Anonymous
Cyber attack
A new kind of warfare
Hackers and activists
Security leaks
Computer hackers
Hackers
Hacktivists.
Anonymous has struck again, with a warning,
this is just the beginning.
Anonymous is a collective known for recent attacks
on government and corporate websites.
The internet is a powerful new medium
where just a handful of people in small groups,
just by shifting data around in the right directions,
can make big changes and big damage.
The more you said, the more frightening it was.
The Pentagon is now singling out Anonymous
as an example of the serious new cyber-threats
facing the country.
The fundamental unit here is information warfare.
We're gaining back the freedoms that the forefathers assured us
through technology, and we can't we can't allow these
freedoms to be taken away.
I will put my body on the altar of liberty again and again and again.
Information is the weapon.
And information properly understood and properly used
in an honest way is more effective than anything else
in the world.
If you've got your eye on Boeing, yeah, please go for it.
I'd like to see those fuckers go down.
Dial the code, modify the code just a bid.
Bombard the Pentagon.
You're either with us, or you're against us.
You have 15 minutes
available for this call.
Hello?
Uh.
Andrew, are you there?
It's not scary to be going to prison?
No, I never was scared to be going to prison.
There's all these cool people, and I'm
learning all these cool things.
And I'm making lifelong future friends and future business
partners, certainly.
Embarrassing people, I enjoy it.
It's viscerally fun.
He's an instigator.
The most lovable little pest
on the internet.
His ability
to make other people so angry is the talent that he has.
Almost 90% of the articles that come out for Weev, they
all start out with, he's a dick, he's an asshole.
Little Weev is going to troll the fuck out of Apple and AT&T.
How do I plan on keeping my corn bread safe in prison?
I will stab a nigger that dares
reach across my plate.
I am the Bruce Lee of regexp.
I didn't get caught.
I put my name on what I did.
I'm not here to play nice with AT&T. I'm here
to comment and criticize.
There was a URL on an AT&T web server
with a number at the end.
And if you add one to this number,
like you could have typed it in the iPad web browser over
and over again, you would see the next iPad 3G user's email address.
Here's AT&T handing out a complete target
list of their customers.
I was morally required to come forward and sort of put them
over the coals for this.
It was, like, 114,000 email addresses.
And it's quite a list.
"New York Times" CEO Janet Robinson.
White House Chief
of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
Diane Sawyer.
Not to mention
the US Army and Congress.
And it doesn't get much more high profile
than Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City.
Mayor Bloomberg was like, this isn't a big deal.
It's not like people can't find my email address.
I'm aggregating public data and using
it to criticize people whose politics I dislike.
The FBI is combing through people's emails,
grossly violating their constitutional rights.
I think I have moral superiority here.
NSA and FBI are both walking here.
And they're looking at the computers.
And they're like, oh my god, these red dots,
they're converging.
They hit a button, renh, renh.
No black SUV.
There's been black SUVs outside the past couple of days.
All the red dots are in the same room right now.
There's going to be even more later.
Magic fucking genie.
You're actually in power.
You're in charge.
The most drastic improvements that need to be made
are in the education system.
We need to give people the kind of classical Western education
that they used to have.
We need a curriculum that embraces,
you know, like, Keats and Byron.
It doesn't sound revolutionary.
It's absolutely revolutionary.
We have people in power that have explicitly
engineered our education system to make people dumb,
obedient, and uncreative.
Getting them out of fucking power and remaking it
so people can be free-thinking, well-educated, sensible,
non-reactionary people, this is a revolutionary thing.
And it's probably going to require
a whole lot of bloodshed.
Why has the FBI targeted you?
They have, by their own admission,
been surveilling me since I was 15 years old.
That was in the search warrant they
used to kick in my door in 2010.
And why?
They wanted me to it inform on hackers on the internet.
They've tried to get me to do that many times.
There is a congruence between whistleblowing and hacktivism
and hacktivists.
The similarity is speaking truth to and of power,
revealing the power structure whether it's corporate,
whether it's government, or both.
I was a senior executive at the National Security Agency.
And I served there for about six and a half years.
I blew the whistle on the secret surveillance programs
called Stellar Wind, which were the foundational surveillance
programs that ultimately Edward Snowden, 12 years later,
is now disclosing through reporters and journalists.
The government went ahead and prosecuted me
under the Espionage Act.
It was a 10 felony count indictment.
I faced 35 years in prison.
Hackers are important in the sense
that they have the capacity to expose
the secret or the inner workings of the state, which
is why they are terrified of hackers,
and they are going after them with phenomenal vengeance.
We are looking at increased transparency.
Unprecedented transparency.
He called the former head of the NSA
at home on a weekly basis for a couple of months,
trying to get him to talk to him.
Barrett was speaking in that language
of real adversarial journalism, that the purpose of journalism
is not to please those in power but to report the truth, even
when it makes those in power uncomfortable or reflects poorly on them.
29 years old, a cocky college dropout,
a self-described anarchist, Brown
proclaims he is policing wrongdoing.
He was brash, he was cocky, he was arrogant.
He was fucking full of himself.
He's awfully narcissistic.
He held court, so to speak, from his bathtub.
Fucking around on Tinychat.
The take of NBC brass was Barrett
was not a very appealing character.
He was not somebody that...
they wanted to tout as in any way
heroic or doing an admirable thing.
Barrett was somebody who was very
open about his own struggles with substance abuse.
He was on a maintenance drug, like a methadone.
He was on Suboxone.
At least he was trying to stay off hard drugs,
to be on at least a medicine.
Who are the members of Anonymous?
Who are they?
They're everyone.
I mean, you'd be amazed.
There's obviously a lot of people
who are hackers who just working in IT.
They work for major corporations in some cases.
There's journalists, writers of all kinds, people
who work at gas stations.
What is Anonymous?
It's basically the power
of an absolutely massive group of people coming together.
Anonymous are your brothers and sisters,
your sons and daughters, your parents and your friends.
Anonymous is you.
Anonymous cannot and will not stand idly while
people are being denied their basic rights and human
liberties.
Understand that something
is horribly wrong with this world.
The Tunisian government
has made itself an enemy of Anonymous.
The Egyptian government has revealed itself to be criminal.
For the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment.
To end the corruption, we must expose it.
If you
are working for a corrupt company, leak the data.
If you are working for a corrupt government, leak the documents.
Think for yourself.
Question authority.
Join us in this battle
for freedom of information worldwide.
Remember, we are you.
Anonymous is you.
And you are Anonymous.
You are fighting for yourself, the web,
and for the next step in evolution.
It's a very interesting relationship
Barrett has with Anonymous.
Barrett's Anonymous.
He's their spokesperson.
Barrett's not Anonymous.
He's not their spokesperson.
Is Barrett really Anonymous?
Because he doesn't hack, and he doesn't really
have computer skills.
Well, does he have a Guy Fawkes mask?
He was fulfilling a very valuable and important
function, which was to give anonymous
the legitimacy it needed.
He was the person who was willing to go on record.
It's an open brand.
Like, anyone can sort of label what they're doing Anonymous.
If you're doing something that people don't approve,
then Anonymous will turn in on itself
and sort of eliminate that.
Like, whatever it is that doesn't fit in
with the truth-seeking, justice-seeking ideology.
Are you not worried that even an informal involvement
with Anonymous is going to end up with you targeted,
with you potentially going to jail for this?
He was interacting with other hackers.
A couple times, he wanted to make the point that he was not
a hacker, that he was of the community.
Anonymous members try to hack into people's personal accounts
and attempt to expose personal information.
And if we did, we wouldn't go around bragging about it
beforehand.
We would wait until we were done.
This article is also poorly written, and I object to that.
He wasn't able to just try to do anything cleanly
without people giving him a hard time about it.
My actual title is Cobra Commander.
Hiss, hiss.
Hiss.
So that's how I need to be acknowledged, I think, further.
I also go by faggot now.
These use that non-pejorative fag.
He's an ego-fag and a moral-fag and a leader-fag and just about
everything but a fag-fag, as you know,
leave it to the internet to have to repeat themselves.
What happened today is certainly illegal.
Why are you willing to show your face?
Barrett being a named person was his own doing.
He did not show up as Anonymous.
He showed up as Barrett Brown.
There's a new world being born here.
At least, that's the perspective of the people in it.
And I think Barrett really reflected that and gave voice
to this emerging world view.
Whether it's valid or not is another question.
And we do not
Forget.
Sabu spoke about things in terms of this
being a movement for revolution, and everybody
was his comrade or his brother.
He had kind of built himself up within Anonymous
and had this reputation of a like,
doesn't give a fuck freedom fighter.
There's de facto leadership, de facto organizer.
Someone had to have the idea and start bringing people in.
So for a little while, they're going to listen to this guy.
They're going to say, what are we doing here?
Why are we doing it?
There are two types of hackers.
There's a ghost hacker, who constantly changes
his identity, so nobody knows who he is
or even how to really get ahold of him.
And then there are people with permanent fixed identities.
Sabu had a permanent identity.
He made it pretty clear what his philosophy, his politics were.
I find him to be incredibly annoying.
He uses words like what's up, niggy.
And like, he's a very, like to me,
I'm very annoyed by everything he says.
Like I don't like his terms and the way he talks.
He was the king of the hacking world,
doing it like a "sir," in fact.
Friends around the globe, we are LOL at security.
LulzSec came from Anonymous, and they
enjoyed what each other did.
Laughing out loud at security LulzSec.
Greetings from Anonymous.
For the past decade, the government
has tried to take control of our internet.
The Lulz boat was just sailing the infinite seas
of hacking excellence, hacking the shit out of everybody.
Topiary, is everything all right?
Are you dead?
Are you OK?
Remember you tweeted my fucking phone number, said,
-512-560-26 Here's the leader of the LulzSec.
Call him now.
You threw it on the fucking LulzSec Twitter?
Barrett Brown is the leader of Lulzec!
Give him a call now!
I got 200 calls
Hurry up.
Get the sign.
Do you have it?
Oh, my god.
Oh my god.
You did it.
Oh my god.
Oh my you did it, man.
No, I'm watching it.
I'm standing here watching it.
You did it. It's working. It's totally working.
If I was working in a cubicle, I'd
be like, oh, what are those Lulzsec guys doing today?
You know those "God hates fags"
morons that protests soldiers funerals and stomp
on American flags because they've
got a problem with gay people.
God hates fags.
What part of that don't you understand, girl?
I don't fucking understand why God hates fags.
Because he can.
We can sometimes take over the websites themselves, put messages up,
as we did today with Westboro.
If you check downloads.westborobaptistchurch right now,
you'll see a nice message from Anonymous.
The hacks got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Pull up the screen, and they're like, Tango Down, cia.gov for the Lulz.
I'm like, oh shit.
What a hacktivist can do and does all the time is embarrass
the power elite in a way that boots on the ground can't.
So you can go and sit in the front of a building,
you can circle the Pentagon.
That doesn't really embarrass anyone.
If you hack the website of the CIA,
you've embarrassed the power structure of the nation state.
You've embarrassed the Pentagon.
You've embarrassed the United States of America.
You've embarrassed it by puncturing
the illusion of their power.
You made us look bad.
You taunted us.
We don't take to kindly to that.
You embarrassed me.
So when someone comes along like a hacker
and exposes the dark underbelly of this beast,
that beast...
it's not just tickling the beast.
They're going to take some swipes at you.
One of the most notorious hacking
groups of all time has had its head chopped off.
Return
to the government crackdown on a loose, large network
of politically-inspired hacktivists.
A 19-year-old
who goes by the nickname Topiari was arrested
in Scotland's Shetland Islands.
The FBI will pull in some 17, 20-year-old kid
and threaten them with 100 years in prison,
just to get them to inform on people.
There were at least three snitches
involved in the takedown of LolzSec.
This was a domino effect.
People were taken into custody that folded on their comrades.
On September 17, 2011, Sabu comes back on Twitter
from his, like, month-long absence.
And he's like, rise up, my fellas.
The next thing I know, it's like, 18 chat rooms are linked
together, and everybody's working in this Occupy Wall
Street chan.
And like, holy shit.
All right, so let's get to work.
I grew up in a normal family.
I'm from Arkansas.
I'm a high school dropout.
There's nothing particularly special about me.
And there's nothing particularly special about any of us.
But together we can form a movement.
I am the 99%.
Get off the street.
Get onto the sidewalk.
The cops tricked us into going down a one-way street.
And then they kettled us because we were on a one-way street.
They were really mean and kinda violent.
Were you wearing your Anonymous mask
when you got arrested?
I was.
I was too.
I don't want to hide my face, but sometimes I
feel like I have to.
People are dismissing
you guys as anarchists.
Anarchy.
Thousands of occupy protesters flooded the streets.
The sinister mask,
fashion on Guy Fawkes, the revolutionary who
attempted to blow up the British parliament buildings more
than 400 years ago, has become a worldwide symbol
of anarchy and revolution.
They are terrorists.
The other side, the rich motherfuckers portraying us
all as destructive, mindless anarchists and so forth,
have really exposed how reactionary
and how inherently violent the police state really is.
I am a journalist!
I am also a protester.
This guy was just arrested,
didn't do anything illegal.
This guy was just standing around too.
We can't see the story from over here.
Remember the press?
How are we supposed to do our job if you kick us out
of the park?
The Jews fooled the Germans, because they got to Germany,
and they were very serious, rigid people.
And the Germans were like, oh, they're just like us.
And so they got this great success in Germany.
And then the Germans figured out,
oh, they took over our banks, and it's
hyper-inflated our currency.
Fuck these people.
And perhaps the punishment was disproportionate to the crime.
Maybe.
But the Jews were the criminal people in Germany,
and they did have something coming to them.
Just a little.
Oh my god.
Perhaps not the Holocaust.
I certainly don't blame you for walking away.
It's a good thing you're a troll.
You can always pull that kind of troll card.
He's obviously a troll and by all
accounts an asshole and highly offensive and of dubious
moral fiber and dubious moral standing.
He is an internet troll.
And for the uninitiated, that's someone
who just likes to mess with people
for the sake of messing with people.
Trolling is a rhetorical style that exposes somebody else's
personality flaws by eliciting a reaction from them that
shows the true nature of their character.
He pinpoints your vulnerability,
and he immediately starts to exploit it.
But for higher cause, to show that you're hypocritical,
to show that you have misogyny, to show that you yourself
are racist while you're yelling at him for being racist.
Trolling is in the Socratic tradition
of questioning everything and driving people nuts until they
question their assumptions.
And that's basically what a good troll will aspire to do.
If I were to name parties that I think were great trolls,
I'd say Giordano Bruno, Zeno of Elea,
Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young,
I'd definitely name some parties who
used a very combative style of rhetoric
but probably nobody alive.
You meet Weev in person, and he's
the nicest guy in the world.
He'll hold the door open for you.
He'll grab you a soda if you ask him.
And if you meet him online, he'll
spew a whole bunch of anti-Semitic crap
and he'll be really mean.
I like to think of trolling as a way of expressing
working-class discontent.
I recall recently that Gina Rinehart called the working
class people of Australia lazy and without self-control.
Trolling is the right of said people
to respond by telling her to perhaps stop eating and get
on a treadmill.
You say that trolling is about creating something
that expresses the true nature of the character.
I wonder how what you said about Gina Rinehart
exposes the true nature of the character,
if you're just talking about her weight.
When she has inherited wealth from her father, a bunch
of mines, and she runs around calling the people that
pull the minerals out of the ground for her lazy and stupid,
it's disgusting.
It's a level of decadence and gluttony
that I think speaks not only through her weight
but her general demeanor.
She's a loud-mouth, obnoxious idiot.
I'm not a bigot, except by the original definition of bigot,
I air my opinion very loudly without the concern
for others' fucking cries of help about,
oh, he's saying something that we don't like to hear.
That's actually the initial definition of bigot,
before it was associated with a racist somebody who
loudly airs their opinion.
And it says something stark now that bigot
is a pejorative term.
There's a quote from Voltaire.
It says, to find out who rules you,
find the people you may not criticize.
Why do we all have to agree with each other?
That's what freedom is about.
I can call you a disgusting kike,
and we can still live in the fucking same society.
He actually is trying to shove this down everyone's throat.
Freedom of speech at all costs, as hardcore as I can make it.
He's a crazy fucker.
But, you know he's, he's a...
our crazy fucker, I think.
What was it, the Gay Nigger Society?
Oh, crap.
I can't say that on camera, can I?
I should probably, probably not put that on camera.
The Gay Nigger Association has been around,
I think, probably since 2000.
It is a very old troll organization.
I was elected president of it in 2010.
The name
is based on a Danish short film called
"Gayniggers from Outer Space. "
The gay niggers
come from the planet Anus, and they are much,
much more intelligent than any other creature in the universe.
When Hurricane Sandy swept through New York,
they posed a bunch of pictures on Twitter
of black people, like, looting and stuff.
And #SANDYLOOTCREW is what they called it, the hashtag.
Tons of media outlets picked it up.
If people were tweeting pictures of white people
in suits doing TVs, the media would actually
investigate it and be like, all right,
this is bullshit, instead of just reporting that nonsense
without any forethought.
Trolls in trouble computer hackers
find themselves on the wrong side of the law
after breaching AT&T's security.
I mean, I guess there's a blurry line between Goatse
Security, was it a troll or was it a hack?
But I mean, the name Goatse Security
invokes that terrible image of, that ruined my childhood.
He named his company Goatse Security.
So if you know what Goatse is G-O-A-T-S-E
I'm not going to explain it.
Hey, there's this gaping security flaw here.
Goatse Security, who are these guys?
And they're Googling Goatse, and they're
getting the goatse picture.
They're called Goatse Security?
Am I pronouncing that correctly?
Yeah, that's right.
We're analyzing coverage from Bloomberg, Goatse,
The Register, and Forbes.
Goatse Security would expose the gaping security holes
in your systems.
A corporation like AT&T and Apple, the only way
you could really get to them was literally
to send it to the media and make a,
a gaping asshole mockery of it.
We're here today to announce that our office has filed
criminal charges against Andrew Auernheimer.
I never understood.
The picture that the press has painted of me is unfair,
and I'd love to have a discussion, a fair discussion.
Truth triumphs in the end.
Would you say you've done anything wrong?
I don't believe I've done anything wrong, no.
What happens when a hacktivist comes some kid like Weev
comes along and punctures the invincibility of the United
States government or AT&T?
You minimize the power of these institutions by doing that.
That's why these kids have to be stopped.
Too late.
My time has come.
Sends shivers down my spine, bodies aching all the time.
Goodbye, everybody.
I've got to go,
gotta leave you all behind and face the truth.
Mama
Come on, everybody.
Everybody, we're going.
Can you can you whistle the "Ode to Joy?"
It's been good knowing you.
I hope to see you all again.
If not, write me shit and keep causing trouble.
Cause as much trouble as you can in my stead.
That was classic. Of course.
You're not coming in?
No, I'm coming in.
I just don't know how fast they're gonna take you.
In my country, there's a problem.
And that problem is the feds.
They take everybody's freedom, and they never give it back.
I'm going to prison for arithmetic.
I added one to a fucking number on a public web server,
and I aggregated this data, and I gave it
to a fucking journalist at that man's publication.
And this is why I am going to prison, is arithmetic.
Fuck this country.
America's priorities
are our priorities.
We are developing solutions
that prevent cyber-threats from becoming cyber-attacks.
Because at Northrup Grumman,
values are what enable us to perform
at the very highest levels.
Because we know that what we do affects
the security of our nation and other nations around the globe.
- Northrup Grumman. - CACI.
- Lockheed Martin. - Booz Allen Hamilton.
- Abraxas. - Palantir.
Stratfor, leader in global intelligence.
Even people who are paying close attention to it,
like me, had never really focused on those players
before until Barrett started doing
the journalism that he was doing.
There's always been contractors.
We had contractors during the American Revolution.
Let's be real in terms of history.
We've never had what were defined
as inherently governmental functions,
including the centerpiece functions of the intelligence
system, the most secret being turned over
for profit to corporations.
If you have that kind of control because of the accesses
you're granted and the government giving you
the deep state intelligence, the deep state data, guess what.
You get to serve the state.
You get to justify its continued existence.
You're going to color the world...
with the mentality of the state
which is, the world's a dangerous place.
There's lots of threats out there.
It's a target-rich environment.
These are people that are in this to enrich themselves.
They're the people in the government,
and they're the people in this business.
And they don't care that it's not helping anyone.
These are not patriots.
These are people that maybe have military background.
They might think of themselves as patriots,
but they are not patriots.
We can meet and surpass
shareholders' expectations, branch into adjacent markets,
and pursue billions of dollars in unconstrained growth
opportunities.
They're invested in the security theater.
Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars
have been spent on national security,
ostensibly to practice I can actually
say it's actually in the trillions,
the total amount of money.
I would argue it's the largest redistribution of wealth
in the history of the United States.
Wars are not meant to be won, they're meant to be continuous.
And if you want to hold a continuous war,
whether in real life or on the internet,
then you need an enemy that can't be destroyed.
And Anonymous is impervious to really being destroyed,
because it's decentralized.
It's everywhere.
And it doesn't even have to exist.
I mean, they could just say it exists, and then it would.
And it's sort of just like terrorism.
Terrorists are everywhere.
Terrorists your neighbor may be a terrorist.
So we have to remain vigilant.
And that's the same thing that's basically happening online.
Right now I've got Barrett Brown.
Founder of Project PM.
And one of our cyber experts
Barrett Brown
Joins us now to break it all down.
So is this an official declaration
of war against Booz Allen Hamilton and possibly
other contractors?
I still collaborate with some Anonymous participants
within my own group, Project PM, acquiring more information
and bringing attention to what's called the intelligence
contracting industry.
So he has this initiative called Project PM, which
was a crowdsource wiki that is supposed to investigate
the mushrooming cyber-security industrial complex.
It's a collaborative research project.
You're tapping into the collective consciousness
of the world, which is always an incredibly powerful thing
to do.
That is going to be the future model of journalism.
The collusion in part with press, mainstream press,
was, we're just going to sort of look the other way.
We're not going to actually use the powers
we have available to us.
He was building up this database
of who was doing what with who, what intelligence firms are
working for what government entities, what outside ones are
working together, what contracts have they
landed that we don't like you know, all that type of stuff,
stuff they don't want the public to know about.
There were these hacks going on that we're expected,
these data dumps.
Shit's about to start getting crazy, if you know what I mean.
Going through thousands of emails
is kind of a huge undertaking.
It's a lot of reading.
Did you do that, go through hundreds of emails?
Can I say that?
These people were contributing to what
they believed was a journalistic project.
They were contributing anonymously,
they thought, to help the cause of journalism.
Obviously Barrett was onto something, otherwise
there wouldn't have been this type of reaction.
41 months, three years' supervised release, one drug
test within 15 days.
Computer monitoring, mental health evaluation,
$73,000 restitution to US Treasury to be given to AT&T.
He reached for his phone.
He reached for something.
They fucking tackled him, handcuffed him,
took him out for, like, 15 minutes.
He came back not just in, like, handcuffs but with the thing
around his waist, the big chain, laughing.
He's seriously walking around the courtroom,
just going, like
Like that.
I gave him the thumbs up.
How dare you be skillful?
How dare you utilize your knowledge?
It's fucking absurd.
And of course it's AT&T's fault.
They are responsible.
How can you say that the company that designed the website
is not responsible for their security flaws?
So the federal prosecutor said during Weev's trial
that just because he has a special skill,
he shouldn't have power over other people.
That's how they view it.
And it's not incorrect to say that people
who understand computers have power.
It's just, I don't think the answer is coming down
on our prodigies and our geniuses.
I'll put it this way.
There was a time when you hacked a company,
and the company hired you.
Now it's you hack a company, and they come
and they beat the shit out of you.
Hackers, hacktivists in prison, by virutally pointing out
weaknesses in the very structures
that we depend on as a common good.
When we weaken the common good, for what?
We're turning on ourselves.
And any time a country empire turns on itself
and begins to find threats from within, well,
that should tell you how far gone we are.
Howdy, internet.
My internet blogging must have pissed somebody off.
They have cut off my fucking TrulinX access
because, of course, we live in a country with a childishly
authoritarian government that can't handle anybody
saying anything mean about it on the internet.
I miss you.
I really do.
There are so many of you that I can't hopefully I see you
in a couple or years.
I wish I could call each and every one of you.
I'm still in prison.
I've been denied access to both sunlight and food.
I can't tweet via the normal means any longer,
but I will still read everybody's responses.
They will be snail-mailed to me.
Fucking barbarism!
Keep up the good fight, and make trouble while I'm gone.
You guys gotta carry the internet-ruin torch, I suppose.
Oh, god.
We've that was one of his better communiques.
I was outside grabbing a cup, and I get a call
from an unavailable number.
And it's like, do you want to accept this toll-free call
from Andrew, from federal prison?
And I was like, oh god, it's Weev.
I could barely make out what he was saying.
But he's like, set up an Asterisk box
so I can upload things to SoundCloud.
And I was like, OK, whatever.
He had email access for a month.
Then they took it away, because they figured out
that he was sending messages to another person, who
was tweeting them out from his account.
He and someone else had, like, code words set up.
So if I said, like, say this to my mom, or something like that,
then the next line would be a tweet.
They were trying to shut him down,
and we found a way to subvert it.
The more that they try to make this go away, the government,
it keeps coming back.
And it'll bring more attention on Weev.
It took him a couple of years to garner 5,000 followers.
And then as soon as he goes to jail, in a month,
he gets 5,000 more.
It took them a month to figure out
that we were uploading to Soundcloud,
even though there was, like, news articles about it.
And just a few days ago, we looked at the caller ID,
because we had two mysterious phone calls.
One of them was from US Government, all capitals.
And the other one was from Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Ever since then, we haven't heard from him.
Out of kind of the ashes of LolzSec,
Sabu wants a new thing, a new group,
a new cause going forward.
And this becomes Antisec.
With the visuals of machine guns,
this was no longer a laughing matter.
And they were not playing games anymore.
He was training people to attack government websites
and attack large corporations and businesses.
Greetings, pirates.
And welcome to another exciting Fuck FBI Friday release.
For Fuck FBI Friday,
we are releasing one gigabyte of private emails and documents.
It was asking for trouble, and trouble
came in a way that like, nobody
could have even written this.
Antisec culminated in Christmas of 2011 with the Stratfor hack.
I remember, like, being home with my family on Christmas,
glued to my computer, like, looking over, trying
to interact with my family, right at the same time,
you know, the Stratfor stuff's going on.
And I guess there's that glee that happens,
the glee that happens whenever like, oh, this happened,
this big hack.
And some people are just hanging out, you know,
because it's like, I'm a devotee to train wrecks.
And other people are, like, seeking out knowledge.
Stratfor is a private intelligence contractor.
They act as an outsourced, private version of the CIA.
The National Security Journalist Joshua Foust
or Foast or Fost or Faust, maybe, he
said that Stratfor's no different
than a private investigator.
But PIs don't have the sort of clientele
that Stratfor had Hunt Oil, National Oilwell Varco, Emerson
Electric, Dell Computers, and Northrup Grumman, Lockheed
Martin, Department of Homeland Security,
Defense Intelligence Agency, US Marines.
And they don't have the sort of informants
that Stratfor has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, Mexican Diplomat Fernando
de la Mora Salcedo, DEA pilot and sometime supervisor William
F. Dionne, giving them information
off of JWICS' top secret classified computer network.
So that's not the PI that you would
hire to see if your spouse is cheating on you.
That's Stratfor.
Cyber thieves made off with the personal details
of hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
They work up to find that they'd
given an unexpected Christmas present, the $50,000
between them, to numerous high-profile charities.
To take an ex-FBI agents and use their credit card
to make a donation to the Red Cross on Christmas Day,
I guess that it's criminal.
But it's also wonderful in its own way.
The Stratfor hack, it's claimed,
also contains email conversations
between Stratfor employees and officials
in their own government.
Every week a company or an agency,
is this going to get worse?
I think so.
People broke into something and, wow, criminals.
Well, OK.
Even if you want to call them criminals,
they're coming up with this information that
looks a lot like criminal activity.
The day that "WikiLeaks" published
the global intelligence files, which
is what it calls the Stratfor Leak,
"The Atlantic" wrote an article titled, Stratfor is a joke,
and so is WikiLeaks for taking it seriously.
And that was the very day of the leak,
so surely they didn't read the 5 million emails
that I've spent more than a year researching.
The 5 million emails have just been published.
The most important revelations are still unknown.
Infamous Anonymous hacker
Jeremy Hammond, number one on the FBI cybercrime list,
pled guilty to Christmas Hacking Spree.
Known as the electronic Robin Hood.
Jeremy Hammond.
Computer hacker Jeremy Hammond
has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
As a former journalist, a former investigative reporter
for "The New York Times," I'm stunned
that the rest of my colleagues well, I mean, frankly I'm
not that stunned are not here.
Jeremy's going to jail for 10 years.
I don't think a lot of people in this country
are going to find out about it if "The New York Times" doesn't cover it.
That's just the way that the media is set up right now.
There's a lot of people outside supporting him.
He's gotten a lot of letters.
So, you know
Hammond's actions are acts of civil disobedience
fundamentally.
In hacking Stratfor, Jeremy Hammond
achieved some degree of transparency.
It opened our eyes to things that we needed to see.
25 years after Bhopal,
after a gas tank released toxic gas
into the city surrounding the factory,
they were monitoring dissent and demonstrations
against Dow Chemical.
Data wants to be free is the hacker credo.
The real questions we need to be asking
is, when this data is shared with people,
who is it benefiting, and who is it hurting?
Jeremy's apartment, you know, is just
books scattered about the floor, books on the shelves.
What could be more dangerous than books?
The internet...
you know, which is really just one giant book about all
of us being written in real time.
Stop projecting this.
We love you!
We all love you, Jeremy.
Jeremy, flash your light.
Your mom is here!
She loves you!
And I'm proud of you too, boy.
My name is Barrett Brown, and I've
been waiting for this day for about six months.
In a way, I've been waiting for this day
since I was seven years old.
On March 5, I received communication
from a certain individual saying that I
was going to be raided the next day at my home.
They go to his house, his apartment.
And he had spent the night at his mom's house.
You know, I go to my mom's house
and sleep over there sometimes.
We've been very close.
Next morning, I woke up at 6:30 by my mom's.
She's scared.
I go downstairs.
There's two FBI agents.
One is named Robert Smith.
He is a FBI cyber-crime fellow.
They say, OK, we've raided your house, your apartment.
Do you have any laptops here you'd like to give us?
So they get another warrant for his mother's house
and find the laptop.
Then they charge his mother with obstruction of justice.
When I was seven years old, I first heard the term FBI.
My parents were fighting a lot.
And my dad would sometimes get angry and throw things
at my mom.
And part of the reason for that was
because my dad was being indicted by the FBI.
And I went from living in a nice house in Highland Park, one
of the nicest communities in America,
to living in a two-bedroom apartment with my mom
and grandma and sharing a bed with my mom
over the next year, when I was in third grade.
They'd gone after his father and bankrupted his father.
And his father was eventually found innocent
and apologized to by the court.
So basically, the FBI ruined his family.
It was after that day I realized I'm a bad guy,
and I had no idea beforehand.
And even now, I still have trouble really
sort of internalizing that.
But if the FBI says it, it must be true.
And from now on, I am the bad guy.
So it's kind of like a quad, and everybody in the apartment
complex can hear this man ranting against the FBI
on the balcony.
And I'm getting a little bit concerned,
but I also want him to have his
because he's Barrett Brown.
He says crazy stuff.
In the evening, we sit in the Tinychat, just joking around.
Whoa, is Barrett getting fucking raided by the FBI?
Holy shit!
If you're in the place getting raided,
OK, you don't know anything, because all of a sudden,
your utilities go out.
And the utilities go out, because the concern
is that the concussion grenades might start a fire.
So they don't want the gas or electricity running, OK.
And none of the stuff you see on television, where
they hit the door with a battering ram no,
that door comes down in one blow, OK?
And you're down on the floor with one of these macho jerks
pointing an assault rifle at your head, swearing at you
and telling you to freeze, or he's
going to blow your fucking brains out.
The second agent came around in his camo with his gun,
and he looked at me as if he didn't
know there would be a girl there.
Barrett's mother came over.
She sees Barrett Brown V, and then
the ampersand over and over and over again on Twitter.
Barrett Brown V& is a way that people communicate that
somebody has been arrested.
He's talking shit.
There's no crime against talking shit.
But maybe there is now.
What kind of threat ends with how do you like them apples?
It's like it's like, from, like, 1840 or something
like that.
If it was just threatening the agent
and that's all he was being charged with,
I wouldn't even care about this case.
Let him and Special Agent Robert Smith go out back and duke it
out, or let Special Agent Smith beat him up
or whatever he has to do.
The second indictment comes, and then it's
like a fucking kick in the gut.
All these guys are doing is trying to
put the fear in him, trying to pressure him to flip.
Barrett's such a stubborn asshole,
that he's never going to flip.
Their claim is that he took a link, copied it
it's journalistically important to get the client list pasted
it into the Project PM chat room, and in that one move,
produced criminal exposure for himself.
The Barrett Brown case is another one
of these seminal cases, and the government
wants to send a very chilling message.
It's fundamentally a First Amendment case.
How dare you hold up the mirror to us?
They called Project PM a criminal organization.
And that's what people freaked out about,
because there were a whole bunch of people on that server
editing that wiki, and like, wait, there's a criminal
I think they're after who, who anyone else?
Any other names to put on our list of people to watch?
The tingly feelings of, like, paranoia
are crawling up my spine like a spider.
They're there for a reason.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't
mean they're not after you.
So Jeremy Hammond did the hack.
10 years at this point.
Who's the guy that's looking at 105 years at this point?
It's Barrett Brown.
And what's the difference?
He's disseminating the information.
He's doing something more dangerous than what Jeremy did.
Here's the message is sends, from the government
to the hacktivists, who are getting great coverage
and are becoming folk heroes through the press.
Don't talk to the press, because we're
going to get their computers and we're
going to get their sources and we're
going to get you through that.
To the press who are covering the hacktivists,
don't cover these hacktivists, because we're going to get you.
I guess what I want, one, I'm no longer your bitch.
Two, all of my charges are dropped.
Three, all of Barrett Brown's charges are dropped.
That's up to the US Attorney.
Figure it out.
Hector Xavier Monsegur
was responsible for the arrest of Jeremy Hammond
and other Anonymous and LulzSec members.
Sources
say he began cooperating with the FBI.
It like, I felt like my brains had been blown out,
like it was the last scene of "The Departed. "
The FBI arrests Sabu, and they turn him within a day.
And they have him back on the internet within two days.
This isn't like...
some guy going undercover in the Gambino crime
family in person for years.
None of us had ever met him before.
He was just this guy we knew from the internet.
He talks the talk so forcefully,
with that kind of New York personality you know,
we are doing the right thing for the people.
We are building this anew from the ground up.
We are taking down the ugly,
evil, capitalist, imperial
machinery, and we are building it back up with our own hands.
My brother, he says.
Looking at Sabu's interactions with reporters during the time
that he was an FBI informant, Sabu
could have easily just told the reporter,
like, no, I don't want to talk to you, go away.
But that's not what he did.
He engaged in, like, an hour and a half long conversation
and then screen-capped it and handed that information over to the FBI.
That's not a free press.
The government has journalists under surveillance.
Do you think the government's targeting you?
I hope not.
I hope I'm not.
Shit.
Everybody's paranoia is just through the fucking roof.
Wait a sec.
If he was working for the FBI from that moment in June
to this moment now, they didn't delete his timeline,
they didn't try to hide any of that stuff.
Want to speak to me?
Want to join the fight?
Go to Wall Street and protest.
Sabu and Jeremy were partners in crime.
They were the digital Bonnie and Clyde, if you will.
Except one of them is working for the FBI the whole time.
The FBI is operating...
in sort of a new theater, which is online.
The government likes to use these hyperbolic terms
referring to cyber-warfare, cyber-weapons.
The feds, by proxy through Sabu,
were giving Jeremy the zero-days to get into these websites.
In order to, say, entrap a terrorist,
they would sell him fake explosives.
But instead of giving him fake explosives, the zero-days are real.
In the hacker world, you either get in or you don't get in.
There's no fake hack.
It wouldn't be a crime if it was a fake hack.
Ugh.
That's the only way I could describe it dude.
She fellated him.
The amount of cooperation was truly extraordinary.
And it was just amaz she just kept saying it over and over.
It was truly extraordinary.
You know and I gotta say too, I
don't know what I would have done in his position.
I really don't.
You have to walk a mile in his shoes to understand.
There's a lot of people that are going to be mad, though,
the amount of truly extraordinary cooperation
that he gave.
This was the first time anybody had ever seen him,
at least publicly.
Like, this was real.
This was finally coming to a close.
And he was facing the guideline
was between 21 and 26 years.
He walked out of...
the Manhattan court complex... a free man.
Yeah.
He immediately cooperated with the FBI when they arrested him.
And the judge said that that was probably
the most significant aspect of the case,
was that Sabu flipped so quickly, which enabled
the FBI to sort of become a part of Anonymous
over a nine-month period.
They were apparently sitting at the computer with him at times.
He had a camera in his apartment or house
that was videotaping him every day.
He was debriefed regularly by the FBI.
Judge Preska said, and I quote, I salute you.
The prosecution and the defense sort of built him up
to be this sort of conservative folk hero,
like the model FBI informant, the person who
every informant should live up to be, to the point
where it made it impossible for them to give him jail time.
It would have been it would've been
bad for the informant program for him
to have worked that long, to work three years
and then be sentenced to prison.
Sabu pretty much neutralized Anonymous.
Yeah.
Completely neutralized Anonymous.
And after he went down, everyone's
afraid of following any leader.
And they're also afraid of starting an operation on their own.
In general, nobody trusts anyone.
If you go onto any IRC chat, they're all just talking about,
you know, like...
- "Who's the fed?" - You're the fed.
At the end of the day, he's just a hacker
getting used by the government.
Sabu is the big snitch.
Like, the ninth circle of Hell is reserved for Sabu.
Him and Cain and, like, Judas will be there with Satan.
There's been an unfortunate deficit
in what people have read and what people have written
about an issue that is of extraordinary importance...
TrapWire.
Barrett sort of shines the light of this stuff.
He's like, oh my god, it's actually happening.
You've got the emails right there.
He stumbles across this.
He stumbles across it, starts talking about it.
TrapWire is software that can match surveillance data taken
from multiple closed circuit cameras
from across the country.
Video feeds are fed into a centralized system that
analyzes them for patterns of suspicious behavior.
To understand TrapWire, you have
to understand the larger context,
because TrapWire is a critical piece of the surveillance
apparatus.
This is actually doing very large swath,
persistent surveillance.
In 2007, TrapWire costs about $1.7 million
to operate in Los Angeles County.
What we know about how it functions
is largely gleaned from those emails.
TrapWire has been deployed in Seattle,
in Los Angeles, in DC.
According to a Stratfor email, there's
500 cameras in this New York City subway
system equipped with TrapWire.
"The New York Times"
said that TrapWire was only used on 15
cameras in the entire country, and that the DHS wrote it off
as a failure.
That's a complete lie.
We had gone to 38th Street Station to troll TrapWire.
And so what troll TrapWire was for us was essentially
acting out these things that the security researcher, Justin,
and other people had said, this might
work to trigger TrapWire's alarms.
Sitting their holding my laptop and looking around,
a little bit.
You were live-tweeting the video.
And you were being ridiculous about the whole thing.
Obvious, yeah.
We ate with a senior official in the Philadelphia Police Department.
During this, a homeland security unit for Philadelphia police
had come to him and said, Dustin Slaughter and Kenneth Lipp
are at 30th Street Station, and they're
worried that they were going to smash cameras,
that we have something terrorist in mind.
It blew our minds when we found out.
My god, they were monitoring this.
They actually were paying attention and freaked out about it.
They're doing what everyone's worried about.
Anarchists are running all over the place and smashing,
burning, looting.
Coverage of TrapWire in the US,
the whole story was smothered in its crib
by "The New York Times. "
It's an open secret that the mainstream media
has special access to the halls of power.
There was a phrase I used to hear at NSA
we're going to tell them what we want them to hear,
not what they need to know.
What we want them to hear.
That's pure manipulation.
That is CYOP Info Op.
You're saying, because you can, you're
controlling the narrative.
Hail victory!
Go, go, go, go, go.
What?
Yeah, dude.
And my magazines and my newspapers and my mail.
I spent the majority of my time in the SHU.
They were like, if you continue, we're going to force-feed you.
And I'm like, well, you're gonna force-feed me.
But hey, I ain't backing down, you know?
The infamous computer hacker known by his alias
Weev is a free man after more than a year behind bars.
An appeals court has now overturned his conviction.
Time behind bars has made Weev even more outspoken than before.
I can't watch my society rot when a bunch of federal scum
just want to throw anybody that they
disagree with in a prison cell.
It's the end of the West right now,
and we've got to fight for it.
Somebody has to.
You have no instincts to flee, like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange?
I'm not running. This is my country.
So this case is at every step of the way
from the initial criminal complaint
to my time in prison has always been about my speech.
And they've wanted to silence me.
They further punished me in prison
and subjected me to conditions above and beyond any
of the other prisoners at my facility because of my speech.
They wanted me to disappear from public view and memory.
It was inside the SHU, like...
inside the SHU...
There's an author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
He was one of the few authors that
kept writing after Stalin told all the authors that they
weren't allowed to write any literature that was compelling anymore.
And he ended up in a prison system called the Gulag.
And he describes there the steps that they
do to try to break you down.
And I kept checking off the bullet points that he listed.
He has, like, a 30 bullet point list
of all the various interrogatory methods
that they used in Soviet Russia.
Temperature extremes are one of them,
and they'll turn up the AC to freezing temperatures
while he was sleeping.
And then they'll pump up the heat during the day.
And they come and like, I couldn't
sleep because they would bang on the door every once in a while.
And they'll shine the flashlight in your eyes
and keep waking you up at night.
They'll put you on a bunk, and then you can't even sit up.
And there's a light right next to your head.
And it's pretty terrible.
No doubt about it, it's pretty terrible.
The surveillance state's already here.
It's already here.
We're constantly on camera.
Like, we can't put that back in the box.
Like, we can fret about it and say, oh gosh,
we need more controls.
That infrastructure is there, and it's not going away.
They can watch us through our webcams.
They can listen through our phones.
There's no privacy left, virtually.
We are the most watched, surveilled, monitored,
eavesdropped population in the history of the human race.
If you have nothing to hide, as justification for violating
your rights, then you have nothing to worry about.
You know where that phrase came from?
Goebbels from the Nazi era.
Nothing to hide?
That means there is no privacy.
I left Iran to come here, and now I
can't have security or privacy?
All we want is just fucking live our lives.
Half of us, we don't even give a shit,
if we could all be left alone.
It's my right by birth to have privacy.
They want to own you.
That's a power relationship superior, inferior.
If I know every single thing about you, about what you
think, how you reason, what your fears are,
what you're planning, what you're doing,
and you know nothing about me, because I'm
shielding my behavior behind a wall of secrecy,
I have incredible power over you.
The power imbalance between us is immense,
because I can now manipulate you, I can threaten you,
I can alter your behavior in all sorts of ways,
I can anticipate your behavior, I can prevent you
from doing things that you're planning,
I can prepare in defense of what you're doing,
I can always stay many steps ahead of you.
This mentality is pathological.
You have to understand the mindset.
You have to understand the psychology
behind those who want to know everything.
That means anything hidden, anything private,
anything sovereign is a direct threat
to the surveillance state.
The capacity of this agency to spy on people
and to know everything that they do
is so extreme and awesome, at any moment pure totalitarianism
could be imposed, and the American people
would have no place to hide.
Security and surveillance state is put into place
in order to keep a population captive.
And they now have all the mechanisms
to do it absolute iron control,
over-arrestive population, should
the population become restive?
The United States unchained itself fully
from the Constitution.
People still don't fully appreciate it.
We talk about mass surveillance, all
this stuff- no, they've unchained.
This is an alien form of government.
It's completely anathema to democracy.
It's completely anathema, but obviously the government's
not going to come out and say, hey, guess what?
We're under national emergency conditions.
I'm going to continue hitting large companies
and institutional powers.
I'm not going to take no shit from nobody.
Fuck them if they can't take a joke.
I was not going to sit still and remain silent,
because if I had remained silent, I
myself would have been complicit in the conduct of a crime
against the sovereignty of who we are as people.
That's We the People, capital W and capital P, We the People.
You can just sign off.
Like, you don't have to be a victim of trolling.
Like, you can just turn off the internet.
Sabu got off.
Judge Preska and the attorneys and the defenders
got on their knees and fellated him.
That's, like, a lot more sex than I
remember going on in the courtroom.
Don't limit your activism to just the mere world
of computers.
Take it to the streets.
We need more foot soldiers in the streets to fuck up shit.
"Dallas, Texas, native Mr. Brown joins other infamous
Texans who fought the government,
such as Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. "
Fucking really?
Really?
The Branch Davidians? Really?
Fuck you.