Based on my own minimal experience, the majority of these IRC channels are just a small group of "Anonymous" doing whatever they want, different channels will get publicised at different times through different means, "Anonymous" doesn't exist in any way beyond being a label people use, I guess it could be compared to "emo" or "jock" in high school; they have no "leadership" but people join these groups and label themselves as such.
> The show was run by a couple of admins he identified as "Q," "Owen," and "CommanderX"—and Barr had used social media data and subterfuge to map those names to three real people, two in California and one in New York.
isn't Q the bot that runs on quakenet as a proxy admin?
I don't know what the chances are that Barr's actually that stupid/crazy, but Citricsquid is saying there's a reasonable chance the IRC admin Barr "tracked down the real identity of" was actually a bot.
Isn't anonymous less an organized group with leaders and more a bunch of people who hang out and occasionally someone says "hey, it would be cool if we all did <thing>" and whoever is listening joins in?
Yes, but traditional media has a hard time grasping the concept. It's just a lot of directionless guys that latch onto whatever cause seems palatable at the time and requires no more effort than running LOIC/other simple DDOS programs. Basically the definition of script kiddies, there's just a large concentration of them on one message board system.
This is true, but doesn't mean there aren't coordinators, actually skilled hackers who embrace the directionlessness even as they give it direction. It isn't _just_ foot-soldiers.
There are no real leaders; they may break off into factions, like those that frequent a certain IRC room, but the group "Anonymous" is a non-entity by any meaningful definition. It's whoever happens to be on 4chan or other, mostly similar message boards, and out of those, whoever is enticed to join a chat room or download LOIC, and out of those, people that actually click the button to send a lot of requests to DDOS (or people that show up to taunt Scientologists, as the case may be).
There are lots of people that go there to marshal the forces and most fail, cf. "/b/ is not your personal army". If someone happens to generate a buzz that rings for most of the board's demographic, they can start a chain reaction where a lot of people hit MasterCard at once, and get a bunch of disciples attracted to an IRC room for who knows how long -- it may last a day or a month, there's no way to say definitively. The marshaller then becomes the leader of that group of disciples, but "Anonymous" isn't a group by itself.
The most accurate definition for Anonymous is "a subset of users of Xchan". That's not a very good definition, especially if you want to go around and pin DDOS and whatever else on individual people.
> The most accurate definition for Anonymous is "a subset of users of Xchan". That's not a very good definition, especially if you want to go around and pin DDOS and whatever else on individual people.
I mentally replace "Anonymous" with "protesters" whenever they're protesting anything. It makes it a lot more clear and it's more accurate. We already have amorphous groups of people who protest various things, and this is, as near as I can tell, the online equivalent.
I would guess that such groups are being manipulated by exceptionally smart people for specific ends, some significant fraction of the time.
I think that's a tempting theory to have. Explains a lot and is easy to understand, but I think it gives individuals too much credit.
I would guess exceptionally smart people drift in and out at random and attempt to use the group for specific ends. I think their success rate is slim and random.
By "random" I actually mean the group may go along if it thinks it would be "lulz". Notice I said "may", it also may not - lots of random noise in the hive mind.
What this means is that trying to control or predict the actions of the group is a fool's game. At best you may be able to influence them occasionally in some small way, its pure chaos theory.
I would guess exceptionally smart people drift in and out at random and attempt to use the group for specific ends. I think their success rate is slim and random.
I think that's what they want you to think. It may even be true. It's not a reason to give up on the "smart core group" theory, though.
I think it gives individuals too much credit.
This is a long running debate. There is a camp that thinks individual personalities have significant effects on History. I'd be willing to believe that Anonymous is entirely emergent, but in that case, there would be a "fossil record" of its evolution. (Great. Now that I've posted that, some smartass Anon is going to create one!)
What this means is that trying to control or predict the actions of the group is a fool's game. At best you may be able to influence them occasionally in some small way, its pure chaos theory.
There's no good way to guarantee which way a buffalo herd will stampede. Doesn't mean there's zero utility in doing so, or that no one can be held accountable.
You don't have to be exceptionally smart, only persistent and willing to eschew the trappings of leadership in favor of playing the "Anonymous has no leaders" game. Anonymous craves leadership but resents authority, so it's crucial to appear indistinct from the super- or trans-human whole while prodding the herd in your desired direction lest you pop the illusory bubble that gives it strength. This is not unlike what Jaron Lanier calls the "oracle illusion", by which something like Wikipedia gets much of it's percieved authoritativeness by scrubbing out any trace of individual authorship. Anonymous tells Anonymous what to do and Anonymous generally does it.
For instance, the most interesting thing about a thread like this[1] is the timestamps, because they give you a rough idea of how many Anons are actually participating. Two and three minute gaps between posts is an eternity on /b/, the kind of thing you see when a thread hasn't gotten much attention and is likely to die. What I am saying is that many (perhaps most) of the posts (even apparently dissenting ones) in the above thread are likely to have been the same person, persistently bumping an overlooked thread, waiting for it to gain traction.
Of course there is no way to prove this, and one can more easily perceive this is a vibrant conversation between a much larger group of people (which also can't be proved). Whether this was intentional or not, it is an easy way for a vocal minority to recruit from the largely apathetic majority. The perception of being part of a group has an enormous impact on getting people to participate[1].
Not only does anonymity amplify the power of "leaders" in this way it also reflects the yearning of the "followers" to be relieved of the burden of an individual identity or responsibility. As Eric Hoffer describes in The True Believer:"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority."
That isn't to say that Anonymous consists uniformly of maladjusted poltroons--it doesn't, by a long shot, nor are they generally fanatics in any but the most temporary sense--but it's not controversial to say that it harbors a large population of disaffected youth and misfits of every stripe. Some eager to "do something", others just bored, but all by definition willing to disappear into a crowd.
[2]:I think this is a pretty uncontroversial point, too, but Bill Wasik's "flash mob" work is particularly relevant http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963 "Q. Why would I want to join an inexplicable mob? A. Tons of other people are doing it."
I just wanted to thank you, this was the second post I read this morning because it looked interesting and you didn't disappoint. The way you master the English language is astounding and I only wish I was able to wield words as well as you.
Skilled technical hackers giving the attacks technical direction, or skilled social hackers who know how to get a bunch of anonymous teenagers to do their bidding?
Anonymous describes themselves best when they describe a hive.
Yes, a hive has a queen but she lasts only as long as the workers feel she is productive.
When a hive reaches a certain size it will establish a new hive, it too will have it's own queen.
Members of the hive will give off pheromones to signal the other members. Not all will follow, some will, however what's important is that the more pheromones of a certain signal propagate the larger the response. The workers are controlled by themselves to a large degree and the queen is in place with certain ceremonial roles. (laying eggs)
The only reason anonymous is a difficult concept to grasp is that from the day we are born we are taught to respect and obey a hierarchy of authority. This authority exists only in the minds of those that believe it. When the last person stops believing it, it will cease to exist.
And assuming fun is not randomly distributed, then it should be possible to identify possible Anon targets by judging the amount of fun it would be for them to take on. Of course, this being Anonymous, it would be unfeasible to survey the full range of targets, because they seem to select those at random.
Power law still applies. Most likely 90% of serious action is done by the same 0.1% contributors (same as it is on HN or reddit or anywhere else).
It may be a real difference if the 0.1% can be easily replaced, Stand Alone Complex style. Say they're all arrested one day, and a month after something happens (Julian Assange is extradited, there's a revolution in Iran, whatever piques Anonymous' interest). There's a good chance many people at the same time will think that something needs to be done, see that nothing is happening, and do it. Not as good as the "old guard" maybe, but they'll probably try.
We can't really know how well this replacement mechanism works...
If we go with the fact that Anonymous is infact a true distributed environment, then the replacement mechanism will be very easy. I think Anonymous is a kind of humanized group-comm architecture sans a coordinator.
You're overestimating the uniqueness of Anon. Most communities nowadays don't have coordinators. And Anon doesn't have limitless communication channels, only about a dozen. For a site/software to be a good choice, it has to be already in the "hivemind". Ask 10 Anon tot tell them 10 places where they hang, and the most common choices are the (only) ones that are viable.
There is a unique feature though - the anonymity. This could really make a difference if things get serious.
Actually no. I had been in their IRC for some time during the first couple weeks of the Wikileaks leaks, and it isn't like that. They are a group that, just like any other, like HN, have certain common and shared values and talk, discuss and act by them. In their case, basicly, they are pro free-speech, pro internet and privacy.
They, like we here in HN, organize themselves around those ideas. Sometimes they act together against someone that goes against their values, like they just did to Aaron, and sometimes they act towards other positive goals like they did in Egypt. It is not about being cool, having fun or anything like that. That is just one of the ways they attract kids and other people to join them in their attacks and other actions. There is no central leadership, no hierarchy, but all their actions are done following certain values and ethics that you cannot really grasp unless you are part of it, just like HN.
Although they don't have leaders, at least in their IRC, there are moderators, that, at least during the leaks, when there were over 3 thousand people in a single IRC channel, would lock the channel, summarize arguments, add questions and unlock it, while they were selecting targets. But usually that only happened when there were that many people and too many trolls spamming the chat.
They are people, from all ages that act by their shared values.
Isn't anonymous less an organized group with leaders and more a bunch of people who hang out and occasionally someone says "hey, it would be cool if we all did <thing>" and whoever is listening joins in?
This idea is repeated so often, I suspect that there's a group of people somewhere that wants that particular message to be repeated and believed. If I were manipulating a group like Anonymous from behind the scenes, that's exactly what I'd want the net at large to think.
On the other hands, if Anonymous were really as decentralized as implied in this meme, I should think everyone would want the media to think there was a shadowy conspiracy inolved -- if nothing then just for the LULZ.
My best guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Anonymous is somewhat decentralized, but there is also a core group (are core groups) that started a self-perpetuating process toward some end. This core group is a little worried that things are a little out of hand, so they are now covering their tracks using the same social-media manipulation techniques used to start Anonymous itself.
Why is it so hard for some people to grasp that Anonymous are just what they claim to be - everyone and yet no one person? There is no roster, no voting, but they are still organized.
It's hard because corporate leaders have an incredibly difficult time organizing their own companies to achieve comparable feats to what Anonymous can do overnight.
You can actually use military techniques to analyze why this is. Anonymous operates inside the enemy ODA (Observe Decide Act) loop.
The ODA loop for a typical corporation is at least 5 people. Eg. from when someone observes something (anon is ddosing us) to when that information reaches someone who can act on it (the CEO) anonymous has already completed it's complete loop which is (post on IRC, have people read it and suggest action) the ODA loop for anonymous is on the order of 5 minutes, the ODA loop for a corporate CEO is probably more like 5 hours to 5 days.
Therefore anonymous will always be about 25 steps ahead of a corporate target. The primary advantage that comes from this is that anonymous appears to act 'randomly' which causes further stress on the enemy ODA loop and forces them to continually react which leaves the proactive party in control of the competitive landscape (battlefield)
If you study military genius you'll find that the most effective commanders were the ones that pushed command furthest down to the org chart.
We know that decentralized control is much more efficient than centralized control. Communism didn't lose because its a failed ideology or because its godless, it failed because it's command and control systems allocate resources poorly. They allocate resources poorly because of information asymmetry and the length of the ODA loop.
The important thing to take from this for software development is that your time from when you decide to implement a feature to when you deploy to production or get a product to market (AppStore,BestBuy,etc) is your ODA loop.
Also, for software watch what happens to your favorite webserver under intense load when you replace it's queue (FIFO) with a stack (LIFO). The LIFO drastically shortens the median response time.
The unifying concept is the half-life (exponential decay) of plans and information. The older your intel, the less valuable the plans you have built off of that information.
Top-down and waterfall approaches institutionalize this in order to provide an illusion of control to the executives and shareholders. Agile development and maneuver warfare each seek to tighten their feedback loops.
> You want me to donate to bradley's fund
> OK BUT what if it puts people in harms' way? What
> if it cause bad ramifications for US citizens?
She's acting like there isn't going to be a trial of any sort. Sounds like she equates contributing to a defense fund with breaking someone out of prison.
He thought that Anonymous was affiliated ("strongly linked") with Wikileaks, as if there was some secret backdoor agreement between them. Nutcase. There doesn't _need_ to be any agreement or promise between Anonymous and other parties.
I can't believe this guy has a job in a security company doing work for the federal government. I'm getting a strong vibe that he's schizophrenic. I've known an unmedicated schizophrenic, and this is the way they talked and acted. Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have "other ways of knowing" or extremely heightened intuition), and a belief that once they tell the whole story of the truths that have been revealed to them the world will take notice and be amazed.
The coder in this story is an hero (OK, just a reasonably nice guy, not afraid to tell the moronic "analyst" to go to hell), and obviously prevented a lot of damage by actively working against Barr's insane plans.
I feel the tiniest bit sorry for Leavy and the rootkit guy, as they clearly weren't encouraging this stuff, but really, they knew this guy was a whack-a-mole and they kept him on anyway, I guess because his crazy ego managed to close sales. It's really hard to take pity on someone that knows there's a crazy guy using company resources to go on a personal jihad against random kids on the Internet, and doesn't do anything to stop it.
The level of invasion of privacy this guy was taking part in, against children, is pretty much inexcusable. He's not law-enforcement, and should not be allowed to act as though he has a warrant for rifling through the personal lives of dozens or hundreds of children. All 50 states have laws that cover cyberstalking, cyberharassment, and cyberbullying; in a just world, this nutjob would end up in prison. Whether these kids have done anything wrong or not is irrelevant. Barr is a private citizen, and adult, and he ought to leave law enforcement activities to the police or FBI.
Edit: I should point out that I don't think anyone should be arrested for browsing facebook or twitter or whatever. I was a bit rambling in this comment, and the entirety of my thought processes are not exactly made clear by the text. The stuff that I think is probably illegal is the stuff he was doing outside of his actual research: Dropping hints and threats in mainstream media and in IRC about the data he was gathering, using his fake persona to stir up a shitstorm by leaking that a security company was gathering data on the people he was talking to, etc. I had to google cyberstalking to even know if there were laws about this stuff (and there are, and in all fifty states). While I don't know if those laws are reasonable or not, I'm pretty sure he crossed the line into breaking some of them, particularly in the case of his underage targets.
Regardless of whether the ones he called out are innocent (though I suspect most are, since his methods are the work of a madman), he trawled through hundreds of profiles, twitter feeds, IRC conversations, and basically cyberstalked the hell out of every friend of every person he thought might be a "leader" of Anonymous; many of them underage, and the vast majority completely oblivious about Anonymous. He even created a fake persona, who was a kid just like his targets. This is the stuff pedophiles and con-men do to get closer to their victims. I'm not suggesting the guy is a pedophile (but "con-man" might be a good word to describe him); I'm just saying that I can't believe any adult (if not Barr himself, who I don't think is quite sane, then one of the many people at his company who had some idea of what he was doing) would look at all these activities and not think, "Whoah! This is crazy and probably illegal. We need to reel this guy in, or get him out of this company before he causes us real trouble."
he trawled through hundreds of profiles, twitter feeds, IRC conversations, and basically cyberstalked the hell out of every friend of every person he thought might be a "leader" of Anonymous...This is the stuff pedophiles and con-men do to get closer to their victims might do.
That's also what private investigators and intelligence agents might do. By your logic, all private investigators using the same methods are pedophiles.
If I were deliberately smearing AB, I'd try to concoct a reason to mention him as you do in posts also mentioning "pedophile" and "schizophrenic" as often as possible, only I'd use logic that wasn't such an indiscriminate stretch.
That said, yes, I agree he's an unsavory character. His actions were also likely to get him in trouble. He was totally out of his depth and should've been fired.
"If I were deliberately smearing AB, I'd try to concoct a reason to mention him as you do in posts also mentioning "pedophile" and "schizophrenic" as often as possible, only I'd use logic that wasn't such an indiscriminate stretch."
Yeah, I would, too.
But, I'm being sincere. This is creepy behavior from a guy who was not listening to reason from anyone around him.
I don't think anyone needs to smear him...anyone who reads the emails can't come away thinking this guy is a good guy. I'm just ranting because this whole thing is terrifying to me.
The thought that our government might be funding this kind of insanity under the guise of "national security" is...well, have you ever seen The Lives of Others? It's a great film about the Stasi in East Germany, and how they read everything, watched everyone, kept dossiers on everyone, and basically just kept an eye on every single person on the off chance they might be up to something. This, to me, is the modern equivalent...though I would hope it's not taking place in any actual police office.
A friend of mine has a father who had a file on him by the Stasi. In it they had a "scent sample". Someone had broken into his bedroom and stolen a piece of linen that he had slept on while he was in the shower one day. It's crazy to think that someone had/has the job of collecting "scent samples". And what a government would need that for, really.
IANAL but it doesn't sound like he did anything criminal to me. He's obviously misguided and silly, thinking he can draw statistical relevance from assumptions based on his personal reading of Facebook profiles, but there is nothing illegal about reading information that someone posts on the internet.
Cyberstalking, to the best of my non-lawyer knowledge, involves real, disruptive harassment, not just a guy who saw you were friends with some other guy and drew some wild conclusions from that.
Barr never dropped the names so any post-facto prosecution for cyberstalking that would have been primarily based on his use of electronic methods to "identify" Anonymous leaders is unlikely.
I don't think there's anything wrong with doing your own detective work, and you certainly don't need a warrant to follow Facebook or Twitter pages. Private investigators do this kind of stuff in the "real world" all the time (granted, they have licenses).
I agree that Barr is incompetent and/or a tinge off his rocker, but the idea that only law enforcement should be able to search publicly accessible data is silly. If I find the page of a guy I haven't seen in five years, should it be illegal if I spend some time reading his publications? What if I just want to find someone that I've heard a story about so I can ask them more information? Should that be illegal? Remember, the people publishing these things publish them by their own choice with the understanding that they are making the information publicly accessible.
Dropping a bunch of names and recklessly implicating individuals in a criminal investigation is at least a civil offense, but there's no crime in drawing wild conclusions about people while cruising Facebook -- at least as long as you use the conclusions judiciously.
I believe what is illegal is that he was threatening these people, by dropping hints in IRC and national media. He used his fake persona to notify the people he had identified as "leaders" that a security company was researching them and had leadership information, etc.
I don't think it should be illegal to browse facebook, twitter, etc. But, the social engineering aspect of things and the kind of shitstorm he was cooking up was definitely evil and irresponsible. I believe some of the stuff he did does constitute bullying or harassment, and many of his targets are underage.
Regardless of the legality, which was just an afterthought in my post, honestly (I had to even search to see if cyberstalking and such had any legal meaning, and it turns out it does), I find what he was doing disturbing as hell.
I'm not sure that schizophrenia is any better an explanation than straightforward arrogance. Assuming that the leaks of his work are reasonably accurate I'd be concerned if the government actually started using his research to arrest people though.
I'm not sure that Barrs interest in finding patterns in publicly available information in order to sell his intelligence is any different to advertising analysts doing the same thing. The attempt to socially engineer Anonymous via IRC is a bit more extreme, but I haven't seen any evidence that he intended harrassing them; the problem would have occurred if and when law enforcement bodies started harassing innocent people based on his dodgy intelligence. If you start making any investigative work or social network analysis carried out by private citizens online illegal on the basis of stalking laws then you risk censuring a lot of people actually doing good work.
True, and Barr's idea is not actually far off; Facebook and other social networking sites are intelligence goldmines, linking people to aliases, groups, networks, and a lot of other things. Think of how hard it may be for a fugitive to retreat to a trusted safehouse when he's published a list of everyone he's ever met on Facebook via the Friends list, and/or named the handful of people he hasn't friended in a status or note.
The CIA has shown interest in Facebook's database for a long time, because, besides the normal detective work a normal detective can do if he reads through a Facebook page, if you get a handful of real mathematicians working with that dataset, they can certainly rig something up that would at least return really interesting results.
"Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have 'other ways of knowing' or extremely heightened intuition), and a belief that once they tell the whole story of the truths that have been revealed to them the world will take notice and be amazed."
Are you describing a schizophrenic or a newbie entrepreneur? ;)
Oh man, I'm not sure if this is funnier if you meant it, or not...
> in a just world, this nutjob would end up in prison.
Yup. I'm interested to see what happens in the weeks ahead. I really doubt that anything bad (other than getting his SSN posted to Twitter...) will actually happen to him, though.
I am not a lawyer, but I'd like to address your legal points.
Just as I don't need a warrant to view a publicly available website, he shouldn't either. What you are proposing is that it should be illegal to view public pages in a certain order or time. What is the difference of me viewing 100 of my new crushes friends pages over 2 days vs 2 years? There isn't, but the first is rifling, the second is innocent curiosity.
I don't believe he was cyberbullying anyone. However, to address cyberstalking and cyberharasamnet we first have to consider what a reasonable person would have felt had those actions been taken against us. Before the release of the data, and while this was going on, those on the list were unaware of what was occurring. Just as a reasonable person isn't threatened until they become aware of the stalking, threats, etc in real life. Being unaware of what he was doing would mean that no constitute cyberstalking, cyberharassment or cyberbullying took place.
Barr is a private citizen accessing public information and drawing crazy conclusions. There's nothing illegal about that nor should there be.
Wouldn't communicating an "untrue statement of fact" that certain people are leaders of an allegedly law-breaking group to government officials or other people constitute defamation (assuming that their reputations were harmed as a result)?
1. The first is that he did not release the report publicly, which is what would cause the defamation. Anonymous did. Thus he wouldn't be responsible for the release of the data. The issue here is really the publishing of it. He did not publish it, and selling it to a private law enforcement agency, in my mind at least is not publishing it.
2. The second issue is related to false police reports. In America, it is illegal to file a false police report. However, this is not what is happening here. He is not claiming to police that a crime was actually committed, instead he is providing information related to that crime. He is basically selling criminal leads to law enforcement. He's basically doing a crime stoppers like program, but generating the leads himself and going straight to the feds.
2. On #2, so if you want to harass someone without putting yourself on the line, generate "evidence" about them and provide it to law enforcement, but don't file a police report. Good to know!
Defamation and libel are civil offenses, meaning (in my lay understanding) a person can be held financially liable if sued but cannot be imprisoned or otherwise restricted except as far as he can be constrained to pay the judgment filed against him.
"Before the release of the data, and while this was going on, those on the list were unaware of what was occurring. Just as a reasonable person isn't threatened until they become aware of the stalking, threats, etc in real life."
People did become aware of it before the release, which is why the exploits of his servers happened, and why Anonymous got butthurt and went on a crusade.
He was dropping hints and threats in IRC, national media, and in email, that he was doing this stuff. He also "leaked" via his fake persona some of the kinds of information he was gathering to his victims so in order to drum up more publicity and to scare them into action. And, it now turns out, he planned to do a lot more than that.
I don't have a problem with him idly browsing facebook or twitter, though I have to question the mental stability of someone that spends all their time voluntarily reading and logging the incoherent ramblings of teenagers all day and trying to build a conspiracy out of it.
The legal issue is that he was threatening people with exposure, via major media outlets. When seeing this stuff, anyone who ever happened to drop in on the IRC channels had to think, "Crap. When is the FBI gonna show up to question me because I made a joke about Egypt on IRC?" You and I both know the government are wholly incompetent at dealing with issues on the Internet, and they try to make up for that incompetence by being extremely heavy-handed in execution of their misguided policies. I'd be scared as hell if I thought someone, apparently trusted by the government, was going to "reveal" my involvement in some wacky Internet conspiracy to the FBI.
The only real legal point you have is the hints and threats issue. There isn't a good public record of what was said. From the article, it appears as though he said he wasn't going to publish names publicly. Although, it seems to suggest this was post DDOS.
There isn't a clear enough public documentation of what happened to fully say one way or another. My suspicion is that those on the list did not tell him to stop, which is one way legally of measuring when harassment starts.
I'm astounded at both the CEO's (Aaron's) lack of basic grammar skills, and predeliction for "script kiddie" talk. How do you get to be CEO of anything when you communicate (even informally) at the level of an 8th grader?
(edit: I meant Aaron; Penny was decently well spoken)
I assumed that all those garbled messages were from typing on an iPhone. One particular error reeked of autocorrect. If you've seen the things people post on Damnyouautocorrect...
Still no excuse for not writing professionally and at least checking up on what you just typed.
Apparently the S/MIME signatures match just fine ... it is possible they got ahold of their private keys as well to sign messages, but that would be more difficult than hacking the central servers as private keys are stored locally on the clients machine.
Not necessarily. You can copy private keys to different machines just as easily as you can copy anything else. Since it's important not to lose private keys, it's plausible that lazy and/or ignorant persons would copy them to central servers for easy retrieval. It's much more hassle to burn to a CD and put them in a safe deposit box at the bank, after all.
A great read. It's amazing how Aaron Barr completely believed his hunches even when his programmer said that the data doesn't backup his analysis.
He is a business man trying to get paid big bucks from FBI for his hunches.
Sadly, were he rewarded with a continuing money stream, he would likely justify the innocent names as "collateral damage" as the money would have been a mark of success.
Aaron Barr fancies himself a modern-day witch-hunter, and it's good he was hoisted on his own petard.
Barr could have edited it out if he didn't really believe it. A fleeting moment of awareness that you support fascism isn't really all that important in the grand scheme of things.
This guy is clearly a dangerous moron. This kinda makes me feel better for being so cold about this whole affair in the other thread.
The terrifying thing is that there are still people in government who believe sentences like "specific techniques that can be used to target, collect, and exploit targets with laser focus and with 100 percent success" through social media.
I mean, who claims one hundred percent success at anything?
EDIT: Also, that coder hopefully shouldn't be buying any drinks for a while.
The same people who believe that DRM can effectively prevent copying, if the people selling it say that it can. Which is to say, the ones who think of technology as wizardry, and evaluate wizards by looking for social proof. (They can't really evaluate what the guy's selling, but they sure can tell if he's the kind of person that would get respect at a cocktail party.)
My read: The piece is based on Anonymous propaganda. Anonymous itself is actually an amorphous propaganda outfit. The primary purpose of their actions is to produce media. Anonymous achieves these ends in part by taking on opponents with good story value, but no consequential power. They also engage in actions against significant players, like credit card companies, but these actions are most effective in creating media while only resulting in momentary financial damage. Anon is a media entity, not a financial one.
Some of them are. The Guy Fawkes masks are sort of a good way of describing them: a bunch of completely unrelated people assuming the same identity for a time. Likewise, the "Anonymous" you hear of is usually the "Anonymous" that pulls this sort of stunt and then publicizes it. There are a number of people hanging out on /b/ doing nothing but humorous (depending on your sense of humor) image manipulation, also calling themselves Anonymous, and people trolling LiveJournal doing the same. They've all got a different character, but if they all use the same name, it makes them difficult to attach attributes to.
They get to be anonymous by all assuming the same name, "Anonymous"; it's tricky to talk about them as a unified group because it's a group of groups, all with the same name. "This Anonymous" versus "that Anonymous" is hard to talk about. (It's a disclosed exploit in language.)
They get to be anonymous by all assuming the same name, "Anonymous"
People have been doing something like that for thousands of years. That's never meant that everything done under that name was wholly aimless and spontaneous.
I didn't say that; I said that it's hard to attach attributes to them since they're not a coherent organization, but a number of people claiming the same name.
Not really any good evidence to support that conclusion unless you're using Barr's statistical methodology. That coder's responses to Barr aren't that far off from what I'd say in his position. It's not surprising that a programmer would be familiar with Internet geek subculture, and predicting that Anonymous will turn LOIC on a direct challenger is not much of a leap.
On a related note, what he was trying to do reminded me of a Kaggle.com winner on social networks, deanonymizing social networks: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak09.pdf . The latter, of course, is better than gut feel.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] thread> The show was run by a couple of admins he identified as "Q," "Owen," and "CommanderX"—and Barr had used social media data and subterfuge to map those names to three real people, two in California and one in New York.
isn't Q the bot that runs on quakenet as a proxy admin?
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Q
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(James_Bond)
There are lots of people that go there to marshal the forces and most fail, cf. "/b/ is not your personal army". If someone happens to generate a buzz that rings for most of the board's demographic, they can start a chain reaction where a lot of people hit MasterCard at once, and get a bunch of disciples attracted to an IRC room for who knows how long -- it may last a day or a month, there's no way to say definitively. The marshaller then becomes the leader of that group of disciples, but "Anonymous" isn't a group by itself.
The most accurate definition for Anonymous is "a subset of users of Xchan". That's not a very good definition, especially if you want to go around and pin DDOS and whatever else on individual people.
I mentally replace "Anonymous" with "protesters" whenever they're protesting anything. It makes it a lot more clear and it's more accurate. We already have amorphous groups of people who protest various things, and this is, as near as I can tell, the online equivalent.
I think that's a tempting theory to have. Explains a lot and is easy to understand, but I think it gives individuals too much credit.
I would guess exceptionally smart people drift in and out at random and attempt to use the group for specific ends. I think their success rate is slim and random.
By "random" I actually mean the group may go along if it thinks it would be "lulz". Notice I said "may", it also may not - lots of random noise in the hive mind.
What this means is that trying to control or predict the actions of the group is a fool's game. At best you may be able to influence them occasionally in some small way, its pure chaos theory.
I think that's what they want you to think. It may even be true. It's not a reason to give up on the "smart core group" theory, though.
I think it gives individuals too much credit.
This is a long running debate. There is a camp that thinks individual personalities have significant effects on History. I'd be willing to believe that Anonymous is entirely emergent, but in that case, there would be a "fossil record" of its evolution. (Great. Now that I've posted that, some smartass Anon is going to create one!)
What this means is that trying to control or predict the actions of the group is a fool's game. At best you may be able to influence them occasionally in some small way, its pure chaos theory.
There's no good way to guarantee which way a buffalo herd will stampede. Doesn't mean there's zero utility in doing so, or that no one can be held accountable.
For instance, the most interesting thing about a thread like this[1] is the timestamps, because they give you a rough idea of how many Anons are actually participating. Two and three minute gaps between posts is an eternity on /b/, the kind of thing you see when a thread hasn't gotten much attention and is likely to die. What I am saying is that many (perhaps most) of the posts (even apparently dissenting ones) in the above thread are likely to have been the same person, persistently bumping an overlooked thread, waiting for it to gain traction.
Of course there is no way to prove this, and one can more easily perceive this is a vibrant conversation between a much larger group of people (which also can't be proved). Whether this was intentional or not, it is an easy way for a vocal minority to recruit from the largely apathetic majority. The perception of being part of a group has an enormous impact on getting people to participate[1].
Not only does anonymity amplify the power of "leaders" in this way it also reflects the yearning of the "followers" to be relieved of the burden of an individual identity or responsibility. As Eric Hoffer describes in The True Believer:"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority."
That isn't to say that Anonymous consists uniformly of maladjusted poltroons--it doesn't, by a long shot, nor are they generally fanatics in any but the most temporary sense--but it's not controversial to say that it harbors a large population of disaffected youth and misfits of every stripe. Some eager to "do something", others just bored, but all by definition willing to disappear into a crowd.
[1]:http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/a/a4/Chanolog...
[2]:I think this is a pretty uncontroversial point, too, but Bill Wasik's "flash mob" work is particularly relevant http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963 "Q. Why would I want to join an inexplicable mob? A. Tons of other people are doing it."
1) Your post is pure gold.
2) You are probably such a transitory leader on /b/ or reddit.
A cryptic tl;dr would be: Lots of people want to be a superhero. Given the choice, most would opt for the power of invisibility.
Writing a long post is easier than getting people to do work for you.
Anyway, I don't see anything suspicious about those post times, not for 2008.
I just wanted to thank you, this was the second post I read this morning because it looked interesting and you didn't disappoint. The way you master the English language is astounding and I only wish I was able to wield words as well as you.
When a hive reaches a certain size it will establish a new hive, it too will have it's own queen.
Members of the hive will give off pheromones to signal the other members. Not all will follow, some will, however what's important is that the more pheromones of a certain signal propagate the larger the response. The workers are controlled by themselves to a large degree and the queen is in place with certain ceremonial roles. (laying eggs)
The only reason anonymous is a difficult concept to grasp is that from the day we are born we are taught to respect and obey a hierarchy of authority. This authority exists only in the minds of those that believe it. When the last person stops believing it, it will cease to exist.
http://images2.memegenerator.net/ImageMacro/4642541/QUEEN-OF...
I mean, who doesn't want to be part of something that's specifically directed ONLY by what's the most fun?
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/2011/02/07/i-confess-im-...
"Feynman! Did you take the doors?"
"Oh, yeah!" I said. "I took the door.
It may be a real difference if the 0.1% can be easily replaced, Stand Alone Complex style. Say they're all arrested one day, and a month after something happens (Julian Assange is extradited, there's a revolution in Iran, whatever piques Anonymous' interest). There's a good chance many people at the same time will think that something needs to be done, see that nothing is happening, and do it. Not as good as the "old guard" maybe, but they'll probably try.
We can't really know how well this replacement mechanism works...
There is a unique feature though - the anonymity. This could really make a difference if things get serious.
They, like we here in HN, organize themselves around those ideas. Sometimes they act together against someone that goes against their values, like they just did to Aaron, and sometimes they act towards other positive goals like they did in Egypt. It is not about being cool, having fun or anything like that. That is just one of the ways they attract kids and other people to join them in their attacks and other actions. There is no central leadership, no hierarchy, but all their actions are done following certain values and ethics that you cannot really grasp unless you are part of it, just like HN.
Although they don't have leaders, at least in their IRC, there are moderators, that, at least during the leaks, when there were over 3 thousand people in a single IRC channel, would lock the channel, summarize arguments, add questions and unlock it, while they were selecting targets. But usually that only happened when there were that many people and too many trolls spamming the chat.
They are people, from all ages that act by their shared values.
This idea is repeated so often, I suspect that there's a group of people somewhere that wants that particular message to be repeated and believed. If I were manipulating a group like Anonymous from behind the scenes, that's exactly what I'd want the net at large to think.
On the other hands, if Anonymous were really as decentralized as implied in this meme, I should think everyone would want the media to think there was a shadowy conspiracy inolved -- if nothing then just for the LULZ.
My best guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Anonymous is somewhat decentralized, but there is also a core group (are core groups) that started a self-perpetuating process toward some end. This core group is a little worried that things are a little out of hand, so they are now covering their tracks using the same social-media manipulation techniques used to start Anonymous itself.
Maybe one could call it a mob mentality?
The ODA loop for a typical corporation is at least 5 people. Eg. from when someone observes something (anon is ddosing us) to when that information reaches someone who can act on it (the CEO) anonymous has already completed it's complete loop which is (post on IRC, have people read it and suggest action) the ODA loop for anonymous is on the order of 5 minutes, the ODA loop for a corporate CEO is probably more like 5 hours to 5 days.
Therefore anonymous will always be about 25 steps ahead of a corporate target. The primary advantage that comes from this is that anonymous appears to act 'randomly' which causes further stress on the enemy ODA loop and forces them to continually react which leaves the proactive party in control of the competitive landscape (battlefield)
If you study military genius you'll find that the most effective commanders were the ones that pushed command furthest down to the org chart.
We know that decentralized control is much more efficient than centralized control. Communism didn't lose because its a failed ideology or because its godless, it failed because it's command and control systems allocate resources poorly. They allocate resources poorly because of information asymmetry and the length of the ODA loop.
The important thing to take from this for software development is that your time from when you decide to implement a feature to when you deploy to production or get a product to market (AppStore,BestBuy,etc) is your ODA loop.
Also, for software watch what happens to your favorite webserver under intense load when you replace it's queue (FIFO) with a stack (LIFO). The LIFO drastically shortens the median response time.
Top-down and waterfall approaches institutionalize this in order to provide an illusion of control to the executives and shareholders. Agile development and maneuver warfare each seek to tighten their feedback loops.
This also gave me a new perspective on pg's "Beating the Averages".[1]
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
[...]
[04:16] <+Penny> OK how do I know who is on my comcast network?
[04:16] <+heyguise> lol
[04:16] <+heyguise> omg that is precious
[04:37] <+Penny> Hey I"m not sure how this whole Torrent thing works, I'm sure I"ll find out but I can tell you that if you want freedom of press and
[04:37] <+Penny> documents, there is a better way than doing it this way. What you did was illegal and it will hurt you guys as wel
...
[04:41] <+Penny> Can you take PHil out?
...
[04:42] <+Penny> Perhaps I'll invest in you guys, but invest in me, please do not leak any of the emails from HBGary
...
<in reference to Greg her husbands emails>
[04:48] <+Penny> OK, so if we fire Aaron, you won't release?
...
<in reference to Bradley Manning>
[04:54] <+Penny> This isn't about Greg's email this is about Bradley. When you work for the military and you take an oath, shouldn't that count?
[04:55] <+Penny> It's not negotiation, I'm asking a question I want answered. You want me to donate to bradley's fund
[04:56] <+Penny> OK BUT what if it puts people in harms' way? What if it cause bad ramifications for US citizens?
...
<Penny's husband Greg now comes on>
[05:51] <+greg> do you guys realize that attacking a U.S. company and stealing private data is something you have never done before?
The coder in this story is an hero (OK, just a reasonably nice guy, not afraid to tell the moronic "analyst" to go to hell), and obviously prevented a lot of damage by actively working against Barr's insane plans.
I feel the tiniest bit sorry for Leavy and the rootkit guy, as they clearly weren't encouraging this stuff, but really, they knew this guy was a whack-a-mole and they kept him on anyway, I guess because his crazy ego managed to close sales. It's really hard to take pity on someone that knows there's a crazy guy using company resources to go on a personal jihad against random kids on the Internet, and doesn't do anything to stop it.
The level of invasion of privacy this guy was taking part in, against children, is pretty much inexcusable. He's not law-enforcement, and should not be allowed to act as though he has a warrant for rifling through the personal lives of dozens or hundreds of children. All 50 states have laws that cover cyberstalking, cyberharassment, and cyberbullying; in a just world, this nutjob would end up in prison. Whether these kids have done anything wrong or not is irrelevant. Barr is a private citizen, and adult, and he ought to leave law enforcement activities to the police or FBI.
Edit: I should point out that I don't think anyone should be arrested for browsing facebook or twitter or whatever. I was a bit rambling in this comment, and the entirety of my thought processes are not exactly made clear by the text. The stuff that I think is probably illegal is the stuff he was doing outside of his actual research: Dropping hints and threats in mainstream media and in IRC about the data he was gathering, using his fake persona to stir up a shitstorm by leaking that a security company was gathering data on the people he was talking to, etc. I had to google cyberstalking to even know if there were laws about this stuff (and there are, and in all fifty states). While I don't know if those laws are reasonable or not, I'm pretty sure he crossed the line into breaking some of them, particularly in the case of his underage targets.
And agreed, the coder was a saint among men!
That's also what private investigators and intelligence agents might do. By your logic, all private investigators using the same methods are pedophiles.
If I were deliberately smearing AB, I'd try to concoct a reason to mention him as you do in posts also mentioning "pedophile" and "schizophrenic" as often as possible, only I'd use logic that wasn't such an indiscriminate stretch.
That said, yes, I agree he's an unsavory character. His actions were also likely to get him in trouble. He was totally out of his depth and should've been fired.
Yeah, I would, too.
But, I'm being sincere. This is creepy behavior from a guy who was not listening to reason from anyone around him.
I don't think anyone needs to smear him...anyone who reads the emails can't come away thinking this guy is a good guy. I'm just ranting because this whole thing is terrifying to me.
The thought that our government might be funding this kind of insanity under the guise of "national security" is...well, have you ever seen The Lives of Others? It's a great film about the Stasi in East Germany, and how they read everything, watched everyone, kept dossiers on everyone, and basically just kept an eye on every single person on the off chance they might be up to something. This, to me, is the modern equivalent...though I would hope it's not taking place in any actual police office.
A friend of mine has a father who had a file on him by the Stasi. In it they had a "scent sample". Someone had broken into his bedroom and stolen a piece of linen that he had slept on while he was in the shower one day. It's crazy to think that someone had/has the job of collecting "scent samples". And what a government would need that for, really.
< /anecdote>
Cyberstalking, to the best of my non-lawyer knowledge, involves real, disruptive harassment, not just a guy who saw you were friends with some other guy and drew some wild conclusions from that.
Barr never dropped the names so any post-facto prosecution for cyberstalking that would have been primarily based on his use of electronic methods to "identify" Anonymous leaders is unlikely.
I don't think there's anything wrong with doing your own detective work, and you certainly don't need a warrant to follow Facebook or Twitter pages. Private investigators do this kind of stuff in the "real world" all the time (granted, they have licenses).
I agree that Barr is incompetent and/or a tinge off his rocker, but the idea that only law enforcement should be able to search publicly accessible data is silly. If I find the page of a guy I haven't seen in five years, should it be illegal if I spend some time reading his publications? What if I just want to find someone that I've heard a story about so I can ask them more information? Should that be illegal? Remember, the people publishing these things publish them by their own choice with the understanding that they are making the information publicly accessible.
Dropping a bunch of names and recklessly implicating individuals in a criminal investigation is at least a civil offense, but there's no crime in drawing wild conclusions about people while cruising Facebook -- at least as long as you use the conclusions judiciously.
I believe what is illegal is that he was threatening these people, by dropping hints in IRC and national media. He used his fake persona to notify the people he had identified as "leaders" that a security company was researching them and had leadership information, etc.
I don't think it should be illegal to browse facebook, twitter, etc. But, the social engineering aspect of things and the kind of shitstorm he was cooking up was definitely evil and irresponsible. I believe some of the stuff he did does constitute bullying or harassment, and many of his targets are underage.
Regardless of the legality, which was just an afterthought in my post, honestly (I had to even search to see if cyberstalking and such had any legal meaning, and it turns out it does), I find what he was doing disturbing as hell.
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201106/6798/Data-in...
I'm not sure that Barrs interest in finding patterns in publicly available information in order to sell his intelligence is any different to advertising analysts doing the same thing. The attempt to socially engineer Anonymous via IRC is a bit more extreme, but I haven't seen any evidence that he intended harrassing them; the problem would have occurred if and when law enforcement bodies started harassing innocent people based on his dodgy intelligence. If you start making any investigative work or social network analysis carried out by private citizens online illegal on the basis of stalking laws then you risk censuring a lot of people actually doing good work.
The CIA has shown interest in Facebook's database for a long time, because, besides the normal detective work a normal detective can do if he reads through a Facebook page, if you get a handful of real mathematicians working with that dataset, they can certainly rig something up that would at least return really interesting results.
Are you describing a schizophrenic or a newbie entrepreneur? ;)
Oh man, I'm not sure if this is funnier if you meant it, or not...
> in a just world, this nutjob would end up in prison.
Yup. I'm interested to see what happens in the weeks ahead. I really doubt that anything bad (other than getting his SSN posted to Twitter...) will actually happen to him, though.
The subthread under my comment is one of the favorite things that's ever happened to me in an HN thread.
Just as I don't need a warrant to view a publicly available website, he shouldn't either. What you are proposing is that it should be illegal to view public pages in a certain order or time. What is the difference of me viewing 100 of my new crushes friends pages over 2 days vs 2 years? There isn't, but the first is rifling, the second is innocent curiosity.
I don't believe he was cyberbullying anyone. However, to address cyberstalking and cyberharasamnet we first have to consider what a reasonable person would have felt had those actions been taken against us. Before the release of the data, and while this was going on, those on the list were unaware of what was occurring. Just as a reasonable person isn't threatened until they become aware of the stalking, threats, etc in real life. Being unaware of what he was doing would mean that no constitute cyberstalking, cyberharassment or cyberbullying took place.
Barr is a private citizen accessing public information and drawing crazy conclusions. There's nothing illegal about that nor should there be.
1. The first is that he did not release the report publicly, which is what would cause the defamation. Anonymous did. Thus he wouldn't be responsible for the release of the data. The issue here is really the publishing of it. He did not publish it, and selling it to a private law enforcement agency, in my mind at least is not publishing it.
2. The second issue is related to false police reports. In America, it is illegal to file a false police report. However, this is not what is happening here. He is not claiming to police that a crime was actually committed, instead he is providing information related to that crime. He is basically selling criminal leads to law enforcement. He's basically doing a crime stoppers like program, but generating the leads himself and going straight to the feds.
And here's that point:
"Before the release of the data, and while this was going on, those on the list were unaware of what was occurring. Just as a reasonable person isn't threatened until they become aware of the stalking, threats, etc in real life."
People did become aware of it before the release, which is why the exploits of his servers happened, and why Anonymous got butthurt and went on a crusade.
He was dropping hints and threats in IRC, national media, and in email, that he was doing this stuff. He also "leaked" via his fake persona some of the kinds of information he was gathering to his victims so in order to drum up more publicity and to scare them into action. And, it now turns out, he planned to do a lot more than that.
I don't have a problem with him idly browsing facebook or twitter, though I have to question the mental stability of someone that spends all their time voluntarily reading and logging the incoherent ramblings of teenagers all day and trying to build a conspiracy out of it.
The legal issue is that he was threatening people with exposure, via major media outlets. When seeing this stuff, anyone who ever happened to drop in on the IRC channels had to think, "Crap. When is the FBI gonna show up to question me because I made a joke about Egypt on IRC?" You and I both know the government are wholly incompetent at dealing with issues on the Internet, and they try to make up for that incompetence by being extremely heavy-handed in execution of their misguided policies. I'd be scared as hell if I thought someone, apparently trusted by the government, was going to "reveal" my involvement in some wacky Internet conspiracy to the FBI.
There isn't a clear enough public documentation of what happened to fully say one way or another. My suspicion is that those on the list did not tell him to stop, which is one way legally of measuring when harassment starts.
(edit: I meant Aaron; Penny was decently well spoken)
Still no excuse for not writing professionally and at least checking up on what you just typed.
Apparently the S/MIME signatures match just fine ... it is possible they got ahold of their private keys as well to sign messages, but that would be more difficult than hacking the central servers as private keys are stored locally on the clients machine.
Aaron Barr fancies himself a modern-day witch-hunter, and it's good he was hoisted on his own petard.
That says everything about Mr. Barr that needs to be said.
The terrifying thing is that there are still people in government who believe sentences like "specific techniques that can be used to target, collect, and exploit targets with laser focus and with 100 percent success" through social media.
I mean, who claims one hundred percent success at anything?
EDIT: Also, that coder hopefully shouldn't be buying any drinks for a while.
They get to be anonymous by all assuming the same name, "Anonymous"; it's tricky to talk about them as a unified group because it's a group of groups, all with the same name. "This Anonymous" versus "that Anonymous" is hard to talk about. (It's a disclosed exploit in language.)
People have been doing something like that for thousands of years. That's never meant that everything done under that name was wholly aimless and spontaneous.
Who among us hasn't?
Then what do you know, he gets attacked by anonymous. Do you think maybe his programmer is in anonymous? :)
Also, his coder is fun. :D Taco!!!