I Am Anonymous

Published in the November 2013 issue

He lives in a town the locals call "Rifle City": Winchester, Kentucky. On one shoulder, there's a tattoo of a skull with a knife in its teeth and a bouquet of grenades dangling under its chin, a tribute to his grandpa's service in Vietnam. But the ribbon for a legend is blank because he never could figure out what he wanted it to say. On his other shoulder he's got a Celtic Green Man made of leaves, and he has a place on his forearm where the skin seems to peel back to show machine parts. His old man used to be a military cop, then a prison guard. His mom hung out with bikers. They divorced. He was homeless for a while then got himself together and went back to school. Now he lives on a small farm with a couple of outbuildings and a pond, some woods across a field, a Chevy truck parked in the driveway.

When the SWAT team pulled in, his shotgun was resting against the wall because he had just gotten back from turkey hunting. A panel truck pulled into his driveway, and when he went out to greet it twelve men in forest camouflage jumped out with assault weapons pointed right at his head, yelling, Get the fuck down!

As he dropped, KYAnonymous pleaded, Don't shoot my dog. He don't bite, he just jumps.

The noise woke up a second witness, his brother Chase. A lean twenty-three-year-old who plays in a punk band and works in a tattoo parlor, Chase remembers looking down from an upstairs window and seeing men with machine guns heading for his door. His first instinct was to grab his .45, cocking it on his way down the stairs.

SWAT! voices yelled. POLICE! The door crashed against the wall.

Chase had the presence of mind to throw his gun into the curtains, then instantly he was on his knees with a hard barrel pressed into his skull. The invaders wouldn't say what they wanted, wouldn't answer questions, just zip-tied his hands and went upstairs to zip-tie his girlfriend and walked them both outside. She doesn't even have any shoes, Chase said. He remembers the FBI guy saying, Shut the fuck up.

This is America, buddy, Chase answered. You're on my property. You shut the fuck up.

All this was happening because Chase's brother had reached out through the Internet and tapped into the global spirit of defiance of Edward Snowden, Tahrir Square, and the Brazilian street protests and brought the future to one small American town — KY-Anonymous is the guy who called the world's attention to the infamous Steubenville rape case, in which members of Anonymous, the global hacker collective, mounted a campaign to expose the town for protecting its town-hero high school football stars from rape charges. Now he's caught up in one of the hottest battles of the modern world, the battle over knowledge itself, an asymmetrical war being fought globally between superpowers and corporations on one side, and on the other side kids who all seem to be twenty-five, a diverse bunch of punks whose common trait is a healthy disdain for official secrets and proprietary information. Current skirmishes range from the NSA metadata program to President Obama's unprecedented crackdown on leakers to the FBI's furious pursuit of little guys like KYAnonymous. They fired one guy at the State Department just for linking to WikiLeaks on his personal blog. And there's the ominous example of Aaron Swartz, the nerdy kid genius who killed himself after federal prosecutors threatened him with a $1 million fine and thirty-five years in prison just for reposting articles from academic journals.

The rest of the SWAT team spreads across the old farm, smashing the door on the barn and breaking an RV window. A CSI team dressed in white lab coats goes in to search the house while the detectives take their suspect to the back porch, where they take off the cuffs and sit him down in an old wicker chair. There's a table and an ashtray filled with butts. This is where they sit in the evening, looking out over the pond.

The FBI man asks if he wants a lawyer.

Why should I? I haven't done anything illegal.

If he lies to the FBI, the agent tells him, he will go to jail for a minimum of five years. Then he asks KYAnonymous if he has hacked into a fan Web site for the Steubenville football team and posted a video demanding the players apologize to the victim.

KYAnonymous says it wasn't him.

We know you're a good guy, the agent says. We like what you do. But if you're lying to us, you'll get more time.

KY sticks to his story.

Hours later, they leave with his $2,000 Alienware computer, his girlfriend's Dell, his brother's Xbox, a car-sale receipt for his truck, a couple flash drives and hard drives, and his credit report — and a warning not to talk about the raid. You don't even have to tell your girlfriend, the agent tells him. You can make up something.

KYAnonymous grasps at the straw. Yeah, I can tell her y'all were here for a grow operation.

There you go, the agent says.

And for a moment it seems like things could actually be that simple.

Flash back just one year, and KYAnonymous doesn't even exist. Known as Deric Lostutter to the government, DJ to his mom, and Shadow to his oldest friends, he was twenty-five years old and working as a waiter in a pizza-and-beer joint for eight bucks an hour, getting home at two or three in the morning stinking of kitchen grease. One day he pulled up a documentary on YouTube called We Are Legion.

The story starts with a group of pranksters on a message board called 4chan who come together to send digital avatars with digital Afros to mob a digital pool at another online community — the birth of anonymous communal action in the spirit of stupidity. Later they add rapidly blinking lights to an epilepsy forum and hack a fake story onto PBS about Tupac and Biggie being alive and living together in New Zealand. To a guy who grew up on Jackass, this seemed like good fun.

But what really grabbed Lostutter was the famous move into "hactivism" in 2008, when the hacker punks took on the Church of Scientology by shutting down its Web sites and summoning thousands to live protests — the first appearance of the Guy Fawkes masks now common to protests all over the world. And just like that, without meetings or minutes, Anonymous was born. The FBI added rebel glamour by responding with arrests, putting one nineteen-year-old away for a year just for helping to shut down a Web site for twenty-four hours. After the government pressured Pay Pal, MasterCard, and Visa to stop routing contributions to WikiLeaks, new Anonymous factions instantly sprang up to crash their Web sites, too. When the FBI responded with forty raids and at least fourteen arrests, new recruits immediately opened new fronts in this war, threatening the officers who ran the brig where Bradley Manning was being held naked while others hacked into the U. S. Senate Web site and another took down the Web site of the CIA. One audacious group hacked into the computers of a pair of military contractors named Stratfor and HBGary Federal, revealing sordid plans to discredit liberal muckraker Glenn Greenwald, manipulate public opinion, and infiltrate activist groups. Others shut down government Web sites in Egypt and Libya and helped Tunisian protesters looking to keep government secret police out of their computers.

The thing is, these are all kids just like Deric Lostutter. Most of them are in their twenties, and some are teenagers. One of the geniuses behind the HBGary hack was an eighteen-year-old from the Shetland Islands who called himself Topiary. Another was a twenty-four-year-old soldier who posed online as a sixteen-year-old girl named Kayla. Multiply that by hundreds, thousands, maybe someday even millions. Because you don't have to sit at home complaining about your crappy job, your crappy town, your crappy country. Anyone can join. All you have to do is find your way to the private Internet Relay Chat channel for newbies and start listening to the conversation.

And Lostutter thought, Fuck yeah, America. Finally someone's getting off their ass. I want to roll with these people!