We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Page #10

and very much hilariously so.

He had to be shut up, it had to be proven

to the world, that this guy was a retard

and that his information was in no way valid.

..and to put that in hacker terms,

Anonymous is a hornet's nest and Barr said,

I'm gonna stick my penis in that thing.

Into mere 24 hours he was

owned, pawned completely,

by a small group of participants,

who basically went on a hacking rampage.

Faster than you can say,

"Get these hornets off my penis!",

Anonymous took down Barr's website,

stole his e-mails, deleted

the company's back-up data,

trashed his twitter account

and remotely wiped his i-Pad.

And he had just reached the

"Ham 'Em High" level in Angry Birds.

The HBGary hack brought

about 70.000 e-mails.

By the most, important ones

had to do with a proposal,

that HBGary had already formulated, it was

packaged up as a nice powerpoint presentation,

kind of, act as privatise agent provocateaurs,

where they were gonna discredit WikiLeaks.

HBGary was proposing submitting fake documents

to WikiLeaks and then, when discovered as fake,

the hare could be called out

and it would dicredit WikiLeaks.

Right. So there are a lot

of specifics I can't talk,

but let me try to answer that

though, in a general sense.

First of all, it's probably no surprise

to anybody, I'm not a big fan of WikiLeaks.

I think that the broad purpose of

trying to get as much information,

proprietary or classified information

from the government, expose that,

is an extremely destructive

and dangerous purpose.

As Julian Assange, had a few

months before noted, that they

had information on a major bank,

showing wrong-doing and Bank of America,

somehow knew it was them.

And the proposals involved, for Bank of America

and the WikiLeaks problem, they entailed

conducting information war on

WikiLeaks and it's supporters,

claiming to sensor them,

within WikiLeaks.

DDoS attacks.

You also wanted to launch cyber attacks

on WikiLeaks' infrastructure, to get

information on document submitters.

One thing I guess, I wanna

make sure is clear is,

none of these activities

had actually occurred.

In buisiness there's a..,

when you start proposing

or thinking about an idea,

there's a brainstorming phase

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

"what could we do, what's theoretically possible?"

Still this was an idea, this was proposed,

this was something that you thought about.

Right.

They also wanted to go on a

campaign targeting Glenn Greenwald,

who is a reporter for Salon,

who's an outspoken critic of the

government and supporter of WikiLeaks.

It seems like you're trying

to attack a journalist here.

Yeah, you know, I don't wanna talk

too much more about Glenn Greenwald,

other than what I previously said.

There was never

an intent to attack

journalists, not on my part.

I guess I should generalise that

to say that, you know, I would never

just outwardly attack a journalist,

other than, if I felt that there was

a journalist in my mind,

that was acting unethically.

That's a fair game for having

a public discussion about.

They were walking a very

fine ethical line at points

and in many cases, the mass

opinion is:
No, they're well past it.

I will not support broad theft of

information released to the public,

'cause that is nothing but destructive.

If somebody has, information

has been stolen from them,

whether or not WikiLeaks encouraged the theft

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

still, they're threatening to

release the information that was

the private property

of another organization,

so your choices are, to

just allow that to happen,

or to try and stop it.

How offensive is too offensive?

We've certainly seen a lot

of strategy, coming out of

governments across

the world now saying,

publically admitting that,

they need to become,

they need to develop

better offensive strategies

in cyber security, because

defense as a whole, isn't enough.

It never is enough.

Some of the most important things, that

have had the most far-reaching influence

and have been the most important, in terms of

what's been dicovered, not just by Anonymous,

but by the media, and the aftermath,

is a result of hacking.

That information can't be obtained

by institutionalist journalistic process

or can't be obtained, or won't be

obtained, by a congressional committee,

or a federal oversight committee.

For the most part, that information

has to be obtained by hackers.

After this had happened, although only

a small number of people had participated,

the collective mood was

exuberance, within Anonymous.

It was a moment of the lulz being recharged,

which people were excited about,

'cause people felt like, the lulz had been

running low, during the middle eastern protest

and so it was a moment

of great triumphalism,

within Anonymous.

#OpSony

Anonymous is currently

targeting Sony's website.

We are doing this, because Sony is

currently suing people for making features,

the Playstation originally

had available to the public.

It started off as a

denial of service attacks,

but then someone really broke

into the playstation network

and stole all the user accounts

and all the credit card information.

Sony has confirmed that hackers

broke into it's playstation network,

exposing the personal information

of up to 77 million users worldwide.

Anonymous basically bent Sony

over and had their way with them

and the consumers were the ones,

that also got hurt in the process.

able to use their playstations.

That, actually had real,

hard-core, end-user impact.

If they break into a site and

they pull back customer information,

do they really need to disclose

a hundred thousand customers?

No. What they're doing,

could be done a lot better.

When I say, better, I mean,

better for the end-user,

for the customers,

while still making a point.

And then, seemingly out of the blue,

there was something

by the name, LulzSec,

that sailed into the seas.

LulzSec is a sort of

group, a couple of people,

mostly from Anonymous,

large part of the same

people who hacked HBGary.

They decided to form

this little group and

just carry on operations, but outside

the purview of Anonymous, for a while.

They hacked whatever they wanted.

They released whatever they wanted.

It's almost like they had no rules.

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

we're gonna stir up the cart.

We're gonna make some trouble.

We're gonna make some waves."

And they did.

What they did was,

they put on a play.

Not high arts,

not low-brow either.

It wasn't particularly,

let's just say, grotesque.

Their symbol, was a kind of cartoon character

of the monopoly man, with the monocle and a cigarette.

There was a lot of iconography of boats and

ships, pirate motifs and then of course a cat.

Chaos and mayhem right now...

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

Some of the things LulzSec did, in a

quarter of public opinion, were less noble.

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