We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Page #3

chocolate rain".

for acts of trolling.

Trolling is a f***ing art.

Trolling is getting the person you are talking to

to get a pissed off as they possibly can

and for no reason except your own enjoyment.

Maybe you are trying to illustrate a point,

but it's mostly for your own enjoyment.

For them it's funny, that the people

think the internet is serious business

and if people think the internet is serious business,

it's a troll's job, to make their life terror.

The idea of Anonymous,

came initially as a joke.

I mean, somebody suggested that,

what if the whole site,

what if 4chan, what if /b/,

was just one person and what if

that just one guy, called "Anonymous"

sitting somewhere and you're just

reading all these posts by one guy.

And it kinda looks like that from

the outsiders perspective, I mean,

there's no way to tell a difference,

it might as well be one guy.

Fox news did very famous segments about it.

They call themselves "Anonymous".

They are hackers on steroids,

treating the web, like

a real life video game,

sacking websites,

invading myspace accounts,

disrupting innocent people's lives

and if you fight back, watch out!

Destroy, die, attack,

threats from a gang of computer hackers,

calling themselves "Anonymous".

I've had 7 different passwords

and they've got them all so far.

Anonymous hacked his site and

blastered it with gay sex pictures.

His girlfriend left him.

She thought that, I was

cheating on her with guys.

As long as I can think back,

Anonymous has done some pretty off-color

things in the name of getting cheap laughs,

you know, but,

I mean that's part of the culture.

We get what we call "Lulz".

"Lulz" is a corruption of lol which

stands for " laugh out loud".

Anonymous gets big lulz,

from pulling random pranks

for example, messing with online

children's games, like Habbo Hotel.

Habbo Hotel was this online community,

where you had an avatar and you

walked around and talked to other people.

It's kind of, like, an early

version of World of Warcraft,

or Second Life or any

of those virtual worlds.

What the people on /b/ did,

was invade Habbo Hotel,

created thousands of avatars,

they all had this one uniform of a

black guy with a big afro,

wearing a black suit

and so there would be

thousands of these people,

black guys-black suit,

you know, huge afro,

walking around this world

and they would do things like,

form a swastika out of themselves

and i think that was

a real landmark, because

it was when they were able to see that,

they can use their numbers to do something

really interesting and really disruptive.

SO we blocked the entrance to their pool

and that just pissed them off so f***ing much.

It was f***ing beautiful!

That was f***ing just wonderful.

Wonderful times!

Those kids loved that pool,

they loved the sh*t out of their pool..

The goal was actually to offend everyone,

simply because the idea that we could offend

you by drawing a little shape on the screen,

was stupid to the people involved in it.

They were like, really you're going to get that

mad over us doing, just drawing this on the screen?

Wow! Well, you need to refocus

a little on life 'cause,

this should not be upsetting you that much.

Barrett Brown, I'm the

director of project PM

and former operative with Anonymous.

We were targeting furries,

which were just a sub-culture of people, of course,

who, you know, a lot of people

in 4chan, find irritating,

by virtue of their being irritating.

A furry is someone, generally a male,

who's autistic, in his twenties,

who identifies with animals and

oftentimes has sexual attraction

to other people dressed as animals.

There's diaper-furs -furries,

who enjoy wearing diapers,

baby-furs, who enjoy

thinking themselves as a baby.

We had furry infiltrators, we were trying, you know,

we had secret groups, mine was called the illuminati,

/i/illuminati

and our goal was to wreak

as much havoc as possible,

because it was stupid.

There was a point when I was, you know,

I'd otherwise seem a respectable writer,

in 2007, when my first book came out,

but I spent my evenings on

Second Life, that big virtual world,

riding around in a virtual spaceship,

with the words faggery-daggery-doo written on it,

wearing afros

and dropping virtual bombs

on little villages and concerts

and waving giant penises around

and that was the most fun

I've ever had in my life.

All these different organizations online,

whether it's 4chan, or just any website,

there is typically a community aspect to it.

This where people have

their social relationships,

this is where their friends are,

this is where they have a creative outlet

and so all those aspects are

going into groups like Anonymous,

where people, feel like

they're part of the bigger thing

and they're able to express

themselves within that group.

There were certain words, certain phrases,

certain ways people respond to things,

certain images that are posted,

that created a pattern

and that pattern was

I guess the origin of

what is now Anonymous.

It's like freemasons

with a sense of humor.

Not so much, as they have

this common symbology

and one of their chief joys,

which is kind of wrapped up

in power and secrecy, was the fact

that they could recognise each other,

by referencing these symbols,

referencing these phrases.

Over 9000,

I lost my ipod,

mudkipz, anything involving mudkipz,

so you have this weird sort of

international cultural developing with

people across the world, wherever they may be.

..and late '06 and into early '07,

there's a bit of a sea change, where

instead of just posting

a bunch of content or

randomly saying, we're going to go over

to some website and post a bunch

of dirty comments against someone,

it becomes a little more organized.

"Welcome to the Hal Turner show"

They went after a guy named Hal Turner.

"we've been discriminated against,

because I'm white.."

Hal Turner is a Neo-Nazi, who

was big online and had a podcast.

"I think that the 14th amendment

was not ratified properly

and I think therefore it is still OK

to have negros as slaves in America".

The first time I heard about Hal Turner,

is he was knocking somebody on 4chan.

He was just being a major dick to a

relatively known user,

and for the fun of it we started trolling

and then I guess we figured we had a moral high ground

which allowed us to get people on our side.

BUt he was a f***ing Neo-Nazi.

That's not okay to be in modern society.

You're not allowed to do that

and there's a million Neo-Nazis out there,

but he started picking on our dude

so we had to go to our dude's f***ing defence

and it just so happened that he was a Neo-Nazi so

that's a bigger reason that he's a f***ing dick face.

..and like, yeah, screw that racist

son of a b*tch, let's do this, you know?

So I joined in and I made

some of the phonecalls

and I played around on the chat-thing on his

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