The Decibel - Former Anonymous hacker worries he helped elect Trump

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

More than 20 years ago, a group of internet users created the online forum 4chan – a mixture of memes, pranks, disinformation and hate speech. Soon, a hacker group on the forum calling themselves Anonymous gained notoriety for their online pranks and disruption. But now, a former member of that hacker group says they regret the role they may have played in driving today’s divisive political environment and wants to make amends.Alexandra Posadzki is the Globe’s financial and cybercrime reporter. She’ll talk about an interview she had with the hacker, who now faces criminal charges, and how memes on a toxic online forum bloomed into real-world consequences.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So on September 11th, 2021, the 20 year anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, hackers or hacktivists associated with this collective called Anonymous essentially gained access to the web hosting service Epic. Alexandra Pszczacki is a financial and cybercrime reporter at The Globe. And Epic at the time was well known for hosting D platform members of the far right. So they get into Epic and then through gaining access to Epic, they gain access to the Texas Republican Party's website and go about essentially defacing the website, replacing the site banner with cartoons, pornography, and a music video,

and then download a backup of the website, which contains personally identifying information and post that information online. Law officials started searching for the hackers that had defaced the website. It led to a home in Oshawa, Ontario. Police were looking for the computers of a hacker named Kurt Tanner. Kurt Tanner is the online handle for a Canadian, Aubrey Cottle,

who now faces charges in the US and Canada. Cottle says he's one of the founding members of Anonymous, a hacker's group known for their signature masks of Guy Fawkes. They're linked to some of the world's most high-profile cybersecurity incidents. Alexandra is on the show to talk about her interview with Cottle, lay out the charges against him, and explain why he feels responsible for the current political situation in the U.S. I'm Madeline White in for Manica Ram and Wilms and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi Alex, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me.

So you actually met Aubrey Cottle in person as part of your reporting. What was that like? Oh, I mean, it was a very interesting experience. Me and Fred Lum, our photographer, drove out to Oshawa for a two-hour interview with Aubrey in his home. And so let's talk about him and his upbringing. What did he tell you about his childhood? MS.

Yeah. We talked a lot about his sort of life up until now. Essentially, I wanted to know how come he was so good with computers and hacking. And he said he had grown up just surrounded by technology and computers. He had a Commodore 64 in his bedroom as a child. His dad worked for a dial-up internet service provider and actually installed a dial-up modem in his bedroom. That's wild to me. That must have been so loud.

Yeah, you remember that like screeching noise it used to make? Yeah, I'm not going to imitate that right now. Yeah, so he had like a dial-up connection like in his bedroom as a kid. So he told me he really grew up immersed in the internet in the very early days of the internet. What kind of effect did that have on him? Well, it certainly didn't make him the most popular kid in his high school. He told me about how he was bullied a lot. He was kind of like the nerdy outcast in his school. And eventually after years of this he snapped.

What he told me was that some kids had broken into his locker and they had taken his Pokemon and Magic the Gathering cards and ripped them into pieces. And this made him very, very angry. And so he ended up having this like emotional outburst and uttering some death threats. And the police were called and he ended up getting arrested and then taking to children's mental health facility. And so he spent some time actually essentially living on a farm.

This treatment facility was on a farm near Blue Mountain in Ontario. And there he spent a lot of time like camping on the property with the youth workers and learning skills like woodworking. He actually had this like canoe paddle that he had made in his home. And then he ended up getting transferred to a Toronto facility. And it was at that Toronto facility that he met another patient there whose older brother was really into software piracy groups. Okay.

And so was that how he learned kind of the skills around hacking is through that piracy group? Yeah. So this older brother kind of picked up on the fact that Aubrey was really into computers and really good with the internet and was sort of like, hey, we need another member in our group to help us with our software piracy. And so he taught him some kind of tips and tricks. And Aubrey told me he didn't really stay involved with that for very long, but that was kind of how he sort of first got exposed to hacking.

All right. So that's how he got into hacking. But before you were telling me about how he was really immersed in the internet as a kid, he was on this one platform a lot called Something Awful. What exactly is this platform? So, Something Awful was this forum where people would go to sort of post like really edgy funny content. So like a lot of very controversial content is very unpolitically correct. It was a very un-PC kind of place.

And that's where Aubrey Cottle actually met this guy called Moot, Christopher Poole, who would go on to create 4chan, which was an image board and very similar kind of vibe to something awful. A lot of like anime pornography and gore and stuff like that. And it's also really like the birthplace of memes. So like meme culture, you know, those like images with that big block text being like really crazy and outlandish. Like that all came from 4chan. And so on 4chan Aubrey Cottle goes by the alias Kurtanner. 4chan ended up doing these internet pranks. That's sort of where it started.

And one of the kind of big first like proper hacking campaigns, it was partly just a prank campaign and it had some like hacking elements, was against this neo-nazi radio host named Hal Turner. And Aubrey told me essentially that he was involved in this, played a really large role in this campaign and they did all kinds of things. They clogged up his phone lines with prank calls, they ordered many many pizzas to the man's house and then they also would like do things like crash his website, essentially. So that was kind of like the hacking component of it.

Okay. And so he's in this culture online of kind of like crass, maybe one would even say immature humor. So like, when does Anonymous become a part of his life story? Users on 4chan, posting on 4chan, by default their username would just show up as Anonymous, like unless you specified an alias. Okay. So that's kind of where the name came from. An Anonymous is, was a very loose collective of people. There's no membership card. It's sort of like anyone can fly the flag of Anonymous and say that they're sort of like affiliated with that movement. I guess the first kind of really big public reveal of Anonymous as a group of people with certain kind of political leanings was the

large-scale protests against Scientology, where all of these anonymous members showed up at Scientology buildings wearing these Guy Fawkes masks. Right. I remember that kind of symbol. Yeah. So, and that was the kind of first moment where the public really became aware of Anonymous. And then there was this Fox News broadcast. I think this was around 2007, 2008. And essentially, it kind of portrayed Anonymous

as this very powerful, shadowy cabal of online terrorists who had allegedly threatened to blow up sports stadiums. And they showed this footage of an exploding van, which Aubrey told me had nothing to do with 4chan or anonymous. And that was kind of this big moment of change in 4chan because a lot of people saw that broadcast and were drawn to 4chan for all of the wrong reasons, thinking it was this group of internet terrorists. And so the forum just got like flooded with all of these people and the moderators were

not able to keep up. And so according to Aubrey, that's when 4chan really became a cesspool. Now all of a sudden it's attracted all of these other kinds of people. Okay, that's interesting. You mentioned there that there was kind of like a political leaning originally to anonymous. How would you describe that? Because these are people who like might call themselves hacktivists, right?

So they do see themselves as activists. I'm wondering if they had like a loose code of honor or some sort of guiding principle that, you know, politically motivated them for their raids, their pranks and their hacks. So a lot of the actions that they undertook really fell on sort of the left side of the political spectrum, right?

So you know, they went after this neo-Nazi radio host. That wasn't necessarily because at that time they were really against neo-Nazis. It was just because he was an easy target, essentially, is my understanding. But then they did later on come out in support of Occupy Wall Street. And so they have kind of veered towards the kind of left libertarian point of view. Aubrey, I think, called himself like an anarchist, anti-fascist. So that's kind of like the political leanings

of Anonymous for the most part. But then after, you know, like there were also far rightright users on 4chan. Right. And so a lot of those tactics that anonymous had been using ended up kind of informing this group of far-right people on the platform. And when we're talking about these tactics, you're talking about like the hacking and the raids and that kind of thing. Yeah, the pranks and they were doing a lot of like misinformation campaigns. So they were doing a lot of like misinformation campaigns.

So they were just posting stuff online, but then these misinformation campaigns later on when they were kind of appropriated, let's say by the contingent of far right users on the platform, they actually started gaining speed. And we saw things, you know, like pizza gate. Right. Which was obviously this like conspiracy theory about Democrats

running pedophilia rings out of this Washington state pizza parlor. Yeah. Which we should say had no evidence and is untrue. Absolutely. It is a completely false conspiracy theory. And so those misinformation campaigns started kind of like going mainstream. OK. And so the people who are behind them were kind of like, oh hey, look cool, we're actually like influencing people like voters during Donald Trump's first election campaign. And so, you know, that's actually around the time where QAnon is born.

And that was this conspiracy theory purportedly from somebody called Q who claimed to be in like Donald Trump's inner circle and was revealing how Donald Trump was leading this fight against Satan worshipping pedophiles. Again, we should say this is a false claim. And this conspiracy theory also really gathered steam, became very, very popular and influential to the point where we saw QAnon supporters as part of that mob that stormed the US Capitol during that riot. Okay, so that's interesting.

You've just outlined like this chain of events. How does Aubrey feel about that now? Does he feel like there's a connection there? Like, does he feel any responsibility in regard to the kind of internet culture that he fostered originally when he created, you know, as he says he did, anonymous? He absolutely does. He feels that very, very acutely. That's actually was a big focus of our interview, that he feels a lot of personal responsibility and guilt. He talked about how it's really hard to not beat himself up all of the time. And you know, I mean, I tried to challenge him on this a little because I said, you know,

well, maybe all of these events still would have happened in a similar way even without his involvement. And he said, yeah, sure, you know, people have told me that before. But you know, there's cause and effect. And he feels that he was part of something that snowballed into this whole other thing, which contributed to the rise of Donald Trump. And of course, you know, it's important to contextualize and there are many reasons why Donald Trump got into power and you can't necessarily pinpoint and say like anonymous

was the reason. But I do remember following that first election campaign where we did see a lot of popular opinion being driven by these like far right internet memes. And I remember when Donald Trump did win the election and a lot of us are going like, how did this happen? And of course, there's like all kinds of things you can point to. But one of the things people kept saying is like, internet memes like swayed a lot of voters and influenced a lot of people in how they were thinking about and seeing Donald Trump as a candidate.

So I spoke to a guy named Dale Barron who wrote a book called It Came From Something Awful. Right. And it's all about this kind of rise of Trump and the role that Anonymous played in like memeing Trump into office. And he said, look, there's lots of reasons why Trump got into office. But this was a factor. And it makes sense that these people who are, you know, behind this anonymous

movement would feel bad about having created a very toxic Internet site. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Okay, so we are talking about Aubrey Cottle because he is facing criminal charges at this point. I'm wondering if you can just kind of take me through what authorities alleged he did. Absolutely. So the first charges were actually in the US, as I understand it. And essentially, he's been accused of being

responsible for that hack of the Texas GOP, which we discussed. And the charge, it's kind of a mouthful, but he's been charged with unlawfully transferring, possessing, or using a means of identification with the intent to commit or aid or abet or in connection with unlawful activity under state or federal law. That is a mouthful. Is there any way to kind of translate that? Essentially, that just means he's accused of hacking and then distributing the information that he hacked? Is that more or less it?

I mean, that's what they outlined in the criminal complaint is that he was the one responsible for this hack into Epic, which gave him access to the Texas Republican Party's website. And they have said that he has claimed responsibility for that hack on social media and in Discord chats, and that they found the stolen data, the backup of the Texas GOP's website on his computer. Wow. Okay. Has he been charged here in Canada, though? He has.

So he's also been charged in Canada, and these charges are a little shorter. There's more of them. Mischief to computer data, unauthorized use of a computer, and possession of a device to obtain unauthorized use of a computer. So we don't know, though, if he's going to be extradited to the U.S. We do not currently know that. I think it's still early. We may see a request for extradition or we may see him face these charges here in Canada. He has had a couple of court appearances in Ontario already. I know this is hypothetical, but if he does get extradited, do we have a sense of what kind of sentence these charges might carry?

So he would face up to five years in prison if he was convicted on the US charges. So police allege that he bragged about doing these crimes online, but you actually spoke with Aubrey. What did he say about the charges? He declined to comment on the charges. And has he pleaded in court with respect to the Canadian charges? I do not believe so. My understanding is it's still very early in the process and his next court appearance is July 31. So what do the lawyers make about the timing of these charges?

Because that epic hack, as you mentioned, happened all the way back in 2021. I'm wondering why we're just seeing charges now. Yeah, that's exactly what his lawyers are wondering as well. They sent me a statement earlier in my reporting where they called the timing of the charges peculiar. And they said, you know, these allegations against Aubrey Caudill are almost four years old and, you know, law enforcement investigated at that time and then essentially did nothing according to his lawyers. And now all of a sudden Donald Trump is back in office and now Canadian authorities are like suddenly choosing to

Cooperate with US law enforcement and arrest in charge Aubrey Cottle So they seem to be kind of implying that this could be politically motivated That's interesting though because we don't really have clarity into what's happening with the Canadian case, because that's under a publication ban, right? AMT. SONIA SILVEY That's right. LESLIE KENDRICK So there could be other reasons for the long time between when the attack happened and when he got charged. AMT. SONIA SILVEY Yeah.

LESLIE KENDRICK So earlier we talked about how he feels some remorse about some of his earlier activities online, like a decade ago, two decades ago. I'm wondering what you made of that, Alex. AMT. SONIA SILVE. I mean, it was very interesting. I think it's like as humans, it's pretty normal for us to think about what sort of legacy we're leaving behind and how our actions are influencing others and what impact we're having on the world.

And so it struck me as pretty logical that he would be feeling this way, especially given what you've mentioned where, you know, his political views as he's identified them are kind of very opposite to, you know, what 4chan ended up becoming and this whole like, rise of the far right and QAnon and all of that. So it does feel like this like weird twist of irony, right, that you would create this thing. And it's funny because I actually read this piece in The New Yorker recently that was talking about Anonymous and 4chan and how 4chan is essentially now very irrelevant because it used to be this like place where there was all of this like

shocking content and now we have that shocking content everywhere. Right. It's no longer the dark corner. Yeah. Everywhere is the dark corner. It's become very mainstream, right? And so he feels that he inadvertently contributed to that and inadvertently contributed to the rise of Donald Trump.

It does seem interesting. I mean, again, you mentioned that it's hard to actually know the exact effect that these kinds of, what started off as like trolling behavior, frankly, had on real world events, like elections and people's votes. But it is interesting to think about this as kind of an unintended consequences story, right? Like you had a bunch of essentially kids, you know, young adults goofing off or what they felt was goofing off and 20 years later, here we are. Yeah, and like you say, it is important to keep in mind there's like a lot of factors, so we can't really just go like, hey, Anonymous, it's your fault that this happened. Obviously, there's so many reasons why we've seen what we've seen. Obviously, people like have felt that this kind of stuff like speaks to them for some reason.

And so like what are the reasons why this kind of content is resonating with so many voters and what are some of the other reasons why Donald Trump is where he is right now? There's many of them. So we can't necessarily give all of the credit to one group of individuals or one internet movement. So what is Aubrey's life like now as he's awaiting his trial? He's on bail.

I understand he's currently working. So after he got raided by police, he ended up losing his home. He was evicted. They took all of his computers. He told me he lost his means of earning a living. And so for a while he was living out of his car with his dog. Someone eventually lent him a Winnebago that he spent some time living in, and then someone else

donated him a computer. And so kind of gradually he built his life back up again, and he ended up getting into crypto, doing some kind of like coding development for various blockchain type platforms, and then had moved into this like ground floor of this house, thought that he had turned his life back around and then ended up arrested and charged recently. And so now he's out on bail. I think he's still working for the platforms. But yeah, I mean, he's got this, all this uncertainty hanging over him now. Is he still active online? Not so much in the hacking avenue, but more just like

on social media, for example. Do we know if he's still out there? He is. Yeah, he's still like posting on TikTok. Live status update. I'm so good. I got the 100 inch TV, Clips home theater. Getting all fancy new home theater lighting and everything. I made it. And he's, you know, even commented a little bit on how he's really not gonna be able to comment on this very much on his social media.

A week ago, I was arrested and charged for alleged hacks that happened in 2021. I will not be making many public statements about this and I'll be referring a lot of people to my legal team during the course of these events, but I will say I'm safe. I managed to make bail. So just lastly here, Alex, what happens next in the criminal case? It's kind of a wait and see as far as I know, we're going to have to wait and see whether there's going to be a request for extradition. And then that would ultimately determine like where he gets tried. And I would assume that it probably would be better for him to remain in Canada and,

you know, face the music here rather than go to the States. But yeah, I guess we just have to wait for his next court appearance and see what comes of it. OK. Thank you so much, Alex. Thank you so much, Alex. Thank you. That was Alexandra Posatsky, the Globe's financial and cybercrime reporter.

That's it for today. I'm Madeline White in for Manica Ram and Wilms. This episode was produced by our associate producer, Aja Souter. I produced the show with Michal Stein and Ali Graham.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thank you for listening.