Stuff You Should Know - The Lowdown on Anonymous

Episode Date: November 24, 2015

Anonymous is an amorphous group of hacktivists with no single leader or power structure. Some call them heroes, others call them criminals. Can they be both? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from house.works.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Noel's over there, so this is Stuff You Should Know.

Yeah, the web edition. Yeah, we've heard of the web, uh-huh. I wanna point out, there's a work party going on. This is how dedicated we are. Right outside our door, people are out there drinking and eating and having a good time and. Drinking alcohol. We're just in here working.

Free alcohol. Yep, even Noel's over there eating right in front of us. Yeah, he is, thanks Noel for that, cause it's making a lot easier. So, Chuck. Yes. Have you heard of Anonymous? I have indeed.

I have heard of Anonymous as well because, you know, I read the newspaper and things like that. You're a hip-happening guy. Super. But I didn't understand really in any way how Anonymous actually worked until researching this episode. Yeah, very interesting. I think we should say we're not experts here.

No. Probably going to get some stuff wrong. Sure. Let's just hope it's a little, like mostly right rather than maybe like the sun episode. We're sorry in advance, Anonymous. Yeah, right. Don't come after us.

So take your ire out on us. I think we're in good shape actually. I read one of their key characteristics is that they don't talk about the group. They don't disclose their own identity and they don't attack the media. Typically they don't. There was actually an attack carried out

by an anonymous offshoot named Wolseck that I guess you could call it an attack of the front line, PBS's front line website. Oh, really? Yeah, they posted a fake news story that said Tupac was alive and well in New Zealand. I don't know if that really constitutes an attack. I guess technically it does,

but that did get some people in the media a little nervous. Like oh, it's the media now fair game, but I think yeah, for the most part, we're media if we're anything, right? I think A, we have some listeners who are anons, which is what anonymous members are called. You think so? Absolutely.

You're probably right. Not a doubt in my mind. And I think they're gonna love this because they like press, they like headlines and they like for people to know what they're doing. Even though they're in the shadows as far as their identities, they fully claim what they do

and stand behind what they do. Sure. Yeah, and then I mean, I think it's pretty smart to keep their identities anonymous because there are a lot of federales after anybody who does any kind of computer crime these days. And the laws are really draconian and really strict and really disproportionately tough.

Yes, and the government uses some of the same tactics that anonymous uses to go after people and anonymous, which as we'll see really ticks anonymous off. Yeah, they think they're big fat hypocrites basically. Yeah. And they have a pretty decent case in a lot of cases. Yeah. So Chuckers, I guess let's start at the beginning.

Yeah, I don't wanna do that deal where people are like, you never even said what anonymous was. Right, so anonymous is a group of hacktivists. Yes. Hacker activists, that term was coined, I think in either 1994 and 1996 by a cult of the dead cow member,

which was an early hackers group. They really kind of set the stage in the 80s and 90s of what computer hackers, and actually telephone hackers initially are meant to do. And the idea is that freedom of speech and the freedom of information is sacrosanct. Yeah. Should not be messed with.

And people who do mess with it deserve to be messed with themselves. But even that contains rules. Yeah, and they've been described as everything from a collective to a shape-shifting subculture, so that Miko Hipponen called them, or Barrett Brown, a Texas journalist, said what they really are is a series of relationships.

Yeah. So it's all very secretive. It's not, and we'll get into this more, but it's not an organization where they go and meet every week with a president and a treasurer, and they wear their Guy Fawkes masks, and they get together and decide what to do next. Right, which makes them really, really, really difficult

to take on if you're a centralized body like the US federal government. Absolutely. Because really, what anonymous is, is an idea, and a concept, and there's an ever-shifting group of people that come in and out of it. And the whole idea is pretty simple. If somebody sees a wrong going on somewhere in the world,

and the person carrying out that wrong can be gotten to via the internet, then they go and they try to rally the troops. And if enough people say, you know what, you're right, that is messed up, and we should do something about it, they, that idea will have enough support that what happens is anonymous, it ends up carrying out an op, an operation against that target,

and there you go. Those people may never join together again for another operation, that operation may end up becoming an even larger operation. It's totally unpredictable, and it's completely fluid, and that means that if you bust some people, which the US government has done plenty of times, there's gonna be tons of other people

to come take their place. Yeah, you can't kill anonymous. No. And what might happen is everything from something a little more lighthearted, like taking over your website and replacing the banners with your own messages to completely disabling your website altogether, so no one can even access it.

The writer named Brian Kelly said there are three key characteristics of the group. One, an unrelenting moral stance on issues and rights, regardless of direct provocations. In other words, it's not like someone's messing with anonymous, so they're gonna fight back. In fact, it rarely is. It's usually, you know, like Westboro Baptist Church

or Scientology. Right. And that's, I don't know that that covers all of anonymous. There's long, almost from the beginning, there's long been fractures in the group between people who just want lolls, which is like entertaining yourself at other people's expense, basically.

Trolling people just to mess with them for laughs, whatever. And others who say, no, we've got a really powerful weapon here, the internet is serious business, and we need to use it for moral crusades, basically. Yeah. And number two, a physical presence that accompanies the online hacking. So don't just stop at like disabling someone's website,

but get out in the streets with those Guy Fox masks. If you've seen the movie, V for Vendetta, or you know anything about the 5th of November, you know the mask that I'm referring to. Yeah, and actually that mask being used by anonymous goes back even beyond V for Vendetta, actually. There was a meme called, I think Epic Fail Guy, yeah. And he was a meme, it was like a stick figure

wearing the Guy Fox mask, and everywhere he went, he just screwed everything up. It's a cool mask. Yeah, so they were like, we'll use that mask. And number three, a distinctive brand, which you know, is that Guy Fox mask. I mean, they're great at branding, you know. For sure.

That and the suit and tie with a question mark in place of a head is one of their logos, which is pretty great. It's a great logo, yeah. And what is their, what is their, their log line? We are anonymous, we are legion. We do not forgive, we do not forget, expect us. Yeah.

That's a little creepy. It is a little creepy, you know? Yeah. They're scaring, they're scaring people who, and I'm not scared, but if you're doing something wrong, then you should be scared, you know what I'm saying? Yes. And a lot of people will say, well, no, actually,

there's, you know, anonymous will come after you, even if you didn't do anything really wrong. That's not necessarily true. There are like offshoots that have, you know, come and gone that, that do believe much more in mayhem and stuff like that. But when you think of anonymous these days, typically you do think of, there is some sort of moral

aspect dimension to the thing that's being carried out. And it depends on what your definition of right and wrong is too, which is clearly a lot of people think that they're anarchists that should be jailed and throw away the key. There's other people that think, no, you know what? They're taking on the immoral corporate giants, not just corporate giants,

that are doing really bad things behind closed doors. Yeah. Pretty interesting. Oh, it's super interesting. Should we take a break? Oh, sure. All right, let's take a break and we'll dig in a little bit more right after this.

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That's right, available now wherever you get podcasts, including iTunes, GE podcast theaters, The Message. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. So Chuck, let's go back to the beginning, shall we? Sure. This whole idea of like, we are legion, we do not forget, we do not forgive, expect us.

That's a pretty far cry from how anonymous ended up starting, right? Yeah. So there's this site called 4chan. 4chan has all sorts of what are called image boards, right? Yeah, it was created in 2003 by a 15 year old Christopher Poole. And Christopher Poole's whole thing was like,

I want to have a place on the internet that's totally sensor-free. And anonymous. Yes, no self-censorship, no, there's nobody in charge, there's no rules, there's no nothing like that. It is just whatever you want to post, whatever you want to say, you want to troll somebody, you want to control them, and it's all,

let's just not take things too seriously, shall we? Yeah. But let's also see how far we can push other people to take things seriously. And so 4chan attracted a certain kind of netizen, I guess, pretty quickly off the bat. And this one image board in particular, B slash B slash, it's like 4chan.org slash B slash.

It's the random board, it's whatever. People started kind of congregating there and finding that they all shared this kind of like desire to mess with people. Yeah, and then anonymous sort of evolved out of that because there were some people saying, you know what, let's step this up a notch and let's not just goof off and have fun.

Let's actually try to accomplish something for good. Yeah, and again, that caused a riff right from the beginning because some of the people were like, no, originally we were doing this for fun. There was this thing called the Hebo Hotel, which is basically kind of a weird second life hangout that they went and infiltrated and just populated

with characters that would like block the pool or basically just like shut down the site, take it over just to mess with people. And it was fun, they were having fun doing it, just screwing with people. And other people said, no, let's use this for good. And that actually kind of came accidentally out of messing with a guy named Hal Turner.

You heard of him? Hal Turner, of the Coney Allen Turners? Right, yeah. So Hal Turner was this extraordinarily racist radio host and he got pranked by some of the original 4chan message board members, right? He was getting like prank calls or whatever. And he recorded the calls and somehow got the data

and published it on a site or released it to his fans and said, hey, why don't you guys go figure out who these people are? And they figured out some of them, including some underage message board members whose parents addresses were posted now on this virulently racist radio hosts website. And so the people from 4chan said, take that down.

And he said, no. They said, okay, well, that was your one warning. Wow. And they went to town on this guy. And by the time they were done with Hal Turner, he was off the air, he was off the air and in prison for I think a couple of years. For what?

Threatening federal judges. They basically went and found like all these emails and stuff and just published everything, including like his home address, all this stuff. They took like his tactic and just turned it on him a million times over. And that was the one where people said, hey, we just did something really good.

We just got a racist radio host off the air. That was thrilling. We should use our stuff for good. And again, some people said, no, we're just in it for the lulls. Other people said, no, we should do this morally. And then even other people said, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, what are you guys doing?

Like that guy had a right to free speech and you just drove them off the air. How can you possibly be proud of that? Yeah. The prong that said, no, there was some good moral dimension to what we just did using our computing skills for good. What we determined is good.

That's the direction we should go. And it kind of took off from there. It was supported by the operation against Scientology. Yeah, that came along in 2008. That was one of their first big ops. It was called a Chanology. And basically what they came across was a video that we've, well, let's say we've all seen.

I've seen it. Everybody's seen it. That's for Scientology. But the famous Tom Cruise video where he's, oh, he's sort of just rambling and he seems a little crazy and kooky and he's talking about Scientology and it got out there and Scientology said,

not very smartly like we want to remove this from the internet, which is impossible. Can't do that because it's 2008 at the time. But they were doing a pretty good job of it, apparently. I saw it and this is before the Chanology op. Right. So they were trying to get it down and Anonymous basically said, you know what?

No, what we're gonna do is we're gonna, we're gonna attack your website. We're gonna get your, everything about Scientology off the internet. We're gonna, what's it called a DDoS attack? Right, a distributed denial of service attack, which is kind of key to an Anonymous op. They attacked Google with a Google bomb for Scientology.

So if you typed in dangerous cult, it directed you to the Scientology website. Right. They had hundreds and hundreds of pizzas ordered and sent to Scientology offices worldwide. Have you heard of Black Faxes? Yeah, they sent them Jet Black Faxes so they would just run out of ink.

Right, over and over again. Yeah, yeah. Which all, you know, those are all pretty silly little harmless pranks. The Scientologists didn't take it that way. No, they weren't happy. In fact, I think they went to the FBI. They did.

You need to look into these people. Right, and so we have to pause here for a second and point something out. One, with both the Hal Turner op and Project Chanology, a lot of people say like, oh man, they went after this racist radio host and got them off the air. They went after Scientology,

which is a roundly hated cult and tried to drive them out of business. And the idea is it just stops there. But if you go a little further, both of those operations were based on infractions by the offending parties against the internet. Hal Turner posted underage 4chan users' parents' addresses on his website and wouldn't take it down.

That's a rule broken. That's why they went after him. Scientology, they tried to censor the internet. And Anonymous thinks of the internet as like their internet. They're the cops of the internet as far as they're concerned. And the internet is not to be messed with and they protect it like that.

And so when Scientology tried to take that video down and was trying to sue people who kept it up, that was censorship of the internet. That's why Anonymous went after the internet. But again, just like the Hal Turner operation, the Project Chanology thing took on this moral dimension. And Anonymous was called upon by a guy named Mark Bunker who was already an ardent critic of Scientologists.

And he said, why don't you guys use what you're doing for legal productive ways? And so Anonymous called for actual physical protests of Scientology's churches around the world. Yeah, and I think now that's become one of their hallmarks. That's why they want to pair the hacktivist activity with a physical presence. And a YouTube video which says, have you ever seen those?

Sure, yeah. They're creepy and awesome. They are. They're really well done. Look, just the whole thing is like very Mr. Robot-esque. Right, and with every video that they release, with every operation they release a video ahead of time saying what's gonna happen, what's going down, right?

Yeah, exactly. And it's very smart to do that because number one, they're showing that they're accountable for their actions, they're taking accountability for it. But also it keeps them from being scapegoated and it keeps other people from claiming their work. Sure. You know?

In 2010 with Operation Payback, they realized, they found out that Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal said, we're gonna stop, you won't be able to donate to WikiLeaks using our services anymore. Right. We're gonna shut that down. Which in and of itself, they figured was bad.

Yeah. But as evidence, they went and found like skinhead websites that you could still donate to using those three mechanisms but you couldn't donate to WikiLeaks. They were like, okay, that's messed up. Yeah. So they said, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna shut you guys down.

Yeah. And they did. It was a cyber attack and they disabled the home pages of Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. And you know, gloated, they had their own special little smarmy messages back. Like there are some things WikiLeaks can't do for everything else.

There's Operation Payback. Yeah. And so like I said before with an anonymous op, like people may disband and never work together on another one or your operation may grow to include even more stuff. And Operation Payback is a really good example of the ladder of those two.

Yeah. It started out because at some point, the United States government hired an Indian firm, an Indian software firm to launch DDoS attacks on these two sites, Mega Upload and Pirates Bay. Sure. And shut them down basically. And both of those are file sharing sites,

typically illegal file sharing sites. Yeah. And so the U.S. government was using these same tactics, DDoS attacks, that they were also prosecuting the hackers anonymous for using. Right. But they were using it with impunity. That really ticked anonymous off.

And we should also say what a DDoS is, right? So Chuck, it's basically, it's taking when you contact a website, when you go to a website, you're contacting its server to request all the information on the page. If a bunch of people do that at once, the server becomes overloaded and the people

who legitimately want to use the site can't get in, or the server becomes so overloaded, the site crashes. Shut it down. Right. So one of anonymous is key tactics is to do a distributed denial of service, where a bunch of people are doing that all at once, hitting the site to overload it.

Yeah. And then there's even software called the low orbit ion cannon, which anybody can go download and use. And you type in a URL and this thing like really hits a site. Like it's like a bunch of people all at once hitting it with just this one computer. We should say that you can be prosecuted,

and many people have been prosecuted and sentenced to jail just for using that. Yeah, not unless you're the US government. Again, but that's what set off Operation Payback, was that the government was using this same tactic that they were prosecuting other people for. Yeah, and because they didn't want any confusion and for people to say, oh yeah,

well they clearly just want to download movies for free and stuff like that. They have their YouTube video where they're like, no, that's not why we're doing this. Right. We're doing that because you guys are using the same tactics that you're prosecuting us for or other people for. Exactly.

And so Operation Payback then at about that time, they found out about the WikiLeaks stop payment from PayPal and MasterCard and Visa and they extended it even further. Yeah, PayPal said it cost them five and a half million bucks. Yeah. Which is a small dent in PayPal, but still it's, you know. No, it is substantial.

The idea though, there's this really great documentary that's available for free on Anonymous's official YouTube channel. We are Legion. I haven't seen that one. This one's called The Story of Anonymous. Oh, okay. And it's pretty good.

It's very straightforward and it's got a lot of the people who are involved in the early days. And I think it goes up to like 2011 or 2012. But it's definitely worth watching. But it interviews this kid who downloaded the low orbit ion cannon and engaged in Project Chanology against Scientology, right? And the FBI came to his door and arrested him.

And he got, like he's, I think he got like time served. So he didn't actually have to serve prison time. But he was like, he wasn't allowed near a computer for 12 months or else he would be arrested. And it was a really bizarre punishment considering that he was just requesting the Church of Scientology's website for its information to the nth degree. But that was it.

He didn't make any threats. He didn't order any pizzas. He didn't do anything. And when you think of the other term for DDoS attacks, they're called virtual sit-ins. It really kind of drives home the idea that this is a form of protest that's being harshly, harshly punished by the federal government in the US.

Which is really strange. Like there's a wired article written by a guy named Tor Eklin, who's a very famous lawyer for these kinds of cases. And it's called America Must End Its Paranoid War on Hackers. And he really kind of lays it out there. Like here's what's going on. Like most people don't realize this,

but there's an untoward amount of punishment being leveled at people who are protesting stuff legitimately by using things like DDoS attacks. And they're going to prison for like 10 years for this stuff. And that's messed up, says Tor Eklin. And I agree. I agree too. Some of the other things they've done.

We mentioned Westboro Baptist Church, which a lot of people just say is a hate group in disguise as a church. I think it's labeled by the government as such. Oh, as a hate group? I think so. Well, they would like take over their website and put messages of peace and tolerance,

which probably really rankled them. They would pose as young girls online to lure in sexual predators and then send that information to the police to expose pedophiles. What else have they done? Well, they were instrumental in the Arab Spring. They basically had a pretty large hand anonymous did

in overthrowing the Egyptian government. Yeah, they like to topple dictators. Yes. And the reason why specifically in Egypt that really ticked them off was Mubarak shut off the internet. And again, just like with Hal Turner, just like with Scientology,

just like with the government. You don't mess with the internet if you don't want to excite anonymous's ire, right? And so they helped Egyptian dissidents by basically instructing them on how to get the internet back online there, how to set up virtual networks that couldn't be shut down by the government.

Some of them went to the point of just communicating with these people and then turning those communications into tweets for them. And then they also disseminated video of the government carrying out violence against protesters and spread it out to the world. They had a huge hand in the Arab Spring,

not just in Egypt, but in Tunisia as well. Yeah, they've also had their hand in the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, Occupy Wall Street, untold amounts of like police brutality cases or police coverups. The Steubenville rape case, that was a big one. Yeah, in 2012, a 16 year old girl was sexually assaulted and they found out, you know what?

There's a coverup going on here. So there was an offshoot called Night, K and I, GHD Sec. And they launched a crusade that said, you know what? Here's what's going on here. There's a coverup going on. And they finally uncovered and publicized the names of two star players in the high school football team that allegedly committed this assault

that were being covered up. So it was a big deal. They basically, and that's a perfect example of an anonymous op, right? There's an injustice in this little tiny corner of the world where Ohio meets West Virginia that no one else had ever heard about. That somebody got onto the 4chan board

and told everybody about this. And people started saying, enough people started saying, we should do something about this. And they left the message board, hit the IRC, internet relay channels, right? And started communicating with one another and figuring out how to launch this attack and what to do and who to attack, and then they attacked.

And in the real world, there were repercussions. And that's anonymous as whole jam. If they go do something, get a bunch of headlines, and then not only did anonymous do this, why did anonymous do this? Who did they do it to? Oh, we should go look at that. And now all of a sudden, this little tiny corner

of where Ohio meets West Virginia, everybody's heard of, and everybody's heard about it in the absolute worst terms. That's an anonymous operation. And then all the people who were part of it disbanded. But on the other hand, the data dump that anonymous had about Steubenville, the rape case, contained a lot of unvetted facts and things like that.

And a lot of people were unfairly treated, targeted from the doxing that resulted. So I mean, I guess the point is that Steubenville is a good example of how anonymous, even when carrying out some sort of moral justice, also has a, there's an amoral dimension to it in that there's a lot of innocent people who can become casualties as a result too.

There's actually a really good Gawker article about Steubenville a year later. I think it was the town that was torn apart by what two people did or something like that. All right, so let's take a quick break here and we'll come back and we'll talk about who anonymous is and how you can become a member right after this. ["The Nineties"]

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Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. All right, so Anonymous is, um, it's tough to define. It's tough to pinpoint because they are hiding in plain sight. There's not, you can't go to anonymous.com and, and sign up for their newsletter and buy your mask in the, in the store and, um, say I want to become a member, just fill out this application. Uh, it doesn't work that way. You should probably not accept applications to be a part of

Anonymous because it's probably a setup. Yes, exactly. Uh, but there is something called Anonymous which does post information about ops. Uh, you're probably not gonna, you're not gonna learn too much inside real information as a casual internet browser. No, and it's more like, um, if you follow Anonymous on Twitter, say you may, like for operation payback, um, I think they,

they listed like the visa site or something and they said fire it will and, um, it was a link to the low orbit ion cannon and the visa website that you post that URL in and it was a way to just get anybody involved in the DDoS thing. The problem is, is that that's, that is, that can be very dangerous if you're just a casual person downloading low orbit ion cannon and you're just doing this because you're having fun helping Anonymous and you're not covering your tracks in any way, shape,

or form in the FBI comes and knocks on your door. You may be facing several years in jail because they're looking to make an example out of you. Absolutely. No, you got to do a lot of work in fact to even get in there. Uh, and once you find yourself, um, in one of these forums where there's real information being discussed, you sort of need to prove your worth, uh, with either ideas or specific skill or

knowledge you might have. Yeah. And then you may be invited to participate in one way or another as an Anon. And again, even if you are at the top of your game at what anybody in the media would think of as like a member of Anonymous, like one of the true, um, the long-term members who's done a lot of ops, um, you can still get busted.

A guy named Jeremy Hammond was busted, uh, and got 10 years for some stuff. A guy named Barrett Brown was busted and got, uh, five years for some stuff and all, again, all of this is just computer crime we're talking about. So again, if this is really like cranking your case, just the, there's a, there's a lot of repercussions to this. Yeah.

Um, there's, there's a misconception too that, um, it is, uh, it's a bunch of brilliant, um, uh, code writers and hackers. Uh, apparently only about a fifth of Anons are, are true hackers. Um, who, who said that? Um, there's an anthropologist, Gabriella Coleman, actually, um, she is an expert at anonymous and has written several books and is in that documentary I was talking about. Yeah.

So only a fifth are, are hackers and the rest, uh, are quote geeks and protesters, but, um, apparently you don't have to be some brilliant hacker. They will call on you if you have some other skill, if you have good ideas, if you're a graphic designer, if you're, have, uh, if you're a good writer, you can help put together a press release. If you're a filmmaker and you want to do these YouTube videos, there's all sorts of ways that, um, you can contribute if you want

to contribute and be in a non aside from being a coder. Um, and the idea that they're completely, what's put out there is that they have no hierarchy whatsoever, that everyone's equal. Everyone has equal footing. Right. There is no leader whatsoever. Um, it is just this big amorphous group of Anons that isn't entirely accurate. Um, they may not have a president and vice president per se.

Or a treasure. Or a treasure. But, um, supposedly they do have, uh, four or five people who are really good at doing what they do. So they sort of take turns emerging as the leader of a specific op maybe. Right. Exactly. But then they'll fall to the background in another perhaps.

And you become a leader, whether you want to be or not. Yeah. Based on your skills as an organizer. Yeah. Um, if you are just naturally somebody who can rally the troops, then your ops are going to be the most successful because you're going to attract the most people. And, um, you're going to attract the guy who wants to put out like a good video for it.

Yeah. You're going to get the most results. You're going to get the most information, the biggest data dumps. Just naturally. That's how it happens. Yeah. And people follow like Commander X does, did a really great job on that op. So let's listen and hear what he does next.

Right. But then other people are like, well, Commander X, you need to shut your mouth because you talk to the media. And even though you've been, you know, in the hacker culture since the 80s or whatever, you, um, you have a loud mouth and that's not cool for this. So on, on a message board, he could be getting deferential respect. Commander X is a real person, by the way. Yeah.

Um, and he could be being called a poser at the same time. Right. And both of those comments have equal weight on the message board, no matter how long Commander X has been doing this. Yeah. He's got duality with anonymous, um, some people look at him as a, as a beacon of light for those who don't have a voice. Yeah.

Um, Attorney General, uh, Eric Holder in 2013 said they are a steadily increasing threat to America's economy and national security interests. Uh, people, uh, a nonce will say, you know what, don't say that because we're not, we're not stealing money. We're not robbing, uh, uh, banks digitally. Right. Uh, after financial gain at all, um, we're out to expose people that are doing bad things for the most part.

Right. And like you said earlier though, when they're offshoots, there's always going to be bad apples, I guess. Yeah. There are. I mean, like for example, Westboro Baptist Church, they did, um, they doxxed. It's where you get the, the person's personal information, yeah, home address, phone number, all that stuff and post it out to the masses.

That's, that's tricky and dangerous. It is. But it's Fred Phelps. So nobody really shed a tear. Right. The problem was they also did that the Libby Phelps, who is Fred Phelps' granddaughter, who had very publicly distanced herself from the church and denounced it and said, I don't agree with what my grandfather does or says.

Yeah. She still got doxxed. And now my name's out there and my personal information. Exactly. So, so yeah, there's a lot of, like Lulsec is another, um, another example. They, they were, they were this group, I think of like six or seven people, um, who carried out what's commonly called 50 days of mayhem where they just went crazy. They just hit whoever they wanted.

Yeah. The, uh, this, this business called magnets.com got hit because they called their customer service reps and asked them how magnets work and the customer service reps couldn't tell them. So they launched an operation against them. They should have, uh, told them to listen to our podcasts on magnets. Totally should have. I assume that our podcast probably spurred that phone call to begin with.

Right. But, um, so yeah, there are groups that do this. But then overall, if you think about anonymous, it is, they, they do the, the ones that get the most press, the ops that get the most press usually have the most moral dimension makes anonymous seem the most Robin Hoodie, like the, the Ku Klux Klan dump. Yeah. That just happened, uh, within the past couple of weeks. Right.

And they went after the clan and, um, got a doxxus on, uh, several hundred members. Yeah. And I don't think there were any huge revelations necessarily in there. Uh, there were a few. Okay. So there were some. They went after the clan and they basically shined a light on the idea that the clan is still very much around.

Yeah. But there were also people, like, I think there was a senator or a Congress person or something that was exposed that were like, I've never been involved in the clan. So there was wrong. There was a separate dump that occurred before the actual one that anonymous came because they can communicate with the media. They're able to do this. They said, that wasn't us.

That's not our research. We can't vouch for that. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I said, that's, that's tricky business. When you're exposing people, those are real lives, um, you better make sure you've done your homework and you've gotten it right.

Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I think anonymous thinks they're getting it right. Yeah. I think they, they tend to think that. Sure. Like, I don't think they're just generally going about their business willy nilly because

they want to be effective to not get a bad rep. They don't want to have anything that people can use against them, you know, to say like, well, look what they did here. They were completely wrong. Yeah. At the same time, though, there is definitely a thread of, you know, appreciating mayhem for mayhem's sake and with some people who, who work under the anonymous banner as well. Well, which is what you're going to get when you're not a well-defined like group with

boundaries. When you're this amorphous, right, everyone is anonymous type of thing. You know, you're going to have that happen. But I think it is kind of a pretty astounding that despite no central authority whatsoever, it isn't just more like crazy and frenetic and just way more mayhem centric that it actually does carry out these ops that do have like repercussions that the average person can look at and say, I kind of agree with that. Sure.

Like I agree with the outcome of this. I think somebody got their due who had it coming. You got anything else? I do. There's one last thing. So the name anonymous. Yeah. It's 4chan.

It did. If you log into 4chan, you can post anonymously. Like you said, I think early on, the whole reason why is because that just helps these, the keep people from self-centering because you're posting anonymously. But then this joke kind of developed on 4chan that anonymous, all these people with the thing, the anonymous handle were really just one omnipresent person. And that's where the, the using that term for these ops, this group, this collective group came from.

Did you ever go to 4chan? Did you check it out? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I've never felt so old than when, but even Reddit does that to me. I just go to the, I just look at sites like that and I just like, I don't even know where to look. Yeah.

You know, I feel like an old man. For sure. Yeah. And I'm like, I don't understand what this means. I'm sure this is hilarious, but I don't understand it. Some of it's funny on its face for sure. But others just like, yeah. I spent a little time on 4chan earlier today just sort of looking around and yeah, it's

not my bag, but people are into it. They definitely are. Yes. You got anything else, dude? No. I thought, oh, I enjoyed this one. I thought it was good. Oh, we left out the H.B.

Gary thing. What's that? So, so in a few years back, this security company named H.B. Gary, the CEO named Aaron Barr came out to the Financial Times and said, I've infiltrated an anonymous. I know who all the top guys are and I'm going to the FBI with it. So some people in anonymous, so let's go see what this guy's talking about, cracked into their website, found out he was totally full of it, but found a presentation that had all

these dirty tricks for undermining anonymous and WikiLeaks and like getting people to turn on one another and all that. So they're like, we're going to go after this guy. Yeah. Because he was publicly boasting too that he was going to take down anonymous. Man, that is not a smart thing to do. No. And there's actually in that anonymous documentary, there's some hilarious clips from Stephen

Colbert explaining what this guy did and equated it to, he put his penis into a hornet's nest and this is going to turn out about the same way. And it did. I just had a physical reaction to that. Yeah. That image. So the guy, the CEO ends up stepping down as CEO and like drops out of public. They totally just really got the guy and really, I think they, yeah, it was, that was a dumb

thing to do on his part, but not only was it dumb for him personally, it also gave anonymous a really great opportunity to show just how you don't mess with anonymous. Yeah. You know? So that was it. That's anonymous. That's right. If you want to know more seriously, go check out that, well, every documentary you can

see that's over an hour and a half long is probably pretty good. And then also there's this, there's a Prezi by a person named Choi Jun Hyuk called Copy of Anonymous, which is a really great basic explainer on anonymous and how it works and functions. Yeah. It's somebody who is at least hung out with members if, if isn't one himself or herself. I bet you you've hung out with a member of Anonymous. Crazy.

We may have one or two in this office. You never know. My money's on Ben Boland. Sure. That's stuff. But he's such an obvious choice. It's got to be somebody you wouldn't think they don't want you to know. Yeah.

Like is it you, Chuck? It's, yeah. It's like, it's Holly from stuff you miss in history. Right. Yeah. She loves Star Wars and hacktivists. Yep. If you want to know more about Anonymous, also you can go type that word into the search

bar at housestuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. Yeah. And speaking of mail, if you are an anonymous member, write us. Yes. Because I want to know something. I don't know if I'm going to buy it though, if somebody's like, I'm an anonymous, dear Josh and Chuck.

Yeah. Love Gary from Gary Jones. Exactly. Right. No. But if I get some weird encrypted thing, I don't know. I think we'll know. Oh, what if we like post a video to YouTube?

That'd be awesome. Yeah. Unless it's saying like we're coming after you guys. No. Did we do a good job? All right. Listener mail. What is this?

I'm just going to call it from an English listener. Hey guys, I'm just an 18 year old from the UK. But you have my most sincere congratulations for running the best podcast out there. Awesome. And I've listened to cereal. Oh. Right? Your free flowing conversation style works so well and it's always a pleasure listening

to you. And you guys have to compete with British radio voices. So that's saying something. It really is because they are clancing. Having burnt through 802 episodes in seven months, wow. I finally ended in a wonderful, spooky spectacular. You have been there with me through break up, six flights, eight long distance trains, three A levels, which is some sort of education thing in England.

Oh, I think that's like exams, finals. Four new jobs, one bike crash, one results day. All of this in six months? Seven months. An interrail trip around Europe and a very lonely night in Brighton train station. Four jobs in seven months. You see that? Is this guy a hit man?

Yeah. Four new jobs. Interesting. It's been a crazy time in my life. Sounds like it. And you've been the constant that's kept me sane. So big thanks to all of you. That's awesome.

So no favoritism. You've made a barrel. I think you're saying like between us. Yeah. Sure. You run an awesome podcast. Keep it up. Look forward to the next 800.

You have one question. You guys get along when the mic is off. Fantastic chemistry. And I've always wondered if it ever comes from your friendship or if you two are just the most professional people ever gone on too long. All the best. Hector Leach clay. Thanks.

Oh, that's a British name. You guys better come to the UK for a live show. We are. Yes. We get along off the air. We would not. You've seen our TV show. You know, we're not actors.

We would not be able to take our way through this. Chuck's been gazing into my eyes this whole episode. Yeah. If it was this not some sunshine boys situation. What was that? Is that George Burns? Yeah. Just go Google it people.

Sunshine boys. OK. It'll all become clear. Nice. Good reference. Thanks Hector Leach clay Esquire the third. Yeah. Hector Leach from clay on it's clay a place.

Is it Leach hyphen clay because that would be his last name. That was a hyphen but that they they never know. They do that a lot over there. You're big on that. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot Hector. We appreciate that. And thank you for not playing fairs.

Isn't that the ideal human somebody who appreciates us both equally? Sure. Sure. So if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S.Y.S.K. podcast tweet tweet. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know book book. You can send us an email to stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com type type and as always join us at our home on the web stuff you should know dot com for more on this and thousands

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