we are anonymous inside the hacker

botnets. Topiary shot back with a second official statement saying that they had never intended to go through with the extortion, only to pressure Hijazi to the point where he would be willing to pay for the hackers’ silence and then expose him publicly. It was a war of words built on the gooey foundations of lies and social engineering.

Topiary still called on journalists and other writers to “delve through” Hijazi’s e-mails carefully, hoping for the same kind of enthusiasm there had been around Aaron Barr’s e-mail hoard. But there was none. For a start, Hijazi just didn’t have enough dirty laundry. More, the infamy of LulzSec was overshadowing any more sobering, sociopolitical points the group was dimly making with each attack—that it didn’t like Fox, or that WikiSecrets “sucked,” or that NATO was upping the stakes against hackers, or whatever Unveillance might have been doing in Libya. It was quite an array of targets; LulzSec seemed to be attacking anyone it could, because it could.

This was getting to some of the secondary-crew members. The hacker Recursion came into the #pure-elite room late on June 3 after watching the Infragard events unfold. He hadn’t taken part in the hack and was shocked when he read the news reports.

“Holy shit,” Recursion told the others. “What the fuck happened today?”

“A lot,” said Sabu, adding a smile. “Check Twitter.”

“LulzSec declared war on the U.S.?” Joepie offered sardonically.

“I caught the jist of it,” Recursion answered before seeming to trail off. He didn’t say anything more on the subject, but twenty minutes later, after presumably holding a private conversation with Sabu, he left the channel, for good.

Sabu was disappointed in anyone who bailed on him in battle. It felt disrespectful. But he moved on quickly to guide the remaining troops.

Sabu came back to the room and addressed the handful of participants. “Well guys. Those of you that are still with us through this, maintain alert, make sure you’re behind VPNs no matter what. And don’t fear. We’re ok.”

“Sabu, did we lose people?” asked Neuron.

“Yeah.”

“Who?” “Recursion and Devurandom quit respectfully,” he answered, “saying they are not up for the heat. You realize we smacked the FBI today.

This means everyone in here must remain extremely secure.” It was a grave reminder of the potential charges LulzSec was racking up if its team members were to get caught.

A few of the members started describing how they were strengthening their security. Storm was getting a new netbook and completely wiping his old computer. Neuron was doing the same. He used a virtual private network called HideMyAss. This was a company based in the United Kingdom that Topiary used and had recommended.

“Did you wipe the PBS [chat] logs?” Storm asked Sabu.

“Yes. All PBS logs are clean.”

“Then I’m game for some more,” said Storm. Sabu typed out a smiley face.

“We’re good,” he said. “We got a good team here.”

Not everyone was good though, and not all logs were clean. The aloof LulzSec secondary-crew member known as M_nerva, the one who had said “good night” to the others just a few days before and not said too much else afterward, had just gathered together six days’ worth of chat logs from the #pure-elite channel and repeated Laurelai’s frantic act in February. He leaked it. On June 6, the security website seclists.org released the full set of #pure-elite chat logs held on Sabu’s private IRC server. The leak revealed, embarrassingly, that not everyone in #pure-elite could be “100 percent trusted,” and that for all its bravado, LulzSec had weaknesses. The team jumped into action, knowing that they had to send a message that they did not accept snitches, even if M_nerva had allegedly been persuaded to leak the logs by another hacker, named Hann. They knew they could find out who M_nerva really was because among the other black hats supporting LulzSec was someone who had access to pretty much every AOL Instant Messenger account in existence. Since many people had set up an AIM account at one time or another, they only needed to cross-check the nickname and IP to come up with a real name and address. It turned out M_nerva was an eighteen-year-old from Hamilton, Ohio, named Marshall Webb. The crew decided to hold on to the information for now.

With Sabu’s trust betrayed, the older hacker was now more paranoid than before. Topiary felt vindicated. He had known that a leak could happen if Sabu kept inviting people into #pure-elite, and it did. But he didn’t push the point. When he brought it up with Sabu, the hacker brushed off the topic quickly. He had nothing to say about it. Instead, Sabu worked on making the wider group more secure by separating it into four different chat rooms. There was a core channel, which now had invited fifteen participants, and #pure-elite, then chat rooms called upper_deck, for the most trusted supporters, lower_deck, kitten_core, and family. Members could graduate up the tier system depending on how trustworthy they were. Neuron and Storm, for instance, eventually were invited into upper_deck, so that they could be phased into the main channel for LulzSec’s core six members: Sabu, Topiary, Kayla, Tflow, AVunit, and Pwnsauce.

The heat wasn’t coming only from the media attention; Topiary was seeing hackers with military IP addresses trying to compromise the LulzSec IRC network and users every day. Already, rumors were spreading that LulzSec had been founded by the same crew that had hit HBGary. Enemy hackers were posting documents filled with details they had dug up online about each member, much of it wrong but some of it hitting close to home. LulzSec’s members needed to switch their focus from finding targets to protecting themselves.

Kayla suggested a mass disinformation campaign. Her idea was to create a Pastebin document revealing that Adrian Lamo owned the domain LulzSec.com; then to add details of other Jesterfags and claim they were members of LulzSec; then to spam the document everywhere. It was a classic social-engineering tactic, and it sometimes worked.

“But saying more or less that LulzSec is CIA,” Trollpoll offered. It was outrageous, but some people would see sense in the idea that the CIA was using freelance hackers to hit Iran or Libya and would build their own conspiracy theories around it.

Topiary and Kayla wrote up a document titled “Criminals of LulzSec,” under the guise of a fictitious social engineer called Jux who claimed to have been invited into the group’s private channel, saying, “I believe they are being encouraged or hired by CIA.” In the document, Jux claimed Lamo was a key member of the group, along with a Pakistani hacker named Parr0t, a Frenchman named Stephen, and an unnamed hacker from the Netherlands. The document was viewed more than 40,000 times, retweeted by notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick, and mentioned in a few tech blogs as a rumor.

When Gawker’s Adrian Chen started reaching out to LulzSec via Twitter to try to investigate them, the crew, still bitter about his exposé