No one but Hector Xavier Monsegur can know why or when he became Sabu,
joining the strange and chaotic Internet collective known as Anonymous.
But we know the moment he gave Sabu up. On June 7, 2011, federal agents
came to his apartment on New York’s Lower East Side and threatened the
28-year-old with an array of charges that could add up to 124 years in
prison. So Hector Monsegur, who as Sabu had become a mentor and icon to
fellow members of Anonymous, surrendered his online identity to a new,
equally faceless and secretive master: the FBI.
For the next eight months, Sabu continued to rage across the Internet
as a core member of AntiSec, a blackhat hacking group within Anonymous.
He helped to deface government and corporate websites and even helped
bring down the private intelligence firm Stratfor—all, apparently, with
the FBI’s blessing as it quietly gathered logs on Monsegur’s fellow
“anons.” Law enforcement officials later told Fox News that Monsegur was
working out of the FBI offices “almost daily” in the weeks after he
pleaded guilty in August and then from his own home thereafter, with an
agent watching his activity 24 hours a day. Sometimes agents were even
posing as Sabu directly. On Christmas, just after the Stratfor hack,
Sabu and I happened to be logged into the same channel on IRC, the
chatting protocol that serves as the medium through which most Anonymous
members planned large-scale operations. I asked the AntiSec members if
they were worried about a law enforcement response to Stratfor. Sabu
shot back:
we’re used to that heat
we survived the first rounds of the raids
He was referring to a series of arrests that past summer that had
scooped up, worldwide, at least 80 alleged participants in the group. At
the time, it was hard to fault his reasoning, since those arrests
seemed to have done nothing to slow the group’s terrifying onslaught in
2011. It was a year in which Anonymous burst into the geopolitical
consciousness of the world, assisting Arab Spring activists and
attacking the security industry, bedeviling law enforcement and
intelligence agencies, carrying out countless hacks against Sony and
other large corporations. As protest movements spread to the West,
Anonymous provided them with crucial logistics (not to mention a great
deal of media attention), from the BART protests in San Francisco to the
Occupy actions across the US and overseas. Anonymous had figured out
how to infiltrate anything, how to mobilize not just machines but
physical bodies, all around the globe...
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