Anonymous busted, mostly in the UK

Youth welcomes prison as route to a good education.

by Carole Cadwalladr

Since 2008, the internet collective have hacked the CIA, the Sun newspaper, the Church of Scientology and a host of other large corporations, sparking a global police crackdown last year. But who and what are Anonymous? A radical new form of activism – or just bored teenagers? We talk to some of the 'hacktivists' and the experts who tracked them down in the deep web…

…. Anonymous suddenly had a face: and the face was of a furtive, greasy-haired youth, wearing a pair of dark glasses and carrying a book called Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. If you had to imagine what a teenage computer hacker would look like, this was it.

The episode was front-page news on websites across the world, as a string of arrests were made: 19-year-old Ryan Cleary from Essex; 16-year-old Tflow from London; 27-year-old Jeremy Hammond from Chicago; a 25-year-old former soldier, Ryan Ackroyd, from Doncaster; 19-year-old Darren Martyn (or PwnSauce), from Galway, and Donncha O'Cearrbhail (or Palladium), also 19 and from Offaly, Ireland. The most recent arrest, 12 days ago, was of another American, 20-year-old Raynaldo Rivera of Arizona….

…What seems incredible, even now (and maybe, especially, to Jake), is how a slightly troubled teenager living on the two-sheep island of Yell, in the Shetland Isles – a place as isolated and remote as anywhere on Earth – came to find himself at the heart of a radical global political movement…

…What's surprising, at first, is that he's not unhappy that he was caught, or that he faces the prospect of several years in prison. "People say that prison is bad, but I lived in my bedroom with a computer for years. It's not going to be as bad as that. I just want to go and do my sentence and get my education in there. I want to get a really good education and just read loads of books."…

Anonymous: behind the masks of the cyber-insurgents

 

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