Opinion The tricksters of our time

Pranksters followed,scrawling their signatures on websites for bragging rights. Organised crime found it could extract millions by hacking into banks. Then,just as the rest of us had gotten used to living much of our lives online,came the hacktivists.

Calling themselves Anonymous,they hacked into conference calls among agents of the FBI and broke into the computer networks of the Vatican. It has become impossible to tell who and what Anonymous might target — or exactly who within Anonymous might be behind it. Critics and defenders argue endlessly about how much of what they do should be treated as political protest — or strictly as a crime. Leaderless,multinational and known by the ubiquitous,sly Guy Fawkes mask,Anonymous is fuelled by a raft of causes,from repression in Tunisia to animal rights in Tennessee to a defence of WikiLeaks. At a time when life,commerce and statecraft have gone digital,hacktivists can threaten governments,or they can just as easily dump innocent people’s credit card numbers on the Internet for more common criminals to steal.

Anybody can be Anonymous. And anybody who calls himself Anonymous can carry out an attack in its name. Some factions of Anonymous use brute force to shut down target websites. Other factions break into systems and steal data. They have threatened to take down Internet root servers on April Fools’ Day,which would effectively shut down the global Internet.

Mary Landesman,a security researcher who now works at Cisco,has tracked cybercrime from its early days,when virus writers showed off their wares on message boards and hackers defaced porn sites for fun. In December 2000,Landesman saw a lament: A virus writer wondered on a message board where her fellow virus writers had gone. Landesman took it as a harbinger of the danger ahead: The virus writers had begun to work for people who could pay them,and they kept quiet. By the early 2000s,a nimble multinational criminal business network had begun to emerge. Hackers could trade in bots and malicious software and help themselves to other people’s bank accounts. Soon cyberespionage rings could steal source code.

Politically motivated hackers began to emerge in the late 1990s — each one with a distinct case and a focused target. Hackers from China and Taiwan duelled against one another. Anti-nuclear activists defaced an Indian government site after the government conducted nuclear tests. Hackers rallied in support of the Zapatistas,an insurgent group in southern Mexico that even in the pre-Twitter days used the Internet to drum up overseas support.

Anonymous rewrote the hacktivist playbook. It began to challenge a far broader political and economic order. Gabriella Coleman,an anthropologist who studies hacktivist culture,described Anonymous as the modern-day “trickster,” at times playful,at others scaring the daylights out of people,and usually slippery. “Grasping them is very difficult,” she said,“putting our finger on them sociologically.”

Anonymity,with a lowercase “a,” also makes the movement vulnerable. Those who affiliate with the movement use a variety of tools to cloak their identities and the devices on which they work. They rarely know one another’s offline identities. That means they rarely know who among them may already have become a turncoat.

That Anonymous can metastasise and spread is arguably at the core of its success. Its critics also see in it a kernel of their downfall. “Anonymous has given birth to something that will either implode on itself and that will be that,” Landesman said. “Or”,she added,in the same breath,“I don’t know.”