Resultados de la encuesta semi estructura aplicada a los docentes

It was late February and bitterly cold in Michigan. A blizzard had followed a false spring and covered Jennifer Emick’s front lawn in several feet of snow. Squirrels were poking in her mailbox and stealing packages in the hopes they contained cookies, but Emick didn’t consider going outside to check. Not only was there the muscle-spasming freeze, she was now deep into the investigation into Anonymous she had initiated. It had reached a new level after Laurelai had passed over logs from the HQ channel. Emick’s goal was to show the world what Anonymous really was—vindictive, corrupt, and not really anonymous at all.

Back in December of 2010, when Operation Payback had really taken off with its attacks on PayPal and MasterCard, Emick had already pulled away completely from Anonymous. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the targets—it was the cruelty she was seeing more and more throughout the network, ever since Chanology. Emick had kept friendships with a few Anons, hosted some supporters in her home, and joined a Skype group sometimes called the Treehouse. She described them as “just some friends who hung out and talked.” Chanology had spawned new Anonymous cells, or sometimes just friendship groups. Some of these groups died off, and many Chanology participants went off to college or stopped associating with Anonymous for good. There were a dedicated few, like Laurelai and Emick, who had come back for the next wave in 2010. Except Emick had become part of a minority that wanted to stop Anonymous.

Like Barrett Brown, Emick tended to see the world through theories, and her big one about Anonymous was that it had become just like Scientology: vindictive, reactionary, and a scam. When she watched the creation of the AnonOps IRC network, she believed operators were trying to revive “this old spirit of being intimidating.” Emick saw young people who wanted to be part of a group of nameless bullies because they were getting picked on at school. Suddenly, they could be part of a group that people were afraid of, she explained.

Emick was gradually creating a crusade that was part principle, part personal. She had four children, three of them teenagers, and she resented the idea that they could fall for “some idiot story” online that romanticized bullying tactics. “Kids are dumb,” she said. They weren’t going to question legalities. “They’re going to say, ‘Ok, cool.’”

She was right about the lack of legal awareness. When thousands of people joined the AnonOps chat rooms eager to help take down PayPal, most didn’t realize that using LOIC could land them in jail. Emick became indignant when she went into the chat rooms at the time and saw IRC operators telling new Anons they had nothing to fear from taking part in a digital sit-in. When Emick confronted the operators Wolfy and Owen under a pseudonym and accused them of trying to raise a personal army, they banned her from the network.

By late February, authorities in the Netherlands and Britain had arrested five people involved in Operation Payback; the FBI continued to follow up on its forty search warrants in the United States. Later, in July, the authorities would arrest sixteen suspects. The one thousand IP addresses that PayPal had given the FBI were paying off. The operators had been wrong, or possibly lying, and what irked Emick more was that they knew how to avoid arrest better than new volunteers.

Soon after learning about the HBGary attack, Emick had started spending hours in front of her computer, egged on by suspicions that the people controlling Anonymous were criminals. She was especially interested in the nickname Kayla, and when she started searching on forums, the name appeared on a popular site for aspiring hackers called DigitalGangsters.com.

Started by twenty-nine-year-old Bryce Case, known on the Internet at YTCracker (pronounced “whitey cracker”), DigitalGangsters was founded as a forum for black hat hackers, and one of its users was named Kayla, a twenty-three-year-old in Seattle. Emick did some more digging. YTCracker was a hacker himself; he’d been programming since he was four, gaining notoriety after he hacked into government and NASA websites and defaced them. He went on to develop a taste in hip-hop music, and he founded a record label and gave concerts at the hacker convention DEF Con. DigitalGangsters had originally been a production for his club nights and raves, but he turned it into a forum for his hacker friends who were moving off of AOL chat rooms and onto IRC. It was a hub for old-school hackers and a proving ground for new ones. In 2005, one of its users, a sixteen-year-old from Massachusetts, hacked into Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account and accessed her nude photos. Four years later, an eighteen-year-old hacker got the password credentials for President Obama’s official Twitter account.

nude photos. Four years later, an eighteen-year-old hacker got the password credentials for President Obama’s official Twitter account. Another hacker got photos of Hannah Montana. The forum was a place where crackers could trade ever more ambitious bragging rights, a place where a person could get in touch with spammers (also known as Internet marketers) and sell a stolen database or two.

YTCracker didn’t like Anonymous because he didn’t like the way innocent people got caught in the crossfire. It had happened to him. In March of 2011, a few hackers on his forum, including one named Xyrix, attacked his site for no reason other than that he hosted some of their enemies. To get his administrative access, they called AT&T and reported YTCracker’s phone stolen, got a new phone and SIM card, and were able to grab his Gmail password. From that they were able to hack into the Digital Gangsters forum, then deface it with a message that said it had been “hacked by Kayla, a 16-year-old girl.”

Here’s where Emick stumbled into a world of confusion. Kayla was described as a twenty-three-year-old on this site, but she had read an Encyclopedia Dramatica article saying that back in 2008, “Xyrix posed as a woman using the name ‘Kayla’ on the Partyvan network.” Xyrix was widely known to be a heavyset twenty-four-year-old man from New Jersey named Corey Barnhill. Emick thought, incorrectly, that this meant Kayla was Barnhill.

Kayla had an explanation for why everyone thought she was Xyrix: back in 2008, she had hacked his main web account and pretended to be him to get information out of a Partyvan admin; the admin then mistakenly thought that Xyrix and Kayla were the same person and added her into Xyrix’s Encyclopedia Dramatica page. The “hacked by Kayla, a 16-year-old girl” deface on YTCracker’s site may well have been Xyrix taking advantage of that misunderstanding to try to humiliate YTCracker.

Emick was going down the wrong path with Kayla, but she still felt she was onto something. She started spending more time on these forums, piecing together nicknames, fake identities, and false information, being led down new trails. While many hackers varied their nicknames, a lust for credibility compelled many more to stay with one name. In many cases, all Emick needed to do was plug a nickname into Google, search for it against forums like DG and Reddit, and then talk to a few of that person’s friends on IRC. She used note-taking software to cross-reference everything.

“You have to be anal retentive,” she later explained. Soon she had amassed gigabytes of data on her computer and had enough to put real names, even addresses, to a few Anons.

Emick felt an urgency to turn her research into something that would better Barr’s faulty approach. Beating Barr at his own game became a personal challenge. Realizing she would need help, she began talking to an online friend from her old Chanology days about forming an anti- Anonymous tag team.

Jin Soo Byun was a twenty-six-year-old security penetration tester who had once been an air force cryptologist but had retired when he was caught in an IED roadside bombing in Iraq. The accident left him with serious brain damage and memory loss, but he threw himself into the 2008 Chanology protests and built up a reputation for social engineering under the nicknames Mudsplatter and Hubris. He and Emick served as administrators on Laurelai’s website, and the pair developed a friendship via Skype, instant-message chats, and phone calls. Often they would just gossip about the hacking scene, taking pleasure in trash-talking their enemies.

Emick told Byun about her plan. Anonymous had become an almost unstoppable mob. “Someone needs to stop them before something bad happens,” she told him. He was game. For a few years, Emick and Byun had talked about starting a digital security company that used Byun’s technology expertise and Emick’s investigative skills. Now they had something to work with, what Emick was calling a “psychological operation.”

Byun reached out to friends in the cyber security industry, gathering about six people who were willing to help their research. Among them was Aaron Barr.

“Right away after helping the [FBI] investigation I wanted to understand the group even more,” he later explained. “Especially the ones that attacked us.”

They needed to act quickly. Anonymous was being riled up to attack Sony, and to make matters worse, HBGary had made them feel they were unstoppable.

They decided to call their group Backtrace Security, a name that came straight out of the 4chan-meme machine. It referred to the Jessi Slaughter incident, when /b/ users had viciously trolled a young girl who had been posting videos of herself on YouTube, leading her mustachioed father to launch a tirade into her webcam—which she then uploaded. Choice quotes such as “I know who it’s coming from! Because I backtraced it!” along with “Ya done goofed!” and the “cyber police” all became memes. Sarcastically using the word backtrace was meant to infuriate Anonymous because it was reclaiming one of their inside jokes.

Emick got everyone connected to a spreadsheet that they could all edit. A chat bar ran alongside it for discussing their work in real time. She provided a long list of nicknames from AnonOps IRC that they would dox. Everyone picked nicknames at random, then delved into finding their true identities. Sometimes someone in the group would get a tip-off that would lead him to add a new name to the list. Barr joined in the online discussions too, sharing general information about Anonymous that he had gleaned from his research. The most time- consuming task was sifting through the compiled data. Emick and the others downloaded reams of information, but picking through it took days.

Once her kids were out the door and on the school bus, Emick was rooted to her desk, sometimes for the next eighteen hours or until her concentration flagged. She skipped lunch and often got the kids to cook dinner. They ate a lot of pizza. Emick said her kids were supportive, though she didn’t let them know what she was up to most of the time. She raised them to be self-reliant. Emick was the oldest of five kids, and her father and stepmother had been alcoholics who largely left her to cook, do laundry, and pay household bills. Although her dad sometimes cooked, her stepmom rarely left the couch.

Emick worked from a seven-foot-wide custom-built desk that was tucked in a corner of her divided living room. On it were her phone, notebooks, files, lamps, a box of Christmas cards from the last holiday season, and two computers. One was a laptop that ran on Linux, the open-sourced operating system, which she used for chatting on IRC. She needed two PCs for when she was pretending to be two people in chat channels at the same time or tweeting on more than one Twitter account. Her main one was @FakeGreggHoush. When she snooped on AnonOps and tried to weed out information, eagle-eyed operators noticed her nickname and attempted to identify her IP address. Each computer worked off a proxy server that put her in two different time zones to prevent them from getting a location match.

Many names on Emick’s list only took about ten or twenty minutes to track down. Some Anons were reusing their nicknames on sites like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and Yelp, where some of them were openly discussing their locations or talking on a public IRC without hiding their IP address behind a VPN. Instead, their IP addresses were “naked,” and linked to their home addresses. In a few cases, Emick and her crew would use different names, claim to be from Anonymous, and talk to the Anons on IRC, sometimes even convincing them to do a video chat.

The investigation really took off when her old friend Laurelai fell for the intimidation tactics that Emick was using through @FakeGreggHoush. When Laurelai handed over the 245-page log of chats from the HBGary hackers’ #HQ channel, Emick couldn’t believe her luck. On top of implicating the nicknames Sabu, Kayla, Tflow, and Topiary in the HBGary attack, the log gave her something even more revealing.

A tiny snippet of the chat log showed Sabu telling the other hackers that they could still log into a backdoor account he had created on HBGary Federal’s server—something that could allow them to snoop on the company’s e-mails again if they wanted. But when he typed out the web address, he accidentally gave away the name of his private server: www.google.com/a/prvt.org.

“Oops,” he had said. “Wrong domain.” He then typed out www.google.com/a/hbgary.com. “There you go.”

But Sabu’s server address had remained in Laurelai’s log. Emick quickly highlighted it and, knowing that she was onto something, pasted it into Google. Sure enough, she came across a subdomain called ae86.prvt.org. The name ae86 was important. The subdomain linked to cardomain.com, a site for car enthusiasts, where Emick found photos and a video of a souped-up Toyota AE86. With that model number, it had to be Sabu’s car. Cross-referencing the information on the car site with the YouTube video of the AE86, she eventually found a Facebook page with the URL, facebook.com/lesmujahideen, and the name Hector Xavier Montsegur. She had slightly misspelled his last name, but this was the closest anyone had ever gotten to doxing Sabu. Emick could not get his address in the Jacob Riis housing complex, but she did figure out that he lived on New York’s Lower East Side.

She did some more research on Sabu’s online exploits. She found that, years before, he had hacked into an obscure porn site called ChickenChoker.com and, oddly, defaced it with a message about being Puerto Rican:

“Hello, i am ‘Sabu’, no one special for now…lately i’ve been seeing ALOT of Brazilian and asian defacers just come out a leash their skills, i didn’t see any Puerto Rican hacker’s, or well: ‘defacer’s’, show up, so i guess i’ll be your Puerto Rican defacer for now huh? elite…”

“It was political, but pointlessly political,” Emick later said. Sabu went to the top of her most wanted list. He was “megalomaniacal,” and “not very bright,” she added.

Eventually Emick and her team pulled together research on seventy identities and were dropping hints on Twitter and to the media that a large group of Anons would soon be exposed. When she finally wrote her stinging profile on Sabu, published on the Backtrace Security website, she concluded that he was Puerto Rican, close to thirty, and hailed from New York’s Lower East Side. He’d had a “troubled” high school career and was relatively intelligent but resentful of authority and “success of people he perceives to be less worthy than himself… After suffering humiliations a decade ago following his posting of rambling, incoherent manifestos on defaced websites, he fell into obscurity until publicly associating himself with the Anonymous protest group.” She got ready to announce his real name to the world.

Sabu, the notorious, well-connected hacker who had rooted national domains, had just been discovered by a middle-aged mom from Michigan.

By mid-March, Emick had organized her list of seventy names into a four-page PDF file she named Namshub. In it she listed Kayla as Corey “Xyrix” Barnhill, and Sabu as Hector Xavier Montsegur from New York’s Lower East Side. Anyone who was a senior Anonymous member was listed in red. She and Byun contacted a few journalists and offered to send them the list. They offered the #HQ chat logs, naturally, to Adrian Chen, the Gawker reporter known for writing skeptically about Anonymous. Since it would be difficult to corroborate the list of names and Chen didn’t want to out innocent people, he latched onto the #HQ logs. They were bursting with juicy tidbits about the inner workings of Anonymous hackers. On March 18, he published an article titled “Inside the Anonymous Secret War Room,” featuring choice quotes from the #HQ channel. It showed Sabu lambasting Laurelai, the group presumptuously congratulating one another after the resignation of Egypt’s president, and the suggestion that this was a leading group for Anonymous with Sabu as its head honcho.

Sabu, meanwhile, was seething.

“I’m going to drive over to his house and mess him up,” he told the others. Topiary and Kayla tried to calm him down. Sabu was referring to Laurelai, noting angrily that he had always suspected that “he/she/it” would betray their trust. What was worse for Sabu, and what he