We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Page #4

website and posted in the threads and what not..

"Who are you and where you're calling from?"

"Ola, this is Pedro, from San Diego.."

"Spick, don't talk, don't call my radio

show anymore, you filthy spick animal"..

"..has begun an integration program,

where they try and purposely

lower standards, to bring more

blacks and diversify the campus

and by the end of the next 5 years,

they intend to bring over 9000!"

He was just a horribly

racist radio personality,

who seemed to handle it

well, when you called in.

He could handle being berated by Anonymous

and that made it very interesting,

it made it a bit of a challenge.

It wasn't some guy,

who just either crumbled

or stopped answering the phone,

it was a guy who would yell back.

"I don't see really where

you're going with this."

"Where I'm going is,

I believe Barack Obama

is genetically incapable,

of exercising the power necessary to govern

the most complicated nation on earth.

That's where I'm going with this.

And I think part of the reason

he's incapable of doing it,

is because of racial, genetic inferiority.

Is that clear enough for you?"

"No, you changed the subject again.."

"Wait a second, you asked me.."

Hal Turner wasn't the first actual person

that Anonymous had caused trouble for,

but the circumstances

ended up being significant.

They DDoS'd his website,

something like that cost him

thousands of dollars, bandwidth fees..

We DDoS'd him, which is overflowing his server

with packets and fake information

and then we kind of trolled him in real life.

We sent countless pizzas to his house.

We signed him up for escorts on Craigslist.

We sent a bunch of pallets of

industrial materials to his house

which he ultimately had to foot the bill for

and basically we destroyed his ability

to pay for his radio show

and that took him off the Internet.

He was super pissed.

..and then they ended up

getting some real hackers

to help them out, like this

wasn't a sort of pranks,

they actually were able to get into

Hal Turner's private servers

and his mail servers

and find some interesting

e-mails that he was

serving as an FBI informant,

which if you're a right-wing

neo-nazi, is not a good thing to be.

..and obviously him being an FBI informant

and also his reaction, his sort of

douchebag reaction to the raids,

damaged his credibility within

the white-nationalist scene,

which is a shame..

Hal Turner is gone,

he's been prosecuted by the

feds for threatening judges..

It wasn't supposed to be different

but it ended up being different.

People who observe Anonymous, see this group called

Anonymous is going after this white-nationalist and say:

"Oh, hey look, Anonymous must be

some kind of activist organization"

So, by virtue of these people joining Anonymous,

Anonymous becomes more of an activist organization.

What follows is a period

of confusion and anger,

whilst you have the

usual sort of people,

who wanna keep Anonymous as this nihilist,

little ridiculous group, are upset that now

the most terrible thing on the internet,

is now becoming a force

for good all of a sudden.

Project Chanology: A series of semi-coordinated 'attacks' on the

Church of Scientology, after its attempts to censor the internet.

Anonymous has never been

about getting media attention,

or getting all of this attention

towards it, which means it's a community,

a pretty, sometimes, insular community,

that is kinda kept to itself,

to make jokes and make content,

but that was of course changed completely,

it was trully and completely out of

it's head when chanology started.

Anonymous started to become

less of a just a culture,

you know, people who

wanted to perform pranks

and more of the internet's first army.

I'm Mike Vitale and my handle is "sethdood".

Now, this is January 2008.

Anonymous is strong now, you know, we're

not a little dinky f***ing group anymore.

This is millions of people

worldwide and we're watching.

And then scientology stepped in,

with a big target on it's chest.

A video came out of Tom Cruise,

which was supposed to be like

an internal scientology video,

talking about secrets of scientology.

"Being a scientologist,

when you drive past an accident,

it's not like anyone else.

As you drive past, you know you

have to do something about it because,

you know you're the only

one that can really help."

He talks about, that you're

the only one, who can stop

bad things from happening

and so this is kinda

widely mocked online.

It circulated like wildfire!

"there's nothing part of the way for me,

it's just..(all the way?..)"

..people found it humorous and goofy

and the church of scientology went into

their "legal mode" and they

threatened websites with

lawsuits, if they didn't

pull down the video.

Instantly the scientologists posted a DMCA,

(Digital Millenioum Copyright Act)

and this is a way,

that if you own content,

you can go to video sites, upload sites

and have your content pulled

when someone uploads it illegally.

So scientology is always

at odds with the internet,

always trying to legally bully people,

out of f***ing them over on the internet.

They always did that and then here

they are trying again, but you know what,

Anonymous saw that and he said,

"You guys just f***ed around badly,

you're trying to sensor our internet,

you're trying to take a joke away

from Anonymous, you don't do that."

What these people did in this case is,

Gregg Housh and these other people, was

they decided, we can probably harness

Anonymous in this case and target scientology.

A few anons, a few people on 4 chan posted: "Hey, we

should grab that video and post it on a few other sites"

and I was one the people on that thread, talking

about it and we got the original source of the video

by reaching out to the person

behind the accounts and everything.

We started posting it. The surprising thing,

was how fast they were DMCAing it on every site.

It looked to us like, they must

have direct contact with the lawyers

and the team who actually pulls

videos off at all of these sites.

It was minutes and these things

were falling down, like, holy crap!

That's messed up!

What followed was, there's this term

called the "Barbra Streisand effect"

and this video as they were attempting

to suppress it, it went everywhere like,

everywhere you look on the internet

you were gonna stumble upon this video.

Actually gawker, the site that I work for,

was I think, the first one

to put it on the website

and we got in a huge legal

battle with scientology,

who wanted us to take it down.

A guy joins the channel

and he says, you should all look at gawker.

So we go over to gawker and

the strangest thing has happened.

This big media company had the video

up on their front page and basically had

a comment underneath it, that

stated very clearly that the FBI,

would have to come and take their servers

to get this video taken down.

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