“You just need to program as good as I analyze.”—Aaron Barr to a programmer.
The Anonymous versus Aaron Barr story reads like a high-tech thriller—in fact, a little too high-tech for me. I understand none of the mechanics, but I grasp the personalities and the emotions. My question is this: Who is the hero and who is the villain?
My post-modernist friends will look at me with a small, pitying sneer and remind me that there are no heroes. Okay, then, who is the villain in this techno-opera? Because while the world is quick to evict heroes, we all agree there are villains a-plenty.
Information and Security
The Cliff Notes version; Aaron Barr is an analyst for HB Gary, a high-profile security firm. He made it his personal mission to track down the “secret identities” of a group of “hackavists” who call themselves Anonymous. Anonymous have come out strongly in support of Wikileaks and taken on a couple of big targets, including Mastercard. HB Gary was negotiating a huge contract and Barr wanted to put the company on the map by un-masking Anonymous. He claimed to have uncovered the “three leaders” and was going to divulge their identities both to the FBI and to a group of the public at a security convention.
Barr’s theory for finding Anonymous involved social media; elaborate triangulation of FB posts, tweets and other communications. Or something like that. He actually assigned three names to major players, or posters at least, in the Anonymous group. Anonymous told him that these people were not involved with them; that they were innocent people whose lives would be disrupted or even ruined if Barr IDed them as hackers, but Barr was going to do it anyway. So Anonymous broke into HB Gary’s systems, pulled out over 40,000 documents and e-mails and hacked the HB Gary website, among other things.
Morals and Movies
It kind of sounds like a plot from a movie. In fact, it is the plot of a 1990s movie called Hackers. (See Comment) In this exchange, are Anonymous the villains, or is Barr?
I have to admit, Barr makes a fine, fine villain. Even his name works against him. In this incident, he demonstrates no redeeming features. None. Barr is arrogant, impatient, mercenary, double-dealing, and churlish to his staff and the programmers he is working with. His own e-mails and other electronic messages prove this. One coder tries repeatedly to show Barr that his “theory” about the social-networking thing is not well-supported mathematically—to no avail. Barr is a braggart, verbalizing his fantasy of putting himself and HB Gary on the map by exposing the hacker group, and paying no attention to reality.
The Anonymous Legacy
By default, then, Anonymous must be the. . . well, non-villains. Anonymous at least express concern for innocent people who are going to be hurt by Barr’s antics—if they really are innocent people and not the ringleaders of Anonymous after all. Anonymous honor schoolyard justice. You hit me first, I hit you back harder. You throw a rock at my friend, I throw a bigger rock at you and yours. If I’m a hero who plays by schoolyard rules, if I see you bullying someone, I’ll make you stop. We all approve of that, in the abstract at least.
My sympathies were engaged by Anonymous before I read a single sentence of this story. That’s because I am an American, and we’ve been programmed for generations to root for people with names like, well, like Anonymous. Anonymous represents the people; the voice of truth, the “little guy” hitting back. The protesters in Iran after dark, crying out, “I am Nadya,” were themselves unnamed. The people of the Underground Railroad were anonymous, as were the citizens in Europe who hid Jews in their houses; Robin Hood was anonymous, as were The Scarlet Pimpernel, Batman and V (or at least they had secret identities). The James brothers robbed trains—they were crooks, basically, but because they had a back-story that alleged they had their land taken unfairly by the railroads, they exist in legend as folk-heroes.
Anonymous the hackers are egalitarian and ingenious, two more things we like. We like to root for the underdog, especially if the underdog is really clever. HB Gary only lost face and money. It’s hard to feel sorry for Barr, who engaged in hubris. Hubris is something we don’t like, again, in theory; or at least, we don’t like it when other people engage in it.
Maybe I should flip this. Maybe the story is a tragedy and Barr the tragic hero whose fatal flaw is his overweening pride; and his failure is a failure to hold back the ravening hordes of anarchists. Naaah. He’s just not good enough to be that either.
So, I should root for Anonymous; except, and I know how craven this makes me, Anonymous scare me.
Hard to Live Your Values When You’re Scared
Anonymous have no boundaries. I’m uncomfortable with that. Their ethic is not, “Information wants to be free,” but more like, “If I can do it, it’s all right to do.” A locked door to them is not a signal of privacy; it’s a challenge. This is might-makes-right. It’s tempting to picture Anonymous, in this battle, as a scrappy group of freedom-fighters waging war against a military machine, but in this scenario, the freedom-fighter have thermo-nukes and stealth drones. That scares me.
Schoolyard justice works great in the abstract, right up until the rock I chuck at my enemy hits the noncombatant second-grader playing hopscotch.
Anonymous thoroughly embarrassed HB Gary. What if the next person who offends them works for a health clinic network, and Anonymous decide to attack the electronic health record servers? What if they get mad at an energy utility? Do they believe that we, who are dependent on those utilities for heating, cooking and light, are noncombatants? Or are we acceptable collateral damage? I don’t know the answer.
Anonymous are kind of like pirates; fun, romantic and Johnny-Depp-cool on our screens and in books; a different matter when they are boarding your cruise ship with automatic weapons.
Basically, if Barr had been a different kind of analyst—let’s say, a humble one, or a quirky one—he could have emerged as the underdog, fighting a bunch of techno-elitists to protect Main Street. Maybe. It’s a hard sell, but it’s possible.
Or is this a battle of models? Is it the Board of Directors majority-rules model against the anarchic, loose collective, roundtable model? Stodgy old-school cops against vandals with daddy issues, or intelligensia against the corporate machine?
So who is the villain?
In a chat room with an HB Gary negotiator, one member of Anonymous taunts, “You got hacked by a sixteen-year-old girl.” That would have been the Jolie character in the movie.