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'Anonymous'
Hacker Explains Why He Fled The US
"I think the idea was planted when I saw others leaving," @AnonyOps told Wolf. "Glen Greenwald left ... There’s a brain drain of political dissidents – America’s punishment for screwing with civil liberties.
The coder — who sees his Twitter success as "hacking public dialog" — left his home, family, and friends because he began to think the government would "fake my involvement in something or try to entrap me, or hit me with a bull--- conspiracy charge."
2
March, 2013
Anonymous is
front and center these days: the amorphous hacktivist group has
been publishing internal data of U.S. banks while
prominent members are prosecuted on charges of stealing
information and sharing
links to
stolen credit card information.
Information
activist Asher
Wolf provides
a unique perspective in an
interview with a prominent American Anon,
who has more than 290,000 Twitter followers via @AnonyOps and
is living
in exile by
choice.
The
hacker left the country out of a fear of being harshly prosecuted by
the government for radical
advocacy of movements
such as WikiLeaks and
Occupy.
"I think the idea was planted when I saw others leaving," @AnonyOps told Wolf. "Glen Greenwald left ... There’s a brain drain of political dissidents – America’s punishment for screwing with civil liberties.
"With
the NSA building massive
domestic spying programs,
I can’t blame anyone for wanting to leave: America
– land of the surveilled, home of the logged."
The coder — who sees his Twitter success as "hacking public dialog" — left his home, family, and friends because he began to think the government would "fake my involvement in something or try to entrap me, or hit me with a bull--- conspiracy charge."
He
likened his situation to Internet
hero Aaron
Swartz, the RSS co-developer and Reddit cofounder who committed
suicide amid
an ambitious
prosecution after
he downloaded millions of academic papers from the
nonprofit online database J-STOR.
"I
left for some of the same reasons Aaron Swartz 'left,'"
@AnonyOps told Wolf. "But exile was my choice of escape instead.
I don’t have suicide in me and I didn’t want to end up in a jail
cell."
Swartz's
girlfriend believes that
the death of the 26-year-old — who was facing
a maximum of $4 million in
fines and more than 50 years in prison — "was caused by
exhaustion, by fear, and by uncertainty ... by a
persecution and a prosecution that
had already wound on for 2 years ... and had already drained all of
his financial resources."
Barret
Brown, the journalist and
Anon arrested for threatening
an FBI officer and sharing
a link to
stolen credit card information taken from Stratfor, faces
up to 100 years in prison.
"From
my perspective, it’s time to either leave or hide," @AnonyOps
said.
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