In December 2010 the heat-seeking Internet pranksters known as Anonymous attacked PayPal, the online bill-paying business. PayPal had been a conduit for donations to WikiLeaks, the rogue whistle-blower site, until WikiLeaks released a huge cache of State Department internal messages. PayPal cut off donations to the WikiLeaks website. Then PayPal's own site was shut down, as Anonymous did what it did best: exaggerate the weight of its own influence.
But, according to "We Are Anonymous," by Parmy Olson, the London bureau chief for Forbes magazine, it had taken a single hacker and his botnet to close PayPal. "He then signed off and went to have his breakfast," she writes.
Even so, Anonymous made it seem like the work of its shadowy horde. "We lied a bit to the press to give it that sense of abundance," says the figure named Topiary, one of the best sources in "We Are Anonymous," a lively, startling book that reads as "The Social Network" for group hackers.
As in that Facebook film, the technological innovations created by a few people snowball wildly beyond expectation until they have mass effect. But the human element - the mix of glee, malevolence, randomness, megalomania and just plain mischief that helped spawn these changes - is what Olson explores best.
"Here was a network of people borne out of a culture of messing with others," she writes, "a paranoid world whose inhabitants never asked each other personal questions and habitually lied about their real lives to protect themselves."
The story of Anonymous and its offshoots is worth telling because of the fast and unpredictable ways they have grown. Anonymous began attracting attention after it attacked the Church of Scientology in 2008; subsequent targets have included Sony's PlayStation network, Fox television and ultimately the CIA. The Homeland Security Department expressed its own worries last year.
Olson provides a clear timeline through Anonymous' complicated, winding history. She concentrates particularly on how it spun off the smaller, jokier group LulzSec. "If Anonymous had been the 6 o'clock news, LulzSec was 'The Daily Show,"' she writes.
The breeding ground for much of this was 4chan, the "Deep Web" destination "still mostly unknown to the mainstream but beloved by millions of regular users." The realm of 4chan called /b/ is where some of this book's most destructive characters spent their early Internet years, soaking up so much pornography, violence and in-joke humor that they became bored enough to move on. Olson, whose evenhanded appraisals steer far clear of sensationalism, describes 4chan as "a teeming pit of depraved images and nasty jokes, yet at the same time a source of extraordinary, unhindered creativity." It thrived on sex and gore. But it popularized the idea of matching funny captions with cute cat photos too.
"We Are Anonymous" also captures the broad spectrum of reasons that Anonymous and LulzSec attracted followers. Some, like Topiary - who turned out to be Jake Davis, an outwardly polite 19-year-old from a sheep-farming community on the remote Shetland Island called Yell, who was arrested in 2011 - were in it for random pranks and taunting laughs.
No comments:
Post a Comment