The Hacker Wars (2014) Movie Script

Anonymous

Cyber attack

A new kind of warfare

Hackers and activists

Security leaks

Computer hackers

Hackers

Hacktivists.

Anonymous has struck

again, with a warning,

this is just the beginning.

Anonymous is a collective

known for recent attacks

on government and

corporate websites.

The internet is a

powerful new medium

where just a handful of

people in small groups,

just by shifting data around

in the right directions,

can make big changes

and big damage.

The more you said, the

more frightening it was.

The Pentagon is now

singling out Anonymous

as an example of the

serious new cyber-threats

facing the country.

The fundamental unit here

is information warfare.

We're gaining back the freedoms

that the forefathers assured us

through technology, and we

can't we can't allow these

freedoms to be taken away.

I will put my body on the altar of

liberty again and again and again.

Information is the weapon.

And information properly

understood and properly used

in an honest way is more

effective than anything else

in the world.

If you've got your eye on

Boeing, yeah, please go for it.

I'd like to see those

fuckers go down.

Dial the code, modify

the code just a bid.

Bombard the Pentagon.

You're either with us,

or you're against us.

You have 15 minutes

available for this call.

Hello?

Uh.

Andrew, are you there?

It's not scary to

be going to prison?

No, I never was scared

to be going to prison.

There's all these

cool people, and I'm

learning all these cool things.

And I'm making lifelong future

friends and future business

partners, certainly.

Embarrassing people, I enjoy it.

It's viscerally fun.

He's an instigator.

The most lovable little pest

on the internet.

His ability

to make other people so angry

is the talent that he has.

Almost 90% of the articles

that come out for Weev, they

all start out with, he's

a dick, he's an asshole.

Little Weev is going to troll

the fuck out of Apple and AT&T.

How do I plan on keeping my

corn bread safe in prison?

I will stab a

nigger that dares

reach across my plate.

I am the Bruce Lee of regexp.

I didn't get caught.

I put my name on what I did.

I'm not here to play

nice with AT&T. I'm here

to comment and criticize.

There was a URL on

an AT&T web server

with a number at the end.

And if you add one

to this number,

like you could have typed it

in the iPad web browser over

and over again, you would see the

next iPad 3G user's email address.

Here's AT&T handing

out a complete target

list of their customers.

I was morally required to come

forward and sort of put them

over the coals for this.

It was, like, 114,000

email addresses.

And it's quite a list.

"New York Times"

CEO Janet Robinson.

White House Chief

of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Diane Sawyer.

Not to mention

the US Army and Congress.

And it doesn't get

much more high profile

than Mayor Michael

Bloomberg of New York City.

Mayor Bloomberg was like,

this isn't a big deal.

It's not like people can't

find my email address.

I'm aggregating

public data and using

it to criticize people

whose politics I dislike.

The FBI is combing

through people's emails,

grossly violating their

constitutional rights.

I think I have moral

superiority here.

NSA and FBI are

both walking here.

And they're looking

at the computers.

And they're like, oh

my god, these red dots,

they're converging.

They hit a button, renh, renh.

No black SUV.

There's been black SUVs outside

the past couple of days.

All the red dots are in

the same room right now.

There's going to

be even more later.

Magic fucking genie.

You're actually in power.

You're in charge.

The most drastic improvements

that need to be made

are in the education system.

We need to give people the kind

of classical Western education

that they used to have.

We need a curriculum

that embraces,

you know, like, Keats and Byron.

It doesn't sound

revolutionary.

It's absolutely revolutionary.

We have people in power

that have explicitly

engineered our education

system to make people dumb,

obedient, and uncreative.

Getting them out of fucking

power and remaking it

so people can be free-thinking,

well-educated, sensible,

non-reactionary people, this

is a revolutionary thing.

And it's probably

going to require

a whole lot of bloodshed.

Why has the FBI targeted you?

They have,

by their own admission,

been surveilling me

since I was 15 years old.

That was in the

search warrant they

used to kick in my door in 2010.

And why?

They wanted me to it inform

on hackers on the internet.

They've tried to get me

to do that many times.

There is a congruence between

whistleblowing and hacktivism

and hacktivists.

The similarity is speaking

truth to and of power,

revealing the power structure

whether it's corporate,

whether it's

government, or both.

I was a senior executive at

the National Security Agency.

And I served there for

about six and a half years.

I blew the whistle on the

secret surveillance programs

called Stellar Wind, which were

the foundational surveillance

programs that ultimately

Edward Snowden, 12 years later,

is now disclosing through

reporters and journalists.

The government went

ahead and prosecuted me

under the Espionage Act.

It was a 10 felony

count indictment.

I faced 35 years in prison.

Hackers are

important in the sense

that they have the

capacity to expose

the secret or the inner

workings of the state, which

is why they are

terrified of hackers,

and they are going after them

with phenomenal vengeance.

We are looking at

increased transparency.

Unprecedented transparency.

He called the former

head of the NSA

at home on a weekly basis

for a couple of months,

trying to get him

to talk to him.

Barrett was speaking

in that language

of real adversarial journalism,

that the purpose of journalism

is not to please those in power

but to report the truth, even

when it makes those in power

uncomfortable or reflects poorly on them.

29 years old,

a cocky college dropout,

a self-described

anarchist, Brown

proclaims he is

policing wrongdoing.

He was brash, he was

cocky, he was arrogant.

He was fucking full of himself.

He's awfully narcissistic.

He held court, so to speak,

from his bathtub.

Fucking around on Tinychat.

The take of NBC

brass was Barrett

was not a very

appealing character.

He was not somebody that...

they wanted to tout

as in any way

heroic or doing an

admirable thing.

Barrett was

somebody who was very

open about his own struggles

with substance abuse.

He was on a maintenance

drug, like a methadone.

He was on Suboxone.

At least he was trying

to stay off hard drugs,

to be on at least a medicine.

Who are the members

of Anonymous?

Who are they?

They're everyone.

I mean, you'd be amazed.

There's obviously

a lot of people

who are hackers who

just working in IT.

They work for major

corporations in some cases.

There's journalists,

writers of all kinds, people

who work at gas stations.

What is Anonymous?

It's basically the power

of an absolutely massive group

of people coming together.

Anonymous are your

brothers and sisters,

your sons and daughters, your

parents and your friends.

Anonymous is you.

Anonymous cannot and

will not stand idly while

people are being denied

their basic rights and human

liberties.

Understand that something

is horribly wrong

with this world.

The Tunisian government

has made itself an

enemy of Anonymous.

The Egyptian government has

revealed itself to be criminal.

For the good of mankind

and for our own enjoyment.

To end the corruption,

we must expose it.

If you

are working for a corrupt

company, leak the data.

If you are working for a corrupt

government, leak the documents.

Think for yourself.

Question authority.

Join us in this battle

for freedom of

information worldwide.

Remember, we are you.

Anonymous is you.

And you are Anonymous.

You are fighting for

yourself, the web,

and for the next

step in evolution.

It's a very interesting

relationship

Barrett has with Anonymous.

Barrett's Anonymous.

He's their spokesperson.

Barrett's not Anonymous.

He's not their spokesperson.

Is Barrett really Anonymous?

Because he doesn't hack,

and he doesn't really

have computer skills.

Well, does he have

a Guy Fawkes mask?

He was fulfilling a very

valuable and important

function, which was

to give anonymous

the legitimacy it needed.

He was the person who was

willing to go on record.

It's an open brand.

Like, anyone can sort of label

what they're doing Anonymous.

If you're doing something

that people don't approve,

then Anonymous will

turn in on itself

and sort of eliminate that.

Like, whatever it is

that doesn't fit in

with the truth-seeking,

justice-seeking ideology.

Are you not worried that

even an informal involvement

with Anonymous is going to

end up with you targeted,

with you potentially

going to jail for this?

He was interacting

with other hackers.

A couple times, he wanted to

make the point that he was not

a hacker, that he

was of the community.

Anonymous members try to hack

into people's personal accounts

and attempt to expose

personal information.

And if we did, we wouldn't

go around bragging about it

beforehand.

We would wait

until we were done.

This article is also poorly

written, and I object to that.

He wasn't able to just

try to do anything cleanly

without people giving

him a hard time about it.

My actual title is

Cobra Commander.

Hiss, hiss.

Hiss.

So that's how I need to be

acknowledged, I think, further.

I also go by faggot now.

These use that

non-pejorative fag.

He's an ego-fag and a moral-fag

and a leader-fag and just about

everything but a

fag-fag, as you know,

leave it to the internet to

have to repeat themselves.

What happened today

is certainly illegal.

Why are you willing

to show your face?

Barrett being a named

person was his own doing.

He did not show up as Anonymous.

He showed up as Barrett Brown.

There's a new world

being born here.

At least, that's the

perspective of the people in it.

And I think Barrett really

reflected that and gave voice

to this emerging world view.

Whether it's valid or

not is another question.

And we do not

Forget.

Sabu spoke about

things in terms of this

being a movement for

revolution, and everybody

was his comrade or his brother.

He had kind of built himself

up within Anonymous

and had this

reputation of a like,

doesn't give a fuck

freedom fighter.

There's de facto leadership,

de facto organizer.

Someone had to have the idea

and start bringing people in.

So for a little while, they're

going to listen to this guy.

They're going to say,

what are we doing here?

Why are we doing it?

There are two types of hackers.

There's a ghost hacker,

who constantly changes

his identity, so

nobody knows who he is

or even how to really

get ahold of him.

And then there are people with

permanent fixed identities.

Sabu had a permanent identity.

He made it pretty clear what his

philosophy, his politics were.

I find him to be

incredibly annoying.

He uses words like

what's up, niggy.

And like, he's a

very, like to me,

I'm very annoyed by

everything he says.

Like I don't like his

terms and the way he talks.

He was the king of

the hacking world,

doing it like a "sir," in fact.

Friends around the globe,

we are LOL at security.

LulzSec came from

Anonymous, and they

enjoyed what each other did.

Laughing out loud at

security LulzSec.

Greetings from Anonymous.

For the past decade,

the government

has tried to take

control of our internet.

The Lulz boat was just

sailing the infinite seas

of hacking excellence, hacking

the shit out of everybody.

Topiary,

is everything all right?

Are you dead?

Are you OK?

Remember you tweeted my

fucking phone number, said,

-512-560-26 Here's the

leader of the LulzSec.

Call him now.

You threw it on the

fucking LulzSec Twitter?

Barrett Brown is the

leader of Lulzec!

Give him a call now!

I got 200 calls

Hurry up.

Get the sign.

Do you have it?

Oh, my god.

Oh my god.

You did it.

Oh my god.

Oh my you did it, man.

No, I'm watching it.

I'm standing here watching it.

You did it. It's

working. It's totally working.

If I was working

in a cubicle, I'd

be like, oh, what are those

Lulzsec guys doing today?

You know those

"God hates fags"

morons that protests

soldiers funerals and stomp

on American flags

because they've

got a problem with gay people.

God hates fags.

What part of that don't

you understand, girl?

I don't fucking understand

why God hates fags.

Because he can.

We can sometimes take over the

websites themselves, put messages up,

as we did today with Westboro.

If you check downloads.westborobaptistchurch

right now,

you'll see a nice

message from Anonymous.

The hacks got bigger

and bigger and bigger.

I'm like, oh shit.

What a hacktivist can do and

does all the time is embarrass

the power elite in a way that

boots on the ground can't.

So you can go and sit in

the front of a building,

you can circle the Pentagon.

That doesn't really

embarrass anyone.

If you hack the

website of the CIA,

you've embarrassed the power

structure of the nation state.

You've embarrassed the Pentagon.

You've embarrassed the

United States of America.

You've embarrassed

it by puncturing

the illusion of their power.

You made us look bad.

You taunted us.

We don't take to kindly to that.

You embarrassed me.

So when someone comes

along like a hacker

and exposes the dark

underbelly of this beast,

that beast...

it's not just

tickling the beast.

They're going to take

some swipes at you.

One of the most

notorious hacking

groups of all time has

had its head chopped off.

Return

to the government crackdown

on a loose, large network

of politically-inspired

hacktivists.

A 19-year-old

who goes by the nickname

Topiari was arrested

in Scotland's Shetland Islands.

The FBI will pull in

some 17, 20-year-old kid

and threaten them with

100 years in prison,

just to get them to

inform on people.

There were at least

three snitches

involved in the

takedown of LolzSec.

This was a domino effect.

People were taken into custody

that folded on their comrades.

On September 17, 2011,

Sabu comes back on Twitter

from his, like,

month-long absence.

And he's like,

rise up, my fellas.

The next thing I know, it's

like, 18 chat rooms are linked

together, and everybody's

working in this Occupy Wall

Street chan.

And like, holy shit.

All right, so let's get to work.

I grew up in a normal family.

I'm from Arkansas.

I'm a high school dropout.

There's nothing particularly

special about me.

And there's nothing particularly

special about any of us.

But together we can

form a movement.

I am the 99%.

Get off the street.

Get onto the sidewalk.

The cops tricked us into

going down a one-way street.

And then they kettled us because

we were on a one-way street.

They were really mean

and kinda violent.

Were you wearing your

Anonymous mask

when you got arrested?

I was.

I was too.

I don't want to hide my

face, but sometimes I

feel like I have to.

People are dismissing

you guys as anarchists.

Anarchy.

Thousands of occupy protesters

flooded the streets.

The sinister mask,

fashion on Guy Fawkes,

the revolutionary who

attempted to blow up the British

parliament buildings more

than 400 years ago, has

become a worldwide symbol

of anarchy and revolution.

They are terrorists.

The other side, the rich

motherfuckers portraying us

all as destructive, mindless

anarchists and so forth,

have really exposed

how reactionary

and how inherently violent

the police state really is.

I am a journalist!

I am also a protester.

This guy was just arrested,

didn't do anything illegal.

This guy was just

standing around too.

We can't see the

story from over here.

Remember the press?

How are we supposed to do

our job if you kick us out

of the park?

The Jews fooled the Germans,

because they got to Germany,

and they were very

serious, rigid people.

And the Germans were like,

oh, they're just like us.

And so they got this

great success in Germany.

And then the

Germans figured out,

oh, they took over

our banks, and it's

hyper-inflated our currency.

Fuck these people.

And perhaps the punishment was

disproportionate to the crime.

Maybe.

But the Jews were the

criminal people in Germany,

and they did have

something coming to them.

Just a little.

Oh my god.

Perhaps not the Holocaust.

I certainly don't blame

you for walking away.

It's a good thing

you're a troll.

You can always pull

that kind of troll card.

He's obviously a

troll and by all

accounts an asshole and highly

offensive and of dubious

moral fiber and

dubious moral standing.

He is an internet troll.

And for the uninitiated,

that's someone

who just likes to

mess with people

for the sake of

messing with people.

Trolling is a rhetorical style

that exposes somebody else's

personality flaws by eliciting

a reaction from them that

shows the true nature

of their character.

He pinpoints your

vulnerability,

and he immediately

starts to exploit it.

But for higher cause, to show

that you're hypocritical,

to show that you have misogyny,

to show that you yourself

are racist while you're yelling

at him for being racist.

Trolling is in the

Socratic tradition

of questioning everything and

driving people nuts until they

question their assumptions.

And that's basically what a

good troll will aspire to do.

If I were to name parties

that I think were great trolls,

I'd say Giordano

Bruno, Zeno of Elea,

Jesus Christ, Joseph

Smith, Brigham Young,

I'd definitely name

some parties who

used a very combative

style of rhetoric

but probably nobody alive.

You meet Weev in

person, and he's

the nicest guy in the world.

He'll hold the

door open for you.

He'll grab you a

soda if you ask him.

And if you meet

him online, he'll

spew a whole bunch

of anti-Semitic crap

and he'll be really mean.

I like to think of trolling

as a way of expressing

working-class discontent.

I recall recently that Gina

Rinehart called the working

class people of Australia

lazy and without self-control.

Trolling is the

right of said people

to respond by telling her to

perhaps stop eating and get

on a treadmill.

You say that trolling is

about creating something

that expresses the true

nature of the character.

I wonder how what you

said about Gina Rinehart

exposes the true nature

of the character,

if you're just talking

about her weight.

When she has inherited wealth

from her father, a bunch

of mines, and she runs around

calling the people that

pull the minerals out of the

ground for her lazy and stupid,

it's disgusting.

It's a level of

decadence and gluttony

that I think speaks not

only through her weight

but her general demeanor.

She's a loud-mouth,

obnoxious idiot.

I'm not a bigot, except by the

original definition of bigot,

I air my opinion very

loudly without the concern

for others' fucking

cries of help about,

oh, he's saying something

that we don't like to hear.

That's actually the initial

definition of bigot,

before it was associated

with a racist somebody who

loudly airs their opinion.

And it says something

stark now that bigot

is a pejorative term.

There's a quote from Voltaire.

It says, to find

out who rules you,

find the people you

may not criticize.

Why do we all have to

agree with each other?

That's what freedom is about.

I can call you a

disgusting kike,

and we can still live in

the fucking same society.

He actually is trying to shove

this down everyone's throat.

Freedom of speech at all costs,

as hardcore as I can make it.

He's a crazy fucker.

But, you know he's,

he's a...

our crazy fucker, I think.

What was it,

the Gay Nigger Society?

Oh, crap.

I can't say that

on camera, can I?

I should probably, probably

not put that on camera.

The Gay Nigger Association

has been around,

I think, probably since 2000.

It is a very old

troll organization.

I was elected president

of it in 2010.

The name

is based on a Danish

short film called

"Gayniggers from Outer Space. "

The gay niggers

come from the planet

Anus, and they are much,

much more intelligent than any

other creature in the universe.

When Hurricane Sandy

swept through New York,

they posed a bunch of

pictures on Twitter

of black people, like,

looting and stuff.

And #SANDYLOOTCREW is what

they called it, the hashtag.

Tons of media

outlets picked it up.

If people were tweeting

pictures of white people

in suits doing TVs, the

media would actually

investigate it and

be like, all right,

this is bullshit, instead of

just reporting that nonsense

without any forethought.

Trolls in trouble

computer hackers

find themselves on the

wrong side of the law

after breaching AT&T's security.

I mean, I guess there's a

blurry line between Goatse

Security, was it a

troll or was it a hack?

But I mean, the

name Goatse Security

invokes that terrible image

of, that ruined my childhood.

He named his company

Goatse Security.

So if you know what

Goatse is G-O-A-T-S-E

I'm not going to explain it.

Hey, there's this gaping

security flaw here.

Goatse Security,

who are these guys?

And they're Googling

Goatse, and they're

getting the goatse picture.

They're called Goatse Security?

Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Yeah, that's right.

We're analyzing coverage

from Bloomberg, Goatse,

The Register, and Forbes.

Goatse Security would expose

the gaping security holes

in your systems.

A corporation like AT&T

and Apple, the only way

you could really get

to them was literally

to send it to the

media and make a,

a gaping asshole

mockery of it.

We're here today to announce

that our office has filed

criminal charges against

Andrew Auernheimer.

I never understood.

The picture that the press

has painted of me is unfair,

and I'd love to have a

discussion, a fair discussion.

Truth triumphs in the end.

Would you say you've

done anything wrong?

I don't believe I've

done anything wrong, no.

What happens when a hacktivist

comes some kid like Weev

comes along and punctures the

invincibility of the United

States government or AT&T?

You minimize the power of these

institutions by doing that.

That's why these kids

have to be stopped.

Too late.

My time has come.

Sends shivers down my spine,

bodies aching all the time.

Goodbye, everybody.

I've got to go,

gotta leave you all

behind and face the truth.

Mama

Come on, everybody.

Everybody, we're going.

Can you can you

whistle the "Ode to Joy?"

It's been good knowing you.

I hope to see you all again.

If not, write me shit

and keep causing trouble.

Cause as much trouble

as you can in my stead.

That was classic.

Of course.

You're not coming in?

No, I'm coming in.

I just don't know how fast

they're gonna take you.

In my country,

there's a problem.

And that problem is the feds.

They take everybody's freedom,

and they never give it back.

I'm going to prison

for arithmetic.

I added one to a fucking

number on a public web server,

and I aggregated this

data, and I gave it

to a fucking journalist

at that man's publication.

And this is why I am going

to prison, is arithmetic.

Fuck this country.

America's priorities

are our priorities.

We are developing solutions

that prevent cyber-threats

from becoming cyber-attacks.

Because at Northrup Grumman,

values are what

enable us to perform

at the very highest levels.

Because we know that

what we do affects

the security of our nation and

other nations around the globe.

- Northrup Grumman.

- CACI.

- Lockheed Martin.

- Booz Allen Hamilton.

- Abraxas.

- Palantir.

Stratfor,

leader in global intelligence.

Even people who are paying

close attention to it,

like me, had never really

focused on those players

before until Barrett

started doing

the journalism

that he was doing.

There's always

been contractors.

We had contractors during

the American Revolution.

Let's be real in

terms of history.

We've never had

what were defined

as inherently

governmental functions,

including the centerpiece

functions of the intelligence

system, the most secret

being turned over

for profit to corporations.

If you have that kind of

control because of the accesses

you're granted and the

government giving you

the deep state intelligence,

the deep state data, guess what.

You get to serve the state.

You get to justify its

continued existence.

You're going to

color the world...

with the mentality

of the state

which is, the world's

a dangerous place.

There's lots of

threats out there.

It's a target-rich environment.

These are people that are

in this to enrich themselves.

They're the people

in the government,

and they're the people

in this business.

And they don't care that

it's not helping anyone.

These are not patriots.

These are people that maybe

have military background.

They might think of

themselves as patriots,

but they are not patriots.

We can meet and surpass

shareholders' expectations,

branch into adjacent markets,

and pursue billions of dollars

in unconstrained growth

opportunities.

They're invested in

the security theater.

Hundreds and hundreds

of billions of dollars

have been spent on

national security,

ostensibly to practice

I can actually

say it's actually

in the trillions,

the total amount of money.

I would argue it's the largest

redistribution of wealth

in the history of

the United States.

Wars are not meant to be won,

they're meant to be continuous.

And if you want to

hold a continuous war,

whether in real life

or on the internet,

then you need an enemy

that can't be destroyed.

And Anonymous is impervious

to really being destroyed,

because it's decentralized.

It's everywhere.

And it doesn't

even have to exist.

I mean, they could just say

it exists, and then it would.

And it's sort of

just like terrorism.

Terrorists are everywhere.

Terrorists your neighbor

may be a terrorist.

So we have to remain vigilant.

And that's the same thing that's

basically happening online.

Right now I've

got Barrett Brown.

Founder of Project PM.

And one of our cyber experts

Barrett Brown

Joins us now to

break it all down.

So is this an

official declaration

of war against Booz Allen

Hamilton and possibly

other contractors?

I still collaborate with some

Anonymous participants

within my own group, Project

PM, acquiring more information

and bringing attention to

what's called the intelligence

contracting industry.

So he has this initiative

called Project PM, which

was a crowdsource wiki that

is supposed to investigate

the mushrooming cyber-security

industrial complex.

It's a collaborative

research project.

You're tapping into the

collective consciousness

of the world, which is always

an incredibly powerful thing

to do.

That is going to be the

future model of journalism.

The collusion in part with

press, mainstream press,

was, we're just going to

sort of look the other way.

We're not going to

actually use the powers

we have available to us.

He was building

up this database

of who was doing what with who,

what intelligence firms are

working for what government

entities, what outside ones are

working together, what

contracts have they

landed that we don't like you

know, all that type of stuff,

stuff they don't want

the public to know about.

There were these hacks

going on that we're expected,

these data dumps.

Shit's about to start getting

crazy, if you know what I mean.

Going through

thousands of emails

is kind of a huge undertaking.

It's a lot of reading.

Did you do that, go through

hundreds of emails?

Can I say that?

These people were

contributing to what

they believed was a

journalistic project.

They were contributing

anonymously,

they thought, to help

the cause of journalism.

Obviously Barrett was

onto something, otherwise

there wouldn't have been

this type of reaction.

41 months, three years'

supervised release, one drug

test within 15 days.

Computer monitoring,

mental health evaluation,

$73,000 restitution to US

Treasury to be given to AT&T.

He reached for his phone.

He reached for something.

They fucking tackled

him, handcuffed him,

took him out for,

like, 15 minutes.

He came back not just in, like,

handcuffs but with the thing

around his waist, the

big chain, laughing.

He's seriously walking

around the courtroom,

just going, like

Like that.

I gave him the thumbs up.

How dare you be skillful?

How dare you utilize

your knowledge?

It's fucking absurd.

And of course

it's AT&T's fault.

They are responsible.

How can you say that the company

that designed the website

is not responsible for

their security flaws?

So the federal prosecutor

said during Weev's trial

that just because he

has a special skill,

he shouldn't have power

over other people.

That's how they view it.

And it's not incorrect

to say that people

who understand

computers have power.

It's just, I don't think

the answer is coming down

on our prodigies

and our geniuses.

I'll put it this way.

There was a time when

you hacked a company,

and the company hired you.

Now it's you hack a

company, and they come

and they beat the

shit out of you.

Hackers, hacktivists in prison,

by virutally pointing out

weaknesses in the

very structures

that we depend on

as a common good.

When we weaken the

common good, for what?

We're turning on ourselves.

And any time a country

empire turns on itself

and begins to find

threats from within, well,

that should tell you

how far gone we are.

Howdy, internet.

My internet blogging must

have pissed somebody off.

They have cut off my

fucking TrulinX access

because, of course, we live

in a country with a childishly

authoritarian government

that can't handle anybody

saying anything mean

about it on the internet.

I miss you.

I really do.

There are so many of you that

I can't hopefully I see you

in a couple or years.

I wish I could call each

and every one of you.

I'm still in prison.

I've been denied access

to both sunlight and food.

I can't tweet via the

normal means any longer,

but I will still read

everybody's responses.

They will be snail-mailed to me.

Fucking barbarism!

Keep up the good fight, and

make trouble while I'm gone.

You guys gotta carry the

internet-ruin torch, I suppose.

Oh, god.

We've that was one of

his better communiques.

I was outside grabbing

a cup, and I get a call

from an unavailable number.

And it's like, do you want

to accept this toll-free call

from Andrew, from

federal prison?

And I was like,

oh god, it's Weev.

I could barely make

out what he was saying.

But he's like, set

up an Asterisk box

so I can upload

things to SoundCloud.

And I was like, OK, whatever.

He had email access for a month.

Then they took it away,

because they figured out

that he was sending messages

to another person, who

was tweeting them

out from his account.

He and someone else had,

like, code words set up.

So if I said, like, say this to

my mom, or something like that,

then the next line

would be a tweet.

They were trying

to shut him down,

and we found a

way to subvert it.

The more that they try to make

this go away, the government,

it keeps coming back.

And it'll bring more

attention on Weev.

It took him a couple of years

to garner 5,000 followers.

And then as soon as he

goes to jail, in a month,

he gets 5,000 more.

It took them a

month to figure out

that we were uploading

to Soundcloud,

even though there was, like,

news articles about it.

And just a few days ago,

we looked at the caller ID,

because we had two

mysterious phone calls.

One of them was from US

Government, all capitals.

And the other one was from

Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Ever since then, we

haven't heard from him.

Out of kind of the

ashes of LolzSec,

Sabu wants a new

thing, a new group,

a new cause going forward.

And this becomes Antisec.

With the visuals

of machine guns,

this was no longer

a laughing matter.

And they were not

playing games anymore.

He was training people to

attack government websites

and attack large

corporations and businesses.

Greetings, pirates.

And welcome to another exciting

Fuck FBI Friday release.

For Fuck FBI Friday,

we are releasing one gigabyte

of private emails and documents.

It was asking for

trouble, and trouble

came in a way

that like, nobody

could have even written this.

Antisec culminated in Christmas

of 2011 with the Stratfor hack.

I remember, like, being home

with my family on Christmas,

glued to my computer,

like, looking over, trying

to interact with my family,

right at the same time,

you know, the Stratfor

stuff's going on.

And I guess there's

that glee that happens,

the glee that happens whenever

like, oh, this happened,

this big hack.

And some people are just

hanging out, you know,

because it's like, I'm a

devotee to train wrecks.

And other people are, like,

seeking out knowledge.

Stratfor is a private

intelligence contractor.

They act as an outsourced,

private version of the CIA.

The National Security

Journalist Joshua Foust

or Foast or Fost

or Faust, maybe, he

said that Stratfor's

no different

than a private investigator.

But PIs don't have

the sort of clientele

that Stratfor had Hunt Oil,

National Oilwell Varco, Emerson

Electric, Dell Computers, and

Northrup Grumman, Lockheed

Martin, Department

of Homeland Security,

Defense Intelligence

Agency, US Marines.

And they don't have

the sort of informants

that Stratfor has Israeli

Prime Minister Benjamin

Netanyahu, Mexican

Diplomat Fernando

de la Mora Salcedo, DEA pilot

and sometime supervisor William

F. Dionne, giving

them information

off of JWICS' top secret

classified computer network.

So that's not the

PI that you would

hire to see if your

spouse is cheating on you.

That's Stratfor.

Cyber thieves made off

with the personal details

of hundreds of thousands

of subscribers.

They work up to

find that they'd

given an unexpected Christmas

present, the $50,000

between them, to numerous

high-profile charities.

To take an ex-FBI agents

and use their credit card

to make a donation to the

Red Cross on Christmas Day,

I guess that it's criminal.

But it's also wonderful

in its own way.

The Stratfor

hack, it's claimed,

also contains

email conversations

between Stratfor

employees and officials

in their own government.

Every week a

company or an agency,

is this going to get worse?

I think so.

People broke into something

and, wow, criminals.

Well, OK.

Even if you want to

call them criminals,

they're coming up with

this information that

looks a lot like

criminal activity.

The day that

"WikiLeaks" published

the global intelligence

files, which

is what it calls

the Stratfor Leak,

"The Atlantic" wrote an article

titled, Stratfor is a joke,

and so is WikiLeaks for

taking it seriously.

And that was the

very day of the leak,

so surely they didn't

read the 5 million emails

that I've spent more

than a year researching.

The 5 million emails

have just been published.

The most important

revelations are still unknown.

Infamous Anonymous hacker

Jeremy Hammond, number one

on the FBI cybercrime list,

pled guilty to

Christmas Hacking Spree.

Known as the electronic

Robin Hood.

Jeremy Hammond.

Computer hacker

Jeremy Hammond

has been sentenced to

10 years in prison.

As a former journalist,

a former investigative reporter

for "The New York

Times," I'm stunned

that the rest of my colleagues

well, I mean, frankly I'm

not that stunned are not here.

Jeremy's going to

jail for 10 years.

I don't think a lot of

people in this country

are going to find out about it if

"The New York Times" doesn't cover it.

That's just the way that the

media is set up right now.

There's a lot of people

outside supporting him.

He's gotten a lot of letters.

So, you know

Hammond's actions are

acts of civil disobedience

fundamentally.

In hacking Stratfor,

Jeremy Hammond

achieved some degree

of transparency.

It opened our eyes to things

that we needed to see.

25 years after Bhopal,

after a gas tank

released toxic gas

into the city

surrounding the factory,

they were monitoring

dissent and demonstrations

against Dow Chemical.

Data wants to be free

is the hacker credo.

The real questions

we need to be asking

is, when this data is

shared with people,

who is it benefiting,

and who is it hurting?

Jeremy's apartment,

you know, is just

books scattered about the

floor, books on the shelves.

What could be more

dangerous than books?

The internet...

you know, which is really just

one giant book about all

of us being written

in real time.

Stop projecting this.

We love you!

We all love you, Jeremy.

Jeremy, flash your light.

Your mom is here!

She loves you!

And I'm proud of

you too, boy.

My name is Barrett

Brown, and I've

been waiting for this

day for about six months.

In a way, I've been

waiting for this day

since I was seven years old.

On March 5, I

received communication

from a certain

individual saying that I

was going to be raided

the next day at my home.

They go to his house,

his apartment.

And he had spent the

night at his mom's house.

You know, I go

to my mom's house

and sleep over there sometimes.

We've been very close.

Next morning, I woke

up at 6:30 by my mom's.

She's scared.

I go downstairs.

There's two FBI agents.

One is named Robert Smith.

He is a FBI cyber-crime fellow.

They say, OK, we've raided

your house, your apartment.

Do you have any laptops

here you'd like to give us?

So they get another warrant

for his mother's house

and find the laptop.

Then they charge his mother

with obstruction of justice.

When I was seven years old,

I first heard the term FBI.

My parents were fighting a lot.

And my dad would sometimes

get angry and throw things

at my mom.

And part of the

reason for that was

because my dad was being

indicted by the FBI.

And I went from living in a

nice house in Highland Park, one

of the nicest

communities in America,

to living in a two-bedroom

apartment with my mom

and grandma and sharing

a bed with my mom

over the next year, when

I was in third grade.

They'd gone after his father

and bankrupted his father.

And his father was

eventually found innocent

and apologized to by the court.

So basically, the FBI

ruined his family.

It was after that day I

realized I'm a bad guy,

and I had no idea beforehand.

And even now, I still

have trouble really

sort of internalizing that.

But if the FBI says

it, it must be true.

And from now on,

I am the bad guy.

So it's kind of like a quad,

and everybody in the apartment

complex can hear this man

ranting against the FBI

on the balcony.

And I'm getting a

little bit concerned,

but I also want

him to have his

because he's Barrett Brown.

He says crazy stuff.

In the evening, we sit in the

Tinychat, just joking around.

Whoa, is Barrett getting

fucking raided by the FBI?

Holy shit!

If you're in the place

getting raided,

OK, you don't know anything,

because all of a sudden,

your utilities go out.

And the utilities go

out, because the concern

is that the concussion

grenades might start a fire.

So they don't want the gas

or electricity running, OK.

And none of the stuff you

see on television, where

they hit the door with

a battering ram no,

that door comes down

in one blow, OK?

And you're down on the floor

with one of these macho jerks

pointing an assault rifle at

your head, swearing at you

and telling you

to freeze, or he's

going to blow your

fucking brains out.

The second agent came around

in his camo with his gun,

and he looked at

me as if he didn't

know there would

be a girl there.

Barrett's mother came over.

She sees Barrett

Brown V, and then

the ampersand over and over

and over again on Twitter.

Barrett Brown V& is a way

that people communicate that

somebody has been arrested.

He's talking shit.

There's no crime

against talking shit.

But maybe there is now.

What kind of threat ends with

how do you like them apples?

It's like it's like, from,

like, 1840 or something

like that.

If it was just

threatening the agent

and that's all he was

being charged with,

I wouldn't even care

about this case.

Let him and Special Agent Robert

Smith go out back and duke it

out, or let Special

Agent Smith beat him up

or whatever he has to do.

The second indictment

comes, and then it's

like a fucking kick in the gut.

All these guys

are doing is trying to

put the fear in him, trying

to pressure him to flip.

Barrett's such a

stubborn asshole,

that he's never going to flip.

Their claim is that he

took a link, copied it

it's journalistically important

to get the client list pasted

it into the Project PM chat

room, and in that one move,

produced criminal

exposure for himself.

The Barrett Brown

case is another one

of these seminal cases,

and the government

wants to send a very

chilling message.

It's fundamentally a

First Amendment case.

How dare you hold

up the mirror to us?

They called Project PM

a criminal organization.

And that's what people

freaked out about,

because there were a whole

bunch of people on that server

editing that wiki, and like,

wait, there's a criminal

I think they're after

who, who anyone else?

Any other names to put on

our list of people to watch?

The tingly feelings

of, like, paranoia

are crawling up my

spine like a spider.

They're there for a reason.

Just because you're

paranoid doesn't

mean they're not after you.

So Jeremy Hammond

did the hack.

10 years at this point.

Who's the guy that's looking

at 105 years at this point?

It's Barrett Brown.

And what's the difference?

He's disseminating

the information.

He's doing something more

dangerous than what Jeremy did.

Here's the message is

sends, from the government

to the hacktivists, who

are getting great coverage

and are becoming folk

heroes through the press.

Don't talk to the

press, because we're

going to get their

computers and we're

going to get their

sources and we're

going to get you through that.

To the press who are

covering the hacktivists,

don't cover these hacktivists,

because we're going to get you.

I guess what I want, one,

I'm no longer your bitch.

Two, all of my

charges are dropped.

Three, all of Barrett

Brown's charges are dropped.

That's up to the US Attorney.

Figure it out.

Hector Xavier Monsegur

was responsible for the

arrest of Jeremy Hammond

and other Anonymous

and LulzSec members.

Sources

say he began cooperating

with the FBI.

It like, I felt like my

brains had been blown out,

like it was the last

scene of "The Departed. "

The FBI arrests Sabu, and

they turn him within a day.

And they have him back on

the internet within two days.

This isn't like...

some guy going undercover

in the Gambino crime

family in person for years.

None of us had ever

met him before.

He was just this guy we

knew from the internet.

He talks the talk

so forcefully,

with that kind of New York

personality you know,

we are doing the right

thing for the people.

We are building this

anew from the ground up.

We are taking down the ugly,

evil, capitalist, imperial

machinery, and we are building

it back up with our own hands.

My brother, he says.

Looking at Sabu's interactions

with reporters during the time

that he was an FBI

informant, Sabu

could have easily just

told the reporter,

like, no, I don't want

to talk to you, go away.

But that's not what he did.

He engaged in, like, an hour

and a half long conversation

and then screen-capped it and handed

that information over to the FBI.

That's not a free press.

The government has journalists

under surveillance.

Do you think the government's

targeting you?

I hope not.

I hope I'm not.

Shit.

Everybody's paranoia is just

through the fucking roof.

Wait a sec.

If he was working for the

FBI from that moment in June

to this moment now, they

didn't delete his timeline,

they didn't try to

hide any of that stuff.

Want to speak to me?

Want to join the fight?

Go to Wall Street and protest.

Sabu and Jeremy were

partners in crime.

They were the digital Bonnie

and Clyde, if you will.

Except one of them is working

for the FBI the whole time.

The FBI is operating...

in sort of a new theater,

which is online.

The government likes to

use these hyperbolic terms

referring to cyber-warfare,

cyber-weapons.

The feds, by

proxy through Sabu,

were giving Jeremy the zero-days

to get into these websites.

In order to, say,

entrap a terrorist,

they would sell him

fake explosives.

But instead of giving him fake

explosives, the zero-days are real.

In the hacker world, you either

get in or you don't get in.

There's no fake hack.

It wouldn't be a crime

if it was a fake hack.

Ugh.

That's the only way I

could describe it dude.

She fellated him.

The amount of cooperation

was truly extraordinary.

And it was just amaz she just

kept saying it over and over.

It was truly extraordinary.

You know and I

gotta say too, I

don't know what I would

have done in his position.

I really don't.

You have to walk a mile in

his shoes to understand.

There's a lot of people that

are going to be mad, though,

the amount of truly

extraordinary cooperation

that he gave.

This was the first time

anybody had ever seen him,

at least publicly.

Like, this was real.

This was finally

coming to a close.

And he was facing

the guideline

was between 21 and 26 years.

He walked out of...

the Manhattan court

complex... a free man.

Yeah.

He immediately cooperated with

the FBI when they arrested him.

And the judge said

that that was probably

the most significant

aspect of the case,

was that Sabu flipped so

quickly, which enabled

the FBI to sort of become

a part of Anonymous

over a nine-month period.

They were apparently sitting at

the computer with him at times.

He had a camera in

his apartment or house

that was videotaping

him every day.

He was debriefed

regularly by the FBI.

Judge Preska said, and

I quote, I salute you.

The prosecution and the

defense sort of built him up

to be this sort of

conservative folk hero,

like the model FBI

informant, the person who

every informant should

live up to be, to the point

where it made it impossible

for them to give him jail time.

It would have been

it would've been

bad for the informant

program for him

to have worked that

long, to work three years

and then be sentenced to prison.

Sabu pretty much

neutralized Anonymous.

Yeah.

Completely

neutralized Anonymous.

And after he went

down, everyone's

afraid of following any leader.

And they're also afraid of starting

an operation on their own.

In general, nobody

trusts anyone.

If you go onto any IRC chat,

they're all just talking about,

you know, like...

- "Who's the fed?"

- You're the fed.

At the end of the day,

he's just a hacker

getting used by the government.

Sabu is the big snitch.

Like, the ninth circle of

Hell is reserved for Sabu.

Him and Cain and, like, Judas

will be there with Satan.

There's been an

unfortunate deficit

in what people have read

and what people have written

about an issue that is of

extraordinary importance...

TrapWire.

Barrett sort of shines

the light of this stuff.

He's like, oh my god,

it's actually happening.

You've got the

emails right there.

He stumbles across this.

He stumbles across it,

starts talking about it.

TrapWire is software that can

match surveillance data taken

from multiple closed

circuit cameras

from across the country.

Video feeds are fed into

a centralized system that

analyzes them for patterns

of suspicious behavior.

To understand

TrapWire, you have

to understand the

larger context,

because TrapWire is a critical

piece of the surveillance

apparatus.

This is actually doing

very large swath,

persistent surveillance.

In 2007, TrapWire

costs about $1.7 million

to operate in Los

Angeles County.

What we know about

how it functions

is largely gleaned

from those emails.

TrapWire has been

deployed in Seattle,

in Los Angeles, in DC.

According to a

Stratfor email, there's

500 cameras in this

New York City subway

system equipped with TrapWire.

"The New York Times"

said that TrapWire

was only used on 15

cameras in the entire country,

and that the DHS wrote it off

as a failure.

That's a complete lie.

We had gone to 38th Street

Station to troll TrapWire.

And so what troll TrapWire

was for us was essentially

acting out these things that

the security researcher, Justin,

and other people

had said, this might

work to trigger

TrapWire's alarms.

Sitting their holding my

laptop and looking around,

a little bit.

You were live-tweeting

the video.

And you were being ridiculous

about the whole thing.

Obvious, yeah.

We ate with a senior official in

the Philadelphia Police Department.

During this, a homeland security

unit for Philadelphia police

had come to him and said, Dustin

Slaughter and Kenneth Lipp

are at 30th Street

Station, and they're

worried that they were

going to smash cameras,

that we have something

terrorist in mind.

It blew our minds

when we found out.

My god, they were

monitoring this.

They actually were paying attention

and freaked out about it.

They're doing what

everyone's worried about.

Anarchists are running all

over the place and smashing,

burning, looting.

Coverage of TrapWire

in the US,

the whole story was

smothered in its crib

by "The New York Times. "

It's an open secret that

the mainstream media

has special access to

the halls of power.

There was a phrase I

used to hear at NSA

we're going to tell them

what we want them to hear,

not what they need to know.

What we want them to hear.

That's pure manipulation.

That is CYOP Info Op.

You're saying, because

you can, you're

controlling the narrative.

Hail victory!

Go, go, go, go, go.

What?

Yeah, dude.

And my magazines and my

newspapers and my mail.

I spent the majority

of my time in the SHU.

They were like, if you continue,

we're going to force-feed you.

And I'm like, well, you're

gonna force-feed me.

But hey, I ain't

backing down, you know?

The infamous computer

hacker known by his alias

Weev is a free man after

more than a year behind bars.

An appeals court has now

overturned his conviction.

Time behind bars has made Weev

even more outspoken than before.

I can't watch my society rot

when a bunch of federal scum

just want to throw

anybody that they

disagree with in a prison cell.

It's the end of

the West right now,

and we've got to fight for it.

Somebody has to.

You have no instincts to flee,

like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange?

I'm not running.

This is my country.

So this case is at

every step of the way

from the initial

criminal complaint

to my time in prison has

always been about my speech.

And they've wanted

to silence me.

They further

punished me in prison

and subjected me to conditions

above and beyond any

of the other prisoners at my

facility because of my speech.

They wanted me to disappear

from public view and memory.

It was inside the SHU, like...

inside the SHU...

There's an author,

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

He was one of the

few authors that

kept writing after Stalin

told all the authors that they

weren't allowed to write any literature

that was compelling anymore.

And he ended up in a prison

system called the Gulag.

And he describes there

the steps that they

do to try to break you down.

And I kept checking off the

bullet points that he listed.

He has, like, a 30

bullet point list

of all the various

interrogatory methods

that they used in Soviet Russia.

Temperature extremes

are one of them,

and they'll turn up the AC

to freezing temperatures

while he was sleeping.

And then they'll pump up

the heat during the day.

And they come and

like, I couldn't

sleep because they would bang on

the door every once in a while.

And they'll shine the

flashlight in your eyes

and keep waking you up at night.

They'll put you on a bunk, and

then you can't even sit up.

And there's a light

right next to your head.

And it's pretty terrible.

No doubt about it,

it's pretty terrible.

The surveillance

state's already here.

It's already here.

We're constantly on camera.

Like, we can't put

that back in the box.

Like, we can fret about

it and say, oh gosh,

we need more controls.

That infrastructure is there,

and it's not going away.

They can watch us

through our webcams.

They can listen

through our phones.

There's no privacy

left, virtually.

We are the most watched,

surveilled, monitored,

eavesdropped population in

the history of the human race.

If you have nothing to hide,

as justification for violating

your rights, then you have

nothing to worry about.

You know where that

phrase came from?

Goebbels from the Nazi era.

Nothing to hide?

That means there is no privacy.

I left Iran to come here,

and now I

can't have security or privacy?

All we want is just

fucking live our lives.

Half of us, we don't

even give a shit,

if we could all be left alone.

It's my right by

birth to have privacy.

They want to own you.

That's a power relationship

superior, inferior.

If I know every single thing

about you, about what you

think, how you reason,

what your fears are,

what you're planning,

what you're doing,

and you know nothing

about me, because I'm

shielding my behavior

behind a wall of secrecy,

I have incredible

power over you.

The power imbalance

between us is immense,

because I can now manipulate

you, I can threaten you,

I can alter your behavior

in all sorts of ways,

I can anticipate your

behavior, I can prevent you

from doing things

that you're planning,

I can prepare in defense

of what you're doing,

I can always stay many

steps ahead of you.

This mentality is pathological.

You have to understand

the mindset.

You have to understand

the psychology

behind those who want

to know everything.

That means anything

hidden, anything private,

anything sovereign

is a direct threat

to the surveillance state.

The capacity of this

agency to spy on people

and to know everything

that they do

is so extreme and awesome, at

any moment pure totalitarianism

could be imposed, and

the American people

would have no place to hide.

Security and surveillance

state is put into place

in order to keep a

population captive.

And they now have

all the mechanisms

to do it absolute

iron control,

over-arrestive

population, should

the population become restive?

The United States

unchained itself fully

from the Constitution.

People still don't

fully appreciate it.

We talk about mass

surveillance, all

this stuff- no,

they've unchained.

This is an alien

form of government.

It's completely

anathema to democracy.

It's completely anathema, but

obviously the government's

not going to come out

and say, hey, guess what?

We're under national

emergency conditions.

I'm going to continue

hitting large companies

and institutional powers.

I'm not going to take

no shit from nobody.

Fuck them if they

can't take a joke.

I was not going to sit

still and remain silent,

because if I had

remained silent, I

myself would have been complicit

in the conduct of a crime

against the sovereignty

of who we are as people.

That's We the People, capital

W and capital P, We the People.

You can just sign off.

Like, you don't have to

be a victim of trolling.

Like, you can just

turn off the internet.

Sabu got off.

Judge Preska and the

attorneys and the defenders

got on their knees

and fellated him.

That's, like, a

lot more sex than I

remember going on

in the courtroom.

Don't limit your activism

to just the mere world

of computers.

Take it to the streets.

We need more foot soldiers in

the streets to fuck up shit.

"Dallas, Texas, native Mr.

Brown joins other infamous

Texans who fought

the government,

such as Branch Davidians

at Waco, Texas. "

Fucking really?

Really?

The Branch Davidians?

Really?

Fuck you.

The Hacker Wars (2014) - full transcript