Transcript: Biella Coleman on Anon at Brookings Institution, December 9, 2011

moarxenu · Dec 13, 2011

Internets academic Gabriella Coleman spoke about Anonymous on a panel on Hacktivism, Vigilantism and Collective Actions in A Digital Age at the Brookings Institution on December 9, 2011. Audio file and uncorrected transcript downloads are available there.

She was mentioned in a WWP thread on The Academcis of Anonymous - Washington Post. This is a corrected version of Biella's talk from the Brooking Institution's transcript found here.

THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
HACKTIVISM, VIGILANTISM AND COLLECTIVE ACTION IN A DIGITAL AGE
Washington, D.C.
Friday, December 9, 2011
PARTICIPANTS:
Introduction and Moderator:
ALLAN A. FRIEDMAN
Fellow, Governance Studies
The Brookings Instituition
Panelists:
GABRIELLA COLEMAN
Professor
New York University
RICHARD FORNO, PH.D.
Cybersecurity Graduate Program Director
UMBC
PAUL ROSENZWEIG
Principal, Red Branch Consulting
Lecturer in Law, George Washington University

P R O C E E D I N G S

MR. FRIEDMAN: So, I want to thank you all for joining us this Friday morning. I know, in the season of holiday parties, sometimes it can be hard to drag oneself out of bed, but I think we have a very interesting discussion lined up today. It's a topic that is both very popular in the media but, at the same time, doesn't get a lot of very serious discussion.

Anonymous and the related phenomena of hacktivism have inspired an incredible amount of fear. I know, inside this particular Institution, there was a decent amount of concern that we might be exposing ourself to some sort of risk because a lot of the media reports are genuinely terrifying.

This seems to be this force from out in the ether that can come and prey on anyone at any time. They have visuals that are certainly resident of many popular media themes, a creepy computer voice, and they seem to be everywhere. At the same time, there are many people who are tempted to dismiss some of the phenomena that we see.

Every generation has some sort of antisocial behavior that people decry.

Bill Buford's famous book Among the Thugs talks about hooliganism and, at the time, everyone in England was afraid that it was going to destroy civic society, and there's a natural reaction among some of the people who have been doing IT for a while that every time the media talks about something new in IT they're going to overreact. See, for example, sexting.

But, there is, I think, quite a bit to talk about and understand in the phenomena of digital hactivism and vigilantism. There is some power on the technical side. The attacks take advantage of social phenomena, of crowd sourcing.

They use tools that are shared by others in some cases, denial-of-service service attacks. The
model of doxing or releasing massive amounts of public information about individuals is
certainly disturbing to many people and many companies. And as we look at it, several things are apparent.

First, much of the power that we see comes from the open nature of the information technology world. We don't regulate how to design a website. We don't enforce clear models of what upstream providers have to do, and private information is easily available about all of us,
everywhere.

So, this is part of the ecosystem that we live in. Similarly, Anonymous as a phenomenon, I think, really deserves to be studied if for no other reason than it's a fascinating, self-organizing system.

Online association and collective action has been something that people have talked about since the beginning of IT, and have talked about the challenges of pseudonymous and Anonymous communication in terms of building a community. This one seems to have accomplished some amount of collective action.

And, at the same time, it's also clear that a world with multiple groups who are happy to engage in their own agenda at the expense of law and order, at the expense of other people's private property, at the expense of other people's systems, is not a very stable model that we want to look into.

So, as policymakers and as scholars, we need to explore that and understand what the long-term trajectory is going to be. To do that today, we have a fantastic panel. We'll be starting off with Professor Gabriella Coleman, who's an assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, soon to move up to McGill University, and she's an anthropologist by training.

Her first book, Coding Freedom is about the online associations and models inside the free software community and how you have community and cooperation and collective action in that community.

She has since been working on, among other aspects, understanding the Anonymous world and has spent a lot of time talking to people involved and studying them as an anthropologist, as an
ethnographer, to understand what's going on in that community.

moarxenu · Dec 13, 2011

On the technical side to tell us a little bit about some of both the attack models and defense approaches that we can have, we have Richard Forno, who is the director of the graduate program, cybersecurity, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and is the co-founder of Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference.

He's also a visiting scientist at the Software Engineering Institute at CMU. He has a long and storied career in IT and computer security and was one of the first people to seriously study Information Warfare as a new phenomena in the Information Age and has written a book on information, The Art of Information Warfare and also Incident Response.

Finally, to give us some understanding of the policy side and the law enforcement approach, we have Paul Rosenzweig, who is the founder of Red Branch Law and Consulting. He's also a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a professional lecturer at George Washington University Law School.

He formally served as a deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security, and twice as acting assistant secretary for International Affairs, where he was deeply engaged in understanding development of policy and strategic plans in a variety of national security activities, including things related to IT.

So, with that, I'd like to welcome Gabriella Coleman to tell us a little bit about her life among the hackers.

moarxenu · Dec 13, 2011

MS. COLEMAN: That was great. Well, thank you so much, Allan, for inviting me here today. It's actually really exciting to be able to talk to a slightly different audience than I normally talk to, which also presented some challenges because I wanted to maybe give you a picture of Anonymous that you may not be getting in the media, for example, but I also just want to cover some basic ground.

So, I've kind of compiled a short little presentation that gives some history, but then also gets at some kind of analytical questions that I think are kind of interesting and important as we maybe
discuss some policy questions during the panel. So, I'm going to just jump right in. All right.

So, Anonymous is, by nature, as well as design, difficult to define. It's a name employed by dispersed individuals; some, small groups of hackers, technologists, geeks, system administrators, human rights activists -- a cluster of both ideas and ideals adopted by these individuals to organize collective actions, online and in the real world.

Some are fearsome, others are trivial pranks. Some interventions have saved lives in the Middle East region. In recent months, Anonymous has continued to show its face in a range of very unlikely places. From an audacious announcement to take down the seemingly invincible Mexican drug cartels to its constant presence in the Occupy movements.

Anonymous seems everywhere, and yet, notoriously difficult to pin down, and they've
made my life as an anthropologist very difficult at times. Their actions are alternatively
peaceful and legal, illicit and disruptive.

Often times, they exist in a moral grey zone, as Anonymous has famously deployed disruptive tactics and illegal ones, such as the distributed denial-of-service attacks, for the sake of making political claims.

Many of these characteristics of Anonymous have much to do with its origins on 4chan, which has become an immensely popular and iconic message board since its launch in 2003.

It's been described by one of my colleagues as the single most offensive human artifact in human history. So, I take no responsibility if you decide to go there. You might have to make an appointment with your therapist afterwards.

Composed of 50 topic-based forums, ranging from animé to travel, 4chan is widely perceived to be one of the most offensive quarters on the Internet, teaming with pornography. Next to nothing is sacred there.

Participants communicating in a language that seems to have reduced English to a bevy of vicious epithets shocking to outsiders, but among insiders taken as the normal state of affairs. Indeed, one of its defining and endearing qualities.

Today, Anonymous is nearly synonymous with a very irreverent brand of activist politics. But before 2008, the monikker was used exclusively by people from 4chan for staging fearsome pranks -- in Internet parlance, trolling.

While trolling has often been the purview of boastful cliques such as the exploits of Weave, who's a hacker, who's the president of a group called the GNAA, which is an extremely offensive trolling group. On 4chan, trolling is largely crowd source and participants are strongly
discouraged from identifying themselves.

Because of all the trolling to come rolling out of 4chan, in 2007, Fox news dubbed Anonymous the Internet Hate Machine, which Anonymous embraced, ironically, and then shortly thereafter, in response to this Fox News segment, it released a grim parodic video describing itself as the face of chaos, harbingers of judgment -- those who laugh at the face of tragedy.

Six months after the release of this video, some anons took this trolling namesake to organize more strident forms of protest.

This surprising metamorphosis is what prompted my ethnographic study of Anonymous in 2008, the year they launched what they would describe as an Epic Win, when they trolled the Church of Scientology.

In the course of a few weeks, these events -- these trolling events against the Church of Scientology, which took the form of sending unpaid pizzas, pranking Dianetic hotlines, sending nude fax body parts to the church -- these events took a dramatic U-turn and came to include earnest street protests.

moarxenu · Dec 13, 2011

Anonymous shifted its tactics disseminating incriminating facts about Scientology, forging bonds with an earlier generation of dissidents, and focusing in on issues of censorship and human rights abuses.

A spout of trolling had thus given birth to an activist endeavor, by the name of Project Chanology and is really interesting because this shift occurred quite accidentally.

And you see this all the time with Anonymous, people had released a video; one of the videos by the name of "Hello Leaders of Scientology" was just done for the fun of it.

It was not a kind of serious video. It was a call to arms to dismantle the Church of Scientology, but it prompted a discussion on Internet chat rooms, where people ask, "Huh, maybe we should, in fact, protest the Church in earnest." So, the video was made for what's called, "the lulz," L-U-L-Z.

These four letters are a bastardization and pluralization of laugh out loud, and it denotes the
pleasures derived from generating things like, Internet memes, which might be very playful cats with insensible captions to more fearsome pranks.

So, so compelling was this video that they decided to organize street demonstrations, and on February 10th, 2008, thousands of anons and supporters hit the streets in cities across North America, Europe, and Australia for a worldwide day of action against Scientology.

Six months after being labeled the Internet Hate Machine by Fox News, Anonymous had legions of followers in the real world, not just geeks and hackers typing at their keyboards who are seizing on the group's name, its ethic of anonymity and iconography.

Project Chanology thus, marked the genesis of a distinct political sensibility, one that cannot be reduced either to just their trolling nor their ardent free speech commitments. It's important to note at the time that Project Chanology took off; the name was still being used by people on 4chan to troll.

Two years later, Anonymous became even more widely known and came to be more widely thought of as an activist entity, as a result of a different network, by the name of Anon Ops.

So, this is a whole different group of people on a different IRC network, who coordinated what you may have heard Operation Payback, also known as Operation Avenge Assange, which was launched to paralyze the Web site of the financial institutions refusing to transfer funds to WikiLeaks from donors.

In the ensuing months, I became shackled to my computer -- that was in December 2010. And, thankfully, I was on sabbatical, as this germinal operation gave rise to dozens and dozens of additional Anon Ops political endeavors, from Op Malaysia, which enabled citizens to bypass government filtering, to providing daily technology assistance to activists in the Middle East and African Revolutions. Those operations, in particular, were dubbed the Freedom Operations.

Then, in February 2011, came one of their most famous operations, Operation HBGary. Aaron Barr, the CEO of the security firm, claimed to have pwned Anonymous -- claimed to have uncovered the identity of key operatives.

In response, and in 48 hours, anons hacked Barr’sTwitter account and spewed the most kind of offensive racial slurs possible in 140-character limits. They had him follow the Holy Trinity of Hitler, Gay Pride, and Justin Bieber. They hacked HBGary's servers. They downloaded 70,000 emails, gutted the files. Then, they wiped out his iPad and iPhone for good measure.

They published the company's data, alongside Barr's private communications, and this was done purely for the sake of trolling, for retaliation, but during the process, they uncovered a document -- the WikiLeaks Threat -- which outlined how HBGary Federal and other security companies might undermine WikiLeaks by submitting fake documents to their site. There was also evidence of plans to ruin the careers of supporters of WikiLeaks -- among them, Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com.

It was only a small crew of hackers within Anon Ops who had started this kind of retaliatory trolling event and ended up exposing what was a kind of COINTELPRO-like proposal.

And, basically, what happened -- and again, this happened so much with Anonymous -- they do something, they discover something, and all of a sudden they decide to go forward with a new type of intervention because previous to this, Anonymous had rarely hacked to expose security flaws and access politically sensitive information, preferring to deface and disable Web sites, along with their legal human rights tech activism.

moarxenu · Dec 13, 2011

The success of HBGary, and especially the kind of colossal media attention it received, launched new wings of Anonymous dedicated to disclosure of documents, dedicated to exposing security flaws, by doing illegal hacking.

Okay, so that's a little bit of a sort of overview of where they came from and just I want to finish off by making a few kind of more conceptual points. There's still a lot more that I didn't obviously cover. So don't take that as, you know, the only thing Anonymous has done.

So, as a result of the actions just described, Anonymous has been generally misunderstood, described by news reports, alternatively as kind of freedom fighters, online activists, or vigilantes.

Given what I just told you, the nature of this confusion is not hard to understand because beyond a foundational commitment to anonymity and the free flow of information, Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program.

Though Anonymous has increasingly devoted its energies over time towards digital descent and direct action, marshaled in the service of political causes, it has no definite trajectory and its political sensibilities are still drawn by the collective will towards pranking, transgression, and mischief.

Even as Anonymous has moved away from pure trolling and 4chan, the underlying character of Anonymous is still intimately connected to kind of lulz joking and mischievous pranking, common to the culture of online message boards, and some of their kind of political actions are still motivated by this kind of prankish sensibility.

Thus, if one term embodies the paradoxical and contradictory character of Anonymous, which is
now made up of committed activists and agents of mischief, or mischievous activists, it is
the lulz. The spirit of the lulz, however, is not particular to Anonymous, the Internet,
trolling, nor our times.

There have been other groups in the past, such as the Dadaists, the Yippies, and the Yes Men, who have shared a kind of similar rowdy disposition where you fuse pranksterism with activism.

But these groups, as opposed to Anonymous, were conceived from the start as radical, political enterprises, who were also quite vanguardist in their composition. They weren't, you know, allowing kind of hordes of people to join up.

Thus, what sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and structure, and its organic political evolution. And so, within the activist expressions of Anonymous, you have order, disorder. You have serious protests in the lulz. You have legal and illegal tactics.

And they kind of coexist to ensure a kind of fiery storm of interventions that will make some people inspire to follow suit, others smile, some cry, and leave many wondering who and what lies beneath the mask, which is to say that Anonymous follows a logic of its own.

Partly because of its maverick image and lulz antics, the group has secured constant media attention, along with a considerable number of participants, as well as a wealth of sympathizers who may not spend hours in chat rooms, but will heed commands to their operations, contribute to DDoS attacks or circulate messages unfurled on popular Anonymous Twitter accounts.

They've developed a loose structure with technical resources, such as Internet Relay Chat being run and controlled by a few elites.

But, these technical elites have erected no formal barriers to membership, such as
initiation guidelines or screening processes. Ethical norms tend to be established
consensually and enforced by all. The hacking operations are much smaller, much more covert, and far less participatory, but all political operations often come together haphazardly.

It's like Anonymous has its finger on the pulse of world events and exploits ones that they think they can intervene in.

Despite its unpredictability and the tendency of Anonymous to act in ways that are irreverent, even destructive, vindictive, often times disdainful of the law, Anonymous has seemed to capture a certain prominent Zeitgeist.

Today, the image in iconography has deeply resonated with many outside of
the purview of Anonymous. The icon most associated with them, the Guy Fawkes mask, has come to stand in for a new form of identity, individualism, the promise of human
flourishing, embitterment, and the absence of leaders, and moreover, in the absence for
the need for individual recognition and fame, and it's become one of the most prominent
sort of symbols in the Occupy movements.

moarxenu · Dec 13, 2011

Across its various faces, Anonymous is configured as E Pluribus Unum, one out of many. The singularity premise on a celebrity anti-leader ethic, participants chastising those who seek credit, recognition and especially celebrity and fame for the labor they put into the collective pot.

And so here, I'm just giving a little bit of a sense of how they do have some shared ethics and norms across the different kind of faces and networks.

The most dramatic example of the importance that Anonymous puts on its kind of anti-celebrity ethic came in real-time on IRC when I had posted on one of the channels, an article from actually a newspaper that comes out of D.C. that was on Anonymous.

And after reading the piece, many participants were just simply indignant that the featured anon had revealed details about his personal life to the reporter and, in fraction, made only worse by the fact that this person hadn't really contributed much to some of the political operations.

One of the very respected IRC operators, who tend to be more prominent, assessed the situation in one biting sentence. She said, "Attempting to use all the work that so many have done for your personal promotion is not something I will tolerate."

A number of anons then called this person into a different channel, asked him to justify his actions. Unsatisfied with his answers, they eventually killed him off by banning him on this particular server.

But it's not simply that, within Anonymous, individuality is eradicated in favor of a well-defined group goal. Part of the reason that Anonymous looks the way it does, operations blooming like crazy as a rhizome or as a hydra is because individuality flourishes among anons.

It is part of the reason for with Anonymous is also driven by strife intentions, especially between the different networks.

Few of the anons in Project Chanology who continue to protest the Church of Scientology were fans of the distributed denial-of-service attacks that Anonops had launched in support of WikiLeaks, for example.

The Anonops network thinks that the Project Chanology operations are too small and narrow to be effective. The hacking-to-leak operations brought other tensions to surface due to the fact that these hacking endeavors by necessity had to be conducted secretly on a network that values open participation.

But even if anons don’t always agree about what's being carried out under the rubric of Anonymous, and they do argue a lot about it, they tend to respect the fact that anyone can assume the moniker. That’s really what they really value.

To conclude, Anonymous sits at the cusp of spectacular visibility, thanks to the media and intense individual invisibility. They’re rootless, evasive, shifty and nomadic. Their visibility is secured by the lulz for better or for worse via pranks, via these hacks, and the lulz securing some of the most audacious irreverent and scary interventions.

The symbolism of anonymity and their anti-leader ethic has circulated far and wide, and seems to have kind of captured the imagination of other activists around the world.

However, in many other respects, they are invisible, intractable; they're spectral.

Anons camouflage their identity, although to different degrees and for different purposes. Since some anons engage in illegal actions, they use it tactically for defensive purposes. Most all anons, even those that engage in only legal and peaceful protests also conceal identity for ethical reasons, as I discussed.

As a whole, they shun individual celebrity and fame. Thus, at the very same time, they've been made into causes célèbres by the media; and by this, I mean a kind of very controversial topic. They, themselves, are disdainful of the culture of celebrity.

To be Anonymous is to be many things from prankster to hacker to human right activist to fusions of these. However, they sublimate signs and markers of their individuality that otherwise are so commonly offered in every way, place and form in today's highly networked world of social media where one is supposed to reveal a constant stream of information about yourself.

Whatever we might think of their individual campaigns, Anonymous has thus secured a small oasis of anonymity in this desert of constant bottom-up self-revelation and top-down turbulence.

So hopefully that'll give you a little bit of a picture of what they look like from the vantage point of an anthropologist who has spent way too much time on internet chat with them over the last year. Thank you.

Anonymous · Dec 13, 2011

I really like Gabriella Coleman, she's given a fairly accurate description.

AnonLover · Dec 13, 2011

Looks like excellent stuff at a glance! I have to read it later, but thanks for finding this moarxenu.

Budd · Dec 13, 2011

"Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"
"I'm not a witch at all. I'm Dorothy Gale, of Kansas."

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Transcript: Biella Coleman on Anon at Brookings Institution, December 9, 2011

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