>>15646472
>https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/hacker-group-anonymous-returns/615058/
In the mid 2000s, Aubrey Cottle was part of a crew of online pranksters who called themselves “trolls” and orbited two anarchic online message boards: Something Awful and 4chan. Thousands of users were on these boards—almost all young men—but among them was a more die-hard band who hung out in the same chat rooms, feuded online, and met up in real life. They called themselves Anonymous. The name was derived from the way 4chan presented usernames. If none was specified, the site displayed “Anonymous” by default.
In 2007, a man appeared at Cottle’s door. Cottle was 20 and still living with his mother in Toronto. As Cottle tells the story (confirmed in part by a friend of his), the man was from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the nation’s equivalent to the CIA. Curious, Cottle led him to his room, which was littered with hard drives, server equipment, and old copies of the ’90s hacker magazine 2600.
“Would you be willing to use your abilities against al-Qaeda and terrorist groups?” the agent asked him. A number of thoughts flashed through Cottle’s mind: Is this guy for real? I would never work for the feds. Should I delete everything? But mostly he felt like a fraud. The man thought he was something he wasn’t.
“You want me to raid internet forums for you?” Cottle asked.
When 4chan began cracking down on organizing raids, Anonymous migrated to Cottle’s copycat site, 420chan, which he’d created to discuss his principal interests: drugs and professional wrestling. And Cottle became the de facto leader of Anonymous, a role he relished. It was during this time, Cottle told me, that he codified a set of half-joking rules for the group that became known as the infamous “Rules of the Internet.” They included “3. We are Anonymous 4. Anonymous is legion 5. Anonymous never forgives.”
Cottle and his friends also were the first to start using the Guy Fawkes mask. They chose it simply because they loved the movie V for Vendetta, a 2005 film adaptation of a dystopian-fiction comic book. V, the film’s protagonist, dons the disguise to fight a future fascist police state by firebombing buildings, inverting the story of the original Guy Fawkes, who is vilified in English folklore for attempting to blow up Parliament in 1605.
Cottle told CSIS he’d think about its offer (which he later declined) and went back to cyberbullying. But not long after the authorities came to Cottle’s door, Anonymous would make the news. A Fox affiliate in Los Angeles had run a segment on the group, framing them as “hackers on steroids.” The report implied that Anonymous was perhaps a terrorist organization, overlaying the segment’s narration with stock footage of a van exploding.