We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Page #9

The Tunisians overthrew Ben Ali,

who was kind of an oppressive dictator.

A revolution that was

facilitated by the internet,

by facebook and by twitter.

Not caused by it, I mean, 50 years of

dictatorship has caused the offspring.

but the internet has certainly been helping.

There's a video where they are thanking us for being involved.

holding up a mask saying

we were the only ones who stood by their side.

Thank you Anonymous.

We want to let you know that you have found new allies...

For me it was...

...awesome to hear that, and to feel the connection.

The same group of hackers, that target anti-WikiLeaks

sites, have now turned their attention, to Egypt.

It could have been the lead up

to the Egyptian revolution.

We would tweet on people's behalf.

We'd get people from Egypt,

who weren't able to access

twitter on their own, on our IRC network

and we would trigger ports for them

and tweet them out using our account,

to help them get the word out,

about what they were experiencing.

Some of this sh*t is personal

and one of the things,

about the movement as a whole,

when Egypt broke around,

is that Egypt broke us, emotionally.

Watching in real time, with

live feeds that we helped set up,

Egyptians get massacred with machine guns.

It was different and I have

never in cyber activism wept before,

it's never bothered me like that,

it's never been able to touch me,

the way Egypt touched me.

It was f***ed up, that

we were watching people

killed, for no reason other

than leaving their homes,

that these people had

every right to freedom,

that they had every right

to choose their government.

..and then January 27th

to 28th rolls around and

the Egyptian government

starts shutting down

the internet, for the whole country.

There's this fantastic traffic-graph,

that you can see the

traffic coming out of Egypt.

It's like this and then..

..just totally stops.

And we're just arrrghh,

what the f***,

to think that a country would

completely cut itself off,

as much as they were able to,

from the outside world.

It was pretty unthinkable.

We know bad things go

on in the dark places.

And suddenly it got quiet.

I remember it was somehow, burned into my brain that

first Twitter was flooded and suddenly everything was quiet.

That's the kinda thing that could start riots.

I think when Mubarak did what he did,

I think it really upset people here,

as well as in the Middle East.

I put myself in their place

and I found myself in

a desert of nothingness,

because he just wiped out everything,

that my world incorporated.

That just showed me

and everybody else that,

the same thing can happen at any time,

at any world, at any government.

Anonymous and the people on the internet,

stood up and said:

Go f*** yourself!

You wanna shut down their internet?

Fine.

The people on the internet will

show them how to turn it back on.

It's almost like the Internet has an actual pain.

It's like the Internet is a living thing.

It's like a conscious thing that gets up and says,

"No, you can't do that!"

A lot of my friends helped with encryption,

helped people on the ground in those countries

validate SSL keys and certficates

and really showed them how to subvert their government

and become free.

And then Telecomix started to...

...tweet connections to the Internet, dial-up connections.

In Egypt the care package we put together

included some kind of our comms information,

the ham radio, the dial modem, details.

In total we helped co-ordinate

and ran about 500 dial-up modem lines.

We also googled up

treatments for tear gas and

other kind of basic medical treatment

and found folks who could

translate that into Arabic.

Sort of, put this together in

a nice one-page .pdf, in a fax

and off it goes.

I think the most effective thing

was shutting down government websites.

We were taking down the

dictator's webpages here.

It is cyber warfare at that point.

When you're dealing with a dictator like that,

that's killing people, all the gloves are off.

We are going to not just

take your websites offline,

we are gonna destroy

your every communications.

We are gonna wreck you like,

a nation state would wreck you.

In Cairo, Egypt, the crowds

are shouting and screaming..

President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down

from the office of president of the republic.

When Mubarak left, it was a "Hell Yeah!" moment.

People can rise up. People can make a change

and I think for a lot of people in America

it was the first time they had seen people rise up

and take down their government and say,

We're sick of this sh*t!

We're sick of the oppression.

We're sick of living as slaves to your power.

We had Egyptians come thank us, as for

doing this stuff and I said something like,

look, you guys just get our

back, if stuff goes down here.

Although it was awesome and it

was one part we were fighting for...

for me it was quite clear

it's not the end of the story.

That it's not suddenly changing into

rainbows and nyan cats, or whatever,

but that we now have to watch even more.

The FBI is now investigating Anonymous,

a loose collection of rogue, tech savy hackers,

credited with bringing down the websites

of Mastercard and Visa last December.

In, sort of, 40 raids back then, they ceased

computers, cellphones, this kind of technical apparatus,

Sometimes, in the case of a

they took her parents stuff, too.

There's always been a sort

of cat and mouse dynamic,

not just in relation

to the feds, but also to

the sort of groups, that

have appointed themselves as

guardians of the republic and there's

groups called like, backtrace security,

which may be a couple

of deranged people who,

I think for personal reasons have,

grievances against anonymous.

I've been threatened by people who are

former secret service agents,

who now run private security companies.

Suddenly on February 5th,

a Financial Times article

comes out, that we all see.

It's quoting this guy named Aaron Barr,

who's the CEO of HBGary Federal,

which is an intelligence contractor

and Aaron Barr is telling this

Financial Times journalist Joseph Menn,

that he's been secretly monitoring the

Anon-Ops server, where all of this is going on

and has done so for several weeks and using his own,

custom brand of information operations techniques,

has managed to identify the

alleged leadership of Anonymous,

including 25 "lieutenants", some sort..

We have to see this document,

everyone wants to know.

We don't need to destroy him,

we don't need to destroy his company,

we just need to see the document

and we'll decide what comes next

after looking at the document.

So they get it. It was unbelievably

easy to get into their network.

And my name was on there, as a string name

and Gregg Housh was listed there by string name.

The facts that matter is that,

what he told the Financial Times was,

everything he told them, was mostly untrue

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