My spider, which I nick-named 'Hazel' - was not only capable of doing the task - but she could then separate the civilian from the government data. Mine was programmed to collect the fax numbers and E-Mail addresses of every single Egyptian. "Another area where my work had an impact was in data collection… I programmed a 'spider'… to crawl servers and harvest specific data.
In what is perhaps the most telling anecdote of X's life as a hacker on the run, he describes his role in attacking the government of Egypt during the Arab Spring while spending his days in a San Francisco coffee shop called Coffee to the People Cafe: X's relationship with Anonymous at that time led to other notable hacks, including what he describes as the takedown of by his own keystrokes ("I hit the fire button"), during the infamous Anonymous attack against credit card companies and Paypal after they cut off Wikileaks' financial lifeline. Despite the relatively inconsequential operation, it was this protest that led to the indictment from which X is still running from today (it carries a maximum 15-year sentence due to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). X describes this kind of low-impact DDOS attack as a "smashy-smashy" operation. And while he did eventually take down the Santa Cruz county website in 2010 as a direct protest for the city's treatment of its street population, it was a minor defacement. It's here that he is still on a roundabout quest to obtain vengeance for the homeless. In more than one instance, he makes it clear in Behind the Mask that he and his colleagues were often driven to action by pure and simple anger: "For those wondering how Anonymous begins a major operation, it usually starts with righteous indignation bordering on group outrage."Īfter accepting the order, we pick up X's Santa Cruz mission a year in, where he is living in the mountains growing weed, or as he refers to his plants: "the girls… Twenty-six of the most gorgeous sativa/indica mix plants the likes of which you could only grow in the black earth of the Santa Cruz mountains." X accepted the mission quickly, which provides insight into the mindset of hackers like him. Otherwise, Behind the Mask has to be read with a certain healthy skepticism about the events detailed wherein.Īpparently, Adama wanted revenge for a homeless friend of his living in Santa Cruz, who was found dead under a bridge. This is provable insofar as the People's Liberation Front certainly exists, and Christopher Doyon is a real person. It's here that X got an order from the "Supreme Commander of the PLF," a man we know in the book only as Commander Adama, to become an Anonymous member. In X's words, his initial thoughts on Anonymous were that it was a "crazy ass science fiction cult" where people wore "stupid Guy Fawkes masks." In fact, he was apparently told to join Anonymous while he was serving as a "Commander" of a small cyber-focused militia called the People's Liberation Front (PLF), run out of a "dungeon" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where "every square inch" of the walls were "plastered with concert posters (mostly Grateful Dead), protest fliers… and hand-drawn art, mostly political in nature." (Of course, this is all according to the author.) "For those wondering how Anonymous begins a major operation, it usually starts with righteous indignation bordering on group outrage."īehind the Mask covers a time period between 2008-2012 wherein X joins Anonymous, quickly rises to a position of influence in the decentralized organization, gets the attention of the FBI Cyber Division, and escapes the US on an underground railroad of his own design. But when you're Commander X, who has given interviews to major publications since escaping prosecution in the US and becoming a fugitive and who still tweets daily and taunts government agencies by writing messages on his timeline, such as "What will the FBI Cyber Crime Division do when there's no more Internet? Is Walmart hiring any security guards?" and "…if you want pigs to respect your protest, show up armed" then quite obviously the traditionally-guarded hacker/media relationship has gone out the window. It's arguably not smart to write a book like this, given the intense thirst from the FBI to capture Anonymous leaders. X's book is the antithesis of what we're used to from Anonymous it's personal, both braggadocious and self-deprecating, and through its first-person perspective provides insight into operations of Anonymous that will be completely alien to any non-hacker reader. While we are used to some sporadic voices from the hacktivist collective movement coming forward to the media, they are mostly heard through voice-scrambling filters in short videos announcing Anonymous operations, or from behind bars. So, as a symbol of his freedom, today X published his first book, Behind the Mask, and it's the first of its kind in terms of advancing the public record on Anonymous.
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