We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Page #2

type of organization.

They had a guy who was

the minister of propaganda,

they were kinda merry pranksters

like, everything they did,

was completely over the top you know,

they would dress up like Mr-T sometimes,

they would do rap songs at

DEFCON, like a rap performance.

One of the guys there, I think his name is

t-fish, or short for tweety fish, coined the term

hactivism, because he saw what,

one of the things, his group was

doing, which he called hactivism

was writing software that people in other

countries could use to communicate securely,

even if their government

was spying on them.

So what the principal was really,

was freedom of expression.

It was everyone should

have access to the internet,

everyone should be able to communicate and

get their message out on the internet.

Even more important in countries,

where there was repressive regimes,

that if you said something against the regime,

they would come and take you away

and you weren't saying anything anymore.

A good place to start are with,

what is often been called virtual sit-ins,

which use the tactic of

a denial of service attack.

Denial of service has been

around for a long long time.

The equilevant of, like

if you, for some reason,

wanted to disrupt a bus service, right?

You can hire a thousand extras to all

go and like, line up at the bus station

and get on the bus,

until that anyone who was

really trying to get on

the bus, couldn't do it.

It's as simple as that.

When you stop trying to visit, the

website goes back up, no permanent damage.

And this tactic has been used

by a number of different groups.

Probably the most famous is the

Electronic Disturbance Theatre.

Another really interesting case happened

in Germany, where a group

of activists got together,

who wanted to protest the

fact that the airline, Lufthansa,

was using, they were using their

planes to deport immigrants

and they would take down the site

and in fact eventually

the German courts ruled,

that this was a legitimate form of protest.

From airports security

to subway bag checks,

there's no question,

it's a new world post 9/11.

It's worse now,

for humans, post 9/11,

because intrusion and surveillance,

which is always going to be misused

by those who can misuse it,

has created a different kind of society,

in which freedom, the freedom

to move unobserved, is a privilege

only of the rich, privacy is a

privilege only of the rich.

Hackers see the technology giving them sanction

to buy their privileged exclusion as well.

Intrinsic to the technology,

is the power to self transcend

and get out of the

hump of the Bell Curve

and move forward on par with the masters

of society and do battle with them

on an equal, level, playing field.

That's hactivism.

Anonymous grew out of,

what's known as, 4chan.

Essentially this is just

a website, where people can upload images

and you don't actually give your name,

it's just sort of anonymous.

When you look at 4chan,

you're often surprised,

because it looks like a site

from, like, 1995 or something.

The idea is very simple:

You post a comment and you post a picture

and you can post it under

your name, or anonymously

and it's seperated into

boards about particular topics.

There's a topic on anime,

there's a topic on weaponry.

There's like a 4chan board for origami.

You just upload interesting pictures of origami.

And then there was a group

called /b/. The /b/ board,

which essentially was

for like, anything goes.

The first time anybody goes on /b/,

it's kind of an instant.. revulsion,

'cause there's never a time that you go in

there where you don't see something horrible.

That instantly puts off a lot of people.

The idea is, post something

that can never be unseen.

Half of the posts on /b/ are there specifically

to make peope not wanna come back to /b/.

Have you ever read Lord of the flies?

is Lord of the Flies,

except some of them aren't 16 anymore,

they're just allowed to act 16.

It's what you get when people are allowed

to express themselves with absolutely

no restrictions whatsoever.

It's the kind of sum of human imagination

when people can get together and paint together

without any limits or parameters.

It's the most vile, disgusting

and funny thing on the internet.

when he was very young, maybe 15,

in the early 2000's.

He started 4chan because he was

a big fan of Japanese animation.

Chris "Moot" Poole is the sweetest

kid you've ever met in your life.

He's small and he's got these tiny features

and he runs the most disgusting

website in the world.

What I think is really intriguing

about a community like 4chan,

is just that it's this open place,

as I said it's raw, it's unfiltered,

and.. sites like it are going

the way of the dinosaur right now.

They're endangered, because we're

moving towards social networking,

we're moving towards persistent identity,

we're moving towards, you know,

a lack of privacy really.

The /b/ board, it's the

exact opposite of facebook.

In facebook, you're supposed to be who you are

and there's, sort of, one model,

which is that you're friends with people. Right?

In 4chan, you're totally an anonymous nobody.

And anonymous speech, a lot of it

is ugly, but not all of it, is (ugly).

It's actually a sort of place,

where people can be honest.

One of the important things about 4chan,

is to have a thread that really explodes

and lasts for a long time.

If it doesn't,

then it disappears, it's

a site that's not archived,

so, it creates conditions for

anything that grabs attention, at some level

and so humor and grotesqueness,

as a result, are quite good for that.

I'd rather just be referred to as anonymous I guess

in the interviews, cause I have some dox out on me.

I grew up on it and I lived there.

That's what I did for fun.

It takes a thick skin to enjoy it but you know,

as long as you're not offended, you'll occasionally

come into something really cool

or really creative on 4chan.

I think the most interesting thing about

it, is how you can watch memes evolve.

You'll see something posted one day,

that a week later, has got

A meme is, basically just an idea.

It's kind of like a gene,

but in the realm of the idea.

A lot of the great internet memes that we

all know and love, you know lolcats, right?

You know, little cats doing funny things

and then you have "I can has cheezburger?"

All that stuff seems to start in this

Petri dish, that is 4chan's /b/ board.

"Say it publically and you're insane,

chocolate rain".

Name any meme from the last

about 6 years and I'll bet you,

either it's first posting

ever, was on 4chan or

at least one of it's earliest revisions

that became what it was, was on 4chan.

"I can see the food situation

is f***ed, so we'll be on our way".

It's basically the best

breeding ground for

internet culture,

as far as I'm concerned.

"Read your neighborhood insurance rates,

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