every time they arrest you they have to
question you
they have to say something like you you
are not under arrest for this
um you do not have to say anything but
if you fail to say something that you
later rely on in court
then this may harm your defense because
i was charged with 80 different
crimes because they basically made like
each hack a different crime
they were supposed to arrest me 80 times
but they could they only finished
arresting me about 40 times because they
could only keep me in custody for 24
hours
[Music]
when i was a child i spent most of my
time on a computer
so if i wasn't for playing games i would
be trying to
go into all these different programs on
the computer to see what they do
and one of them was a this really old
program called microsoft front page
which allows you to create websites when
you create that website is you basically
it's kind of like editing a word
document and you can actually see the
code behind that
website you created and that's kind of
how i first picked up programming and
that's where my
interest in technology and computers
really kicked off how old were you when
you were
doing this and this was when i was
roughly nine years old so i think my
first experience of a hack
was when i didn't have a calculator with
me but i was trying to do my maths
homework
so i went online and i went i found the
online calculator
having programming knowledge in my head
i kind of
thought about the most obvious way that
the person made this calculator
because i programmed it this calculator
had a security hole in it
where you could basically type computer
codes into this calculator
and you can hack the entire website
through this to this malicious or
broken calculator and that was kind of
my first experience of
realizing that um very simple
programming mistakes
could do a lot of damage and could
potentially allow a hacker to get in
and take take control over everything i
also tried to hack
my school computers and servers and they
were quite poorly protected so for
example i managed to get into
a private file server and find
the salary of all the teachers and
people's exam grades and stuff like that
and how did the school react to that
they didn't really take it very well at
all because they kind of thought i was
trying to blackmail them
obviously hacking's portrayed a lot of
movies yeah so have any movies done well
and what movies have done it badly
like most movies and tv shows don't do
it well at all and like they do it in a
completely ridiculous way
and like they have all these 3d graphics
and interfaces which are completely
unrealistic
like when you hack it's just like black
terminal with white text that's what
that's what hacking looks like it's
actually quite boring
but some tv shows actually do do it very
realistically like
mr robot i think has been the most
realistic in terms of
portraying hacking like the actual hacks
they do are real hacks on exploits
when did you first start to become aware
of anonymous
as a group i started becoming aware of
anonymous as a collective of people
when i started hanging around various
online chat rooms
associated with these online activists
and eventually kind of evolved into a
wider activist campaign
under the banner of anonymous obviously
people have their own nicknames in these
chat rooms
so it's not as if each person is calling
themselves anonymous
it's more that we're actually acting
collectively
under the kind of flag of anonymous
there is no formal hierarchy there's no
leaders but there's a kind of fluid
kind of chaotic hierarchy in the sense
that it's a
democracy so if you do something
and people like it then they'll come and
help you with that
and if they don't like that then no one
will join so it's kind of
a democracy and a meritocracy in some
way
um in the sense that the best ideas win
and you don't need leaders to choose
which ideas
um should have merit or not anonymous
movements were against
the entertainment industry at this point
that i thought that was their name for
focusing on
yeah that's what they were focusing on
at the time and then it kind of evolved
into other campaigns
for example when uh visa and mastercard
shut services off to weak leaks uh to
stop quick leaks from receiving uh
donations
anonymous um launched a denial of
service attack
against mastercard and visa so can you
tell me about one of the first
attacks you were involved with under the
banner of anonymous one of the
kind of first hacks that we did is we
participated
during the arab spring when egypt was
having a revolution
and tunisia as well and for example we
hacked the
prime minister um of tunisia and
replaced his front page with a kind of
like a message
to support the revolution
so how did you do this let's explain how
would you do something like that so what
a lot of the hacks that we did were very
simple
in the sense that it wasn't really to
show that we were master hackers
but more that the companies that we were
hacking had very poor security
so this there's a few very common
hacking vulnerabilities that
were quite common at the time
one of them is for example called sql
injection which is to deal with the way
that
a website is programmed and how it
accesses
its internal database and if it's not
programmed correctly then you can
basically hack the entire database and
change things
so when you hack a company's database
you might come across passwords
and when you crack those passwords you
might
find out that people are using the same
password everywhere
so for example with one company hacked
um their ceo
was using the same password for his
email company account his paypal account
his world of warcraft account
and pretty much every single account so
we managed to get access to his entire
online life because he was using the
same password everywhere
he was a ceo of a us
defense contractor called hp gary
federal
when we hacked um hp gary federal's
emails
it was exposed that they were up to a
lot of
no good in the sense that one of the
things that they were trying to do is
blackmail american journalists
that support the weak leaks and so
that's kind of when i realized that
information can give people a lot of
power or can change the world
and then you're one of the finest six
core members of lulz
is it a little stick doll sick yeah so
what is lost
so dulcek was a group that i co-founded
that was born off anonymous and the
reason why
i i proposed the idea of lolzic was
because
what happened was that a lot of people
were hacking lots of different things
anonymous and we're finding all of these
security availabilities in all these
companies
but there wasn't necessarily a good
reason to actually exploit this
vulnerabilities in the sense that there
was no political or activist reason
to expose those vulnerabilities or to
hack those companies
and i didn't really want people to hack
those companies under the banner
of anonymous if there wasn't a political
or activist reason to do so
so we created this alternative kind of
banner
or hacking kind of group called lalsec
where we would just like dump
or hack companies in there um
that we didn't necessarily have a kind
of activist reason to hack
to kind of separate those two concerns
we hacked fox for example and that was
done under
the lawsuit banner to be leaked the x
factor contestants database
so there isn't really a political reason
to leak the x factor's contestant
database so that's why i didn't want
people
to be doing that kind of thing under the
banner of anonymous
and then what did you do use
international remember
so like i wasn't directly involved in
the news international act
because at that time i was taking a
break from lolsic
but zalzek found a security probability
in the sun and this was just around the
time that the news of the world hacking
scandal was happening
so there was a really good reason to
hack the sun and so we had the sun and
we
put up a fake news article on there
saying that rupert murdoch was found
dead in his garden
um i think was something to do with
palladium poisoning
and a lot of people on the internet
reflect that we gained something like
150 000
followers there was we hacked into
an fbi affiliate organization and leaked
fbi agent usernames and passwords
we hacked into the arizona police
department
the u.s senate uh what else
there's like a whole list of them what
how old are you at this point
yeah 15 16 at the time 15 16 you're
hacking the us senate
yeah but at this point actually most of
our hacks
didn't even come from us at this point
we're just getting so much attention
but other hackers were giving us stuff
that hacked for us to release
so we're kind of becoming weak leaks for
hackers at that point you got into
trouble with the police how did that
come about so eventually i
left lulzig because it was kind of
getting
a bit repetitive at the time and about a
month after that
um i was sitting on my computer one day
in my room
and i hear a knock on the door so there
was about three police officers
in um playing clothes clothing and i
kind of like rushed into the
into the flat and they
came into my room and immediately knew
that i was the one they were looking for
probably because of my age and i just
kind of sat in my room for three hours
as i watched them
try to search my whole room for any kind
of like usb sticks or
laptops then i was taken to a belgravia
police station in london
every time they arrest you they have to
caution you
they have to say something like you you
are not under arrest for this
and you do not have to say anything but
if you
fail to say something that you later
rely on in court then this may harm your
defense because
i was charged with 80 different crimes
because they basically made like each
hack a different crime they were
supposed to arrest me 80 times
but they could they only finished
arresting me about 40 times
because they could only keep me in
custody for 24 hours they had all these
questions for me
and they were hoping that i would
basically reveal to them what i did or
try to snitch on all the people in the
group i didn't i just like
every question they would ask i would
say no comment because that's what i was
advised to do by
my lawyer at the time and
they were really not expecting that i
think as because i was under 18
they thought i would talk and um
they kind of tried to threaten me to say
if you talk
if you don't talk then you know you
might be extradited to the us
were you scared i wasn't scared because
i knew as a 16 year old
like the chances of wearing the gel are
very slim because they have different
sentencing guidelines for under-18s
and i wasn't aware of any like hacker
under 18 in the uk um you know being
going to jail for something like that so
i wasn't really kind of scared i was
more kind of
like um kind of pissed off that i was
arrested
than scared about
a year into the case it turned out that
one of our
the members in the group so there were
six members in the group and one of them
was living in new york and he was
arrested and later flipped to be an fbi
informant
and the fbi had basically a copy of
everything that we typed the chat rooms
so like the evidence was too strong so
we had to please guilty
so i was the only one that was sentenced
to a non-constitutional sentence because
i was on
anyone under 18. i was sentenced to a
20-month jail sentence
that was suspended which means that i
have to serve it unless i commit another
crime
and then i was also sentenced to 320
hours
of community service which i served in a
charity shop that sold clothes for deaf
blind people
there's one more thing that's
interesting about your sentence is that
you were given a two-year internet ban
so after i was arrested when i was
released on bail
part of my bowel conditions was that i
was not supposed to use any device
that had access to the internet
and i was not supposed to use the
internet but nowadays they didn't do
that
because they realized that accessing the
internet is basically essential to
participate in society nowadays
how did they police that i mean they
couldn't actively police
my branding from the internet because
the only way they would
tell is if i went on facebook for
example and i started you know messages
messaging people on facebook
and made it really obvious but if i just
like did a google search or something
they probably wouldn't know
so as part of my sentence i had to email
the police every time i for example
bought a new computer
or dispose of the computer and also i
was um
not allowed to use encryption for
anything except for work or educational
purposes
and that was an order that lasted for
five years
what's the state of hacktivism in 2021
so anonymous isn't as active as it used
to be since i was arrested there was a
lot of activity
and anonymous also kind of spread to
other parts of the world like asia
and latin america and there's also lots
of spin-offs of lots of
there has been lots of activism since
then but more by individuals and
lone actors rather than by groups of
people
like anonymous
he gestured at me just as i was holding
the phone trying to get through to the
office in london
uh with his gun and he cocked his
kalashnikov in very aggressive fashion
uh waved at me and it was pretty clear
that what he was intending to do or
threatening to do
uh was wait until i was on the phone to
the office and then he was gonna either
fire the gun
right beside me or belt me in the face
with a gun or something