The Technology Snob’s Favorite Hacker Group

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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/12/anonymous_vs_lulzsec_the_technology_snob_s_favorite_hacker_group.html

By Gabriella Coleman
Slate.com
Dec. 8 2014

This essay is adapted from Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many 
Faces of Anonymous, by Gabriella Coleman, published by Verso. On the 
evening of Thursday, Dec. 11, Coleman will be discussing her book with the 
ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian at a free Future Tense happy hour event in 
Washington, D.C. For more information and to RSVP, click here.

Here is a question without an easy answer: Who is Anonymous? I have spent 
more than half a decade spending copious time with Anonymous on chat 
rooms, during protests, and interviewing participants. Still this question 
has no easy or at least straightforward answer. Various groups of hackers, 
technologists, activists, geeks, and unknown parties use the name to 
organize diverse genres of collective action. These have ranged from 
humiliating hacks against security firms to technological support for 
Occupiers or Arab revolutionaries. In some instances, a multitude 
participates, as was the case with one of their most famous interventions: 
Operation Payback from December 2010. Anonymous targeted the websites of 
PayPal and MasterCard after they ceased accepting donations for WikiLeaks.

Anonymous has also involved smaller and more exclusive hacker groups such 
as LulzSec and Antisec. LulzSec—a crew of renegade hackers who broke away 
from Anonymous—engaged in a startling 50-day catalytic run that began in 
early May 2011 and abruptly ended in mid-June, soon after one of their 
own, Sabu, was apprehended and flipped in less than 24 hours by the FBI. 
Among LulzSec’s targets were Sony Music Japan, Sony Pictures, Sony BMG 
(Netherlands and Belgium), PBS, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, 
the U.S. Senate, the U.K. Serious Organized Crime Agency, Bethesda 
Softworks, AOL, and AT&T. Despite the avalanche of activity—and numerous 
intrusions—LulzSec, when compared with Anonymous, was more manageable and 
contained, at least from an organizational perspective. Its members also 
hacked with impunity, finally making good on the 2007 Fox News claim that 
Anonymous was comprised of “hackers on steroids.”

Even the haughtiest of security hackers—those technologists whose skills 
are channeled toward fortifying computer security—who had earlier snubbed 
Anonymous cheered on LulzSec. Old-school black hats lived vicariously 
through LulzSec, in awe of its swagger, its fuck-you-anything-goes 
attitude, and its bottomless appetite for exposing the pathetic state of 
Internet security. One Anon Anon (as members of Anonymous call 
themselves), also once active in the black-hat scene, put it this way in 
an interview with me: “LulzSec seemed to have a sort of fully formed 
mythos straight out of the gate while other hacker groups like Cult of the 
Dead Cow took decades to achieve that.”

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