The Other McCain

Siggi Thordarson (left) with Julian Assange

My colleague Ali Akbar called my attention to this Rolling Stone story about Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, the hacking wunderkind who at age 17 became Julian Assange’s most valuable assistant. Thordason reveals the reckless ambition and cult-like paranoia inside the WikiLeaks freak show, and this 600-word excerpt is pretty brutal:

In the wake of the Manning cables, Assange wanted more newsmaking leaks, but the material coming in wasn’t meeting his insatiable appetite or ambitions. So Siggi reached out to Gnosis, a hacker group that made its name in December 2010 for compromising more than a million registered accounts on Gawker websites.
Gnosis tipped Siggi off to a notorious 16-year-old female from Anonymous named Kayla who had just helped hack HBGary, an IT security firm that worked for the U.S. government. Gnosis claimed to have an unpublished copy of HBGary’s database, including its clients’ names and e-mails. “Don’t release it,” Siggi messaged back. “Allow us.”
Anonymous, however, ended up leaking the files themselves, and Siggi told Gnosis that his boss was pissed. “You can’t really control Anonymous,” Gnosis replied. “You can kinda herd them in the right direction but other than that lol good luck.”
But that didn’t stop Siggi from trying. In January 2011, Siggi got word that DataCell, the hosting service behind WikiLeaks, had valuable contracts pulled by an Icelandic power company called Landsnet, and he wanted revenge. “I have a funny request for you,” Siggi wrote Kayla in one chat. “www.landsnet.is is something ‘Anonymous’ should take down if it’s possible.” Two minutes later, Kayla replied that she’d just unleashed a botnet against the website, a form of a cyberattack that swamps the site with requests. Siggi tried logging on to the Landsnet site. “Haha request timed out,” he wrote.
The attack didn’t stop there. When Siggi explained that the Icelandic government had made a deal to assume DataCell’s contracts, Kayla asked if he wanted her to take down one of its sites too. “Definitely,” Siggi replied. Minutes later, a ministry site was down. But as the sites fell, Siggi joked that Kayla might inadvertently knock Iceland’s power offline too. “If you see a button that says turn off electricity don’t press it please,” he wrote.
With his connections to the Anonymous cell more secure, Siggi suggested that the group could be of even greater help – getting them more secret documents that WikiLeaks could release. “I don’t care where the information comes from,” Assange had told him, which Siggi took as carte blanche to solicit stolen material. So Siggi had Gnosis introduce him to one of the most infamous hackers of all: Sabu, leader of the Anonymous offshoot LulzSec. In the spring of 2011, LulzSec had taken down the sites of high-profile targets including Fox, the CIA and PBS, whose Web page they replaced with the title “FREE BRADLEY MANNING. FUCK FRONTLINE!” But Sabu wanted proof that Siggi was who he said he was by speaking with Assange directly. Siggi claims to have complied and arranged the Skype call.
With Sabu convinced, Siggi put him on a job: to dig further into the Icelandic government’s computers to see if it had intel on the DataCell deal. Soon, Sabu delivered. Siggi says Assange told him to have LulzSec upload the files to a WikiLeaks FTP server, which they did. And Sabu soon had more secrets to offer. He told Siggi his crew had recently hacked Stratfor, a “global intelligence” agency and government contractor, and found more than 5 million confidential e-mails between Stratfor and companies such as Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, as well as government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
But as the e-mails poured in, Siggi began to grow anxious and questioned the scale of the operation. Even though he was the one who initiated the relationship with the hackers, he worried that they were going too far. “Crossing this line by accepting stolen information and publishing this is literally just breaking the law,” he says he told Assange. “You’re going away from being a journalist organization and threatening national security.” But, once again, Assange told him he didn’t care how the information was obtained. . . .

You should read the whole thing. It confirms in detail a lot of what anyone with common sense understood intuitively: Assange is an irresponsible psychopath, and contempt for the rule of law was the core value of the WikiLeaks/Anonymous project.

Assange’s supporters will accuse Thordarson of “betrayal,” but how could anyone expect loyalty within an enterprise so profoundly committed to criminality? The moral of this complex story is ultimately simple: Bad causes attract bad people.

She wants to believe that it is about sexism or misogyny, but as a guy who has experienced online harassment myself, I know this is false. Yes, women are in many ways particularly vulnerable to this — ask Michelle Malkin, Dana Loesch, Ann Coulter or Katie Pavlich — but the fundamental problem isn’t really about that:

On the one hand, it seemed unlikely that I’d soon be defiled and decapitated at the hands of a serial rapist-murderer. On the other hand, headlessfemalepig was clearly a deranged individual with a bizarre fixation on me. I picked up my phone and dialed 911.
Two hours later, a Palm Springs police officer lumbered up the steps to my hotel room, paused on the outdoor threshold, and began questioning me in a steady clip. I wheeled through the relevant background information: I am a journalist; I live in Los Angeles; sometimes, people don’t like what I write about women, relationships, or sexuality; this was not the first time that someone had responded to my work by threatening to rape and kill me. The cop anchored his hands on his belt, looked me in the eye, and said, “What is Twitter?” . . .
Andy Trotter, a communications adviser for the British police, announced that it was Twitter’s responsibility to crack down on the messages. . . . Police “don’t want to be in this arena.” It diverts their attention from “dealing with something else.” . . .
Abusers tend to operate anonymously, or under pseudonyms. But the women they target often write on professional platforms, under their given names, and in the context of their real lives. Victims don’t have the luxury of separating themselves from the crime. When it comes to online threats, “one person is feeling the reality of the Internet very viscerally: the person who is being threatened,” says Jurgenson. “It’s a lot easier for the person who made the threat — and the person who is investigating the threat — to believe that what’s happening on the Internet isn’t real.”

You can and should read the whole thing, because Amanda Hess has located the basic problem: Police are either ignorant of social media — “What is Twitter?” — or can’t comprehend the reality of a type of threat that has never been aimed at them.

Unless and until you have been targeted by obsessed hate-trolls, you really can’t understand what it’s like. And the inherent imbalance between anonymous harassers and their targets — “who write on professional platforms, under their given names, and in the context of their real lives” — is not a problem that is limited to women. When your livelihood is in large measure dependent on using Twitter to obtain information and promote your work, whereas the anonymous hate-troll uses the Twitter platform only to engage in harassment, you quickly discover that your ability to counteract the harassment is quite limited.

Amanda Hess should ask Patrick “Patterico” Frey how difficult it is to get law enforcement to take online harassment seriously. The dangerous tactic of “SWATting” is dismissed by some journalists as a “prank” and, despite the fact that some people have been sentenced to prison for SWATting hoaxes, so few perpetrators are prosecuted that SWATters believe (quite correctly) that they are unlikely to face serious consequences for their actions.

Part of the problem — and perhaps Hess hasn’t thought about this — is that many journalists actually celebrate online harassment.

What else were the crimes of “Anonymous,” except orchestrated online harassment of designated enemies? The fact that this criminality was done in the name of a political cause, and that the targets were corporations like Sony and Amazon rather than individuals, does not change the fact: Crime was committed, and many journalists have treated Anonymous hackers as heroes.

“The time for talk is over, it’s time for collective refusal, civil disobedience, and direct action.”
— Jeremy Hammond, Anonymous hacker

Why is it acceptable to target PayPal with DDOS attacks, but not to target journalists with personal threats? Why have some people tried to make a hero of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, who threatened to “destroy” an FBI agent’s family?

Why didn’t Amanda Hess take notice of Mandy Nagy’s harassment by Anonymous supporter “Occupy Rebellion”? Here you have a gang of vicious cyberterrorists whose very name, Anonymous, is intrinsic to the problem of online harassment, and whose claim of “civil disobedience” in defense of their crimes is a direct challenge to the rule of law. And, in case Amanda Hess has forgotten, it was the defense of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks that was the rallying cry of Anonymous in 2010.

Julian Assange is an accused rapist. Kinda relevant.

Law enforcement must take online harassment more seriously. Amanda Hess has that exactly right. But we cannot expect law enforcement to prosecute harassment if we ignore (or endorse) the lawless anarchist impulse of digital terrorists. Nor can we expect online harassment of women to be taken seriously when liberals like Amanda Hess tolerate the constant obscene harassment of conservative women:

The C-word and the F-word, and various combinations thereof, are somehow acceptable political discourse when liberals do it. Eventually, Amanda Hess managed to overcome the problems of anonymity and of law enforcement not taking online harassment seriously:

My harasser finally acquiesced to the protection order when my lawyer showed him that we knew the blog comments were coming from his computer—he had made a valiant attempt to obscure his comments, but he’d slipped up in a couple of instances, and we could prove the rape threats were his. When the judge approved the order, she instructed my harasser that he was not allowed to contact me in any way—not by email, Twitter, phone, blog comment, or by hiring a hot air balloon to float over my house with a message, she said. And he had to stay at least 100 feet away from me at all times. The restraining order would last one year.
Soon after the order expired, he sent an email to my new workplace. Every once in a while, he re-establishes contact. . . .
A few days before I received the threats in Palm Springs, he sent me a link via Twitter to a story he wrote about another woman who had been abused online. Occasionally, he sends his tweets directly my way—a little reminder that his “game” is back on.

This raises a question: Why doesn’t Amanda Hess publicly name the monster who is perpetrating this harassment? Crime is a people problem. Identifying the perpetrators is essential to preventing and discouraging crime, but perhaps Amanda Hess is afraid of being sued by her harasser. That can be a problem, too.

BomberSuesBloggers.com

UPDATE: Credit where credit is due:

@rsmccain I've spoken out against both sexist attacks on conservative women http://t.co/B1k0K9A4iP And Julian Assange http://t.co/S66tH3OCsZ

— Amanda Hess (@amandahess) January 7, 2014

As I say, I mostly agree with Hess’s analysis of the online harassment problem, but I don’t think turning it into a Women’s Studies candlelight-vigil take-back-the-night rally is the solution. That kind of “consciousness raising” solidarity protest may feel good, but is no substitute for law enforcement locking up criminals.