We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Page #8

malignant in their attitude

towards internet freedom,

compared to other western countries.

A guy named tux, wanted to

attack the Australian goverment,

in retaliation for upcoming

internet censorship laws.

One of them involved banning pornography

with women with small breasts, for some reason,

so that was the first time that

Anonymous went up against a goverment.

When they did, they DDoS'd and

took down several goverment sites.

It was the first time that Anonymous

was going up against a state.

If you'd ask me,

all throughout 2008 and most of 2009,

is the politics of Anonymous,

always going to be sutured and hinged to

the church of scientology,

I would have said yes.

and it became unsutured, unhinged,

when a different political

wing was born in 2010.

The motion picture association (MPAA)

had hired an Indian software firm,

to DDoS the pirate bay

and Anonymous, coming out of 4chan,

DDoS'd the motion picture association of America,

as well as other groups like the

recording industry association.

It angered people for a lot of different reasons.

Obviously one of the reasons was that they were

attempting to censor the Internet.

Another of the reasons, though, was that

people in Anonymous had been arrested before for

taking part in such attacks,

say on the Church of Scientology

and other targets that there had been before.

I think there was a big sense of the hypocrisy.

This was the moment a kind of network,

a kind of architecture was born where,

there was a different

node that was unrelated.

Some people crossed over

and they were connected

by aesthetics and by ethics

and yet that was a different

ship that was sailing.

It's our task, to

find secret abusive plans

and expose them, where they can be

opposed, before they're implemented.

The intersting thing about Julian Assange,

is that he actually also sprang from

a hacker culture.

It's a mentality of

spreading information.

Julian was Mendax,

he was the greatest hacker that

ever walked the face of the earth

when I was a kid, they rumored

he can move satelites around in space

by hacking into NASA.

Maybe it never happened but

it was a myth that kept young kids like me

wanting to plug a computer into a modem

and see if I can move some satelites around.

WikiLeaks is an instantiation

of the hacker ethos.

Truth wants to be free

and we want to liberate it.

WikiLeaks released a huge

trove of diplomatic cables.

There's a lot of controversy

from every quarter of society.

The WikiLeaks website released nearly 400.000

secret US files on the Iraq war late today,

it was the largest leak of

classified US files in history.

The diplomatic cables show

the US is spying on it's alies.

Lots of things which were understood in private

and may have been, not even talked about explicitly,

suddenly they're out there,

in the cold light of day

and it's going to make some goverments

and some individuals very uncomfortable.

He was showing the world a glimpse of how

the powerful elite actually work,

at least to some extend, I mean

these are fairly low level diplomats

sending messages back and forth

but it's a side of government you hardly ever see

and it's pretty eye opening and,

you know, once it's out it's out.

I think information wants to be free

and let's look at it, let's analyze it.

It's important that we know such stuff,

It's important that we know what our governments do

and if they don't tell us, then somebody has to.

It's time to open the archives

There was one particular moment,

that really sparked the fire

and this was when PayPal,

Mastercard and Amazon,

pulled services for WikiLeaks.

So all of a sudden,

there's no way to actually

process donations to WikiLeaks.

Then their people went and found like,

neonazi groups.., Visa and Mastercard

were perfectly fine with you being able to,

PayPal, being able to make donations to them.

But WikiLeaks, No!

You can pay the KKK, you can donate

money to the Westboro Baptist church

with your PayPal and your f***ing Mastercard,

but you can't give any money to WikiLeaks

and I think WikiLeaks is doing a good thing.

It's a total hypocrisy that they

got their little f***ing banking mafia

to f*** WikiLeaks over.

People were incredibly angry

and it was a real sense of rage.

There was, I think it was a sense that

WikiLeaks was exposing lies that

the government told to the people

and now the government was desperately trying

to make sure that those lies weren't exposed.

And then, there was just an intense

I can only call it fury.

If you're a hacker, it's one of those

'John F. Kennedy was shot' moments.

Not to actually compare it to that,

but it's one of those

moments you always remember,

exactly where you were and

when you heard it, I mean,

I just really never dreamed

they would have the audacity.

Anonymous very quickly

moves into an attack mode.

Anonymous DDoS'd PayPal. They were pissed!

Cyber protest, virtual sit-ins, however

you wanna look at it, DDoS is a tool that is,

it's like driving a finished

nail in with a sledgehammer.

The numbers of participants were massive.

And they managed, over the

course of a couple of days,

to disable the website

of Mastercard and PayPal.

It was like watching the hack

magician finally get a trick right,

because you're not expecting it

and then it's magnificent, it was beautiful,

'cause what you had is,

people finally stood up for something.

How long has it been since we

had a huge really relevant protest.

I'm not talking Tea Party, I wanna

bring my guns in public, I'm talking,

I'm talking 10.000 angry people said this

is not right and I wanna do something about it.

Soon after January 2nd I believe

WikiLeaks was blocked in Tunisia

and Anonymous got into that.

They then intervened,

at first solely for the purposes of like,

stoping the censorship that was happening.

They did some DDoSing

and this was a time and period

where they were getting involved,

with what I would call, non-internetees.

Social movements inbuilding lines of solidarity.

My name is Pete Fein, you can

call me an internaut or a hacktivist.

Telecomix is an ad hoc cluster

of volunteer net activists,

who have spent much of the last year trying

to keep the internet running in the middle east.

During that time, we saw the

Tunisian government, not only

sensoring and filtering the internet,

but also doing some kind of

technical trickery to steal

people's facebook passwords

and delete their posts

and see who is posting what,

fake posts, stuff like that.

So Tunisian hackers came to us,

they were members of Anonymous

and I didn't even know we had members of

Anonymous in Tunisia, so it was a shock to me

and they had the keys to

some parts of the kingdom,

so to speak, when it came

to the dictator in Tunisia.

We went in, on behalf of those Tunisian Anons

and we helped them get that and extract it

and then it went to WikiLeaks.

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