The Barrett Brown Saga

Until the moment the FBI burst through his door, it had been much like any other day for Barrett Brown.

The 31-year-old writer and activist, closely affiliated to the Anonymous hacking collective, had been joking around late at night in an internet webcam chat room with a few friends. But the conversation abruptly halted when Brown's video feed blacked out. Amid a flurry of commotion and cries of "get down," a troupe of armed agents surged into his apartment in Dallas, Texas, and handcuffed him face down on the floor.

Since that evening, on 12 September last year, Brown has been in a Texas jail awaiting a looming trial that could land him several decades behind bars. He stands accused of committing 17 offences in total, including aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft, making internet threats, and retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer. But it is no ordinary, open and shut case. It is a bizarre saga that involves a web of secrets, scandals, covert informants and some of the most widely publicised computer hacking conspiracies in recent history.

US authorities have made it clear in indictments lodged against Brown that they view him as a menace to society — an anti-government anarchist agitating for violent revolution. But supporters claim he is being subjected to heavy-handed prosecution, comparing his plight to that of Matthew Keys, the Reuters social media editor accused last week of conspiring with Anonymous, and Aaron Swartz, the prominent internet freedom activist who committed suicide in January while facing a host of controversial hacking charges. In reality, neither side is the full story.

Brown, just short of 6 feet tall, skinny with sandy brown hair, grew up in an affluent part of Dallas County, the son of a wealthy Texas real estate developer. He is a somewhat eccentric character — a college dropout firebrand with a history of drug addiction and a penchant for ranting, red wine and cigarettes.

Before he crossed paths with the FBI, Brown was a prolific writer who had contributed to publications including Vanity Fair, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and satirical news site the Onion. He had a short stint in politics as the director of communications for an atheist group called Enlighten the Vote, and he co-authored a well-received book mocking creationism, Flock of Dodos, which the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz compared to works by celebrated authors Thomas Paine and Mark Twain.

"I really just wanted to write humour and was absolutely on track to doing so until a couple events and thoughts in 2009," Brown told me in August last year, shortly before his arrest. What changed his trajectory was that he immersed himself in what he would sometimes jokingly term "this computer shit" — a strange and chaotic world of online activism.

There were a number of factors involved, each of them closely connected. It began when Brown hatched the idea for an internet thinktank he named Project PM, in 2009, dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance. Then, in 2010, WikiLeaks published thousands of classified US government documents. And at around the same time Anonymous exploded onto the world stage, attacking the Church of Scientology and defending WikiLeaks by declaring cyberwar on payment processors like Paypal and Visa, which had blocked the whistleblower website's funding sources after pressure from US politicians.

Brown saw a conflation of interests between Project PM, WikiLeaks and Anonymous. He believed WikiLeaks was doing a "tremendous service to humanity" by releasing classified government information, and he was inspired by Anonymous, which he viewed as "unprecedented" because of the way it brought people on the internet together as a force for political change.

Before long, Brown had directly affiliated himself with Anonymous, and by early 2011 he was working alongside some its most skilled hackers as a sort of de facto press officer. He had no hacking ability, but instead put his flair for writing and rhetoric to use. He would send out missives to his media contacts and do televised interviews in which he would rail against murky government cybersecurity initiatives that he said Anonymous would expose.

Some within the diffuse community of Anonymous took an instant dislike to Brown, accusing him of being a paranoid egomaniac who was seeking fame and hogging the limelight. But he rarely gave his critics a second glance because, as far as he was concerned, he had more pertinent issues to deal with — on one occasion embroiling himself in a surreal public spat with a Mexican drug cartel over a kidnapped activist.

"We have hit upon things here that really do matter — that haven't been given due consideration," he would bark in his distinctive, rapid-fire baritone southern drawl. "The battlefield is the information flow."

Brown's interviews, some aired as "exclusives" on major US TV news networks like NBC, grabbed attention. He viewed himself as engaged in what he would refer to as "information operations," almost like a military propaganda campaign. Hackers would sometimes obtain data and then pass it on to him. He would spend days and nights hunkered down in his small uptown Dallas apartment poring through troves of hacked documents, writing blog posts about US government intelligence contractors and their "misplaced power" while working to garner wider media coverage.

When servers belonging to the American security thinktank Stratfor were infiltrated by the hackers in December 2011, for instance, Brown alerted reporters across the world. He told the Times that millions of stolen emails, later published by WikiLeaks, could prove to be "the smoking gun for a number of crimes of extraordinary importance". It was mostly hyperbole, of course, but he was a skilled operator. He knew how to get headlines, especially headlines that would rile his adversaries.

By becoming a public advocate for hackers implicated in major computer crimes, however, Brown was in extremely shaky legal territory. He had developed a close relationship with an Anonymous splinter group called AntiSec — a volatile, militant outfit that had evolved out of LulzSec, another Anonymous offshoot which took credit for a series of prominent attacks on government websites and multinational corporations over a 50-day rampage in the summer of 2011.

AntiSec became highly active toward the end of 2011, hacking Stratfor and then later a Virginia-based law firm involved in defending a US marine who had played a key role in a massacre of civilians during the Iraq war. The group dumped thousands of Stratfor customers' credit card numbers online and posted a large trove of emails obtained from the law firm, collaterally exposing personal details about victims of sexual assault in the process.

It appeared that the hackers were becoming increasingly callous and equally careless, veering from the "vigilantes for good" image they liked to project of themselves.

Brown said that the credit card leak was a "public relations blunder" that had caused internal conflict between the hackers. One party had been "blindsided" by the data dump, according to Brown, and one of the team quit the group and "went dark" because of it.

"I wasn't informed of the leak or the nature of the leak," he told me at the time. "I do defend them for it and I will take responsibility for defending them. But if I had my way it would have been done differently. I have no... they don't need me, basically, so they don't ask my opinion."

But by then it was too late: Brown's relationship with AntiSec had pinned a law enforcement target on his back. A few months after the hack on Stratfor, he was raided for the first time by the FBI. He was not arrested, but some of his property, including his laptop computer, was confiscated as evidence.

On the same day, 6 March 2012, an explosive Fox News story outed a core member of both AntiSec and LulzSec as an FBI informant. "Sabu," real name Hector Monsegur, 29, had been "turned" nine months earlier by the authorities after being traced to his New York apartment.

In order to escape jail, Monsegur, a notorious loudmouth elite hacker who was considered a ringleader of the groups, had been covertly cooperating with the FBI to help build cases against, and track down, his former partners. It was an extraordinary development that shook the hacking community and made front page news internationally.

Prosecutors, likely assisted at least in part by evidence gleaned by Monsegur, have since accused Brown of aiding and abetting the transfer of the credit card numbers obtained from Statfor's servers in a case of aggravated identity theft. The hackers used the credit cards to fraudulently donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities including the Red Cross and Save the Children.

Brown, who denies all of the charges against him, is also accused of a separate fraud-related offence that carries up to 15 years imprisonment for copying and pasting a hyperlink in a chat room to a file that allegedly included within it some 5,000 Stratfor credit card details. This has caused an outcry among some activists, with secret-spilling website Cryptome — which published the same link Brown is accused of sharing — posting a statement likening the charge to "official chilling of free speech online" and criticising "over-reaching indictments."

The spiralling debacle eventually took its toll on Brown. The FBI seizure of his property and the revelation about Monsegur, whom he angrily branded a "degenerate pussy traitor," seemed pivotal.

When I spoke to him earlier in 2011 he had appeared optimistic — as if he felt he was riding the crest of an unstoppable wave. He would talk enthusiastically about "spiritual change" taking place due to revolutions sweeping the Arab world, and explain how young Anonymous hackers he knew had assisted activists in the Middle East by providing them with tools to counter government surveillance and tracking. But by spring 2012, his mindset seemed to alter, his mood darker and at times almost anguished.

"We're losing hope in the idea of trying to convince the American people to pay attention to something that matters," he lamented in April, speaking on the phone from Dallas. "To some extent we are all the enemy, all of us have failed."

Brown was frustrated that mainstream media outlets were not covering stories he felt deserved attention. He would complain that reporters would often approach him and ask about the personalities of some of the more prominent hackers, like Monsegur, but ignore the deeper issues about governments and private contractors contained in documents that had been hacked.

Complicating matters further, as a recovering heroin addict, Brown was taking Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat opiate withdrawal. This was having an impact on his health, perhaps amplified by the cyclone of drama engulfing him. One day in August, he told me he had broken down in tears. "All of it gets to be too much," he wrote in an email.

Three weeks later, Brown would be in jail. He had posted online a series of videos in which he appeared to issue threats directed at a named FBI agent, whom he accused of harassing his mother, and demanded that his previously seized property be returned. In the videos he looked frazzled, pale and on edge. He concluded with a lengthy tirade, saying he feared drug cartel "assassin squads" were out to get him and warning government officials not to come near his apartment.

"I will shoot all of them and kill them if they come," he said, looking blankly straight into the camera. "It was pretty obvious I was going to be dead before I was forty or so — so I wouldn't mind going out with two FBI sidearms like a fucking Egyptian Pharaoh."

Within hours of the video appearing, agents charged through his door and pinned him to the floor. For the FBI, it was clearly the final straw. Brown had moved from publishing long blog screeds blasting shady security firms to making violent threats. Hyperbole or not, a line had been crossed. His time was up.

When the moment finally came, Brown can't have been too surprised. He suspected that one day he was going to end up carted off to a dingy jail cell, he just didn't know exactly when or in what circumstances. He had accepted his fate fairly soon after becoming involved with Anonymous.

"I'll probably be charged or indicted," he told me during one interview in early 2012. "I just hope that a trial will bring more media attention to the issues that brought me here in the first place."

Brown is due to face two separate trials, the first of which is scheduled to begin on 3 September.

Last I heard from him he was doing all right.

"How's everything?" he wrote in short message. "I seem to be in prison."

--

This article first appeared in the Guardian.

The Sabu Revelation

To most observers he seemed unpredictable, dangerous and so highly skilled that he could evade the long arm of the law. But in an astonishing revelation, last week it emerged that Sabu, the notorious figurehead of hacking group LulzSec, had for almost nine months been working secretly as an informant for the FBI.

The identity of 28-year-old Hector Xavier Monsegur, who led a rampage against government websites and multi-national corporations, had been uncovered when he failed to mask his computer's IP address using an internet chat room on just one fateful occasion.

Soon after, FBI agents appeared at the door of his apartment on the sixth floor of a 14-story housing project in Manhattan. The agents reportedly played "good cop bad cop", convincing the infamous hacker - almost immediately, according to court documents - that his only way out was to cooperate with an international investigation into his former comrades.

Monsegur, under his Sabu guise, proceeded to continue operating aggressively online - in some cases encouraging fellow hackers to commit crimes - all while under apparent instruction of the FBI.

Some suspected he had been "turned" - but the hacker world is rife with conspiracy theories and there was no hard evidence to prove it. "Sabu was identified, apprehended by the FBI and turned to an informant," one perceptive group wrote in November last year. Yet the claim never gained substantial traction.

From the perspective of the authorities, it was a tactical masterstroke. They had managed to flip the most notorious, the most feared, and the most accomplished of the LulzSec members. Due to his close ties and wide respect among hacker collective Anonymous and other splinter groups such as AntiSec, Sabu was a goldmine to the FBI. With his help, they were able to level charges against five accused hackers based in Britain, Ireland and America.

There are concerns, however, about how far the Bureau went to pursue its goals.

On 19 June, just 12 days after Sabu had been arrested, LulzSec, the group he commanded, issued a public call to arms. "Top priority is to steal and leak any classified government information, including email spools and documentation," it wrote in a manifesto.

Sabu was quick to proudly point out the manifesto to his 30,000 Twitter followers. "The biggest, unified operation amongst hackers in history," he wrote, possibly from an FBI computer. "All factions welcome. We are one."

Two months later, on 17 August, Sabu disappeared offline for 30 days. We now know that just two days prior, on 15 August, he had secretly pleaded guilty to twelve counts of hacking in a closed hearing at Southern District court, between Manhattan Bridge and Broadway, New York. When he returned, though he reportedly helped call off some attacks, he maintained a hostile front, claiming, "I wasn't owned, arrested, hacked or any of the other rumors [sic]."

In December, he encouraged an offensive against companies manufacturing surveillance technology; he called on hackers to target "with impunity" anyone supporting legislation that would restrict internet freedoms; and played what sources close to him say was a central role in hacking intelligence and security thinktank Stratfor. The attack on Stratfor resulted in 75,000 credit card numbers being posted online, with 5.5m of the thinktank's confidential emails subsequently passed to WikiLeaks.

This trend continued almost right up until 6 March, the day he was "outed" in an exclusive published by Fox News. As recently as two weeks ago Sabu had publicly instructed hackers to "infiltrate" international crime organisation Interpol and to "expose" arms companies. "Hack their servers," he tweeted on 28 February. "Scour their user email/passes. Grab mailspoolz. Grab docs... Leak. Rinse. Repeat."

Sabu's activities while working out of FBI offices, and then later his home under 24-hour surveillance, raise significant legal and ethical questions. Most notably: by encouraging people to commit crimes in such a brazen fashion, did he cross the thin line from informant to agent provocateur?

It has been suggested that the attack on Stratfor and the subsequent dealing with WikiLeaks was allowed - perhaps encouraged - by the FBI, not only to strengthen the US government's case against the hackers, but also to assist in the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (This does not seem beyond the realms of possibility, particularly given America's well-documented desire to prosecute Assange for his role in publishing US government secrets.)

It could have been the case, of course, that Sabu on occasion went "rogue" while under FBI direction. But given that he was the most notorious hacker in the world and having his every move monitored, it is doubtful the authorities would have let him out of their sight long enough for him to have the opportunity - repeatedly and over a period of several months - to incite others to commit criminal acts. What appears more likely is that the FBI decided, like the hackers, they too could play dirty.

These are issues that will no doubt be addressed In the months ahead, as the FBI's tactics fall under scrutiny in the courts and elsewhere. The impact of the Sabu revelation, meantime, has unsurprisingly reverberated like an atomic bomb within the Anonymous community.

"I feel for the ones who worked with him and who trusted him with leaks/data," one hacker told New Statesman. "They could never have known."

This sentiment is one shared across online chat rooms frequented by Anonymous, where there are varying degrees of anger, paranoia, fear and sadness.

For many, the large void left by Sabu will provide a defining moment of sobering reality. His silent Twitter page, once a ceaseless stream of anti-establishment rage, is now nothing but a ghostly relic - a symbolic reminder that in the shadowy virtual world hackers inhabit, no one is untouchable, and everyone, no matter who they profess to be, is potentially an informant.

This article first appeared at: http://www.newstatesman.com/the-staggers/2012/03/sabu-fbi-hackers-informant

How did Anonymous hack the FBI?

In the last twelve months it has attacked government websites in Syria, declared cyber war on a brutal Mexican drug cartel, and exposed an anti-WikiLeaks "dirty tricks campaign" allegedly plotted by a prominent US security firm. But on Friday, Anonymous, a diffuse network of internet hackers, reached a new level when it intercepted and leaked a conference call between FBI agents and Scotland Yard detectives.

The astonishing feat - confirmed as genuine by the FBI - was apparently carried out after the hackers breached email accounts belonging to the authorities. In doing so, they were able to snoop on communications being exchanged between forces involved in a joint international anti-hacking operation across England, Ireland, Holland, France, Denmark, Sweden and America. In a piece of surreal real-life theatre, the tables were embarrassingly and dramatically turned. The investigators became the investigated; the watchers became the watched.

The call in question, which lasts around 16 minutes, is one of the boldest leaks ever produced by the hackers, and it may also be one of the most revelatory. A fascinating glimpse into a highly classified world, it shows the extent to which the Metropolitan police is willing to collaborate with its foreign counterparts as part of cyber-crime investigations, even if doing so means interfering with the British judicial process. At one point during the call, for instance, one of the Scotland Yard detectives tells his FBI colleagues that they secretly delayed an ongoing court case involving two UK-based suspected hackers - Jake Davis and Ryan Cleary - at America's behest.

"Following some discussion with the New York office, we're looking to try and build some time in to allow some operational matters to fulfil on your side of the water," the Scotland Yard detective is quoted as saying. "We've got the prosecution making an application in chambers, i.e. without the defence knowing, to seek a way to try and factor some time in, that won't look suspicious." He goes on: "Hey, we're here to help. We've cocked things up in the past, we know that."

The FBI has previously declined to comment on whether it would pursue extradition of Cleary or Davis, both of whom are facing a series of charges in Britain for their alleged involvement with Anonymous and its affiliated offshoot, LulzSec.

The call suggests, however, that the US could indeed be building its own case against the hackers. Davis in particular, who stands accused of being the audacious LulzSec spokesperson known online as "Topiary", would no doubt be wanted by the Americans. Over a two-month period in 2011, LulzSec perpetrated a series of high-profile attacks on the websites of US-based multi-national corporations and state agencies - including the CIA and the US senate - making it a prime target for cyber-crime investigators within the FBI.

Prior to the leaked call, it was clear that Davis's legal team already suspected US involvement on some level. This was made apparent last month, during a short hearing at Southwark Crown Court, when Gideon Cammerman, Davis's lawyer, expressed concern about outside interference, asking prosecutors that any "letters of request from a foreign jurisdiction" are presented to him when evidence is formally exchanged on 30 March, prior to Davis and Cleary entering pleas on 11 May. (A letter of request is a method used by a foreign court to seek judicial assistance, such as to obtain information or a witness statement from a specified person.)

Responding to concerns raised by Cammerman, a source within the Crown Prosecution Service said that they could not officially comment on the matter of foreign involvement until after 30 March, but stressed both prosecution and defence had a "common interest in the case being tried here [in the UK] effectively," hinting that any possible US extradition request could hinge on the outcome of the British trial.

In the meantime, the key question is whether Anonymous is sitting on more hacked information as explosive as the conference call, which, depending on its content, could have potentially massive repercussions.

To some extent, the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have now been put on the back foot. Likely rattled and aghast that their own private conversations were hacked by the very hackers they are paid to investigate, they will be apprehensive about what could come next.

Cleary's lawyer, Karen Todner, has starkly warned that "whole cases could be blown apart" as a result of future security breaches; Anonymous, as ever, has promised more revelations are yet to come.

"You think we're done? Fuck no," tweeted one of its most prominent hackers, Sabu, on Friday. "Truth is we're still in the agents (sic) mailbox right now."

This article originally appeared at: http://www.newstatesman.com/the-staggers/2012/02/hackers-fbi-davis-call

Inside LulzSec

It was a tight-knit and enigmatic group finding its feet in the febrile world of hacker collectives, where exposing and embarrassing your targets is just as important as protecting your own identity.

But leaked logs from LulzSec's private chatroom – seen, and published today, by the Guardian – provide for the first time a unique, fly-on-the-wall insight into a team of audacious young hackers whose inner workings have until now remained opaque.

LulzSec is not, despite its braggadocio, a large – or even coherent – organisation. The logs reveal how one hacker known as "Sabu", believed to be a 30-year-old security consultant, effectively controls the group of between six and eight people, keeping the others in line and warning them not to discuss what they have done with others; another, "Kayla", provides a large botnet – networks of infected computers controlled remotely – to bring down targeted websites with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks; while a third, "Topiary", manages the public image, including the LulzSec Twitter feed.

They turn out to be obsessed with their coverage in the media, especially in physical newspapers, sharing pictures of coverage they have received in the Wall Street Journal and other papers. They also engineered a misinformation campaign to make people think they are a US-government sponsored team.

They also express their enmity towards a rival called The Jester – an ex-US military hacker who usually attacks jihadist sites, but has become embroiled in a dispute with Anonymous, WikiLeaks and LulzSec over the leaked diplomatic cables and, more recently, LulzSec's attacks on US government websites, including those of the CIA and the US Senate.

In a further sign that the spotlight is beginning to engulf LulzSec, a lone-wolf hacker managed to temporarily cripple the group's website on Friday morning. Originally thought to be the work of The Jester, an activist, known as Oneiroi, later claimed responsibility for the attack but did not provide an explanation.

The group's ambitions went too far for some of its members: when the group hit an FBI-affiliated site on 3 June, two lost their nerve and quit, fearing reprisals from the US government. After revealing that the two, "recursion" and "devrandom" have quit, saying they were "not up for the heat", Sabu tells the remaining members: "You realise we smacked the FBI today. This means everyone in here must remain extremely secure."

Another member, "storm", then asks worriedly: "Sabu, did you wipe the PBS bd [board] logs?", referring to an attack by LulzSec on PBS on 29 May, when they planted a fake story that the dead rapper Tupac Shakur was alive. If traces remained there of the hackers' identities, that could lead the FBI to them.

"Yes," Sabu says. "All PBS logs are clean." Storm replies: "Then I'm game for some more." Sabu says: "We're good. We got a good team here."

Documenting a crucial five-day period in the group's early development from 31 May to 4 June, the logs – whose authenticity has been separately confirmed through comments made online by LulzSec's members – are believed to have been posted online by a former affiliate named "m_nerva". They contain detailed conversations between the group, who have in recent weeks perpetrated a series of audacious attacks on a range of high-profile targets, including Sony, the CIA, the US Senate, and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

LulzSec threatened m_nerva on Tuesday in a tweet saying "Remember this tweet, m_nerva, for I know you'll read it: your cold jail cell will be haunted with our endless laughter. Game over, child." As an explanation, they said: "They leaked logs, we owned them [took over their computer], one of them literally started crying for mercy". The leaked logs are the ones seen by the Guardian.

The conversations confirm that LulzSec has links with – but is distinct from – the notorious hacker group Anonymous. Sabu, a knowledgeable hacker, emerges as a commanding figure who issues orders to the small, tight-knit team with striking authority.

Despite directing the LulzSec operation, Sabu does not appear to engage in the group's public activity, and warns others to be careful who and how they talk outside their private chatroom. "The people on [popular hacker site] 2600 are not your friends," Sabu warns them on 2 June. "95% are there to social engineer [trick] you, to analyse how you talk. I am just reminding you. Don't go off and befriend any of them."

But the difficulty of keeping their exploits and identities secret proves difficult: Kayla is accused of giving some stolen Amazon voucher codes to someone outside the group, which could lead back to one of their hacks. "If he's talking publicly, Kayla will talk to him," Sabu comments, bluntly.

Topiary, who manages the public image of LulzSec – which centres around its popular Twitter feed, with almost 260,000 followers – also acted previously as a spokesman for Anonymous, once going head-to-head in a live video with Shirley Phelps-Roper of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church, during which he hacked into the church's website mid-interview.

His creative use of language and sharp sense of humour earns praise from his fellow hackers in the chat logs, who tell him he should "write a fucking book". On one occasion, after a successful DDoS attack brings down a targeted web server, Topiary responds in characteristic fashion to the hacker responsible, Storm: "You're like our resident sniper sitting in the crow's nest with a goddamn deck-shattering electricity blast," he writes. "Enemy ships being riddled with holes."

But while LulzSec has a jovial exterior, and proclaims that its purpose is to hack "for the lulz" (internet slang for laughs and giggles), Sabu is unremittingly serious. Domineering and at times almost parental, he frequently reminds the other hackers of the dangers of being tracked by the authorities, who the logs reveal are often hot on their heels.

During one exchange, a hacker named Neuron starts an IAmA (Q and A) session for LulzSec on the website Reddit for "funzies" and to engage with the public. This immediately raises the ire of Sabu, who puts an angry and abrupt halt to it.

"You guys started an IAmA on reddit?" Sabu asks in disbelief. "I will go to your homes and kill you. If you really started an IAmA bro, you really don't understand what we are about here. I thought all this stuff was common knowledge ... no more public apperances [sic] without us organizing it."

He adds: "If you are not familiar with these hostile environments, don't partake in it."

The logs also reveal that the group began a campaign of disinformation around LulzSec. Their goal was to convince – and confuse – internet users into believing a conspiracy theory: that LulzSec is in fact a crack team of CIA agents working to expose the insecurities of the web, headed by Adrian Lamo, the hacker who reported the alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning to the authorities.

"You guys are claiming that LulzSec is a CIA op ... that Anonymous is working to uncover LulzSec ... that Adrian Lamo is at the head of it all ... and people actually BELIEVE this shit?" writes joepie91, another member. "You just tell some bullshit story and people fill in the rest for you."

"I know, it's brilliant," replies Topiary. The attempts did pay off, with some bloggers passing comments such as: "I hypothesize that this is a government 'red team' or 'red cell' operation, aimed at building support for government intervention into internet security from both the public and private sectors."

The group monitors news reports closely, and appears to enjoy – even thrive – on the publicity its actions bring. But the logs show that the members are frustrated by the efforts of a self-professed "patriot-hacker" known as the Jester (or th3j35t3r), whose name is pejoratively referenced throughout.

The Jester is purportedly an ex-US military hacker, and was responsible for high-profile attacks on WikiLeaks prior to the release of US diplomatic cables in November. In recent weeks he has made LulzSec his principal target, describing them as "common bullies". Topiary in turn dismisses The Jester as a "pompous elitism-fuelling blogger" – but the group is always worried that The Jester or his associates are trying to track them down.

The Jester claims LulzSec are motivated by money and points to allegations that the group tried to extort money from Unveillance, a data security company. Similar accusations against LulzSec by two other groups, "Web Ninjas" and "TeaMp0isoN_". Web Ninjas say they want to see LulzSec "behind bars" for committing "insane acts ... in the name of publicity or financial gain or anti-govt agenda".

The logs do not reveal any discussion of extortion between the LulzSec inner circle; nor do they indicate any underlying political motivations for the attacks. But amid the often tense atmosphere depicted in the logs the hackers do occasionally find time to talk politics.

"One of these days we will have tanks on our homes," writes trollpoll, shortly after it emerged the US government was reclassifying hacking as a possible act of war. "Yea, no shit," responds Storm.

"Corporations should realize the internet isn't theirs," adds joepie91. "And I don't mean the physical tubes, but the actual internet ... the community, idea, concept."

"Yes, the utopia is to create a new internet," says trollpoll. "Corporation free."

On Monday 20 June, Sabu's worst fears may have been confirmed when a 19-year-old named Ryan Cleary was arrested in Wickford, Essex and later charged with a cyber attack in connection with a joint Scotland Yard and FBI probe in to a hacking group believed to be LulzSec.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson described the arrest as "very significant", though LulzSec itself was quick to claim Cleary was not a member of the group and had only allowed it to host "legitimate chatrooms" on his server.

"Clearly the UK police are so desperate to catch us that they've gone and arrested someone who is, at best, mildly associated with us," the group tweeted.

An individual named "Ryan" is occasionally referenced by the hackers in the logs, though he himself does not feature and appears to have only a loose association with the group.

Scotland Yard confirmed on Thursday that it was continuing to work with "a range of agencies" as part of an "ongoing investigation into network intrusions and distributed denial of service attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group".

In response to the leaked logs, LulzSec posted a statement on the website pastebin, claiming users named joepie91, Neuron, Storm and trollpoll were "not involved with LulzSec" and rather "just hang out with us".

They added: "Those logs are primarily from a channel called #pure-elite, which is /not/ the LulzSec core chatting channel. #pure-elite is where we gather potential backup/subcrew research and development battle fleet members – ie, we were using that channel only to recruit talent for side-operations."

The group has vowed to continue its actions undeterred. But they now face a determined pincer movement from the FBI, UK police, and other hackers – including The Jester, who has been relentless in his pursuit of them for more than a fortnight. If its members' real identities are revealed, LulzSec may vanish as quickly as it rose to prominence.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/24/inside-lulzsec-chatroom-logs-hackers

Read the full chat logs here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/24/lulzsec-irc-leak-the-full-record

Follow up coverage: New York Times, ZDNet, The Age, Yahoo, Maximum PC, Salon, Thinq, the Register, Washington Post, BGR.