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If Truth Be Told
The Politics of Public Ethnography
By Didier Fassin Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6977-6
CHAPTER 1
Gopher, Translator, and Trickster
The Ethnographer and the Media
GABRIELLA COLEMAN
Three days after a pair of brothers stormed the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo and brutally gunned down scores of journalists during the magazine's morning meeting in Paris, the countercultural digital activists known as Anonymous launched #OpCharlieHebdo. In a video announcing this political maneuver, a Flemish branch of Anonymous declared, "It's obvious that some people don't want, in a free world, this sacrosanct right to express in any way one's opinions. Anonymous has always fought for the freedom of speech, and will never let this right be smirched by obscurantism and mysticism. Charlie Hebdo, historical figure of satirical journalism has been targeted." The effect was pretty much immediate. A bevy of journalistic outfits — stretching from the most mainstream of establishments to the most boutique of niche technological blogs — churned out stories about the intervention, deeming it unusual for at least one reason: Anonymous, so often taking a confrontational stance toward Western governments, this time appeared to be bolstering those very governments' interests.
As became customary following any large or distinctive Anonymous intervention, about half a dozen media requests came my way, in this case, regarding the retaliatory operation. By this time I had found the vast majority of these queries to be predictable: equipped with basic information about Anonymous, journalists would ask probing questions about the specific intervention in question, presumably with the aim of filling in the gaps of their knowledge (and also acquiring a tasty sound bite). This time, however, one journalist deviated from this norm — and not in a laudable fashion. On January 11, 2015, a reporter for one of the major three-lettered U.S. national networks contacted me by email, and it wasn't long before we connected on the phone. Like so many other journalists laboring under a looming deadline, he cut right to the chase, asking me to connect him to a participant in the collective willing to speak that evening on the national news telecast.
The request, while difficult to fulfill, was not unusual; by that time I had introduced Anonymous participants to journalists at least a couple of dozen times. What was exceptional was his stubborn insistence on the particular Anonymous participant he wanted to interview: "the Julian Assange figure of Anonymous." Stunned by this ill-informed solicitation (the vast majority of journalists had studied enough to learn that Anonymous was premised on an ideal of leaderlessness or were at least more aware of the gaps in their knowledge), I first had to muzzle my laughter before transitioning into a role I had once occupied fairly often, that of a cultural translator and ambassador. I offered a version of the following explanation: because Anonymous eschews leadership there is no "Julian Assange figure." I hammered deeper into this point, drawing from years of anthropological research. Participants are so quick to ostracize leaders and fame seekers, I continued, that it has prevented the development of an official leader, and even the emergence of a spokesperson is rare. While many Anons respect Assange and have supported him and his causes, there is no equivalent Assange figure in Anonymous. I finished by telling him that while Anons have appeared on TV before, it took some measure of work to earn their trust, so it was not likely that I or he could convince someone to agree to an interview in a single day.
Seemingly undeterred and unconvinced by my explanations, he became more aggressive in his pursuit by attempting to bribe me, suggesting that if I helped him a producer might later seek me out to publicly comment on matters related to hacking. Now annoyed, I opted to offer help but only in a roundabout manner, as a sort of test. Would he, I wondered, put in the effort to seek out Anonymous for himself, based only on counsel? I offered to facilitate his contact with the operatives by teaching him how to get on their chat channel. I sent an email with basic instructions for how to join their communication infrastructure, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), attached to a promise of further help once he was there. Unsurprisingly he failed the test. I never saw him on the channels nor heard back from him.
The wake of this exchange provided an ideal moment to reflect on my many years of interactions with journalists, an incidental byproduct of my multiyear anthropological study of Anonymous, which culminated in a popular ethnography on the topic published by a trade press. This case was striking for being anomalous; after my brief exchange with the reporter, I recall thinking that he was not only the single most clueless, uninformed journalist I had ever spoken to but, thankfully, had become the exception. That day it dawned on me that just as my view of Anonymous changed after being in the trenches with them, so too did my views on journalists shift after clocking so many hours with them. Fieldwork, which at first centered almost exclusively on interactions with activists, very quickly came to involve a near constant engagement with the journalistic field: over a roughly five-year period I was interviewed by around three hundred journalists, wrote numerous op-ed pieces, and eventually contributed extensive background information for a series of investigative articles, documentaries, and a web-based television documentary series. My book, while rooted foremost in an ethnographic sensibility, also adopted several journalistic conventions. Initially skeptical of the general enterprise of journalism, especially its most commercial or mainstream incarnations, I had grown not only to respect many journalists but had also become deeply entangled with the fourth estate.
In what follows I recount the distinct roles I adopted during my interactions with journalists, most often the roles of a translator and gopher, eventually a prolific broker, and on occasion a trickster. I occupied these positions for multiple reasons that shifted over time. Initially I traded my access to media outlets for the promise of publicity to the attention-hungry Anonymous activists I was studying. Eventually the task of shaping popular understandings of Anonymous via established media channels became more interesting as a political end in itself. And ultimately, as I wrote my book, I saw journalism as indispensable for publicizing the plight of Anonymous activists, especially hackers, rounded up by the state. I conclude by reflecting on why the contemporary moment is especially ideal for experts to engage with journalistic publics.
My Ethnographer's Magic
My involvement with journalism was an entirely coincidental byproduct of my primary field of academic study. Droves of journalists sought me out not because I was a technology pundit or public figure but because I was one of the few experts researching Anonymous, a confusing and tricky political phenomenon to describe, at least in any straightforward or compact fashion. At this point, after years of activity, there are a few definitive things that can be said about Anonymous. While increasingly recognizable as advocates for social justice and stewards of disruption and direct action, employing a recognizable roster of tools and tactics (including freezing websites, doxing, hacking, leaking, publishing coordinated Twitter alerts) across various "ops," Anonymous is nevertheless whimsical, making it impossible to predict its next steps. Because participants refuse to establish an ideological or political common denominator, Anonymous is not best thought of as a traditional social movement, for no matter how internally diverse such movements always are, for instance exhibiting radical and moderate wings and a diversity of tactics, they still tend to be oriented toward a single issue or cause, such as fighting for the environment or civil rights. Anonymous is far more plastic. It functions as an improper name — Marco Deseriis's term — which is an alias anyone can deploy for whatever purpose. Anonymous, in specific, combines a general idea — that anyone can be anonymous — along with a set of tactics and iconography around which different groups around the globe have coalesced to take action. In the past five years the majority of Anonymous interventions have been geared toward concrete political and progressive causes, for example, their role in supporting the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring movements; their commitment to domestic social justice issues, seen in engagements against rape culture and police brutality; and their exposure of the shadowy world of intelligence and security firms. But when journalists first reached out to me in 2010 Anonymous was far more baffling and I happened to be one of the few people who had spent time with participants and publicly ventured any conclusions on the subject. This only intensified as my perceptions and interpretations of Anonymous evolved in step with its ability to generate increasingly prominent and newsworthy activities.
My research on Anonymous commenced in January 2008. It was the month when participants first targeted the Church of Scientology, an intervention that began as a fierce pranking endeavor but then morphed, quite surprisingly, into a long-standing protest campaign named Project Chanology. Prior to this campaign the name Anonymous had been used almost exclusively for sometimes devilish and gruesome attacks, sometimes playful and jocular hijinks. Between then and 2010 my research on Anonymous could be described as a part-time curiosity rather than a full-blown ethnographic study. After a dramatic surge of politically motivated direct action activity among Anons, in December 2010 I switched to full-time fieldwork research.
The blizzard of Anonymous activity began soon after WikiLeaks published a cache of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, a move that prompted the U.S. government to target the WikiLeaks founder Assange and pressure companies like Amazon and PayPal to halt the processing of all services to his organization. The AnonOps node of Anonymous, angered by this act of censorship, rallied in support of WikiLeaks. In keeping with an Anonymous tradition, in early December 2010 they launched a multiday distributed denial of service (DDoS) campaign against every company they identified as having caved to U.S. government pressure. (A DDoS attack momentarily disables access to a website by clogging the targeted website with more data requests than it can handle.)
After this op Anonymous never let up, demonstrating an incredible run of activism between 2011 and 2013. For instance, it dramatically and assiduously intervened in each of the 2011 revolts that so intrigued the public: in solidarity with the Tunisian people, Anonymous hacked their government's websites; the Spanish indignados beamed Anonymous's signature icon, the Guy Fawkes mask, on the façade of a building in the Plaza del Sol; and after playing a crucial role by disseminating the earliest calls to occupy Wall Street, Anonymous further developed its propaganda techniques in service to Occupy as the movement attracted more and more people to join its encampments.
Back in December 2010, in the midst of its initial surge of direct action activity, I installed myself in nearly a dozen of the Anonymous chat channels that then proliferated on IRC and rarely logged off any of them in the next two years. In contrast to their knowledge of WikiLeaks — a constituted entity with clear objectives — journalists were understandably perplexed by Anonymous's origins, motives, and organizational style. Even as I began to tease out its cultural and ethical logics, throughout most of the winter of 2011 I found Anonymous deeply bewildering; while it was clear that many participants were galvanized to act in order to expose corruption and remedy injustices, many of their activities seemed to stem rather directly from a rowdy and often offensive culture of humor. Furthermore, even as I gained access to many Anons and witnessed some operations, I also became increasingly aware of an inaccessible underworld where sometimes illegal activity was hatched. While I began to recognize that Anonymous had settled into a few predictable patterns, it also was clear that mutability and dynamism are core features of its social metabolism and development; it was difficult to forecast when or why Anonymous would strike, when a new node would appear, whether a campaign would be successful, and how Anonymous might change direction or tactics during the course of an operation.
With the exception of technology journalists capable of finding Anonymous for themselves, the great majority of reporters in 2010 and much of 2011 knew so little about the collective — and so little about the basic functioning of the Internet technologies it relied on — that they imagined the participants were entirely beyond reach, as if they were deliberately hiding in the digital equivalent of a black hole. Almost immediately I dispelled the myth of Anonymous's incognito status and did so by acting as a gopher. It was really only a question of logging on to their chat services, I explained time and again. I taught the willing, a couple dozen journalists, how to use Internet Relay Chat — a text-based communication platform invented in 1988 and popular among hackers of all stripes for communication — so they too could spend hours of their day chatting to participants directly. (Generally those who took my advice were far too busy with daily grind of deadlines to spend as much time as I did on the IRC channels.)
Although far less common today, the idea that Anonymous is out of reach still occasionally crops up among non-technologically oriented journalists covering it for the first time. Take, for example, a July 2015 request from a Washington-based reporter specializing in Canada-U.S. relations. After Anonymous leaked classified Canadian government documents that revealed the existence of twenty-five spying stations located around the world, he sent me an upbeat electronic missive: "You might imagine how I might find some of this Anonymous stuff about CSE [Canadian Security Establishment] spying in the U.S. incredibly intriguing. If only Anonymous had a 1–800 media hotline!" I replied that they do have something similar to a hotline, but it is in the form of a series of chat channels devoted to internal organization as well as media inquiries and communications. I passed along the information he would need to seek out participants.
This "hotline" — the variegated network of Anonymous IRC servers and channels — acted as my home base throughout these years of intense fieldwork. One of the most bustling IRC servers at the time, hosted by AnonOps, even maintained a channel named #reporter, dedicated to communications with the press. As I did my research I witnessed journalists conduct dozens of interviews with participants, especially those reporters willing to do so in public. (Most were unwilling to conduct public group interviews for fear of being scooped.) Some of these early journalists had found their own way onto IRC. But it was and remains gratifying to teach the ones who reach out for technical assistance so they can interact with Anonymous themselves. (I also enjoyed watching them discover that portions of the so-called dark web are far more accessible and less creepy and sinister than many had initially imagined.).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from If Truth Be Told by Didier Fassin. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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