Anonymous is one of the biggest online vigilante groups.
Members hack into companies and governments.
They have hacked into Donald Trump’s personal information.
They have posted online his Social Security number,
his cell phone numbers.
I’m loud, proud. I don’t hide shit.
It confuses a lot of people.
You’ve seen them wearing masks in protest.
They prefer a life in the shadows.
I have a lot of friends that are constantly
scared for me and my safety.
The FBI has had some success against suspected Anonymous associates,
arresting at least 20.
My personal motivation is to destroy shit, laugh,
have a good time, and feel the rush of power.
Someone has broken into the National Bank,
the Federal Reserve.
The mysterious group Anonymous has struck again.
An online game of cat and mouse is underway right now
with an invisible enemy.
So let’s say Anonymous is anywhere between
five people with multiple personality disorder
or 500,000 people,
of which 400,000 of those are probably 16 years old
and really just want to know how to hack their friends’ Roblox account.
[Super_Users]
[Anonymous Member]
Hi, my name is Aubrey Cottle, aka Kirtaner.
Anonymous is, well,
it’s a lot of things, really, depending on who you ask.
So there was a handful of jackasses, myself included,
that came out of the 4chan community
that decided to start causing a little extra chaos and mayhem.
We started building tools, frameworks.
We were basically training people
into a whole bunch of asshole black hat hackers and trolls.
I fostered the ever-living crap out of that.
And at the end of 2006, throughout most of 2007,
we were messing with a neo-Nazi called Hal Turner,
a New Jersey radio show host.
You are not going to kick me off my own server
that I bought with my hard-earned money.
And you are not going to force me to close my website.
And you are certainly not going to force me to shut down my radio show.
The joke is on you.
Next thing you know, we’re making Fox News
for being a bunch of internet terrorists,
hackers on steroids,
some kind of internet hate machine.
Anonymous gets big lols from pulling random pranks.
Just kept growing and growing and growing.
Next thing you know,
some other people took the ball, ran with it,
started attacking the Church of Scientology.
That’s when the whole Guy Fawkes mask protests in the streets
started in earnest.
It just so happened that this mask was the one that they had in stock
in all the regional costume stores.
For what the church is doing to its members
and to people that come in,
and the abuses that it does,
we don’t think that’s fair, we don’t think it’s legit,
and we think it needs to stop immediately.
We put out the call, “We’re going to be protesting.
If you want to hide your identity,
then just go and everybody buy a Guy Fawkes mask.”
We are celebrating L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology,
we are celebrating his birthday.
And there you have it,
the aesthetic kind of stuck.
From there, just defacing and wrecking the internet
left, right, and center for the next year or so.
It’s been called Operation Payback.
The targets, commercial websites
which have withdrawn services from WikiLeaks.
A group of computer hackers claims to have breached security at NATO.
Anonymous has heard the cries for freedom from the Tunisian people
and has decided to help them win this battle against oppression.
Things kind of hushed down for a while after the snitch.
Then Anonymous turned their sights on ISIS.
Anonymous says it’s eliminated more than 6,000 Twitter accounts
linked to ISIS.
That was a whole thing.
This is a message to the military of Myanmar
and Min Aung Hlaing.
Hackers have attacked Myanmar government websites
as part of protests against the military coup.
Coup in Myanmar.
Had some fun there.
It scared their military so hard
that in the space of, I’d say, about a week,
they decided to take all of their records offline
and go paper hard copy only.
You ever just casually haze and terrify a foreign military
just for fun?
Yeah.
Some people call us digital Robin Hoods,
freedom fighters,
all these altruistic labels.
I don’t know.
When it comes to all the actual core people within the Anonymous groups,
we’re a bunch of malicious assholes.
Anonymous started as trolling.
We were just doing shit because we thought it was funny.
It really didn’t matter who got in the way, who got hurt.
I admit I myself made a hell of a lot of mistakes
Some of Anonymous’ worst actions...
Epilepsy Foundation, back in 2008.
People reacted to it with... with confusion.
It was common knowledge that Anonymous was not responsible.
You know, the FBI even said it themselves.
No, we were.
That was us.
I know that because...
I was there.
There was a reason, albeit misguided.
March 2008, Project Chanology was in full swing.
I went to go to the protest lines.
Some of the people outside the Church of Scientology
recognized me,
started having a little bit of a freak out,
started bowing at my feet.
I’m looking, I see some Scientology jackass up there
snapping photos, taking pictures of me.
Obviously, if all these people are bowing at my feet,
I must be someone important.
My dad taught me a lot about the Church of Scientology growing up.
I knew what they did to people
that they labeled “suppressive persons.”
I was afraid for my family’s safety.
Something happened, I snapped.
I called some people and said, “We got to do something about this.
We have to shut this shit down.”
We did as much as we could to try and shut it down.
And when that didn’t work,
we thought, let’s do something real fucking shitty,
get some bad press on purpose.
Then everybody will wake up and stop supporting Anonymous
and slow this whole thing down.
One thing led to another.
Next thing you know, we’re messing with epileptics
on the Epilepsy Foundation website,
seeing headlines like,
“Possibly the first computer-based attack over the internet
that caused physical harm.”
That shit sticks with you.
You have a soul.
That stuck with me for a long fucking time.
Still does.
I was retired for a number of years.
I haven’t been rolling with Anonymous for all this time.
There's a time period that I still don't even remember everything.
Things started getting really chaotic and hectic.
There's enough traumatic memories.
I started getting more and more and more depressed
and thought I can’t take this anymore.
I need to let it be known that I existed.
I started trying to find people that would actually listen to me
and not treat me like I was schizophrenic or delusional or crazy.
It took a long time.
I never actually expected to unretire,
start doing things again,
but kind of one thing led to another,
and then I got back on my bullshit.