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Submission to the DEF CON 29 Short Story Writing Contest:
https://forum.defcon.org/node/237748

title: Untitled
author: phonebook

It was 2007 when I first Googled “how to join Anonymous,” and it was 2021 when I found my answer.

If you asked me now what exactly brought the hackertroll collective to my attention fourteen years ago, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Friends were talking about it. Pundits were talking about it. It was on the radio, the TV, the now-ubiquitous social media sites that were, at the time, still in their infancy. A word-of-mouth campaign spread, faster than any normal gossip.

Back then, though, the nameless name was on everyone’s mind, and it had something to do with the FOX 11 “exploding van” video. A local news station in California had picked up on strange news: an online collective of pranksters with no known identity was conducting crank calls, DDoS attacks, and controversial “raids” on online social platforms. These raids had begun to branch into the offline world, in the form of harassment campaigns on anyone Anonymous deemed an enemy. FOX 11 took the story, paired it with dramatized footage meant to symbolize what they called internet terrorism, and forever burned Anonymous into the American zeitgeist.

Amid the prank calls and the disguised voices, I saw a group of creative minds. I recognized people like me who thought outside of the box, even if our artistic mediums were different. And I saw something cool. Ordinary hackers had power, sure, but Anonymous had panache.

After the FOX 11 video, Anonymous didn’t go away — they loved the attention, and I loved watching them get it. The trolling continued into the spring of 2008, when scores of unknown protesters, dressed in hoodies and Guy Fawkes masks, descended on Scientology outposts across North America. Bigger and bigger news outlets ran with the story, sending the polished adult world into an uproar. I relished this: at the time, I had no seat at the table in that adult world, no personal agency. Somehow, this mysterious collective had an intoxicating grip on the minds of an entire continent, and that grip was fast expanding across the globe. It was an upending of the suit-and-tie Way Things Should Be.

I wanted in. I Googled, and got the frustrating, predictable results: Anyone can join Anonymous. There is no application, no process. If you align with our ethos, welcome to the club. We are Legion. Join us. Expect us. Et cetera.

In my hapless searching, I stumbled upon the imageboard forums, the “chans,” that might have been my entry point, but these were well-disguised. The media had reported 4chan as a breeding ground for lawless e-lords, but they’d gotten it wrong; the real epicenter was 420chan, which, after receiving a surprise feature in the FOX 11 video, had taken care to throw on virtual camouflage to keep out nosy journalists, Bible Belt parents, and viewers like me. 420chan’s cyber ghillie suit came in the form of a website background made up of gory images, gore which had the pleasant side effect of preventing any screenshots of 420chan from appearing on live television. No respectable news outlet would air pictures of beheadings and mangled limbs.

Still, even if a curious internet tourist made it past those filters, the tailored message persisted: you don’t have to do anything to be in Anonymous. You either are, or you aren’t. Get a mask and hop on the bandwagon.

The showmanship was fine, but I didn’t want to roleplay. I wanted to be in the brain trust.

However, back then, my internet warlord dreams wouldn’t work out. This was for two reasons. The first was that our modest, homeschooled family shared one computer, a monolithic white slab of an iMac plunked down in the middle of the family room, and our house’s open floorplan provided no cover for illicit internet activities. The screen was visible from any room except the dining room, which was reserved for Thanksgivings and birthdays and where no one otherwise spent much time. Any dark Googling had to be done while my mother was out for a walk, or at the grocery store, and even then we’d only have a thirty-second warning from the time the garage door opened to clear the history, put the iMac to sleep, and arrange the desk chair in pristine order. We had gotten in trouble for playing Miniclip games before; I wasn’t getting caught dead anywhere near 420chan.

The second reason was that I was eleven years old.

Through middle school and high school, I’d keep up to speed with the hacking world, but when it came time to cram for finals and plan for college, Anonymous fell off my radar. I’d later find out that they fell off everyone’s radar: the chaos and wave of arrests in 2011-2012 was enough to put key players off the scene until things cooled down. Some stepped back for years, and some stepped back forever. Anonymous had split into subgroups and factions, but across the board, everyone united behind their fury at Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, who cracked and became an FBI informant at the first sign of prison time. No one liked a rat, and after Monsegur’s cooperation led to five other Anonymous arrests, no one wanted to be next.

Life went on, and among all my career choices, I landed on the storytelling path. It seemed the least limiting of industries; I could combine all my passions, and I could hop from one narrative world to the next, passporting through the broad tapestry of human existence with words and images.

More importantly, I sought out storytelling for its escapism, for how it allowed the teller to craft the world they wanted on top of the less-appealing world that exists. My desire for a mental getaway was not unwarranted. I’d grown up in a religious sect that believed the world was going to explode in 2011, which screwed with my childhood brain. Until I was fifteen, I believed there was no future, so to get away from impending doom, I dreamt up fantasy stories about youngsters with big imaginations and work ethics, stories about people like me having a voice.

As I grew older, the fantasy element stayed, but after 2011 came and went and the world didn’t blow up, I could allow a more grounded reality to temper my interests. Real people’s lives fascinate me. I learned about the wide world of public school and college, exposed my mind to other cultures, and realized that human truth was stranger than the wildest fiction I could dream up.

It wasn’t long before this path lead to an interest in docudramas. I dug my heels in against overly political media—hanging on to the last vestige of Narnia naiveté—but I couldn’t last. it was in 2020, when the Q moral panic was sweeping North America and my close family was in dire danger of succumbing to Chicken Little Cult Round 2, that I broke. Enough was enough. I had to do something.

How, though? Where were my entertainment skills best used? I needed an inroad. I needed a story that I’d be passionate about writing, something with power and sex appeal, something that would be deathly fascinating for any audience to watch — but also something that was semi-serious, something that could serve as a cold shower of clarity for theorists and deniers and their ilk. I had no idea where to start.

Then, January 6th happened.

I was at the dentist’s office that morning. The air was clear. I’d bought salmon and a jar of olives at a Whole Foods near 14th St, and boarded the train back to my home office to write a few articles and put the fish in the oven for lunch. It was a pleasant day, so I’d stayed off social media, wanting to savor a January rarity, until later in the day the Slack messages started rolling in — hey. Check Twitter. Oh my god.

Along with the rest of the world, I watched the carnage unfold, glued to Twitter as leaked videos poured onto my timeline from the few leftists who’d been secretly keeping tabs on the social media app—and festering GOP echo chamber—that was Parler. One person in particular, a hacker, had discovered that Parler had an exploitable API endpoint at which anyone could plug in sequential integers and have a video UUID returned to them, which could then be accessed in any browser without having to log into Parler itself. This would come in handy: Parler’s vendors and hosting services had threatened to terminate their relationship with the beleaguered platform, and when Parler disappeared, so would terabytes of incriminating Capitol riot evidence.

The hacker did what had to be done, successfully archiving every Parler video just before the platform went dark, and backing up the footage in a data dump that would later lead to 400+ arrests and provide shocking evidence in the sitting president’s second impeachment trial.

Like many others following the story, I couldn’t stop watching. On the Saturday night before the Super Bowl, I sent out an inquiry, a breezy 139-character tweet to that person responsible for archiving the massive trove of attack footage. In the month after the uprising, she’d been lauded as a sort of digital Sully Sullenberger, for good reason, and I thought her story might make slick entertainment.

Little did I know that this outreach would lead me to the door of someone else — a responsible party I’d unknowingly sought for 14 years.

He saw my tweet, and offered to talk to the other hacker for me. They knew each other. When he sent a screenshot of an article, claiming he’d founded Anonymous, I don’t remember if I believed him.

But after several subsequent weeks spent vetting his claim, I had no other choice.

Every writer prays for a lightbulb moment; this one nearly smacked me in the head. Only one story needed to be told, and it wasn’t the Parler hack. Somehow, over a decade of secrecy and digital camouflage, Hollywood had managed to make Anonymous-derivative movies and shows, but missed out on the one eternally fascinating individual who’d kicked it all off.

The more I learned, the more I knew I couldn’t let this one go. Here was my way to lend aid to the objective truth; here was a way to heal from the family cult era; here was a way to shed long-overdue recognition on someone’s vibrant life; here was a way to contribute to the pot-stirring I’d wanted so badly to get in on, a decade and a half before. Now, though, I was a writer with career experience. I had industry connections. I could actually make things happen. The timing was cosmically right.

Everything had all come full circle.

So, in the spring of 2021, I began to work. It’s been slow going, but I have a small team behind me now, and we’re dedicated to bringing this story to your screens, no matter how long it takes. It’s the tale of one man, how he gloriously screwed up his personal life and the free-world internet, and how he’s now rising from the rubble to piece both back together.

In June 2021, I realized the story would be incomplete if I didn’t make a cultural research visit to the hacking conference to end all hacking conferences. Year after year, cheerful destruction descended on Alexis Park, and everyone I’d spoken to in my research had a DEF CON story, the identifying details of which could never be repeated in print. Someone once stole a pay phone, smuggled it into a hotel in a trench coat, kept the quarters and gave the phone to someone else, who patched it into the hotel’s phone system. Someone launched a mattress out a hotel window and it landed on, and flattened, a car. Someone else hacked all the hotel’s phone lines. Someone checked hundreds of guests out of their rooms in the middle of the night. Strangely, Las Vegas hotels did not often extend repeat invitations.

No docudrama about hacking would be complete without DEF CON, so I’m coming to witness it firsthand. I’ll be the writer carrying yellow notepads and trying not to look exploitable. See you in August, Nevada.