We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Page #6

We're going to the streets,

every major city of the world

has a scientology building.

"Be very wary of the 10th of February.

Anonymous invites you to join

us in an act of solidarity.

Anonymous invites you to take up the banner of

free speech, of human rights, of family and freedom.

Join us in protest outside of

scientology centers worldwide."

..and you just see this consensus

forming that it's going to happen.

So we made the 3rd video,

the 'Code of Conduct.'

Don't bring weapons, dress accordingly,

cover your faces, 'cause

they will try and find out

who you are and screw with your life.

"Rule number 17:

Cover your face. This will prevent your

identification from videos taken by hostiles."

Scientology has a history of harassing,

stalking and just generally doing

horrible things to it's critics,

so people needed a way

to hide their identities.

A lot of people had very legitimate fears.

They don't want to be followed home,

they don't want to be stalked,

they don't wanna put their

families or themselves in danger.

Everyone was all, well,

we're gonna wear a mask.

What's the only mask that we all

already know, or have a joke about?

..and it's the Guy Fawkes mask.

You seen the movie 'V for Vendetta'?

You know, the ending scene where

everyone is wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.

That is very reminescent of

what Anonymous thinks, Anonymous is.

We wanted to represent anonimity in

some way, when it moved into real life.

I think that the Guy Fawkes mask,

was one of the most

natural things to happen.

It is the idea that,

non of us are as cruel as all of us.

You have this massive crowd

of people who are Anonymous,

that is going to fight

against a bigger thing and win.

Even after watching the video

it's like, yeah this is great but,

who is actually gonna do it?

Who's gonna step up?

Our people are actually

gonna get out of their house?!

And I guess we were really

affected by the stereotype of

that whole community

their being insolent when they're

too afraid to leave their mum's basements.

I figured, maybe 50 nerds

from every city somewhere

might show up and wear their masks

out of a building for a while and leave.

No one thought that

they were gonna come out.

This is me on the way there.

I haven't slept, very f***in' tired..

..and I remember going to the park that day

and it's really early in the morning

(which I thought was a bad idea)

and I'm smoking a cigarette and I'm looking

around like, where the f*** is everybody?

There's nobody here.

So here I am. Sitting in Bronx Park,

waiting for the other anons to show up.

I remember thinking, like, oh f***!

Am I gonna be the only one in the park?

Am I going to walk to

scientology with 6 or 7 people,

which totally defeats the entire purpose of this

because now they could single me out? You know?

Then I get up and I start walking around

and I see there's a lot of green

balloons over there, for some reason,

on the other side of the park!

There was like 200 people!

There was Guy Fawkes masks everywhere

and I'm like, holy sh*t, this is huge!

There's a lot of us.

That's pretty good.

I had no idea how many anons

there were until we started moving..

..and it just got bigger!

I remember walking through Times Square and

everybody in Times Square was an anon.

This is like a 1000 person

per minute foot traffic area

and everywhere I'm looking,

I'm seeing anon's symbols.

It was f***ing wild!

It was really wild.

..we start getting numbers in..

..and Sidney:

We're thinking that,

it's going to be 50 people

and before 10am,

before even time, there's

already 50 people there

and there's still streams of

people walking down the streets.

A couple of hours into it, you know,

'cause it could have been

till 1 in the morning,

you're looking at Sidney as.. wow!

There's 250 people in Sidney.

The cops are estimating higher

than that for their reports.

What just happened?

Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne happened

and you know, over

We nearly broke a thousand leaving Australia.

Now, the next protest was Tel Aviv,

which had actually got it's first

scientology building a week before this.

There were Palestinians and Israelis

at this protest, both holding their flags

and at one point, they actually switched

flags and held up each other's flags.

It was awesome to see.

I call our guy in

London, a Brit anon

and I say hey,

what's going on there?

And he's like, did you

just get out of bed?

I said, yeah, I didn't

even turn on the computer,

I just figured I'd call you.

And he said, we've got 600 people

and the cops are really mad at me.

All the major cities were having

hundreds of people come out.

It was massive!

Clearwater had like 300 people.

I don't think anyone beat out L.A.

I think L.A. had over a thousand people.

The thing that happened was

something completely different,

hundreds and hundreds

of people from every city,

just.. swarmed the streets.

It's kind of overwhelming, a little

even scary, but scary in a good way.

Soon, you know, we'd outrun the 10.000 mark

and we were joking the whole time,

over 9000, you know, one of those memes.

It was too sureal,

it was not believeable.

We go by one name.

We are Anonymous.

It was very empowering,

especially after people saw

thousands of people showing up.

This was it. We owned

the world at that point.

You've got lolcats

and you've got Rickrolling,

you've got all these other things,

that Anonymous has been involved in..

..then you know, take us a month later and

in every major country in the world

and every major city in the world

and what the hell just happened?

What changed, who flipped the switch?

The world looked very

different to me at that point.

We all met each other.

The idea of an anon is, you're

alone until you get to 4chan

and then these people think like you.

Then, all of a sudden, you're not

alone, you are with 500 others.

They all know the same jokes as you,

they all, clearly, have

similar interests as you.

Here's your culture.

You meet your own people finally.

Immediately you felt like you were at home,

if you were an anon you were at home.

We all spent years in the same place

looking at the same pictures,

laughing at the same jokes,

pretty much we were already friends,

even though we've never ever met.

It was very happy.

It's perhaps a little surprising.

It's not just pre-teens or teenagers,

there's a far more even

mix of males and females,

than you would imagine otherwise.

Everyone always figured

Anonymous was a very male ..thing.

But it wasn't like that, at all.

There's some hot girls come through,

like, it's some really (..!),

you'd be surprised..

..and you know there were a lot of

these guys who weren't socially good.

They were very awkward,

they still lived at home

at 23, half of them virgins

and I tell you, the amount of those people

who got laid from these protests happening,

is in the thousands, that would

Rate this script:5.0 / 1 vote