery has played a part in Anonymous political operations ever since.

20102012: The Explosion of Digital DirectAction

In 2009 and 2010, Anonymous actions were centredon Project Chanology and trolling. Some peopleparticipated in Project Chanology solely online,engaging in boisterous discussion on the popular web forum Why We Protest. Others, especially


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those living in or close to major cities across North America and Europe, showed up at monthly streetprotests rain or shine (or snow) to mock Scientologyadherents and air the documented human rightsabuses of the church. They were supported by asmall cadre of committed Scientology defectors,some of whom started to identify as Anonymous.Some of these defectors hail Anonymous as thegame changer that enabled them to be openand public about their ordeals with the church(Christman, 2012).

During this period, Anonymous branched outpolitically. For instance, some individuals who were active in Chanology contributed to Iransfervent (though unsuccessful) green revolution. In2009, denizens of 4chan were still using the name Anonymous for notorious trolling escapades. Trollingbegan to wane in 2010, when Anonymous politicalportfolio diversied considerably. At the time of this writing, pure trolling under the name Anonymoushad largely ceased. There is, however, nothingpreventing its resurrection.

In February 2010, individuals coordinatedOperation Titstorm, a DDoS attack on the Australian government to protest legislation aimedat curbing pornography by requiring Internet serviceproviders to use lters. No government should havethe right to refuse its citizens access to informationsolely because they perceive it to be unwanted,declared Anonymous in an email sent to the press.The Australian government will learn that one doesnot mess with our porn. No one messes with our

access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for anyreason(quoted in Cheng, 2010).

The political use of a DDoS attack placed Anonymous in a camp alongside hacktivists likethe Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT), whichhad hosted virtual sit-insin the late 1990s. In 1997,for instance, the EDT ooded Mexican government

websites to support the Zapatistas struggles forautonomy. While Anonymous had initially deployedDDoS attacks during their rst trolling raid againstthe Church of Scientology, Project Chanologyabandoned this tactic. It never approved of nor reliedmuch on hacking. To this day, Project Chanologyopposes the use of DDoS attacks and tends to dismissthe networks that deploy them. To acknowledgeits internal feuds and sectarianism, Anonymouseventually adopted the refrain Anonymous is notunanimous. This message has yet to penetratepublic consciousness the mainstream mediastill tends to describe participants only as hackers,technological actors already freighted with simplistic

and pejorative associations.In September 2010, seven months after OperationTitstorm (and two years after venturing into the world of political activism), a new node hatchedfollowing a rift over protest styles. Organizing inthe name of Internet freedom, a group of Anonshad set their eyes on protesting the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) through legal channels alone. A handful of the

group clamoured for direct action tactics, whichincluded black fax, emails, phone calls, pizzas calledto the ofce, a full on classic Anon assault,as oneparticipant described it to me. In the minority, they were banned from a particular Internet Relay Chat(IRC) server, but naturally could still use the name.So they did, and proceeded to blitz these guys[copyright industry] into paying attentionby DDoS-ing pro-copyright associations such as the MotionPicture Association of America in defence of piracyand le sharing.

This group eventually managed to attract a sizablestreet team of participants and supporters. Afterroaming from one IRC network to another, theseparticipants eventually established a dedicated IRCserver named AnonOps in November 2010. This


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network, known by the name of its IRC server, would come to boldly embrace DDoS tactics andeventually endorse hacking as a political weapon,thus becoming one of the biggest and mostcontroversial media sensations.

By early December 2010, however, AnonOps IRCchat rooms, once bustling with life, had come to astandstill. Core AnonOps participants systemadministrators, organizers, media makers andhackers were concerned by its dwindling numberof supporters. Then on December 9, 2010, the numberof supporters skyrocketed. AnonOps managed to tapinto, channel and thus render visible the collectivefuror over what its supporters deemed to be a whollyinappropriate act of censorship against the whistle-blowing organization WikiLeaks, which had causeda restorm of controversy after releasing a trove ofleaked classied diplomatic cables. Anonymous,specically AnonOps, launched a DDoS campaignaimed at PayPal, MasterCard and Visa in response totheir refusal to accept donations for WikiLeaks frontman, Julian Assange.

The technical work of jamming website access wascoordinated by a select number of participants usingbotnets (a large network of compromised computers).Many other individuals contributed using a toolknown as Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC). An opensource application available for download on theInternet, LOIC allows users to contribute to a DDoScampaign. LOIC lacked privacy protections, however,and participants were not consistently informed thatthey would be put at legal risk unless they took extra

precautions to hide their IP addresses. (Eventually,14 individuals, now known as the PayPal 14, wouldbe arrested in the United States in mid-July 2011over alleged participation in these events.) Thismass participation may not have been technicallynecessary, and it was certainly ethically dubious.Nevertheless, it revealed to the world at large the

level and scope of supporters disenchantment with what they saw as unacceptable corporate censorship.

This gathering was also one of the rst large-scalespontaneous online demonstrations. The outpouring

of support even surprised AnonOps. Numbers onthe IRC channel jumped from 70 individuals to 7,000in a couple of days (a fraction were also bots). As oneparticipant explained, this left AnonOps stunnedand a little frightened.The targeting of WikiLeaks was yet another catalyst for politicizing Anonymous;some key participants and organizers active today jumped aboard at a momentous time.

By 2011, both Anonymous and WikiLeaks were

recognized as staunch albeit controversial advocates for free speech. Both were ready to pounceinto action, in distinct ways, in the face of censorship.Prompted by the Tunisian governments blocking of WikiLeaks, on January 2, 2011, AnonOps releaseda video launching OpTunisia. The campaign wasinitially spearheaded by one person, who corralleda group of participants, some of whom becamemoderators (they helped keep orderon the publicIRC channel by keeping the conversation on-topicand kicking trolls off the channel). A technical teamof hackers attacked Tunisian government websitesand undermined software the dictatorial regime was using to spy on citizens. Many others aidedby translating information, writing manifestos andcrafting publicity videos.

Although Anonymous initially intervened to stampout censorship, the same team continued to lend ahelping hand as country after country in the regionunderwent revolution. Individuals organized in adedicated AnonOps chat room, and the operationsbecame collectively known as the Freedom Ops.For several months, they teamed up with localactivists and hackers in Libya, Egypt, Algeria andSyria. Although many participants have since moved


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on or simply vanished, some forged relationshipsand connections that continue to this day.

By this time, Anonymous had becomemultitudinous, prolic and unpredictable. In

January 2011, AnonOps was buzzing with activity,making it impossible for one person to stay abreastof all the developments. The IRC network houseddozens of distinct chat channels for other ongoingoperations to support the environment, studentmovements in Latin America and WikiLeaks, amongother causes.

Then, early in February 2011, an impromptuoperation targeting the corporate security

rm HBGary fundamentally and dramaticallyrecongured the political culture of AnonOps.Participants transitioned from covert to publicforms of hacking, such as Web defacing. Hacking,always a tool but often used more clandestinely,became a public act, wielded for multiple purposes: vengeance, turf protection, technological assistance,theatrics, exposing security vulnerabilities, searchingfor information to leak and for the lulz.

Much like the formation of Chanology, thistransition wasnt planned. It was a spontaneous actof revenge prompted by the actions of Aaron Barr,CEO of HBGary. Barr boasted that his rm hadcompromised Anonymous, claiming to a reporterthat it had allegedly discovered the real identitiesof top operatives and was ready to hand them overto the FBI; a spreadsheet of names had been foundand circulated online. In response, an AnonOps crewtook the initiative to locate security vulnerabilitieson HBGary servers and search for information toleak. A small group of hackers commandeeredBarrs Twitter account. They hacked HBGary servers,downloaded 70,000 emails and deleted les. Theypurportedly wiped out Barrs iPhone and iPad, andthen published the companys data alongside Barrsprivate communications. They sent the following

cocky rationale to a reporter for the Tech Herald, whohad covered their actions for many months:

Let us teach you a lesson youllnever forget: you dont mess with

Anonymous. You especially dontmess with Anonymous simplybecause you want to jump on a trendfor public attention. You have blindlycharged into the Anonymous hive, ahive from which youve tried to stealhoney. Did you think the bees wouldnot defend it? Well here we are. Youve angered the hive, and now you are being stung. It would appearthat security experts are not expertlysecured. (quoted in Ragan, 2011)

Anonymous unearthed a damning documententitled The WikiLeaks Threat, which outlinedhow HBGary, in conjunction with the US Chamberof Commerce, the Bank of America, PalantirTechnologies and other security companies, couldundermine WikiLeaks by submitting fake documentsto the organization. Anons also found evidenceof plans to tarnish the reputations of WikiLeakssupporters, including journalists such as GlennGreenwald. Celebrated by Anonymous at large forrestocking the lulz, this operation inspired a teamof technological elites to break away and devotethemselves to the pursuit of mischief, unambiguouslyproclaimed in their choice of name: LulzSec.When you get over nine thousand PMs [privatemessages on IRC] asking to help in some random

opexplained one member, its a case of the hell with this, I want to go have some fun.Although thepress usually equated LulzSec with Anonymous, thehacker crew attempted to distance itself from thelarger collective due to their freewheeling attitudeand their indiscriminate choice of targets. In contrastto Anonymous, for instance, LulzSec went after the


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press, who had been totally off limits, even amongthe networks such as AnonOps that favoured illegaldirect action tactics.

It is likely for this reason that the infamous Sony

PlayStation hack, executed between April 17 and19, 2011, was often retroactively (and, as far as weknow, incorrectly) attributed to LulzSec and, at thetime of the hack, to Anonymous, as LulzSec had yetto come into being. The massive breach forced Sonyto shut down the network for a prolonged period oftime, leading to signicant nancial loss and scoresof irate gamers around the world. To this day, while ahandful of LulzSec members have been prosecutedfor hacking, including against Sony Pictures, noone has been either indicted or prosecuted for thePlayStation Network outage. 4

With constant news coverage detailing their 50-day spree, hackers and hacking groups became thepublic (and notorious) face of Anonymous, even ifother operations were ongoing and LulzSec had, forthe time being, proclaimed its independence from Anonymous. On May 13, 2011, LulzSec declaredon Twitter: Must say again: were not AnonOps, Anonymous, a splinter group of Anonymous, oreven an afliate of Anonymous. We are #Lulzsec :D(LulzSec, 2011). The team provoked a measure ofcontroversy among Anons for being such a loosecannon. Although LulzSec and Anonymous sharedcommon principles, a common culture and evensome personnel, there was still enough ideologicaldistance between the two that many Anons, along with security professionals, geeks, activists and

hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, eitherseemed to genuinely enjoy their antics and supportthem, or were at least compelled enough to watch

4 See Charles Arthur (2013), LulzSec: The Unanswered

Questions, The Guardian , May 16, available at: www.guardian.co.uk/

technology/2013/may/16/lulzsec-unanswered-questions.

the wild show LulzSec put on as it targeted PBS, FoxNews, Sony Pictures and EVE Online, along withdozens more.

This small crew of hackers, embroiled in their own

dramas, eventually retired on June 25, 2011, butmany of the same individuals subsequently bandedunder Operation Antisec.Unlike LulzSec, Antisecloudly and proudly branded itself as an Anonymousoperation. While not forsaking deviant humour(which had been a core feature of LulzSecs publicpersona), Antisec adopted a more militant tone.This was largely attributable to two hackers: JeremyHammond, a political radical who is currently in jailawaiting sentencing, and Hector Xavier Monsegur,known as Sabu, who worked with Anonymous,LulzSec and Antisec. Soon after being arrested on June 7, 2011, Sabu also cooperated with lawenforcement as a FBI informant. Soon after, hebecame the public face of Antisec through hispopular Twitter account, where he specialized in140-character tirades against the groups maintargets: the government, security rms, the policeand corporations.

While Antisec was busy at work over the summerof 2011, several stable and distinct entities wereoperating simultaneously: AnonOps; Chanology;Cabin Cr3w (a small team that had formed, in part,to poke fun at Antisec, but conducted its own legaland illegal operations); a new network known as VoxAnon (which initially formed in opposition to AnonOps); as well as regional networks in Brazil,India and elsewhere. With few exceptions, media

accounts of Anonymous have tended to focus onhacking, which has now become a convenientshorthand to describe Anonymous activities;however, many of Anonymous operations, past andpresent, have little to do with hacking. Anonymouseffectiveness stems, in part, from its tactical diversity.Operation BART (OpBart) provides a striking case.


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Once again, Anonymous took action in responseto an act of censorship: In August 2011, the SanFrancisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) decided todisable mobile phone reception on station platformsin order to thwart planned protests against policebrutality. Anonymous naturally publicized the well-attended street demonstrations they helped organize. A couple of individuals also hacked into BARTscomputers and released customer data in order togarner media attention. An illicit, semi-nude photoof BARTs ofcial spokesperson, Linton Johnson, was republished on the bartlulzwebsite, with thefollowing brazen rationalization: If you are going tobe a dick to the public, then Im sure you dont mind

showing your dick to the public(Bartlulz, 2011).Soon after OpBart, activity on AnonOps once againcame to a halt. Its IRC network was often taken ofineby a rogue hackers DDoS attack. VoxAnon providedanother home base, but it often came under attack as well, and it had yet to pull off a major operation. Inthe fall of 2011, many Anons turned their attentionto the Occupy protests sweeping North Americaand Europe. Even before Occupy ofcially began on

September 17, 2011, Anonymous had churned outmany videos and images, essentially acting as aninformal but vital public relations (PR) wingof the movement and drumming up support. Some Anons chose to encamp with the protesters, whileothers provided technological assistance. At thecamps, individuals without any prior connectionto Anonymous Internet-based networks sportedplastic Guy Fawkes masks.

In the winter of 2011-2012, Anonymous onlineactivity roared again. In late December, Antisecannounced that it had hacked the global intelligencerm Stratfor. It initially used customers credit cardsto donate to charities la Robin Hood inhonour of Lulzxmas, and eventually handed offcompany emails to WikiLeaks. By this time, a number

of Twitter accounts, such as Your Anonymous News, AnonyOps and AnonymousIRC, had amassedhundreds of thousands of followers. The largest, Your Anonymous News, currently has over one millionsubscribers and roughly 25 individual contributors.This trend demonstrates that while Anonymousrelies on the media to amplify its actions and amasssupport, it is not wholly dependent on corporatemedia to get word out or issue calls to action.

The Stratfor affair was followed by a urry of widespread participatory protest activity between January and March 2012. This activity largelyemanated out of AnonOps and VoxAnon, with widesupport on Twitter and other forums. First, there were protests against a looming copyright bill, theStop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the passage of which unravelled due to a massive and elaborateoutpouring of dissent. The linchpin was a blackoutday,a Web-based protest of unprecedented scale. Byraising awareness about SOPA and publicizing theblackout day, Anonymous contribution was notable.On January 17, 2012, non-prots, some prominent Web companies, public interest groups and

thousands of individuals temporarily removed their websites from the Internet to voice their oppositionto the bill. Thousands of citizens called or emailedtheir political representatives to voice their concerns.

The next day, federal authorities orchestratedthe takedown of the popular le-sharing siteMegaUpload. The companys controversial founder,Kim Dotcom, was arrested. Anonymous activists were outraged at the governments pre-emptive

takedown of this popular website: it seemed toconrm that if bills like SOPA became law, Internetcensorship would become commonplace. AlthoughKim Dotcom had not yet been found guilty of piracy,his property was conscated and his website shutdown.


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In the wake of these events, Anonymous coordinatedits largest DDoS campaign to date. This time, it didnot reach out to the public at large to take part; itrelied on its own (or rented) botnets. Anonymoustargeted a slew of websites, including the homepagesof Universal Music, the FBI, the US Copyright Ofce,the Recording Industry Association of America andthe Motion Picture Association of America, all of which experienced downtime.

Anonymous reappeared in Europe a few weeks later,as massive on- and ofine demonstrations wereunfolding to protest ACTA, another internationalcopyright law. After the Polish government agreedto ratify ACTA, Anonymous took down a slew ofgovernment websites and publicized the streetprotests that were sweeping Krakow. Soon after,as part of a self-conscious publicity stunt and withno connection to Anonymous groups, membersof the left-leaning Palikots Movement politicalparty concealed their faces with paper-cut-out GuyFawkes masks during a parliamentary session toprotest ACTA. The European Union scrapped ACTAin July 2012.

According to a Wall Street Journal article fromFebruary 21, 2012, weeks after the urry of protests,the US National Security Agency (NSA) labelled Anonymous an imminent threat to national security,claiming that Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limitedpower outage through a cyber attack (Gorman,2012). Subsequent news reports quoted Anonymousactivists and security experts who dismissed the

NSAs claims as fear mongering.5

For all of its legaland illegal tactics, to date, Anonymous had never

5 See Sam Biddle (2012), No, Idiots, Anonymous Isnt

Going to Destroy the Power Grid, February 21, available at:

http://gizmodo.com/5886995/no-idiots-anonymous-isnt-going-to-

destroy-the-power-grid.

publicly called for such an attack, and there is noevidence to suggest that it had even considereddoing so.

On March 5, 2012, one of the core Antisec hackers,

Jeremy Hammond, was arrested by the FBI. The nextday, Fox News broke the story that one of the mostprominent Anonymous hackers, Sabu, had been working as an FBI informant subsequent to his arrestin June 2011. This conrmed the long-standingsuspicion that informants had inltrated Anonymousand that Antisec had been at least partly manipulatedby government interests. Mistrust, which had alwayshung over the Anonymous networks, began to give way to a bleaker, ominous paranoia. Many wondered whether this would put an end to Anonymous.

Antisecs hacking activity subsided for a period oftime, but in March 2012, hackers and others helpederect a new leaking platform, Par:AnoIA (Potentially Alarming Research). Hackers have expressed theneed to re-shift internal security practices in orderto protect individuals from ongoing governmentinltration.

Anonymous-led activity picked up again over thesummer of 2012 with a urry of international ops.OpQuebec, which defaced provincial police websites,gained momentum in May 2012 after the passage ofBill 78, a law curtailing protest activity. Organized in June 2012, OpIndia rallied on the streets; activiststook down a state-owned Internet service provider website for blocking le-sharing sites.

In early 2013, Anonymous hackers launched

Operation Last Resort and once again initiated astring of Web defacements and hacks, this time inmemory of the activist and hacker Aaron Swartz.Many believe that Swartz committed suicide dueto his ongoing legal battles with the AmericanDepartment of Justice and the prospect of facingdecades in jail for downloading a large cache of


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academic journal articles from JSTOR, the scholarlyarchive.

The Logics of Anonymous

Relying on a fairly predictable script, mostcommentators including journalists andacademics alike usually introduce Anonymousas an evasive and shadowy group of hackers. Thisdescription distorts sociological reality. Although Anonymous is certainly a home to hackers, a greatmany Anons are neither hackers nor difcult to nd.If you want to talk with some participants, simply logonto one of their IRC networks.

Invented in 1989, IRC is still used by geeks andhackers to develop software and (as its namesuggests) to chat. IRC is unlike other media weare familiar with today it is entirely text-based,generally free of candy-coloured icons or cute noisesand conducted with its own mix of text commandsand norms of communication. By todays standards,IRC provides bare-bones functionality, but its stayingpower and appeal likely lies in this simplicity. Idealfor real-time communication and coordinating

operations, many Anons settle onto various stableIRC networks, where they converse on public orprivate channels. In many regards, it functions likean online social club open 24 hours a day. This is where lulzy humour ourishes and intimate bondsof fellowship are formed. Anons arent required touse IRC, though; some prefer to act alone, whileothers turn to Web forums, Twitter and/or other chatprotocols. Illegal activities are orchestrated on inviteonly, encrypted communication channels.

Nevertheless, compared to spheres of hacker activity where contributions (and often respect) requiretechnical skills, Anonymous is more participatory, which sustains its dynamism and exibility. In orderto be part of Anonymous, one need simply self-identify as Anonymous. No particular abilities are

required. To be sure, hackers (including programmers,security researchers and system administrators) areessential to Anonymous networks. They erect andmaintain communication infrastructure, and inltrateservers to expose weak security or in their hunt forinformation to leak. Given the mass medias frenziedobsession with hackers, their actions invariably naba majority of the headlines. While hackers obviously wield more technical power and their opinions carry weight, they dont erect entrance barriers nor controlthe evolution of Anonymous. Individuals withouttechnical skills can participate by collectively writingpress communiqus, giving media interviews onIRC, designing propaganda posters, editing videos

and mining information that is publicly availablebut difcult to access. To get the word out andattract new volunteers, participants have developedbest practices. Back in 2010 and for much of 2011,it was common for a small dedicated team toconstantly ood 4chan with propaganda materialto recruit participants. Today individuals runninglarge Anonymous Twitter accounts coordinate tospark a Twitter storm with established hash tagsto publicize an issue in the hopes it will trend.

Organizers thus emerge to advise, inspire and corraltroops, and some even broker between differentgroups and networks; brokering is vital for theformation of inter-network ad hoc teams.

No single group or individual can dictate the use ofthe name or iconography of Anonymous, much lessclaim legal ownership of its names, icons and actions.It has now become the quintessential anti-brandbrand. Naturally, this has helped Anonymous spreadacross the globe. Although Anonymous may at timesappear to be chaotic, participants rarely choosetargets randomly. Operations tend to be reactive;existing local, regional and international eventsand causes can trigger action from Anonymous.Leaking and exposing security vulnerabilities aretwo common proactive interventions.


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All types of operations can usually be linked to aparticular IRC network, such as AnonOps, AnonNetor Voxanon or a Twitter account dedicated to theoperation, such as @OpLastResort. Althoughindividuals on these networks generally take creditfor their operations, they sometimes deny theirparticipation. Naturally, regional issues commandthe attention of regional networks. To date, and witha few exceptions, regional operations have garneredscant academic or media attention; they may proveimpossible to study retrospectively.

Only a handful of actions performed under thebanner of Anonymous have been atypical, such asthe lone anti-abortion hacker who targeted Britainslargest abortion clinic.6 While predictions of chaosunleashed by evil or maladjusted hackers loomlarge in the states anxieties about Anonymous, theyremain largely unrealized. To date, no Anonymousoperation has been diabolical and no existing nodehas ever expressed the desire to do something asrash as taking down the power grid (as the NSA oncepredicted). Thats not to say that all of Anonymousoperations are laudable, or effective. Indeed, since the

character and tactics of each Anonymous operationare distinct, blanket moral judgments are hard tomake and tend to be overly simplistic. In some cases,targeted individuals and organizations have sufferedsome combination of harm to their reputation andnances. (From Anonymous point of view, this isthe desired outcome.) Given its unpredictability,past actions are no basis for predicting the future.Still, reckless operations meant to endanger liveshave, thus far, never been part of Anonymous moral

calculus or tactical repertoire.

6 See Ben Quinn (2012), Anti-abortion activism escalating,

warns clinic targeted by vigil, March 13, The Guardian, available at:

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/13/anti-abortion-activism-clinic-

vigil.

The majority of individual Anons never break thelaw; however, since Anonymous cant generallypolice participants, its possible that some may.Certain factions have certainly done so (and over100 individuals across the globe have been arrestedfor their alleged participation). Any vulnerability willbe exploited, any advantage generally leveraged. Ahandful of Anons have used tactics such as doxing,that is, leaking someones Social Security number andhome address or other personal information. Thistactic was used against BARTs ofcial spokespersonand against numerous police ofcers who pepper-sprayed Occupy protesters.

Journalists highlight these controversial acts, whichinvariably boosts Anonymous prole. Unlikecriminal groups who want to remain hidden, Anonymous seeks the limelight. Partly becauseof its maverick image and transgressive antics, Anonymous has attracted signicant attention,sometimes admiration and sometimes fear. As anentity though, Anonymous is often slippery, evasiveand invisible. Its organizing principle anonymity(or technically pseudonymity) makes it difcult

to tell how many people are involved overall. Although core participants exist and chat channelsare dedicated to reporters, Anonymous has a shiftingcast of characters. Some individuals routinely changetheir online nicknames. If a participant leaves for afew months, catching up can prove frustrating andcertainly time consuming, even more so for anobserver.

Misinformation about Anonymous abounds. Some

of it is self-sown, but some has been foisted uponthe movement. Journalists, even those reporting forreputable news outlets, have at times incorrectly cast


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DDoS campaigns as a subspecies of hacking. 7 In fact,the servers that bear the brunt of DDoS attacks arenot hacked into and do not suffer any permanentdamage or data loss. A successful DDoS blocksaccess to an Internet domain (often a very largeone), but it does not affect an organizations internalcomputer system. If companies follow basic securitybest practices, their nancial payment processing,trading networks and other core infrastructure wontbe sitting wide open on the Internet, vulnerable toan attack. DDoS tactics are political stunts. The sitesthat are the most vulnerable to these attacks tendto be symbols of important infrastructure, not theinfrastructure itself.

To disguise itself further, Anonymous also seeds falseinformation, thereby pulling the wool over the eyesof the media, and even confounding participants. As one organizer put it, so much of Anon[ymous]relies on smoke and mirror tactics.For example, an Anonymous-based group may take credit for a hack,actually given to them by some other hacker or team; Anonymous relies on botnets to knock a websiteofine, but it wont advertise this in its press releases.

It can be hard, at times, to distinguish b from fact,truth from lies. This obfuscation adds to Anonymousmystique and, thus, to its power.

WEAPONS OF THE GEEK

While certainly unique in its bombast andcapriciousness, Anonymous is part of a wellspring ofhackers and geeks taking political matters into theirown hands to make their voices heard, to orchestrate

7 For example, in March 2013, an article in the Los Angeles

Times issued a correction after incorrectly stating in a post that an

indictment charged Anonymous with what amounted to hacking.

See Matt Pearce (2013), Wisconsin man indicted in Anonymous

attack of Koch Industries, Los Angeles Times , March 27 Available at:

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/27/nation/la-na-nn-anonymous-

koch-hack-20130327. The correction appears near the end of the article.

protests over a range of issues, in particularcivil liberties, and to transform policy and law. Anonymous signals the growing importance of whatI call weapons of the geek,in contrast to weaponsof the weak the term anthropologist James Scott(1985) uses to capture the unique, clandestine natureof peasant politics. While weapons of the weakis a modality of politics among disenfranchised,economically marginalized populations who engagein small-scale illicit acts such as foot draggingand minor acts of sabotage that dont appear onthe surface to be political, weapons of the geek is amodality of politics exercised by a class of privilegedand visible actors who often lie at the centre of

economic life. Among geeks and hackers, politicalactivities are rooted in concrete experiences of theircraft administering a server or editing videos skills channelled toward bolstering civil liberties,such as privacy. Unlike peasants, who seek to remaininconspicuous and anonymous, geeks and hackers,even Anonymous, indisputably call attention tothemselves via their volatile, usually controversial,legal and transgressive political acts. They are testingnew possibilities and legal limits for digital civil

disobedience.

Hackers and geeks, diverse in skills, politicalsensibilities and national backgrounds, are naturallyintervening in equally diverse ways. For instance,hackers have crafted a legal mechanism to side-steptraditional copyright regulations: copyleft, a class oflicenses that can be applied to software to renderit open source. Since the early 1990s, hackers havecoded and used privacy and encryption tools suchas Pretty Good Privacy and Tor (originally short forThe Onion Router) to provide technical protectionfrom state and corporate snooping. Dozens of otherexamples of geeks engaging in diverse genres ofcollective action come to mind, from the charteringof new political parties such as the Pirate Party inEurope, to the astonishing proliferation of informal


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workshops, such as hacker labs and spaces, aroundthe world, to the rise of policy geeks educatingpoliticians and staff technologists advising lawyersin advocacy groups.

Hackers and technologists have also been at theforefront of the dramatic resurgence of whistle-blowing. These activities are, in part, the result of theefforts of Julian Assange, who chartered WikiLeaksin 2006, and US solider Chelsea Manning (formerlyBradley Manning),8 who provided WikiLeaks withits most explosive material. Anonymous wouldeventually take the baton of leaking by targetingsecurity rms and governments. To date, the mostsignicant leak has come from Edward Snowden,an ex-NSA employee and system administrator. In June 2013, he conrmed what Anonymous, privacyactivists and journalists have been claiming for years:the NSA not only has vast capabilities to intercept,store and analyze the digital traces and footprintsof citizens and foreigners alike, but in so doing hasbroken numerous laws and lied to Congress.

Within this diverse and expanding ecology ofhacker-based activity one might even view it as anemerging digital environmentalism Anonymousspecializes in acts of disobedience, deance andprotest. It is adept at magnifying issues, boostingexisting (and usually oppositional) movements andconverting amorphous discontent into a tangibleform. Individuals who live at great distances fromeach other, without hefty nancial resources, bandtogether under recognizable names and symbolsto direct attention on and thus judge often quite

swiftly the actions of individuals, corporations andgovernments. To do so, they often exploit a feature ofour collective digital predicament: corporations andgovernments have collected and stored a vast sea of

8 On August 22, 2013, Chelsea Manning announced that she

considers herself a woman and had changed her name.

digital data, often insecurely on unencrypted servers, which can at times be legally accessed, and in othercases illegally procured, but once leaked, is nearlyimpossible to contain and sequester. 9

Since Anonymous forte is publicity, it can create a PRnightmare for its targets. This reects an importantaspect of the contemporary media and informationenvironment: the reputations of institutions orindividuals are now more vulnerable to crediblecritiques and leaks, as well as false smear campaigns.Even if information is not featured on the eveningnews, it may still spread like wildre if enoughindividuals circulate it on social media.

Still, Anonymous stands apart for the unparalleleddegree to which it injects suspense, drama andintrigue into existing or self-generated events.Sometimes it merely pens a manifesto, other timesit ignites a large-scale protest. Each intervention isdistinct, but all benet from Anonymous formidablePR machine. The machine churns out homemade videos, manifestos and images via Twitter, IRCchannels or Web forums, usually generating somedegree of spectacle. In a more general register, itsiconography Guy Fawkes masks and headlesssuited men symbolically and spectacularly assertsthe idea of anonymity, which they embody in deedand words. Anonymous particular elixir of spectacleis especially nourished by its aforementionedunpredictability and mystery: Who exactly arethe men and women behind the mask? What willthey do next? How will police react to their callsfor justice and their threats to release the names

of alleged perpetrators? It thus works to air and

9 See 35% of Companies Worldwide Dont Use Encryption

to Safeguard Business Data(2013), Kaspersky Lab, March 14, available

at: www.kaspersky.com/about/news/virus/2013/35_of_companies_

worldwide_dont_use_encryption_to_safeguard_business_data.


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dramatize a panoply of issues that might otherwisehave remained hidden, elusive or underreported.

Anonymous, already infamous, is hard to sullyfurther, especially due to its relatively minimal funding

requirements. Unlike WikiLeaks, Anonymous has nosalaries to dole out or rent to pay. Costs are largelyconned to hosting IRC servers and renting botnets. As a result, Anonymous, as an entity, has little tolose and, combined with no allegiance to a masterplan or set of goals, this affords them tremendousexperimental freedom in thought and action.

Even if shielded from shocking or degradinginformation about its participants or operations,

charges of terrorism or overly deviant and recklessbehaviour have, on occasion, been levelled againstthe group by government ofcials and journalists.These attempts to discredit Anonymous haveneither stuck as a dominant narrative, nor becomeprevalent, likely because they strike as hyperbolicbecause these activists have not engaged in violentterroristic behaviours.

The bottomless appetite the press has for

sensationalism has made Anonymous notoriety anideal subject for coverage. Fuelling the re of mediahype, as Anonymous often does, may be celebrated,denounced or (fatalistically) accepted, dependingon ones views about the hotly debated nature of journalism. Should the media strive for cool andcontained objectivity? Or for a public that is alreadyaccustomed to some degree of entertainment with itsnews, might an element of fantasy, intrigue, humourand gravitas captivate more attention? Whateverones opinion, Anonymous has become a centralxture in the media because it aligns so well with theprevailing journalistic culture of sensationalism.

One might justiably ask if Anonymous provocationsand publicity, whether self-generated or delivered via the media, can lead to large-scale structural

change or policy reform. While many of Anonymousoperations solely generate publicity, many others havefocussed on yielding other outcomes, although oftencoupled with a savvy media strategy of engagement.For example, during the Arab Spring, Anonymousprovided technological assistance to activists on theground; many of its leaks have given a rare glimpseinto the inner workings of private security companiesseeking to land coveted government contracts forsurveillance or propaganda. Anonymous has exposedgrave human rights abuses, for example, in Burma with OpRohingya, and has instigated numerousstreet demonstrations. However, Anonymous is ill-equipped for self-directed policy reform or targeted

engagement with Internet governance. If participants were to unmask, clean uptheir act and come out tostate or national capitals to pitch their causes, they would no longer be recognizable as Anonymous.

Nevertheless, Anonymous was so notable in theanti-SOPA demonstrations that I received a call froma famous venture capitalist involved with organizingthese protests. He wanted to learn whether itsparticipants could be harnessed a little more directly,

for the purposes of rallying around Internet reform.The beauty and frustration of Anonymous lies inits unruly and unpredictable spontaneity as itsmembers like to boast, with a commonly statedrefrain, We are not your personal army. Thisinability to harness Anonymous directly preventstheir assimilation and neutralization by establishedinstitutional actors. But the venture capitalistsintuition that Anonymous is an important partof the mix was correct. Some Internet advocacyemployees have also told me they cannot publiclysupport nor work with Anonymous, but are cheeringthem on from the sidelines (many hackers are lessthan enthused, seeing Anonymous as too juvenile orirrational for their taste). A number of Anons havealso had numerous behind the scenes discussions with more traditional activists and advocates over


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Internet governance and other policy issues. Thereare, nevertheless, limits to Anonymous ability tointervene in policy reform and it is best viewed as amultifaceted protest ensemble.

Still, the broader effectiveness and success of Anonymous is contingent on the vibrancy anddiversity of its wider political milieu. Anonymous isa niche in a broader ecosystem of geek- and hacker-oriented activism, which includes policy reform,participation in Internet governance and whistle-blowing. Social change requires a diverse tool kit,including ne-tuned interventions targeting policyto rowdy and subversive tactics. In the ght fordigital rights and civil liberties online, Anonymousexists alongside, although not directly working with, advocacy organizations such as the ElectronicFrontier Foundation (EFF).

Distinct modalities need not compete or be mutuallyexclusive; they can and do cross-pollinate to forma broad-based, internally diverse movement. A functioning democracy requires investigative journalists who spend years piecing difcult puzzlestogether, advocacy groups with lawyers and policyspecialists who strategize for legal reform, whistle-blowers who take on individual risk and protestmovements open to the citizenry at large.

Some predict that Anonymous wily, irreverent andat times illegal tactics (such as DDoS campaignsand hacking) may lead governments to restrict thecivil liberties that Anons have so passionately beenclamouring to protect. Government ofcials andlaw enforcement may be quick to paint Anonymousas imaginary goblins to paraphrase the American journalist H. L. Mencken (2008) who famouslyquipped the whole aim of practical politics is tokeep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous tobe led to safety) by menacing it with an endless seriesof hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. However,this prediction loses its legs when one contextualizes

Anonymous historically. Long before Anonymousrose to prominence, national governments aroundthe world aspired to control the Internet, andimplemented statutes eroding civil liberties. Indeed,state secrecy and surveillance are so well entrenchedthat even if Anonymous were to vanish tomorrow, orif it had never existed in the rst place, it is unlikelythe expansion of the surveillance state and the post-9/11 curtailment of civil liberties in the United States would be deterred. Although Anonymous actions will likely be used to justify further restrictions onliberty, Anonymous should be seen as a reaction tothese trends, not simplied as a primary cause.

In the face of trends like increasing state surveillanceand secrecy, silence and inaction from the publicmight actually be more dangerous than any legislation justied in the name of Anonymous actions. Anonymous counters political disengagement andpassivity, acting as a gateway for some individuals toengage in direct action. Spectators can join in, followalong and get their daily dose of news. Organizationslike the EFF have a narrowly dened set ofopportunities for participation: nancial support,

reading and circulating weekly email alerts, politicalcampaign advocacy and attending yearly benetevents. Anonymous, on the other hand, providesindividuals with avenues for personal and collectiveparticipation. While Anonymous might not appealto everyone no political movement ever can or will it functions as a wide-open platform for discretemicroprotests. Participants need not ll out forms,make donations, or in this case, even provide theirlegal names. By participating, individuals becomea part of something larger than themselves. Theyacquire diverse skills. Some will likely dedicate yearsof their lives to activism.

Anonymous has awoken and cultivated politicalsensibilities for some citizens. Dissent of the sort Anonymous specializes in allows citizens to exercise


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their rights and demonstrate on behalf of the causesthey embrace. This lesson was reinforced througha recent conversation with one young Europeanparticipant, a talented and prolic video editor. InFebruary 2013, he revealed how fundamentally hehad been transformed by Anonymous:

Well Anonymous changed a fkg lotin my life, it changed 99 [percent] ofmy lifebefore Anonymous, I wasa regular student at school, doingstuff like playing pc games. I viewedthe USA as a dream land, especiallybecause Obama pulled back soldiersfrom Afghanistan...My dream was tobecome a architect or policemen, adoctor. But ever since I got involved in Anonymous, and accessed differenttypes of information from readingtwitter news, I saw how governmentssaw justice, I started to see thingsfrom another perspective. Everyday Isee the value of free speech. I work with people I didnt even know and

work with them for people who cantalways speak for themselves.

Early in May 2013, this Anon completed a video forOperation Guantanamo. Opening with a montageof news clips featuring President Obamas repeatedpromises to close down the prison on GuantanamoBay, the video highlights the hypocrisy of a president who ran a campaign on a promise that he has thusfar failed to keep. This young Anon has already made

over 90 videos for Anonymous. In May 2013, henished high school.

CONCLUSION

In 1996, a group of RAND researchers publisheda seminal book on netwar. They dened it as anemerging mode of conict (and crime) in which

actors rely on small teams and exible networkedorganizational forms lacking a precise centralcommand or a rigid hierarchy (Arquilla andRonfeld, 1996). Although netwar is often identied with criminal activity or digital networked politics,the RAND authors emphasized its diversity. Netwarcan emerge online or ofine. It can be initiated forcriminal, religious, ethnic or civil society purposes.Many of the authors insights still ring true today.However, several examples heralded as exible, adhoc, peer-to-peer and non-institutional formations,from MoveOn.org to open source production,are now fairly stable formations with eshed-outstrategies and doctrines; over time, they routinized

and became institutions in their own right. Anonymous, on the other hand, has steadfastlyresisted routinization. With its exibility, dynamismand ad hoc autonomous groups, Anonymousmay epitomize netwar even to the extent thatprotagonists celebrate and theorize its core features.Still, it is worth noting that a few of Anonymoustactics, notably hacking and DDoS campaigns, relyon a logic of command and control. For instance,

although an Anonymous DDoS attack may be widely participatory and its target may be chosen byconsensus, the majority of the actual network trafcrequired to perform the attack is controlled by asmaller group. These elite participants must possessthe technical skills to wield botnets. This reveals anelement of a more traditional top-down hierarchy. Infact, a private channel on one of Anonymous biggestIRC networks, where targets were chosen and hacksdiscussed in secret, was actually called #command.Nevertheless, the simultaneous existence ofdifferent types of operations as well as multiplebackroom cabals, some at war with each other, manyexperiencing internal feuds, prevents a calcied andstable seat of concentrated power from forming.


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Networked and exible forms of online activismand dissent like Anonymous have arisen in lockstep with the vast collection of information and softwarethat can algorithmically harvest data for real-timesurveillance and behaviour prediction. With a greatdegree of accuracy and sophistication, this datacan forecast consumer preferences, map socialrelationships, predict sexual orientation based onones friends online and potentially even warnmilitary or commercial institutions that a staffmember is likely to become a whistle-blower andleak sensitive information to the public. 10

Anonymous is all the more interesting for its abilityto escape the orbit of big data analysis, inquiry oftenmarshalled for the purpose of anticipating behaviourpatterns. Even basic sociological treatment of Anonymous is difcult, although not impossible.This elusive entity is devilishly hard to track andpredict. Signicant time and resources are requiredsimply to follow the arc of a single Anonymousoperation, let alone the social life and history of anIRC network such as AnonOps. Its symbolism ispervasive, yet much of Anonymous remains opaque

and undecipherable an increasingly rare state ofexistence today; thus, it acts as a vital counterweightto the state of surveillance.

The inability to divine its future, much less form aconsistent and comprehensive account of Anonymousat present, is most likely what is so unsettling andthreatening to governments and corporationsalike. Nevertheless, law enforcement has pouredsignicant resources into nding and apprehending

hacker suspects. In the United States, two LulzSechackers have been sentenced. Antisec hacker Jeremy

10 See Ryan Gallagher (2013), Software that Tracks People on

Social Media Created by Defence Firm, The Guardian , February 10.

available at: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-

social-media-defence.

Hammond plead guilty in September 2013 to nineacts of hacking, including the Stratfor hack, andis awaiting sentencing. In the United Kingdom,four individuals involved with Anonymous weresentenced in May 2013 and received punishmentsranging from community service to 20 to 32 monthsin jail. Earlier in January 2013, two men in the UnitedKingdom were sentenced to jail, one for sevenmonths, the other for 18 months for their role inthe DDoS campaign against PayPal. In Ireland, two young men pleaded guilty to defacing a website ofthe Fine Gael, an Irish political party, for which the judge noted the only harm was embarrassment. Shened them 5,000 euros each and has ordered them

to complete a restorative justice program and toreturn to court in October 2013.

So far, judges on both sides of the Atlantic havetreated these activities as purely criminal, unwillingto entertain the idea that the actions may have beprincipled dissent. One key difference betweensentencing in Europe and the United States isthat in the United States, punishments are usuallyaccompanied by astronomical nes. Both LulzSec

hackers in the United States were ned overUS$600,000, while no one in the United Kingdom was ned and in Ireland the largest ne has, thus far,not exceeded 5,000 euros.

Due to its lack of transparency, labyrinthinesociology and bountiful secrecy, Anonymous maynot be the best model for democracy; in a fewinstances, operations creep uncomfortably close to vigilantism. It has, however, also revealed current

impasses and limits to democracy, the sort of critiqueoffered by Anonymous is an essential feature ofthe democratic process. While Anonymous has notproposed a programmatic plan to topple institutionsor change unjust laws, it has made evading laws andinstitutions seem desirable. It has enabled action ata time when many feel that existing channels for


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change are either beyond their reach or too corrupt.One core organizer captured this sentiment after Iasked him why he joined the more militant wingof Anonymous, Anonops: I was sold on the raids[DdoS, black faxes, etc.] because Id been an activistfor years before I got involved in Anon, like aboutfour-ve years, and Id just experienced that once vested interests have made a government decision,lobbying by ordinary people wont get it changedback without scaring them a little.By unpredictablyfusing conventional activism with transgression andtricksterism, Anonymous has captured the attentionof a diverse cornucopia of admirers and skeptics.Many are watching, recognizing the power of the

mask as a potential force to unmask corruption,hypocrisy, and state and corporate secrecy.


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WORKS CITED

Anonymous (2007). Dear Fox News. YouTube video. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RFjU8bZR19A.

(2008). Message to Scientology. YouTube video, January 21. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ.

Arquilla, John and David Ronfeld (1996). The Advent ofNetwar. RAND Corporation.

Bartlulz (2011). Linton Johnson The Face of BART. August 24.

Cheng, Jacqui (2010). Anonymous Targets AustralianGovernment Over Porn Filters. Arts Technica.February 10. Available at: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/02/anonymous-targets-australian-government-over-porn-lters/.

Christman, Tory (2012). Tory Christman ex Scientologistand Declared SP Shares Her Experiences @ DublinOfine. YouTube video, August 15. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch.

Fox News (2009). 4Chan: The Rude, Raunchy Underbellyof the Internet,April 8. Available at: www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512957,00.html.

Gorman, Siobhan (2012). Alert on Hacker Power Play,The Wall Street Journal , February 21. Available at:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204059804577229390105521090.html.?v=SZzQUV6JUr0&list=PLC311FA5229AC4B73&index=9.

LulzSec (2011). Available at: https://twitter.com/LulzSec/status/69051330660007936.

Mencken, H. L. (2008). In Defense of Women. Rockville,MD: Arc Manor. First published 1918 by PhilipGoodman.

Ragan, Steve (2011). Report: HBGary Used as an ObjectLesson by Anonymous. February 7. Available at: www.thetechherald.com/articles/Report-HBGary-used-as-an-object-lesson-by-Anonymous/12723/.

Scott, James (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday formsof Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress.


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ABOUT CIGI

The Centre for International Governance Innovation is anindependent, non-partisan think tank on international governance.Led by experienced practitioners and distinguished academics,

CIGI supports research, forms networks, advances policy debateand generates ideas for multilateral governance improvements.Conducting an active agenda of research, events and publications,CIGIs interdisciplinary work includes collaboration with policy,business and academic communities around the world.

CIGIs current research programs focus on four themes: the globaleconomy; global security; the environment and energy; and globaldevelopment.

CIGI was founded in 2001 by Jim Balsillie, then co-CEO of ResearchIn Motion (BlackBerry), and collaborates with and gratefullyacknowledges support from a number of strategic partners, inparticular the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario.

Le CIGI a t fond en 2001 par Jim Balsillie, qui tait alors co-chef dela direction de Research In Motion (BlackBerry). Il collabore avec denombreux partenaires stratgiques et exprime sa reconnaissance dusoutien reu de ceux-ci, notamment de lappui reu du gouvernementdu Canada et de celui du gouvernement de lOntario.

CIGI MASTHEAD

Managing Editor, Publications

Carol Bonnett

Publications Editor

Jennifer Goyder

Publications Editor

Sonya Zikic

Assistant Publications Editor

Vivian Moser

Media Designer

Steve Cross

EXECUTIVE

President

Rohinton Medhora

Vice President of Programs

David Dewitt

Vice President of Public Affairs

Fred Kuntz

Vice President of FinanceMark Menard

COMMUNICATIONS

Communications Specialist

Kevin Dias

[email protected]

1 519 885 2444 x 7238


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57 Erb Street WestWaterloo, Ontario N2L 6C2, Canadatel +1 519 885 2444 fax +1 519 885 5450www.cigionline.org

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