We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists

It was 6 in the morning.

I got a knock on my door,

a really loud knock

and I thought it was my dad,

who had locked himself out or something,

so I opened it and it's the LED

flashlights and the really obnoxious,

bulletproof vests

and they're dragging

me out into the cold,

when I'm in my pyjamas.

That was not fun..

They seemed pretty shocked by the

sarcastic, belligerent, angry teenager,

that they dragged

out of bed that day.

I don't know if it's just that

I was 19 or that I was a girl but,

they didn't expect, this.

whoever they are,

they scared the sh*t out

of some people those days.

They scared the sh*t,

out of the powers that be

and that's why this

is being investigated.

That's why I'm under indictment.

That's it.

Because,

between the days of

December 6 and December 10,

proved to the government,

that their regulations,

their ideas,

their view of PayPal,

their view of WikiLeaks,

their view of the Afghan war,

and Egypt and Tunisia and Libya,

it didn't f***ing matter.

Their opinion no longer mattered,

because someone was out on the internet,

kicking ass.

The computer hacker group Anonymous,

is claiming tonight, that it took down

the website of the federal appeals

court in San Francisco this afternoon.

They took down senate.gov servers,

they've taken down HBGary,

SONY is claiming they did

So many confidential files,

that tonight, because of these hackers,

can be in the hands of anyone.

Visa, Mastercard, the PayPal situation.

-The criminals who hacked into Sarah Palin's private e-mail.

The church of scientology says,

Anonymous is a cyber-terrorist

group of religious bigots.

Anonymous and this other group called LulzSec,

they seem to be wanting to prove a point.

Anonymous was like the big, strong,

buff kid who had low self esteem

and all of a sudden,

punched somebody in the face and

was like, Holy sh*t I'm really strong!

And Anonymous calls itself

the final boss of the internet

and sometimes it proves

to be really f***ing true.

If you were going to violate

the freedoms of the internet,

you certainly better watch the f*** out.

They are, kind of, the

rude boys of activism.

There's a real rough edge to that,

which I think also,

is one reason why they

garner so much love

and hate from people too.

They represent a certain

sort of chaotic freedom.

Individual, young,

nameless, faceless folks are having

geo-political impact

and it's both exhilarating to realize

that and terrifying to realize that.

It kind of depends on

how that power is wielded.

We are legion.

We do not forget.

Expect us.

We stand for freedom,

we stand for freedom of speech,

the power of the people,

the ability for them to protest

against their government, to right wrongs.

No sensorship, epecially online,

but also in real life.

We have members throughout society

in all stratums of it worldwide,

yet we have no leadership.

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

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

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

Good timing..

I would love to live in a country

where the government fears its citizens

and not the other way around.

Right now, plenty of Anonymous actors

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

I've been called many things,

there's unpatriotic..

..that we're just a bunch of children

sitting in our parents' basement.

I get called a terrorist sympathizer.

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

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

You know, sometimes these

words aren't entirely unfair but,

this is a serious political movement.

No one in the general public

really seems to get it.

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

Anonymous to be everything and anything, is its power.

Anonymous is a series of relationships.

Hundreds and hundreds of people,

who are very active in it and who have varying skill

sets and who have varying issues they want to advance

and who are collaborating

in different ways each day.

They're a little bit like

a prism or a calaidoscope.

They've got many different

facets in many different sides.

Of course when you spend

enough time with them,

you start to get a sort of feel or texture,

that's not just random,

right? Yet it's very multifaceted,

very rich, which does span from the quite

lighthearted to the very very serious.

Bob Dylan had lined a song to say,

"to live outside the law,

you must be honest".

(Absolutely Sweet Marie)

They might do something which isn't

technically correct, maybe it's not

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

that in their minds at least are ethical.

People who know what they're doing,

who share an ethos,

who have a commitment to

exposing and humiliating "the man",

who have a very low tolerance of some

eyes and what they perceive as evil

and the part of over-winning power structures.

They share information,

they share tools and techniques

and they are currently

having a very good time.

The hacker culture,

as we know it,

really sprang from one place. There was MI (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

and there was specifically people in the model

railroad club, the tech model railroad club.

Hacking originated as humorous pranks.

When the guys in MIT put a VolksWagen

up on top of the dome of the building,

people woke up and saw a

car up there in the morning,

or they measured a bridge by the body-lengths

of somebody, let's say his name was Brian

and they discovered the bridge

over the Charles river was,

you know, 822 Brians.

These are funny things.

That's where hacking originated

and then migrated in

engineering and computer communities.

It's, really, it's pranks.

Basically Microsoft

and Apple, both,

got their entire start of computer crime.

Bill Gates stole

pretty much all of the MS-DOS.

Steve Jobs,

he was creating boxes to

defraud the phone company.

I always saw hacking,

as implicitly political.

Hackers, whether they're

conscious about it or not,

whether explicit about it or not,

make a statement,

about how we should treat information.

And some years after my book came out,

one of the people I wrote about,

Richard Stallman,

got very publically

and explicitly political

about open software, about..

And he believed that software should be free.

Free as in freedom, not free

as in beer, as he put it there.

Behind it, whether misguided or

not, there is a political impulse.

Hactivism was a term coined by a

group called Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc).

The Lopht had an interesting

relationship with the cDc.

Actually there was 3 members,

that were in both organizations.

And we kind of capped like,

the serious security research,

that they were doing, they

would do under the Lopht name

and if they're doing some sort

of just goofy stunt-like things,

they would do it under the cDc name,

because the cDc was really kind of a,

sort of, like a propaganda

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