Ian Thornton: So, this is where I met Commander X.
He was sitting here, cowboy hat out,
and he was reading. He had a thick sci-fi novel.
And I just recently had published my first novel.
So, it seemed appropriate
that I drop $2 in there.
And he looked up and he had this interesting face.
Craggy, and a definite story.
So, the gut reaction of the novelist is to...
Is to engage, and find out more,
but little did I know that I was about to fall into
the quicksand of hackers,
of Anonymous,
and the beautiful randomness of life.
♪
Commander X: He saw me reading a book, and he said,
"You know, I wrote a book."
And I was like, "Well, you got one of your books?"
Ian: I came and I brought him a book, and he read it.
Commander X: I wanted fucking stories.
I mean, reality had become a bit too much right then,
and it was fucking great. It's a great book.
Ian: I didn't have an idea for six weeks who this guy was.
He was just a friend on the street,
but then he told me he was a cyber warlord,
one of the generals in Anonymous.
Online hackers who identified as being part of Anonymous
and other groups have carried out dozens of high-profile
online operations.
Ian: And that he was on the run from the FBI
and had been for six years.
Commander X: Because I felt that the prosecution was political
against myself, I chose to flee into exile,
and I'm in Canada now.
Ian: And there was an article that could corroborate all this
and it was in the New Yorker,
and I should go home and read it.
Commander X: I mean, he was polite about.
"Okay, okay. Cool. Yeah. I'll take a look at it tonight,"
but I knew from the look in his eyes, you know,
he wasn't buying that meat without inspecting it.
Ian: I cross-referenced the name that was in the article,
Christopher Mark Doyon, and up popped his mugshot from
when he was arrested for trying to sell
large quantities of LSD at a Grateful Dead gig in Indiana,
and when his face popped up I got goose bumps.
It was a life-changing moment.
Like, I get the same look every time I reveal myself.
I could tell that he was just like,
"Dude.
Dude, you really are this person."
♪
Today?
Well, today they're making a fucking movie about my life.
(laughing)
I've been called cyber terrorist,
but I have to laugh right now at the fucking very idea.
What is an information terrorist?
Please, I mean, can somebody help me with that?
How can I terrorize people with the truth?
Crowd: Liberation, yes! Apartheid, no!
David Kushner: Commander X had a knack for being at
the beginning of these movements, being right there.
Commander X: We're information activists just trying to make
our world a bit freer, and a little better.
He is smart, he is articulate,
and his words have power that most people's do not.
That's dangerous to the power elite.
We fight bad guys and tyrants wherever we find them.
He was very divisive.
Some people loved him, some people hated him.
He was a distraction at best, I think, of times.
He would type in all caps, you know what I mean?
Like, he was a guy who commanded attention.
If there's anyone who did the most to take the edge
between absurdity and awe-inspiring
and just fucking ram it over to the fucking absurdity part,
it was Commander X.
Commander X: Look, this is a war.
I mean, straight up, this is a war.
I think there's, like, an entertainer in him.
I mean, he likes to tell stories,
he likes to kind of take you into a whole world,
and sometimes you don't know how much of that is exaggeration.
Gregg Housh: You have to put a person behind the mask.
People want stories.
So, Commander X did make a good story.
♪
I was talking with my editor at the New Yorker
about doing a larger piece about Anonymous
And to me, the story was how has activism
moved from the streets to the internet
and then back to the streets.
That was, I think, fundamentally the story I was telling,
and Commander X was really the personification of that.
It was a profile of
a contemporary American activist.
He grew up in Maine, like on a ranch in Maine,
but, you know, he had a difficult life.
He had a difficult upbringing. His father was abusive.
My parents were not... very good people.
I'm just going to end it there,
but they were not very good people.
And, so, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house,
and I had become fascinated with the idea of computers.
Narrator: The Industrial Revolution expanded the strength
of man's muscles and the reach of his hand.
The Information Revolution is magnifying the power of
his brain, changing forever the way Americans
work, play, travel,
and even think.
And I was always quite fascinated by the computer in
Star Trek, the thing fucking talked.
So, I convinced this guy who worked for my dad...
He was a pharmacist's assistant...
To bring me to the local university
and show me a real fucking computer.
So, he brought he down to the university and sat me down.
And of course, I immediately sit there,
and I was like, "Hello, computer,"
because the only knowledge I have of computers is Star Trek
and it's supposed to talk, right?
And he's like, "No, no. It doesn't work like that."
And there was a program. It was a very basic
chat program. As a friggin' 13-year old kid,
you're sitting there just seeing shit kind of
start talking back to you, you're like,
"Fuck me," you know? That's incredible, you know?
Then I went to my grandmother and I said, "I need $100."
there was no way to buy a computer back then.
It was a kit that you bought, and then they sent it to you,
and you literally had to solder the fucking thing together
and then plug it into a television,
and a cassette recording, and the cassette recorder
acted as the hard drive, and I said,
"Grandma, just sit down, please. I want to talk to you.
I am convinced, grandma, that these things called
computers are going to change the world."
And she's like, "Well, what does it do?"
And I was like, "You can use it as a calculator,
you can balance your chequebook with it,
you can play video games."
She leaned back in the chair and she says,
"Well, I'm going to spend two dollars
and buy you a pocket calculator,
and then I'm going to sit you down and teach you how to
balance your chequebook,
and then if you do all that I'll take you out to
the video game store and for $40 I'll buy you a Pong game,
"and you can just skip the $100 computer."
And I was like, "Grandma, you just don't understand.
This is going to change the world."
It took me about a year to put the thing together.
So, you can see that coming into it from that way,
in that fashion, just the fascination's never
going to wear off now. I'm like a kid in a candy store.
I'm living my own science fiction.
I wake up every morning, I get in front of that computer,
I am not unhappy.
I spend 10, 12 hours a day in front of that thing
and I just find it all fascinating,
every single fucking day I get up.
He gets to Cambridge. He was sleeping on park benches.
My understanding of it was just because he liked the mobility
of it. He claims that he was always homeless by choice.
And then I went to a Grateful Dead show.
(laughing)
Inevitably, that was going to come into it,
and it was in Boston.
(speaking indistinctly) You can't hide.
We're going to go on the protest side.
Free, free, free South Africa.
Christopher: And I ran across an anti-apartheid protest.
Free, free, free South Africa.
I stopped. I hung out with people. I smoked some pot.
Um, I was given flyers and shit. You know, you make friends with
people that got a flyer in their hand, you're going to read it.
I was so angry that there could be a system of government
in our century, in my lifetime
that you had to go into a police station
and put your hand up to a colour chart,
and based on how dark or light you were,
that's how many rights you got.
That is fucking ridiculous.
(playing drums)
And then, they're like, "Yeah, well, you know,
thanks for hanging out with us and, you know,
we're doing this thing fucking tomorrow."
They got me really good with the whole hanging out with me
and smoking some weed thing, because, you know,
being a solitary kind of kid, anybody that felt...
Made me feel like I was their pal, you know,
they get the time of day.
And, you know, of course I had to do other things.
I went to a lot of rock shows back then.
I had to make a living and I did that at rock shows.
Not only am I not ashamed, but I'm somewhat proud of
the fact that we sold really good LSD.
We would go out and do a US tour with the Dead,
and we would raise shit tons of money,
and it just gelled more is all it did.
I went to more Dead shows, I made more money,
I went to more protests.
Some dude with fucking cakey-ass dreads literally down to
his knees would sidle up next to me
and give me maybe a little piece of paper folded up like this
in the passing crowd, and it would be the next
ELF action, or the next ALF action,
or the next protest against anti-apartheid.
That's definitely the whole texture of the cloth,
and it just gets woven tighter and tighter as I become
more and more sucked into this idea of just permanent
resistance to all this fucked up shit.
The things like the Animal Liberation Front,
the Earth Liberation Front.
I did my tours of duty in both of those,
and then, eventually, our little, silly little hacker
group that we called the Peoples Liberation Front.
The PLF, we more of, like, a little militia.
We adopted these titles called Commander.
We'd all dress in camo when we went to protests and shit,
and one day my friend sat me down, and said,
"Look, we want to have a talk about something."
A hacktivist group by the name of Anonymous
had hacked the forums
of the Epilepsy Foundation of America,
and they had placed on the forum, on the front page,
a animated gif.
These gifs, these animated gifs, they strobed very brightly,
they strobed very fast.
They could take an epileptic and cause him to have a seizure
just from looking at it.
Four people went to the hospital across the country,
and these people were literally harmed
by hackers thousands of miles away,
physically wounded.
It sounds so funny on one level. I get the LOLs.
I get why they did it. They're still fucking dickheads.
If you're out there today watching this movie,
you're a piece of shit.
He was a Deadhead. Here's a guy who would, like,
anti-apartheid protestors. He got busted, supposedly,
for selling 300 hits of acid at Dead shows.
I mean, this is what he's coming out of.
So, this idea that these punks were trying to hurt people
was upsetting. So, he didn't have a great
opinion of this, um, Anonymous, whatever it was.
We can't let that fucking pass. These people need to either be
brought to justice or, at the very least, fucking
monitored to see what else they're going to fucking do.
So, I was tasked with literally
infiltrating Anonymous.
I was to go in the IRC, spend as much time as I could,
make as much contacts. Not to get these people busted.
This was not some sort of law enforcement thing.
I just wanted to know what these fucking people are up to,
you know? So, that's how I get into Anonymous.
♪
Barrett Brown: There was no founder of Anonymous.
From late 2007 on,
there was some degree of soft power that,
in one way or another, managed to corral this phenomenon,
and did so in ways that were effective,
that allowed it to become a decisive force,
sometimes in the history of nations.
There was no reason to expect that that would last.
Without a charter, without a structure,
there was no reason to expect this would go on for too long.
It is frankly shocking in retrospect that it worked
for as long as it did.
My name is Barrett Brown.
I'm a journalist, an activist, and gentleman adventurer.
Anonymous was not founded and I'm not sure if anybody
would've taken responsibility for it had they actually
founded it back in the 4Chan days.
The 4Chan website, the image board,
that had been around since maybe 2004, 2005.
The primordial soup from which Anonymous eventually evolved.
That was the crucible for Anonymous.
So, I don't think you can really understand Anonymous
without understanding 4Chan.
There were message boards within 4Chan.
It was a forum for people on the internet to talk
freely and openly about a variety of subjects.
Then there was a board that was just the random board.
/b/, where you could talk about anything.
That's where it became a bit more free form
and the idea was that your default handle was "anonymous."
That was the name you were given.
It was kind of like this hive mind of the internet,
and so, they started to do what they called raids,
which was sort of, like, hey, let's do, like, a little
field trip on the internet. Something fun and stupid.
So, one of the famous ones was Habbo Hotel,
which was this children's game,
which they decided to infiltrate.
You know, have all these characters with afros.
I think there was some, like, Nazi imagery.
It was just about shock value and fun.
Obviously offensive fun.
And I participated in some of these things.
Like, some of the Second Life raids where they would
don these bizarre, garish outfits
and go around and wave giant penises, like,
at concerts they were having at Second Life, you know,
and bomb furry nightclubs.
I remember thinking, like, the sort of emergent
organization that's going on here.
This is a new dynamic that the internet has made possible.
In a world where there's no pioneer land,
there's no more frontier, suddenly it was all frontier,
in every direction.
I wondered, you know, what would happen when
these people realize what power they have
and what greater power they could have if they were to
adopt some shared ideology, some shared enemy even,
and that ended up happening.
Gregg: Everyone knows that Anonymous existed,
depending on how you look at it,
all the way back to even late '03,
but in reality that was two people on a website, you know?
The strangest thing happens, you know?
In January '08 it becomes this, you know, giant movement
that the news is covering, and that was partially my fault
and definitely an accident.
You know, I look back and I wish I could say,
you know, I masterminded this amazing thing on purp...
No, I... I had no idea what I was doing, dude.
On January 14th, 2008, up on 4Chan,
this video is posted of Tom Cruise being insane.
Reporter: Tom Cruise, Scientologist.
Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident,
it's not like anyone else. It's you drive past,
you know you have to do something about it,
because you know you're the only one that can really help.
And another post comes saying the video's gone,
and everyone's like, "Well, wait.
Why did... Why did that get taken down?
That's Tom Cruise being insane. It's fucking funny."
We decided that we're really good at doxing people.
We're really good at getting their information and hunting
people down, and use some connections to find the person
who had the video, and by "we" I mean a few of us
who were on IRC, which is a chat system.
We went and found the person who had uploaded that video,
and got their source, and we re-uploaded it.
(laughing)
It was taken offline in, like, 30 seconds.
Scientology at that point was watching YouTube for everything
going by, and like, "Got it again,"
and, uh, that actually pissed us off.
You just don't do that.
You don't take something off the internet.
I remember talking to someone about this
and they equated it to, like, a playground
and somebody took their ball.
We have fair use laws under the DMCA,
but YouTube was still caving because they didn't want to
fight a billion dollar behemoth like, you know, Scientology.
Barrett: The Church of Scientology had a long history,
ever since the internet became a thing,
of trying to control it, trying to censor materials
from the church that they considered to be proprietary.
Generally things that are embarrassing
regarding their beliefs.
So, we decided we were going to troll Scientology
by putting out a press release.
Computerized Voice: Hello, leaders of Scientology.
We are Anonymous.
Over the years we have been watching you.
Your campaigns of misinformation,
your suppression of dissent, your litigious nature.
It straddled the line between goofy and awe-inspiring.
It happens to successfully veer towards awe-inspiring.
Computerized Voice: Anonymous has therefore decided
that your organization should be destroyed.
This is ominous. We're writing, like,
"The internet is coming for you. Get ready."
Computerized Voice: We shall proceed to expel you from
the internet and systematically dismantle
the Church of Scientology in its present form.
Anonymous promised an army would come and defeat Scientology.
Would come and bring just unprecedented chaos.
It was about 10:20 at night on the 21st of January, 2008.
I don't remember my birthday half the time.
I don't know why this one sticks so well.
But that we uploaded this video,
and, uh, I think, if I'm lucky,
20, 30 people watched this video, find it funny.
Computerized Voice: We are Anonymous. We are legion.
We do not forgive, we do not forget.
Expect us.
Gregg: I got woken up by my girlfriend at the time.
It was, like, 4:30 in the morning she's calling me.
Maybe 5:00. It was right around there, and she says,
"Turn on CNN."
And I turned on CNN and the video's on CNN,
and I'm like, "What is going on?"
Computerized Voice: You have nowhere to hide,
because we are everywhere.
And at that point we're sitting there with a million views
on the video, news reaching out, trying to get a hold of us,
Scientology paying big money to private eyes, trying to find us,
and an army kind of in front of us,
that are all going by the name Anonymous now.
They promised an army, they didn't have it,
but by virtue of making it clear, making it palpable,
people wanted this army that would emerge from the internet
and right wrongs.
Gregg: And so, naively, we're like,
"Well, then let's plan a global, worldwide protest in
every, you know, major country on the planet."
We're going to be those old school protest types,
but do it like the internet does it.
So, make it fun.
We're sending Anonymous outside, so they better remain anonymous.
So, we're going to need to cover our faces.
The media needs something they can show
that's the ominous thing, right?
So, we had to give them a mask.
(phone ringing)
It had to be available. So, we actually spent the next
about 25 hours calling comic shops, costume shops,
and literally every single city we tried to call
had Guy Fawkes masks in stock sitting in back that no one
was buying that they had discounted
because everyone thought after the V for Vendetta movie
that a million of these would sell, and none did.
And we're like, "Well, great, decision made."
It's the only mask we can actually use.
Everyone wants a romantic version of this story.
No, it was because it was the only one available
in every single town we were going to be in.
David: It was ominous. It sort of created this
mythology of Anonymous. Who is Anonymous?
What are they? They wear these masks, you know?
And I think that was the time when Anonymous
was really branded.
Barrett: And so, having conceived of the army
and presented the picture, the army came.
They happened to be clever enough to organize all of these
thousands of people who saw this video they made.
And, so, the army was materialized.
The army showed up.
This is what the internet would look like if it went outside.
There were women, there were people of colour.
Every race. There were young and old.
There was everyone, and we just weren't expecting that.
We were really expecting the young, hacker-ish 4Channer
guys to all show up and that to be our little group of 20 that
stood on a corner for an hour, and instead, all these other
people showed up and it was great.
And that's how Anonymous first became a decisive force.
We have a thing now, what do we do with this?
It had only been built for fighting Scientology.
In reality its whole goal was just to
screw with them for a week.
You know, again, this being so off the cuff
and so completely accidental. Every step of it.
We didn't expect this to keep going.
Christopher: The Scientology protest at that time was
funny as hell, and that's what eventually sold me on them.
They really turned out to be people that were authentic.
So, I'm hanging out with these people,
and, like I said, the vast majority of them,
I have to admit, were good people.
At that point in the story,
there's just one of those cathartic moments
that's about to happen for, really, everybody,
and that was the release of the Collateral Murder video.
Christopher: Within weeks of the release of that was
an immediate thunderstorm of persecution
fired off at WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks picked a fight with the US,
now the US is fighting back in more ways than one.
American lawmakers want to see founder Julian Assange,
they want to see him tried under the espionage act,
and the WikiLeaks website has its own trouble.
This is a new news here.
PayPal has announced it has suspended WikiLeaks' account,
costing it a vital source of funding.
Barrett: MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal agreed to a behind
the scenes US embargo against WikiLeaks,
whereby they all simultaneously more or less said,
"Oh, we're not going to process donations to WikiLeaks anymore."
Immediately there is this fucking visceral rage,
because websites like the KKK or the Westboro Baptist Church
have PayPal donation links on their fucking sites,
but then, what?
A publishing company like WikiLeaks,
just trying to get enough money to pay for their servers and no?
Are you kidding me?
And so Anonymous just leapt that day.
The day the donations portals came down,
Anonymous said, "We're coming for you."
Supporters of the website WikiLeaks launching a sweeping
cyber war this week.
That's right, it's being called Operation Payback,
or also Operation Avenge Assange.
And it's basically a loose affiliation of hackers
that call themselves Anonymous.
This time they're turning attention to what they consider
to be the enemies of WikiLeaks. Visa, MasterCard are the big
hits they've had so far.
Reporter: This man calls himself Commander X
and says he's part of Anonymous.
The power of Anonymous is-is that we have the ability
to affect change on the internet.
Their method of choice, a denial of service attack,
where hackers overwhelm websites with a huge volume of requests
for information, crashing the site,
says Commander X, for a cause.
That process is the equivalent of a virtual sit-in.
I can best sum up my philosophy with the quote that
I'm so famous for and is, I admit, very fucking funny.
You only need two things in this world to be
a world-class hacker, a computer and a cool pair of sunglasses,
and the computer's optional.
You have a site online? All of a sudden we've
snapped our fingers and the site is gone.
Anybody can do it.
You don't have to be a hacker to take down a website.
You know, you can download a program and figure it out
in an afternoon.
These are all various DDoS weapons.
This would be the equivalent of a rifle.
And so now our target has been loaded,
and, as we say in Anonymous, pew-pew-pew.
And hopefully hundreds, if maybe thousands of people
would download this same software, and all of us fire.
So, it's really about multiplication.
This is a weapon that's designed to be used by an army.
And we just kept going. It was an incredible time,
because that entire 10 days, you don't even sleep.
You have, in essence, Julian Assange,
who has become a cyber messiah,
and hundreds of followers who are waking up zombie computers,
their soldiers, and attacking companies like Visa, MasterCard.
And this is the first time you really begin to hear,
during those 10 days, the FBI rhetoric was just over the top.
You know, these are cyber terrorists,
we're going to shut them down, and of course, we're all like,
"Yeah, fuck you." You know? So what?
It's protest, motherfuckers. Get used to it.
♪
In the midst of that, I'd been living in Santa Cruz,
and I had a cabin up in the mountains,
but I used to stay, and when I was in Santa Cruz
I didn't pay for a hotel.
There's places to sleep outdoors.
Santa Cruz doesn't just have homeless people.
You have, like, your mentally ill,
and your addicted who hover around Santa Cruz
because there's a lot of drugs there. It's a surf town.
But the vast majority of people that they label
homeless people are actually just Bohemes.
They're just people travelling up and down the coast.
It's a travel corridor, for backpacking,
camper living culture that existed in California.
♪
You will not make it illegal for a man to fall asleep
on the fucking grass and give him a ticket
and even put him in fucking jail.
And when that doesn't pass muster in court,
you make a law against people covering up with a blanket
at night when they're asleep.
Literally, they've got a blanket law in Santa Cruz.
I'm not even shitting you.
(playing drums)
These homeless people had a protest camp going
called Peace Camp.
We were sleeping on the courthouse steps,
sleeping in protest.
We're sleeping literally with a sign next to us that said
"I am protesting the sleep law. That's why I'm sleeping here."
There's people sleeping all over this fucking courthouse.
What's going on here?
It's Peace Camp 2010.
(cheering)
Christopher: We're stars, man. Peace Camp 2010.
They can't get enough of us. We are the media darlings.
I'm Matt De Nesnera at the Santa Cruz county courthouse
where homeless activists have been protesting
city ordinances for more than a month.
Christopher: We have a squad of sheriffs on hand.
The Santa Cruz police department despised all of us
"professional protestors."
The tension began to grow in Santa Cruz, very, very big time.
Looks like they're going to arrest us.
And I'd been arrested.
Nobody had any clue that this scraggly guy with a long
red beard and everything is, like,
one of the most notorious hackers online,
with the name Commander X.
I decided that I would harness my new friends
that I was garnering in the Anonymous collective,
and I said, "I got a plan."
I said, "I think I want to take down the county website."
And I said, "But I want to be super cool about it",
'cause I'm here in this fucking town.
So, what I'd like to do is do it really ethical hacking style.
Let's do it on a Sunday at noon for 30 minutes,
and we'll preannounce it, we'll tell them the specific
time it will be down so that, you know,
the public will know, and just wait,
"you know, and it'll come back."
We just went off and did it.
I sat in a fucking coffee house
and I'm churning out these attacks.
I'm deploying cyber weapons that our crew built
just to DDoS shit.
Two detectives from Santa Cruz sheriff's walked in
and gave everybody a good fucking look over,
and that's when I started packing up
to get the fuck out of there. Oh, my God.
My fucking heart is coming out of my chest.
Sweat pouring off me.
I got my pack on my back, my laptop over my shoulder,
and I just fucking scoot left and walk normal as you can.
But anyway, I make my way to the library,
put out the press release from the library,
and then the next morning, I get up
and the headline is on the Santa Cruz paper.
I mean, in big black letters.
"Santa Cruz Cyber Attack."
And I knew, I knew. I just knew it was epic,
and I knew my life would never be the same again.
And the other thing I also knew was that Anonymous was the most
powerful force ever to be created in humanity so far,
and that no doubt they were fucking coming for us,
and coming for us with guns drawn literally.
Leon Panetta: Cyber is the battlefield of the future,
and most of these attackers are going after
whatever the hell they can
in order to show you what they can do,
and that is very hard, very frankly, to defend against.
I am Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA,
former Secretary of Defence, and now chairman of
the Panetta Institute for Public Policy.
Power can be very infatuating
when you know you have power and you can exercise that power,
and I think in many ways that's what happened with a group
like Anonymous and other hacking groups
that suddenly realized
they had their hands on a very powerful weapon
and they weren't quite sure,
and I think they still remain not quite sure,
about just exactly what it means.
You know, for something like the CIA and for other
intelligence agencies, at least you know the devil
that you're after, but when it comes to Anonymous hackers,
it was much more difficult to try to figure out.
What are they after? What damage could they do?
Are these just a bunch of people, you know,
playing 21st century hacking games?
Or are these people that have
a motivation that could be very dangerous to our security?
I was fucking Batman,
and I had powers.
By then I was, like, gearing up, I'm geeking up.
I'm starting to fucking bust some shit.
I'm starting to fucking have some fun with this,
'cause I was working very hard by that point.
I was putting in 10, 12, 15 hour days
to this movement of Anonymous.
I was participating to the fullest extent that
I could do and not die.
Commander X is who he is and, you know, we all know.
We've all seen his version of reality,
but, um, he didn't come into my orbit until people started
talking to me about the fact that X said he talked to you
on IRC and I'm like, "Who?"
He just kind of showed up as a guy who was putting up
websites under the Anon name and you'd look at it
and the website looked like it was built in 1993.
Like, one of the first drafts of a website ever that
a guy who was openly telling us he was homeless was building.
So, like, you didn't want to just outright say,
"Uh, what the fuck, guy?" You wanted to say,
"Okay, the guy's trying with very limited resources."
I mean, he would be, you know, he would be doing his thing,
and obviously he was doing DDoSing,
he was hitting targets. He was...
I didn't think he was doing too much harm,
and I was always kind to him, because surprisingly enough,
I am actually innately a kind person by default.
And I just said nice, like, things sometimes.
Like, a sarcastic, like, "Go forth. Continue Commander."
Gregg: As I understand his story, he was the kind of
hippie protestor who showed up, and, you know, was holding signs
anti-war, and all that, you know,
and that was none of us.
To speak the honest truth, like, I'm the 19-year old driving
a car who sees a puddle and a bunch of people at
a bus stop and hits the puddle as fast as he can.
That's me at 19. I'm not the good guy.
So, from the very beginning there was definitely a clash
of just personalities, 'cause he came at it
from a completely different way.
We sort of were thrust into being activists
very accidentally and that was just who he thought he was.
Christopher: I did not have all access
at that point to Anonymous, I was, you know, definitely
very strong and a very powerful person,
and had the respect even of people like Barrett Brown
and Gregg Housh and stuff like that,
and I remember clearly going to Barrett Brown and asking him,
"What do you think we should do next?"
I think he responded with just one word.
"Keep an eye on the Middle East."
Commander X and I did not sit there and plan the advent of
Op Tunisia and the Tunisian Revolution.
The Tunisian Revolution began when a fruit vendor in Tunis,
the capital, uh, set himself on fire in protest of the local
corrupt police having taken away his assets
for failure to pay a bribe.
That is what starts the initial conflagration.
That's what started the street uprisings, the rage.
It provided an enzyme.
Or, sorry, a catalyst rather. I'm not good with chemistry,
or much else. It provided a catalyst,
a centre of attention for those in the country who are
aware of it to, uh, rally around.
Tunisia is one of those interesting ones where
they invited us in.
We didn't even come and talk to them.
They came and talked to us, you know?
At first we all thought we couldn't help.
I mean, honestly, strange enough Commander X was the first one
on that channel saying "No, we can actually do this."
And we all thought he was fucking insane.
I mean, like, who the hell are we?
This is a dictator of an African nation.
Some Tunisian hackers came to us, in Anonymous,
and in fact they were more or less handed off to me
because nobody knew quite to do with them,
but they claimed to have some rather extraordinary access,
but needed some assistance.
Um, it's a small country with a small infrastructure,
and we have the user names and passwords to everything.
You name it. The water supply.
Like, the radio stations.
The servers that the president's email is on.
You don't have to hack anything. We just have the passwords.
Here you go.
So, we were able to prove that these people
were receiving just enormous bribes,
living like gods while Tunisia drowned in poverty.
And so now, these people are really just fucking furious.
Is this right? Who are the people who are planning on
going to the streets? Are they... are they our people?
You know, are we helping some extremists
who are going to make it worse?
So, we did a lot of work with these guys,
and we did, honestly, like, days of research into
who the president was. Ben Ali, who he was.
You know, the dictator, you know?
Turns out the people going to the streets were really
the people, and they needed to overthrow this dictator.
To the extent there is right and wrong,
and that one can point to a large group of people and say,
"That one is mostly right, that one is mostly wrong,"
there was never any question that we were right,
and if this was to escalate further,
it would be a terrible thing for everybody involved,
but I would personally be enthusiastic about that.
(shouting)
I mean, you look at it and think what could hackers do?
But you'd be surprised at how important it is to
keep communication from city to city.
We built this list of
all the technologies they would block,
and we kind of estimated what order that they would
try and block them in. Like, easiest,
they're going to just get Twitter and Facebook turned off
in the country, right?
So, we put proxies up and fed them to all the people
in the major cities as "As soon as these stop working,
access them this way."
Can we get activated satellite phones to some of
the people in these towns? Yes, we can.
(shouting)
It keeps going from there to, like,
seven layers of communication.
So, when the internet goes down,
then when the cellphones go down,
we can keep handing them a new way to keep in contact.
(shouting)
Christopher: This is all unravelling in hours and days.
It's breakneck speed.
I fought, as we talked about earlier,
in the apartheid movement for 10 fucking years.
It took 10 days to run the dictator out of Tunisia.
(cheering)
Gregg: After Tunisia, we're starting to help
the Egyptians with the same tools,
'cause now we've kind of got a tool kit.
We're really beginning to define skill sets that specifically
apply to these street revolutions.
Gregg: One of the things we had done there was
we knew the internet was going to get cut pretty easily.
So, our preparedness for that was we had gotten dial-up ISPs,
old-school, '90s-level modems mailed into Egypt.
So, if the internet got completely cut
but the phones were still working,
they could dial into the internet.
(shouting)
We turned the internet back on in Egypt three times.
(shouting)
Barrett: So, that the Egyptians were using the internet
to organize what would become the Arab Spring.
Christopher: Oh, my God. We are having geopolitical impact!
We're saying who's going to fucking rule in this world
and who isn't.
(shouting)
Gregg: None of these were our protests when you look at any
of the stuff we did during the Arab Spring.
None of them were our ideas.
This is a revolution
for the sincere people of this country.
They're the ones that want to make the change.
They're the ones that will make the change.
They're the true heroes of the country.
People showed up, asked for our help.
It turned out it was things we could do.
So, we did it, and then I went back
to building some plumber's website the next day.
(sighing)
I mean, I think we came out of the Arab Spring
pretty convinced we were all fucking gods.
Commander X is definitely a victim of his own ego
at this point.
(shouting)
Was Commander X on the ground in the square in Tunis,
in the capital, getting shot at?
No! There were people on the ground risking their lives.
They could have possibly done this without us.
We could not have done it without them.
♪
Barrett: By the time the Tunisian Revolution
was over, by the time Egypt had started,
the FBI raided 40 US households on a single day
in late January in 2011 over these DDoS attacks
that slowed down MasterCard's corporate website
and Visa's and PayPal's for a couple seconds.
Armed raids with families being held at gunpoint in some cases.
They were gunning for us. This is, like, fucking war.
Reporter: Dozens of FBI agents targeted alleged members of
a loose-knit hacking group. Armed with search warrants,
agents hit six homes in New York along with locations across
the country, seizing hard drives and computer accessories.
It's all at the same moment.
Literally, the same fucking moment.
That's how they do this shit.
So, that we can't get on, like, IRC, and say, "Hey, dudes.
They're coming. Fucking wipe your drives and run."
And so that's what they did,
except there's only got 39 of them,
because one...
was Batman.
The reaction they had was so knee-jerk to our attacks
on PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa.
Visa.com went offline for a few minutes.
Did that affect anyone's ability to buy anything
or give anyone's info away? No, it did nothing!
Their marketing piece where you could download a brochure
was offline for a few minutes.
Somehow $50 million in dam... No, dude. No.
When have you, as someone who has a Visa card,
ever gone to visa.com?
It didn't affect anyone, and it was down for five minutes,
but they tried to get people, you know,
to go to prison for it.
MasterCard's site was offline for a couple hours,
but again, that was their fault.
Their shit was really badly built.
Um, but again, very clearly nobody uses those sites
to do their transactions. Those sites are advertising.
Jay Leiderman: You know, what does it take to get a case
indicted these days?
Couple mil in Bitcoin and extortions
and things like that.
Whereas, you know, what did it take a case
to get indicted in 2010?
A low-orbit ion cannon.
By nature it's a joke.
Like, the thing says "pew-pew" on it.
It's... by nature it's a joke,
and, you know,
a joke will get you prison in 2010.
My name's Jay Leiderman. I'm a criminal defence attorney.
I do a lot of underdog work.
I do a lot of stuff that people won't touch
because they're worried it's at too high or too clandestine
a level that men in, you know, black Escalades are going to
pull up and what have you, and that shit doesn't happen.
That... come on. Don't tell them that, though,
'cause then I miss out on all my fun.
I sent out a series of tweets that I would represent some
righteous hacktivists busted in my hood, meaning California.
So, in our general mailbox the next day there was a message
from them saying, "I'm Commander X,"
and, you know, "I am the Commander X."
Not just Commander X. "I am the Commander X,"
and, um, he thought they were looking for him
for the potential Santa Cruz DDoS.
They consider that unauthorized access.
And he thought that things were going down very quickly,
or were going to be going down very quickly for him.
I was in Mountain View, California,
and I had known that they pretty much
tracked me to Mountain View.
I was seeing the Crown Vics around,
I saw the FBI agents in the library
when I was surfing on the internet.
They literally had me surrounded by at least a dozen agents
at all times.
They must have really, really feared me at that point
to deploy a dozen agents rather than just walk up
and fucking arrest me.
Jay: I'm going back and forth with X.
You know, we had the meeting spot arranged.
At that point I'm still using, like, some sort of
commercial-based email. I'm still new.
And he was using
some encrypted form of email.
For some reason he said to me, the last email he said to me
was like, "Jay, I'll see you at 10:00 o'clock,
at the such and such coffee house."
And I said to him, "Why on earth did you say that?"
He had told me the name of the place weeks before.
I had it. I had it written down, I knew where I was going.
There's a guy in Bermuda shorts and that stupid Hawaiian shirt
that they always make FBI agents wear thinking that that's
somehow fucking stealthy, and he's staring right fucking
at me as I'm walking down the street.
So, I'm like, "Okay, so it's a game, right?"
So, I'll play the game. I go to the coffee house.
Another FBI agent comes in, sits down,
takes my fucking picture with his cellphone.
I was like, "Okay, let's see if you know about the secret
fucking passageway out of this fucking coffee house,"
because I did.
Down the fucking stairs I went, out the fucking back door.
Nadia, the fucking... FIB from hell,
she was screaming 'cause she fucking saw me
bolting down this alley and couldn't get out of traffic
in time to come after me.
Ended up coming up the fucking sidewalk with pedestrians
literally leaping out of this woman's way
as she drives up the fucking sidewalk,
and I just sat down in a bus stop.
I lit a cigarette.
And, an FBI agent, who I've come to call Cyber Crime Guy,
got out of the van, calmed Nadia The FIB down,
made her put her gun away, and just calmly sat there with me
and waited while I finished my cigarette.
He asked me my name.
And I said, "Dude, if you don't know who you're about to arrest,
you're not doing your job right."
Right then, Jay Leiderman drove by. (laughing)
Jay: I was looking for parking and I got a call from my office
that Christopher Doyon was on the phone.
Yeah, I called back the number and it was an FBI agent.
They were like, "Yeah, hold on. He wants to talk to you."
They got him an hour before I got there
at the place we had arranged to meet.
I don't know what their methods are.
Who knows if they had, like, some camera planted
in the little whatever tree,
X was, like, you know, sleeping under.
You know, looking at his computer when he's typing.
You know, I can't prove that it was on my end.
But, it sure appears that the FBI violated
attorney-client privilege by having my E-mails monitored,
and were able to pick him up
an hour before I arrived at the meeting.
Christopher: At that point,
I went through a couple of days of court hearings
to determine exactly what the fuck
they were going to do with me.
Jay: They were alleging $6,200 in damages.
They did what they could to make sure it was over $5,000.
Because that's what they were told
by the United States attorney's office.
How do I know that? Even though I don't know that?
Because that's what every United States attorney's office
tells everyone about it.
They say, "Listen. You've gotta get this
over $5,000 or this is a misdemeanor."
This is just some guy in a library, like,
clicking enter on his computer.
Come on, man. It's like, "What's this worth?"
And then, that's what ultimately happened with PayPal.
It was, you know,
"Be good for 18 months and we'll dismiss all of these."
Of course, he could've gotten 15 years.
Christopher: So, I was released on bail.
It's a mistake, tactically, on their part.
You had me. And you let me go.
And, so of course, I went back to the fucking war.
(laughing)
I'd like to state for the public record
that this press conference is being held against the advice
of my legal counsel.
X is good at giving attorneys ulcers.
Me, I'm ulcer-proof. I work fine.
This document alleges
that I am the notorious hacker-activist
known to the world as Commander X.
I am Commander X.
Well, I don't know. You try to tell him to shut up.
See how that works.
The indictment further alleges that I am in association with
the global Internet freedom movement known as Anonymous.
And I say, yes, I am immensely proud
and humbled to the core,
to be a part of the idea called Anonymous.
He does have the right to remain silent.
He chooses not to exercise it.
You know, I am a homeless guy.
And I'm scary smart.
And despite the best efforts of the city, the county,
and now the federal governments, I will not be silenced.
The FBI is now in possession of three of my computers,
two fucking cell phones,
and, God knows how many fucking external drives.
They'd taken all of my electronics.
They'd forbidden me from using electronics.
How am I gonna handle this? I can't go back to hacking.
But I want to keep fighting and keep fucking with 'em.
And it dawned on me what I was gonna do.
I'm gonna say goodbye and I'm not coming back.
And, I began my run to the Canadian border.
David: As far as I knew, I think he was like,
sort of the first fugitive out of this whole movement.
Jay: I never really believed that he was in Canada
because it seemed too obvious.
You know, it's like hiding in plain sight being in Canada.
Like, I really didn't think he had gone to Canada.
And sure as heck, he went to Canada.
If you wanna call me a terrorist,
I've got no problem with that.
Um, but I would ask you, "Who is it that's terrified?"
And if it's the bad guys that are terrified, um,
I'm really super okay with that.
Gregg: The media for some reason
loved talking to, and about, Commander X.
I, for the life of me,
never got it, but I also didn't think I had to.
Like, the things he was saying in the media,
while sometimes, they were crazy,
most of the times they were just our talking points.
David: I went to go see him up in Montreal.
Whenever you heard interviews with somebody in Anonymous,
they treated it like, you know, you were just some troll
that had run out of a cave,
and you were all pixelated and all of that.
But, like, here was a guy
who kind of looks like an older hippy guy.
And that put a face on something
that had been faceless to a lot of people.
But, I think it was in that moment too,
when he really became even more ostracized
within the subculture of Anonymous.
Because the one thing you weren't supposed to do
was to distinguish yourself, really, as an individual,
and put a face on something that's faceless.
Gregg: A lot of accusations have been levied at him about
what literally is referred to as "fame-whoring."
And they're not entirely wrong.
I mean, he obviously wanted it.
He literally named himself Commander.
You know, in his own version of the story, you know,
very much says that he came in and was, you know,
helping to make things better.
And, um...
David: There were certainly people who just felt
that Commander X didn't deserve
to have a feature in The New Yorker about him.
It was a line in the New Yorker, but I forgot who said it.
But it was like, you know, "I really got sick of Commander X
when he started comparing himself to Batman."
That is a line, that if it is said about you,
if it is written about you,
if it is something that everyone agrees with,
if it can be uttered in truth, uh, should be enough.
But, let me go further. He was an albatross.
He was an anchor. An anchor on all of our necks.
He would claim that, like, actions were being taken
that weren't being taken at levels that just,
we weren't working at, at that time.
His alias is Commander X, and in some recent interviews,
he's made some startling claims.
He says that Anonymous may very well be
the most powerful organization on Earth,
and that the group of 50,000 members worldwide,
have access to every classified database
in the U.S. Government.
People would then be like, "Why did he say that?
I mean, that just sounds stupid."
We could bring small children in here.
And, like, we could tell them,
"Oh, we have access to every classified data."
And, a five or six-year-old would suddenly work that out,
and be like, "Well, how do you know, first of all,
that you have all of them. And second of all, uh, you know,
why would you say that out loud if you really did?
Wouldn't that be a massive security breach?"
Talk a little bit more about them.
Christopher: Well, I have nothing more to say.
What do you want to know?
It was getting to people
because he was also making the message look bad.
Like, he says this that's obviously insane.
Then another Anon says something that's obviously true.
"But, they're all insane!"
Barrett: "Several weeks ago",
I began research and experimentation
on the development of a software program and kit,
that when downloaded and installed,
would allow the user to conduct true time travel,
"essentially turning their home computer into a time machine."
This is literally a fucking E-mail he wrote in 2009.
"I was taking a break from reading up on the theory
behind psionic time travel, and I was sitting under a tree..."
That's a... Fucking "sitting under a tree."
That's fucking obnoxious. "I was wondering idly,
if I would ever crack the theory of time travel."
How could you even wonder that?
"As that moment, myself from approximately 25 years
in the future came strolling down Haight Street!
The 'me' from the future, less than 10 feet away, turned,
and actually smirked at me.
"I guess my Time Travel Software Kit works!"
That's Commander X.
That guy was, was, was, was among those people, who,
when I was not able to formulate the message,
in the background or the foreground with the press,
it was him.
It was increasingly him.
And then, when I went to prison, it was very much him.
The FBI raided me on March 6th, 2012.
Raided my apartments first. Found I wasn't there.
Uh, which was by design.
Then raided my mom's house
and took about all their electronics:
computers, phones, files.
Just like they had taken files and papers from my place.
And then, six months later, after I had learned,
I had been told by the prosecutor
that they were going to be charging my mom as well.
Which is a very common practice among the FBI,
charging someone's female loved ones to get them to co-operate.
And knowing myself, that I would never co-operate with the FBI,
I made several videos laying all this out.
Hi, I'm Barrett Brown again.
This is part three of a three-part series,
I want to make to the FBI. (laughing)
Sorry, I've got a case of the giggles.
Uh...
My mom has not been involved in any of this at all.
Was not, did not know about the tip I received previous day.
Didn't know I was over there. I come over there a lot.
Uh, didn't know I brought, you know, laptops over.
You know, didn't notice. Didn't pay attention.
I also threatened to shoot anybody, any more FBI agents,
who came to my house.
They know that I'm armed.
And I come from a military family,
that I was taught to shoot by a Vietnam vet,
and by my father, a master hunter.
And I will shoot all of them and kill them.
It was pretty obvious I was gonna be dead
before I was 40 or so.
So, I wouldn't mind going out with two FBI side-arms
like a fucking Egyptian Pharaoh.
And so I was raided.
Woman: It's like, super passionate about this argument.
Agent: Get your arms in the air! (yelling)
Get on the ground! (agents yelling)
- (groaning) - (yelling)
(screaming and yelling)
Barrett: Ow, ow, ow!
Man: Ho!
Is Barrett getting fucking raided by the FBI?
Holy shit! Ho-ho!
Barrett: Few months later, I was charged, this time,
with 11 counts of aggravated identity theft.
Barrett: The charges in this case, to justify it,
involved me copying and pasting a link,
from an Anonymous IRC chat room.
Then, a month later, after that, after those charges,
I was charged once more for obstruction of justice,
just like my mom was,
for hiding laptops in her kitchen cabinet.
So, long story short, I went to prison.
Christopher: If America's supposed to be
the bastion of liberty around the world,
how do I even end up here in Mexico?
How does shit like this even happen?
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
is one of the worst punished statutes out there.
In that, the amount of time you can get,
in relation to the harm caused, is astounding.
Christopher: Yeah, okay, I'm a criminal.
What I face now is 12 years in prison.
This is hanging over his head,
as does an absconding charge now.
So now, on top of the 12, is added another seven.
So we're now talking about 19 years, and I,
in prison, do not have that long to live.
So it's a life sentence.
And for me, that's the line in the sand.
I actually first went to Toronto because of a world premiere
of a documentary called We Are Legion.
(audience laughing)
I first met X at a, um, at an Occupy Protest in Oakland.
At the height of the Occupy movement.
And at that point, he was homeless.
He was, I mean, he was clearly living on the streets.
He was attracted to the movement
because of its activist potential.
I have stood upon the mountaintop
known as Anonymous and looked down on a world
inflamed with revolution.
And I saw him again when he was homeless in Toronto.
And he was, you know,
Toronto is not an easy place to be homeless.
And, uh, you know, he wasn't doin' well.
He wasn't doin' well.
No country should be allowed to stifle dissent
to the point where people are committing suicide,
people are fleeing their own country never to return.
I mean, think about the decision I made.
I'm never going home.
Something about the city made me feel like it would be
a very awesome place for me
to take a bit of a break.
And, maybe blend in.
You know, "I'll settle here. It seems all right."
And, so I met Ian Thornton,
when he was just walking down the street.
Ian: As a recently turned storyteller, this was gold dust.
I mean, there was no master plan to do anything with it,
but viscerally,
this is the sort of thing a storyteller dreams of.
Truth being weirder than fiction,
this had to be investigated.
Christopher: Almost every person who I've ever revealed myself
to while I was on the run, all said the same thing.
"Why did you tell me?"
"Why would you do something that stupid?"
And Ian, too, asked me, "Why would you do that?"
And it's simply because I needed the help.
So this, for several years,
was the bedroom of Commander X.
And quite uncannily,
someone has been using it as a bedroom.
He slept with his laptop underneath his head.
He would wrap it in bubble wrap, particularly during the winter,
make it watertight,
and then if he were disturbed during the night,
at least his laptop was under his head.
And he'd get up every morning. He'd go to the coffee shop.
And that's where he'd start his electronic warfare,
and mischief, and intrigue.
He helped me write the books because I didn't have an agent.
I didn't have a lawyer. I didn't have a publisher.
You know, he gave me safe houses,
whenever I needed them, hotel rooms, Airbnb's.
He had a cottage out by the lake.
He knew what my goals were, which was to find asylum.
We went through some incredible experiences
where we really thought I was going to Iceland for a minute.
And then it didn't pan out.
We thought for a moment,
quite seriously, I might be going to Russia.
And that didn't pan out.
Audience: U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.!
Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody.
Christopher: And then Trump got elected.
Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business.
Donald Trump had already made himself a rabid enemy
of the Mexican people and the Mexican government.
We will build a great wall along the southern border.
(audience cheering)
And Mexico will pay for the wall.
- Believe me. - (audience cheering)
You can use my words.
We will never pay for that fucking wall.
Trump had really ratcheted up the tension
between the two countries.
And when you're looking for asylum,
this is what you're looking for.
It's a political hack.
You're essentially looking to pit two nation states
against each other for the sole purpose of creating
a tiny bubble of freedom for yourself.
So, Mexico is looking really in play here.
The big problem of course is geography, right?
I've got to go back into the United States of America.
And do I really want to go back from being a political dissident
in exile, in Canada, to being a fugitive,
both boots on the ground?
And so I produced a 30 page pdf,
and called Ian to the coffee house.
I said, "So, what do you think?"
And he's like, "You're not gonna actually do this, right?"
And I was like,
"Yeah, I think I'm gonna do it."
I said, "Well, wanna help?"
And so that was born, Operation Golden Eagle.
Golden Eagle, for those not, maybe up to speed,
is the national bird of Mexico.
It made a nice code name.
I secretly contacted Barrett Brown.
And I said, "Do you wanna come with me, dude?"
"You wanna get out?"
"When I won't go to Mexico with you, when I'm, you know,
to leave a country that I have increasingly come to despise,
it means I don't like you and don't think much
of your planning ability.
And his decision was "No."
How many times do you have to flee the country?
I just wanna do it once.
♪
Christopher: Anonymous Operation Golden Eagle
is by far the weirdest human endeavour,
probably in human history so far.
It was the most elaborate, thoughtful, Anonymous operation
that I have ever been a part of.
One hundred kilometres to Altona begins...
now.
This is south-eastern Manitoba, Canada.
We knew it was hunting season in Manitoba.
We knew if I was gonna go through woods in Manitoba,
I might get shot at.
And I did.
And one has to fuckin' wonder, how a hacker from Cambridge,
ends up in a place like this.
And out of Altona, I will break back into my own country.
And guess what.
This is our first camp in the United States of America.
Because that, folks, that's North Dakota.
I'm now, by my own choice,
a full-on fugitive.
Wanted dead or alive. How do you like them apples?
But I'm actually taking a cab right out of Pembina
straight to Grand Forks.
From Grand Forks, I'm catching a Greyhound
all the way to El Paso. (laughing)
All the way to what we call, in this operation,
the exit node.
Which is El Paso.
El Paso is the city that I'll stage my exit out of America.
If something's gonna go wrong,
it's gonna go wrong in these 15 kilometres,
where some cop jacks me up way the fuck out here,
'cause I can't explain what the fuck I'm doin' out here.
Bullet casings.
People are out here shootin'.
And if I don't make it,
if I'm killed by bandits,
or if I'm captured by United States authorities
in the last one and a half kilometres to the border,
I want you to know I did my best.
But hopefully, I make it.
♪
Now, I have no idea.
I have very little idea what's in here.
I have this laptop when he switched for a newer one,
a more lightweight one for his trip.
He wanted to be far more streamlined.
And this was the stuff that he left.
Oh, jeez. Look at this.
This is World War I stuff.
Ian: When I hugged him at the Greyhound station,
in September 2017,
I didn't think I was going to see him again.
But I will be meeting up with him in Mexico City
for Guy Fawkes Day.
Christopher: People in the Anonymous Collective
have learned to watch my Twitter very carefully.
And so, I began to tease,
"Hey, guys. Watch me on November 5th."
'Cause I didn't want to just announce I'm gonna be
at the monument ahead of time.
"I'm gonna do something really cool, guys.
Keep an eye out."
I have hundreds and hundreds
of journalists who follow my Twitter account
just for that reason.
We're on our way to the Million Mask March in Mexico City.
Just to remind the people in power that we're still here.
We're still Legion. We're still everywhere.
We never forgive. We never forget.
Crowd: No justice! No peace!
No justice! No peace!
Christopher: Since 2013, actually,
we've been doing Million Mask Marches.
It galvanizes everyone
who thinks they associate with Anonymous all in one day.
- Man: All streets! - Man 2: All streets!
Christopher: Sort of to celebrate how much we've grown
over the last year.
Meet other Anons. And that's kind of cathartic.
That's a pretty big thing for an Anon because we don't get
to meet each other very often.
There's a lot going on here in Latin America.
There's a lot of tension.
There are people in the streets of Chile,
Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela.
They are marching against their government.
And all of those protests in Latin America have, at least,
the potential of overthrowing their government.
So, if the culture is, generally speaking,
in a revolutionary mood, that's a really big sign
that today could be good and even bigger than normal.
I would not be at all, even marginally surprised,
to see 2,000, could be even bigger.
(laughing) Look at this!
You! - Ian: (laughing)
Okay, come on. Get him in the truck.
Get him in the truck quick.
We gotta get out of here. We gotta go.
We'll talk on the way. Let's go.
God, dude, look at you.
You got a, you brought a mask, right?
They took 'em off me at the airport.
They are illegal to bring 'em in?
I don't know. But I had four of 'em.
They took them from me.
Oh, we'd better have our wits about us.
That's not good news, actually. That's concerning.
Christopher: Dude, how do I keep ending up at all these icons
of revolution?
Like, I literally live, like a block away
with a rooftop view of the fort
where the entire Mexican Revolution began.
It's like a fucking shrine,
and now, completely with no input of my own,
here I am, at the monument de Revolucion.
I mean, come on, dude.
Woo-hoo!
Today is the Million Mask March, Anonymous Million Mask March,
and Anonymous has always supported Julian.
So, all over the world, Julian supporters decide to show up
on this day, on November 5th, and wear a Julian mask,
instead of Anonymous mask.
(barking)
Okay, I'm gonna talk to my people.
All right, guys, this is Commander X,
live at the Million Mask March.
You know, we're few right now.
That's true, maybe by the standards
of other Million Mask Marches,
but that can change in a heartbeat.
If you are somewhere in Mexico City right now,
and you happen to be listening to this stream,
then, you know, get your shit down here.
We're not going anywhere.
And if you can't, then just get busy and start tweeting streams,
other people's streams as well as my own.
Make it go everywhere.
Make everything go everywhere about Million Mask March.
So, let's really make ourselves known this year.
Ian: Your life is completely used to this.
Mine wasn't.
So, when we started to live our adventure,
I was doing stuff that was completely foreign to me
and was scary.
And the crescendo was when
you cut your way into Mexico.
You know, I started out with a great idea,
and then it was sort of like,
flying at a hundred miles an hour off a cliff in Juarez.
I left Juarez thinking, "This was fucked up shit.
I was screwed and I'm gonna end up living in a hut,
in the desert, in fucking Mexico,
eating cactuses for the rest of my life."
Honest to God, I thought I was completely fucked.
There was a point in time
where I gave up hope and quit even trying.
And that's when I went and got Xander.
Hey, look at you.
Three months old.
That was the moment when I was
gonna just leave this mortal sphere,
or "mortal coil" as they say.
This is Xander's first Christmas on Planet Earth.
Oh, look at the size of that fucking bone, buddy.
I decided to give it one more fight, with like, literally,
the last bit of me left.
It's a weird thing, and I mean, thank God it turned around,
I guess, right?
And I didn't cash out.
I guess, really, you kinda gotta thank my dog for that.
I mean, really, how weird is it
the world might end up getting saved by a fucking dog?
♪
Christopher: I'm here in Guanajuato now.
You know, having spent,
a couple years almost exactly, here in Mexico.
You know, I've moved around a lot.
I've met people.
I've generally tried to build a network of friends to help me.
They're the same, right? Same size?
- Woman: Mas grande? - Is this grande or this?
- Woman: No. - I like the colour too.
- I'll take that one. - Man: Okay.
Christopher: Yeah, yeah.
And thus comes into play, people like Vic.
Well, I was just walking the streets,
and then, I saw this American guy who's standing all lost.
Didn't know where to go.
I just saw him looking one way and the other.
And he saw us, and, " Hey, guys, do you speak English?"
I'm like, "Yeah."
"Hey, where can I go to a coffee shop?"
I'm like, "Okay, let me take you there."
Especially because of the streets here.
So we started walking and we started talking,
and then he kind of asks some questions to see if I kind of
knew a little bit about, well, Anonymous.
I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with them."
And, we talk a little bit more,
and he said that he was one of the founders of Anonymous.
And when I get back home, I search online.
I was, "Holy shit. It's truly him."
And I was like, "I..."
And I was like, "Damn, now I searched him online"
And I got all paranoid, right?
So, he sent me an E-mail.
And he was like,
"Oh, I slept in a dumpster. It's my birthday.
Like, it was the worst birthday of my life."
So, well, I was like, "What am I gonna do?"
"Maybe you can stay here for a couple of months
until things get, I don't know, good again."
I mean, he became a really good friend,
especially because kind of, nobody likes him.
(laughing) I like broken things.
(laughing)
♪
I gotta make sure they don't get fucked up.
I'm broke and I needed to sell some books
to make grocery money.
There it is! Yes!
All right, like a herd of fucking stampeding turtles,
we're off.
Most of my friends were not actually aware of any of this.
I was just the eccentric American
who lives in Guanajuato.
Nobody knew anything about me,
and so I felt that it was incumbent upon me
to let them know that,
"Hey, actually, I got this secret."
And, I mean,
I tried to put myself in their shoes for a moment.
And think, "Wow,
what if I found out that Vic was like friggin' Batman?"
You know, that's the kind of level of revelation this is.
You know, you got a really serious secret life here
that nobody knew about.
Christopher: My goal is to confront the Mexican government,
surrender to their authority, and make my case for asylum.
Because in this country, I have the right to do so.
As an underground, as a dissident,
I've lived amongst you.
And I've had a very normal life,
I mean, I've been so fucking happy here.
And, that normalcy is just a taste of what I hope
that I can have if the government of Mexico
will do the right thing,
they will let me stay here in this country,
in your country.
And if fate will allow me to remain in this city,
that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Brian: Is Commander X on the run for a good reason?
Um, I honestly do not know if Commander X is on the run
for any good reason.
I don't know that he represents a serious threat
to law enforcement now.
I mean, if you were to take the top 1,000 or 2,000
biggest threats to our cyber security, in the United States,
my guess is Commander X isn't anywhere near that list.
Jay: I've done several cases up in San Francisco.
And the person who was,
you know, prosecuting his case initially
is the head of the unit now.
And, it's been a couple of years,
but, I mean, the last time I talked to him,
he's like, you know, "Say 'Hey', to Mr. Doyon.
"We, you know, we'll see him at some point
and we'll get ourselves re-acquainted."
I would have no doubt that he would be a prize trophy
on some U.S. attorney's wall.
Barrett: There is so much that is inexcusable
that happens to all of us.
Starting with that incident with the 40 US raids by the FBI.
Forty homes raided by armed FBI agents over an incident
that slowed down a corporate website for a few seconds.
Gregg: There are a lot of people,
especially a lot of media, who have said that, you know,
"Those arrests really led to an end of Anonymous.
And very much a slowdown of Hack-tivism."
But, what it more did was drive it a little more underground
here in the U.S.,
and cause people to realize that they needed to actually,
you know, be anonymous a little better.
Barrett: I would remind any cognizant human being
who considers themselves a citizen
of a democracy driven by informed consent,
when someone like me is targeted,
or someone else, a whistle-blower, is targeted,
we are not the ultimate target.
The public is the ultimate target.
It wasn't to fuck with me.
It was to prevent you from being able to act as a citizenry.
Which no one in this community,
intelligence community, the DOJ, FBI,
no one considers you, and your informed consents,
to be a proper thing.
If you don't understand that that's the subject matter here,
you are not a citizen.
You're part of the problem.
You know, I've heard all the arguments
and I understand this is about freedom of information,
etcetera.
But the reality is that we're also dealing with something
that could be very dangerous.
For example, when the Russians, you know,
used cyber to come after our election systems in 2016.
Did they cross a line?
Because that was a bold attack.
We don't know the answer to that.
And, at some point, I think we need to have that dialogue.
About, what are some of the rules of the game here
when it comes to cyber?
Because if we just sit back and say "The Hell with it.
We should let everybody do their own thing."
At some point, we're going to pay a hell of a price.
Hopefully, you guys can see the stream okay.
I'll turn it back around for me.
Thank you for tuning in this morning.
Hopefully, like I said, everything will turn out okay.
I have my legal paperwork with me.
Here I am, cameras in tow, and everything,
requesting political asylum and emergency refugee status.
I've always known that this moment would come,
but I also didn't want to fuck it up.
So, I wanted to make sure that the moment was perfect.
And I believe that we're in that moment now.
You know, it's the end of a long fucking run.
Ten fucking years.
And not at all sure that I would ever make it to this moment.
I bought these boots just for the journey.
The day I left Toronto to come here to Mexico,
I bought these boots.
Those boots have travelled 10,000 kilometres.
You make the decision, then, yeah, of course,
you instantly accept the consequences.
And the consequences of this decision is I would,
most likely, never go home, except perhaps in a box.
My goal, originally, was to keep fighting and not get caught.
I'm still fighting and I'm not caught.
And I'm this close to victory.
And this time in a very permanent, final way.
You're not fuckin' gonna drag me back in chains.
End of conversation. I'm gonna get fuckin' asylum.
- (Man speaking Spanish) - Man 2: What are you here to do?
What is the purpose of your visit?
Dame una segunda.
Christopher: And now being 99 percent sure
that we got our ducks in a row, and the things are in place
that need to be in place, and I will be, I believe, shortly,
surrendering myself to the authority,
and the sanctuary,
and the safety of the Mexican government.
I'm happy to report that today,
the government of Mexico did the right thing.
Officials of the INM have accepted my petition material
for political asylum,
and have granted me emergency refugee status.
I am the first information activist in history to receive
political asylum in a foreign country for protest actions
taken under the flag of Anonymous.
One of the reasons that I stuck with this process
to the bitter end, despite my not really having to,
was my fervent hope that I will not be the last.
You know, the way he talks about it,
it's almost like you're talking with a Vietnam veteran
who's talking about his brothers in arms.
I mean, he really feels it and gets emotional.
The reality is too, is that Anonymous, and X,
all these people, like, they've left a trail online.
If you dig hard enough, you can find it.
And Commander X will be remembered
as one of these iconic figures,
divisive figures, whether you believe him or not.
Yeah, well, now that he's almost Mexican,
but not speaking Spanish, it's gonna be very hard for him.
- Hi, how are you? - Woman: I'm fine, thank you.
And you? - Oh, you have English!
Thank you -Woman: Just a little.
Oh, you have more than I have Spanish.
One burrito, one latte. - Woman: Okay.
Perfecto. Thank you so much.
It's gonna be a lot of fun, like watching him, like,
getting a job, being stable, having a routine like work.
I think it's gonna be even harder
than getting the residency. (laughing)
Oh! (laughing)
Yeah, yeah, look at this! Holy crap!
Ian: I'm always sort of concerned for him and about him,
but I sense there are better days ahead for him.
He's now a bona fide,
or he feels like a bona fide human being again.
He has a piece of paper
from a government with his picture on it.
And even for an anarchist, and a maverick,
and a rebel such as he,
that seems to make him feel somewhat whole again.
As for him and his activism there.
Who knows?
Man: Vamos a saludar a mi amigo, Pancho Villa.
Que le vaya muy bonito. Hasta Luego.
Vic: I don't know.
Like, his personality is kind of like, a big "Fuck the system."
A big "I don't wanna be a part of this."
So he's gonna find a way.
He's always gonna find a way,
like, to push the boundaries of the system.
And I think that's cool.
One last shot of this beautiful square here
and this beautiful church.
And this incredible historic square of San Miguel de Allende.
The city where I've won my freedom, here in Mexico.
Thank you, guys. I'm gonna tune out now.
Thank you guys for watching.
And I'll see you all later tonight on Anonymous Bites Back.
Look for that on Twitter.
I'll be on. Expect me.
♪