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The Gaudy Wallpapers That Give Rural Russians a Taste of the Outside World

Photos by: Lucia Ganieva

Images made in the homes of the Udmurtian people, who live in villages in central Russia. Striking are the photographic wallpapers, that are in practically every house, in their living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens. In decorating the walls of their homes with photographic wallpaper, they found a way to materialise their dreams of far away and exotic places, places they will never be able to visit but in their dreams. The images show these wall decorations, that have fully become part of the interiors, and, like the dreams of the inhabitants, have no clear boundaries.

Photos by: Lucia Ganieva

Traveling between villages in the Russian republic of Udmurtia, photographer Lucia Ganieva discovered an intriguing trend. Almost every home she visited was decorated with brilliant wallpaper depicting lush nature scenes. It wasn’t because rivers were en vogue, rather the decorations represented the dreams of the wider world that the low-income villages might never get to see.

“These are villages where people are not following the trends, but create their own style,” says Ganieva. “The people who live there, most of them are not very rich, however they do have very cosy and colorful houses and I think in this way with their wallpaper they go into dreaming, because they cannot really travel to other countries. But also it’s quite expensive to go to other places in Russia.”

For Ganieva, who was raised in St. Petersburg but now lives in Amsterdam, the wallpaper brought back memories. Her own childhood home in Russia had similar wallpaper. “About 35 years ago it was a big trend in Russia, everywhere all people had this, also my parents when I was a child,” she says.

Ganieva was in the region for two weeks in the summer of 2010, at the invitation of the Rodchenko School of Arts in Moscow to tutor young photographers in the field. While on her own, she began photographing the wallpaper she came across. Dreaming Walls and Land of Birches are the two halves of the project that came out of it. Together they offer a portrait of one of those unexpected expressions of culture you’d probably never hear about if you didn’t stumble upon it yourself.

As nature scenes go, these wallpapers run the gamut. Lakes and rivers, mountain ranges and beach scenes, a cluster of magnolias or tigers crouching in the jungle — they’re about as exotic to this birch-bound part of Russia as you could imagine. Their garish colors are framed with the furniture and miscellany of the homes they decorate. The effect succeeds in pulling the viewer between two Udmurtian environments–those they occupy and those they yearn to visit.

A Cultural Display

More than just the Udmurtian equivalent of a photo of the Eiffel Tower decorating some suburbanite’s bedroom, the images are a window into the values of the region. The republic of Udmurtia is located less than a thousand miles northeast of Moscow, and is home to some 130 different ethnicities–one of the most diverse areas in Russia. The mostly rural people observe a long-standing animist tradition despite an overwhelming influence of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam in the region. This animism–characterized by a worship of nature itself, particularly the birch tree–explains the prevalence of the nature scenes pasted up on everybody’s walls.

“They don’t have icons at home, but in this way the do have their “god” inside their homes,” says Ganieva.

Most of the shooting was accomplished with the guidance of friendly villagers she met during her travels. Ganieva says people in the region are happy to invite people into their homes, and proud to show off the decorations. On several occasions the homeowners would be out working or worshipping in the woods, but since everyone pretty much knows everyone in this region her guides had access to the homes anyway. Once she was inside, it wasn’t hard to find what she was looking for.

“In some houses they have two or three–in the living room, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, but also in the municipality and in a school I took photos, actually everywhere. In some houses they were old, maybe 20 years, but in some houses quite new, maybe a few weeks.”

With the eye-catching wallpaper, it’s easy to overlook the signs of the rooms that contain them. All together the pictures aren’t just an interesting cultural artifact — it’s a whole aesthetic that’s actually quite charming and even beautiful. For Ganieva, it’s a testament to what they represent to the residents.

“It amazed me how they succeeded in creating a special place by combining their furniture, plants and flowers and the wallpapers in a subtle but almost artistic way,” she says.

All photos by Lucia Ganieva

A $335M Project to Save NYC From Climate Catastrophe

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has awarded $335 million to Bjarke Ingels’ Copenhagen and New York-based architecture firm BIG, a winner in the Rebuild by Design competition. Image: BIG team

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has awarded $335 million to Bjarke Ingels’ Copenhagen and New York-based architecture firm BIG, a winner in the Rebuild by Design competition.

Image: BIG team

BIG's plan, the Big U, proposes to buttress Manhattan against the next superstorm by creating sloping, organic landscapes near the water's edge. Image: BIG team

BIG's plan, the Big U, proposes to buttress Manhattan against the next superstorm by creating sloping, organic landscapes near the water's edge.

Image: BIG team

Elevated parks and walkways would both shield downtown Manhattan from rising tides, and create more park space for residents. Image: BIG team

Elevated parks and walkways would both shield downtown Manhattan from rising tides, and create more park space for residents.

Image: BIG team

Here, a rendering shows how elevated green space would also buffer noise from FDR Drive, making the East River Park more tranquil. Image: BIG team

Here, a rendering shows how elevated green space would also buffer noise from FDR Drive, making the East River Park more tranquil.

Image: BIG team

Instead of fighting against the water, the Big U is designed with the expectation of floods. Image: BIG team

Instead of fighting against the water, the Big U is designed with the expectation of floods.

Image: BIG team

Underneath the FDR, further south towards Chinatown, will be pavilions made available as storefronts, and public art spaces. Image: BIG team

Underneath the FDR, further south towards Chinatown, will be pavilions made available as storefronts, and public art spaces.

Image: BIG team

To determine what each neighborhood's needs are, Ingels and his team at BIG interviewed businesses and residents around the edges of the city. As a result, once finished, no two areas of the Big U will be identical. Image: BIG team

Image: BIG team

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has awarded $335 million to Bjarke Ingels’ Copenhagen and New York-based architecture firm BIG, a winner in the Rebuild by Design competition.

Image: BIG team

BIG's plan, the Big U, proposes to buttress Manhattan against the next superstorm by creating sloping, organic landscapes near the water's edge. Image: BIG team

BIG's plan, the Big U, proposes to buttress Manhattan against the next superstorm by creating sloping, organic landscapes near the water's edge.

Image: BIG team

Elevated parks and walkways would both shield downtown Manhattan from rising tides, and create more park space for residents. Image: BIG team

Elevated parks and walkways would both shield downtown Manhattan from rising tides, and create more park space for residents.

Image: BIG team

Here, a rendering shows how elevated green space would also buffer noise from FDR Drive, making the East River Park more tranquil. Image: BIG team

Here, a rendering shows how elevated green space would also buffer noise from FDR Drive, making the East River Park more tranquil.

Image: BIG team

Instead of fighting against the water, the Big U is designed with the expectation of floods. Image: BIG team

Instead of fighting against the water, the Big U is designed with the expectation of floods.

Image: BIG team

Underneath the FDR, further south towards Chinatown, will be pavilions made available as storefronts, and public art spaces. Image: BIG team

Underneath the FDR, further south towards Chinatown, will be pavilions made available as storefronts, and public art spaces.

Image: BIG team

After Hurricane Sandy wrecked the coastlines of New York City and New Jersey, and knocked the power out of lower Manhattan for a week in October 2012, the Department of Housing and Urban Development scrambled to make sure the catastrophe didn’t happen again. But they didn’t know exactly how, so they launched a competition called Rebuild by Design. Ideas came in from architects and urban planners, all of them aimed at fighting rising tides with some solution better than levees. The hope was to create a coastline intrinsically resilient against floods.

Unlike standard dikes, the plan calls for a sloped barrier that’s built into the landscape.

Bjarke Ingels’ Copenhagen and New York-based architecture firm BIG is one of six winners announced this week. The proposal is called the Big U, and it won $335 million to buttress Manhattan in preparation of the next superstorm. The other winners will focus on the Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, and New Jersey.

The Big U will stretch eight miles along Manhattan’s coastline, looping south from West 57th Street and then back up to East 42nd Street—a perimeter that hugs the area of Manhattan hit by the blackout. Much of the protection offered by the Big U will be from elevation. But unlike standard dikes, which can actually trap water, the plan calls for a more organic, sloped barrier that’s built into the landscape.

Not a War Zone

“We’re doing it in a way that will be in dialogue with all the neighborhoods along the Big U, so that what we’re doing will never be perceived as a war zone, or a piece of resilience infrastructure,” Ingels says. Instead, “when you go there in the future you will see amenities that are tailored to the neighborhoods. Undulating landscapes, street furniture, pavilions, that are part of an environmental and social program.”

To determine what those neighborhood needs are, Ingels and his team at BIG interviewed businesses and residents around the edges of the city. (“The list is almost endless,” Ingels says.) They met with various organizations—the LES Group, the Battery Conservancy, and so on—to determine how their plan could suit as many stakeholders as possible. As a result, once finished, no two areas of the Big U will be identical.

Take the East River Park: currently, if you venture east past the FDR Drive freeway, there’s a hike-and-bike path, and scattered soccer and baseball fields, overlooking the East River. It’s flat, and to get there, you cross over the highway on a small footbridge. Ingels proposes building a sloping landscape that would start at the top of the footbridge and curve down towards the water.

Ingels is also a speaker at WIRED by Design. Stanley Chow for WIRED

“Instead of a staircase or sagging ramp, people arrive at the top of a varied hill that seamlessly takes them to the water,” he says. “It’s a more three-dimensional landscape, more like Central Park, where you have different views.” Plus, it would buffer the noise from the FDR for park-goers, making it a more tranquil area. Also underneath the FDR, further south towards Chinatown, will be pavilions made available as storefronts. Hidden in their architecture will be a series of massive sliding doors that can be deployed as flood barriers in the event of a storm.

That double-duty aspect prompts Ingels to compare the Big U to the High Line, the abandoned railway that’s been converted into one of New York’s most celebrated public spaces. “What if you could make a new piece of infrastructure for resilience that comes with social side affects,” Ingels says, “so that you would never guess that the bench you are sitting on, or the landscape you’re walking on, is also what will prevent a flood?”

A Bigger Idea

Ingels proposal is part of a larger shift in thinking. Historically, there are dozens of ways urban planners have prepared cities for storms—Ingels and his team actually cataloged all of them at the outset of this project. For instance, after Hurricane Katrina, city officials built 133 miles of levees, walls, and flood gates around New Orleans. There are points where the barriers reach 54 feet in height.

In New York, where 8 million people seem to be constantly clamoring for new real estate, that kind of fortressing would make the city more cramped. Rather than barricade against the water, the Big U could create more land for New Yorkers in expectation of rising tides.

Click here for information WIRED by Design, a live magazine.

This Man Spent 42 Hours Alphabetizing Every Word in Star Wars

Photo courtesy of Tom Murphy VII

Tom Murphy VII is not crazy. He just woke up one morning with an odd idea in his head: what would a movie look and sound like if you ordered every word of dialogue alphabetically? And instead of rolling over and going back to sleep like the rest of us would, he spent the next 42 hours making it happen. But, no, “Tom 7,” as he goes by on Twitter, isn’t crazy—if he was, he wouldn’t have been able to create the brilliantly futile Star Wars video we showed you Thursday.

When we first saw the movie, all we could think was, why does this exist? And then, how long did it take to make? And perhaps most importantly, why can’t we stop watching it?

“The video is meant to be provocative in its uselessness,” Murphy says. “I don’t really know where it came from. I like to think of stuff like music or a book or Wikipedia or a movie as data—how can you take that and play around with it?”

The Hot New Frontier of Energy Research Is Human Behavior

Illustration: Getty

When it comes to discussions about energy and climate, the focus is nearly always on technology. We wonder whether coal can be cleaned and solar panels made efficient, if there might be a breakthrough in algae biofuels or carbon storage. In short, we think about about hardware.

But a traditionally overlooked area of energy innovation is experiencing a boom in research attention: human nature. Engineers and power companies are now drawing on lessons from the social sciences, trying to understand the behaviors that shape energy use and how people can be persuaded to use less energy in the first place.

The potential savings are enormous. According to a recent report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, an energy industry think tank, the U.S. could cut energy consumption by one-quarter without hurting its economy. Another analysis pegged the potential household savings offered by such simple measures as carpooling and window-sealing at 7 percent of total U.S. carbon emissions, an amount roughly equivalent to the year emissions of France.

With the United States pledging to dramatically cut fossil fuel pollution by 2030, the shift in focus is coming at an opportune time. “In the last few years, there’s definitely been a lot more interest in behavior,” said Ed Vine, an efficiency researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “In order to achieve our energy-saving goals, it can’t just be technology by itself.”

Vine has worked at Berkeley Lab, which conducts research for the U.S. Department of Energy, since the late 1970s, not long after a cardigan-clad President Jimmy Carter asked Americans to turn down their thermostats to save oil. For the next few decades, that moment would become a cultural shorthand for energy conservation based on changes in personal behavior: well-intentioned, sensible and, well, kind of boring.

Moreover, most of the people working on energy efficiency were engineers, who tended to view challenges as essentially technical. If they designed better systems, of course people would use them, because that would be sensible. Human nature isn’t always sensible, though. Witness the long struggle to make energy-efficient light bulbs mainstream, or the way most people still prefer to raise the thermostat rather than put on a sweater.

Eventually, as economists Hunt Allcott and Sendhil Mullainathan would write in Science in 2010, engineers and policy experts needed to confront “a more complex, less idealized, view” of energy choices. They’d have to engage with the social sciences, with psychology and sociology and anthropology, and use randomized trials and iterative designs.

“Engineers do innovative things, and that’s still continuing,” said cultural anthropologist Susan Mazur-Stommen, who directs the Behavior and Human Dimensions Program at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “But engineers are not great at understanding human behavior. They’d make these rational arguments about saving money or energy, and people would say, ‘That’s great!’ But people didn’t change.”

'The next step: testing some of the ideas that the social scientists are talking about.'

The influence of social scientists can be seen in the agenda from this year’s Behavior, Energy and Climate Conference. There are talks about improvements in modeling human behavior, the roles of social networks, and the methodological details of conducting ethnographies.

Many of the talks at the conference involved how to frame energy-saving programs, or analyzed the influence of promotions. Simply signing pledges, for example, seems to have long-term effects, and it’s better to emphasize a few key behaviors rather than presenting long lists of possible changes. According to Vine, strategies for encouraging people towards better behaviors—nudging them, in social science-speak—are a major research theme, as is the resonance of different messages with different demographics.

“We find that energy savings is a good selling point for certain people up to a certain point, but you need other messages for other audiences,” Vine said. Some people find environmental health, personal comfort or energy independence to be especially compelling, and energy companies are just now developing a fine-grained understanding of their market’s segmentation.

In a similar vein, Mazur-Stommen is intrigued by the various ways people respond to home energy-management apps, such as Google’s now-defunct PowerMeter. Some people ignore them, while others make the apps a part of daily life. That seems to have little to do with technical aptitude, she noted: Indeed, techies seem to lose interest once they’ve figured out how the systems work.

Mazur-Stommen also mentioned burgeoning interest in applying principles of game design to energy programs. Her own pet project is the Tamagotchi Building Project: an attempt to envision how buildings can be anthropomorphized, so that energy-efficient acts feel like gestures of affection. “People inhabit their buildings for much of each day,” said Mazur-Stommen. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could enter a more nurturing relationship with them—if we could think of them as pets?”

Mazur-Stommen’s architectural Tamagotchis are still hypothetical, but a few companies have already started taking social insights to market. The most prominent is Opower, which works from the premise that behavior changes are frequently motivated more by peer pressure than virtue or even self-interest. Opower contracts with utility companies to give personalized assessments of household energy use, which is compared to neighborhood patterns and accompanied by savings advice. So far, they’ve consistently achieved energy savings of around 2 percent.

Another company, Bidgely, has developed algorithms that pull appliance-specific energy signatures from household electricity patterns, then provide suggestions on how to cut back. According to preliminary research by Bidgley, this results in average energy savings of 6 percent. Further hinting at the market’s possibilities, Apple recently announced its entry into home energy management, and Google purchased smart-thermostat maker Nest Labs in January.

For all the interest, though, commercial applications are still in their infancy, Vine said. Much room remains to innovate and apply social science’s insights to commercial products. “That’s the next step: testing some of the ideas that the social scientists are talking about,” he said. “There’s still a long way to go.”

If it still seems hard to imagine Americans putting on their collective sweaters, though, Vine points to the experience of California during the electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001, a period which helped fuel interest in behavioral studies of energy use. Within months of being asked to reduce their energy use, Californians cut back by a whopping 7 percent. Later, when the crisis ended, energy use went back to normal—but the episode showed that change was indeed possible.

Is Anonymous Dead, or Just Preparing to Rise Again?

Photo: Jon Snyder/WIRED

The hacker collective Anonymous and its factions LulzSec and AntiSec drew widespread attention between 2008 and 2012 as they tore loudly through the internet ruthlessly hacking websites, raiding email spools, exposing corporate secrets and joining the fight of the 99 percent. The groups seemed unstoppable as they hit one target after another, more than 200 in all by the government’s count. It seemed no one was beyond their grasp.

But then all went quiet.

The group was undone in part by Hector Xavier Monsegur, an Anonymous leader and government informant known online by the nom de hack Sabu, who was arrested in 2011 and quickly turned against his cohorts, helping the government arrest several key members in 2011 and 2012. Since then, aside from a couple of recent actions by Anonymous, such as Operation Last Resort, which targeted the U.S. Sentencing Commission and MIT websites to protest the unusually harsh prosecution of internet activist Aaron Swartz, and the recent leak of documents taken from Brazil’s Foreign Ministry, Anonymous has gone silent for the most part.

Those who have followed the movement closely say Sabu’s role in the arrest of Jeremy Hammond and others has had a chilling effect on Anonymous, causing members to lay low and worry if additional informants are lurking among them. But experts also warn that the sporadic nature of Anonymous activities is inherent in its makeup, and the group can be easily reconstituted and revitalized in an instant.

“It may never come back, but I wouldn’t count on it,” says Mark Rasch a former federal cybercrimes prosecutor and now chief privacy officer at SAIC. “Don’t throw away your Guy Fawkes masks just yet.”

Anonymous, he notes, is like a flash mob: It appears suddenly, acts quickly, then disappears. As long as the movement can attract new members, the arrests of former ones will have little affect on its survival.

“It’s not like you throw them in jail and they disappear,” he says. “It’s sort of like squeezing Jell-O. It just moves somewhere else.”

But while the amorphous, incognito nature of Anonymous is its strength it’s also a weakness in that maintaining strict and constant anonymity at the individual level is difficult to do and can lead to burnout as well as mistakes that expose members to arrest.

There’s also a basic conflict between the need to maintain constant anonymity while also establishing the kind of meaningful relationships with fellow Anons that make the movement effective.

“It’s extremely hard to … interact with people closely and have to hide yourself,” says Gabriella Coleman, a McGill University anthropologist who is one of the leading experts on Anonymous and whose book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous publishes later this year.

“You’re not supposed to reveal much about yourself, but there is a kind of desire to connect and get to know each other,” she says. “Clearly if you do, you’re going to get in trouble. And if you don’t, over a period of time it gets exhausting. [Anonymous is] configured in such a way that it’s not ideal for its own social reproduction. But it’s ideal for its reinvention later.”

Photo: Bryan Derballa/WIRED

The Birth of Anonymous

The birth of Anonymous itself was sporadic and amorphous. It took form over several years, beginning around 2006 on the popular 4chan message board and in Internet Relay Chat channels. The initial group, if it could be called that, lacked the intensity and political fervor Anonymous later became known for, but drawing attention to their activities was one of their trademarks from the start.

The first Anons were in it for the lulz–simple amusement. In one of their first pranks they disrupted the virtual Habbo Hotel, an online hangout for teenagers, with a kind of denial-of-service revolt. They flooded the hotel with Afro-sporting avatars resembling “sharply dressed disco dancers” and blocked access to the hotel’s pool, according to Parmy Olson, who charted the rise of Anonymous and its splinter groups in her book We Are Anonymous .

The group’s focus turned to more serious matters in 2008 with Operation Basement Dad, in which members also got their first taste of widespread attention. The group created the @basementdad Twitter account in response to reports that Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man, had imprisoned and raped his daughter in the family’s basement for 24 years. Although the Twitter account was created just for laughs, it drew nearly half a million followers before Twitter shuttered the account.

But the group really got notice that same year when it took on the Church of Scientology after the church pressured YouTube into deleting a leaked video of an impassioned Tom Cruise extolling the church’s power and influence. Driven in part by reports that the church brainwashed members and punished those who challenged or questioned its dogma and leaders, Anonymous launched Project Chanology, a massive campaign against Scientology, beginning with DDoS attacks against its websites. The campaign, however, also moved offline with protests held outside Church of Scientology facilities and popularized two of the Anonymous memes that would become the group’s hallmarks: YouTube videos announcing their intentions using a computerized voice and the tagline “We are Anonymous; We are Legion” and the grinning Guy Fawkes mask members wore in public.

Just as Anonymous gained mainstream notice, however, it seemed to disappear. Little was heard from the group again until 2010, when Anonymous defended the cause of file-sharers with DDoS attacks aimed at the Motion Picture Association of America and others. But the move that really got the group attention was Operation: Payback (.pdf), a series of DDoS attacks against PayPal, Visa and MasterCard for their refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks after the site began publishing the leaks of Chelsea Manning.

When WikiLeaks drew attention to the DDoS attacks, interest in Anonymous grew exponentially. Participation on the public channel where members and spectators communicated jumped tenfold from 700 to 7,000 people, Coleman says.

But with the group’s new focus came conflict. The initial plan to support WikiLeaks only called for creating a mirror of the organization’s server and site. But then some in the group launched the DDoS against PayPal. This angered other members, who argued that the protocol for voting on the group’s actions had been breached, Coleman says. Some factions within the loosely affiliated collective developed a “hunger for leaking and hacking,” creating further division. The schism prompted the creation of AnonOps, a platform for organizing and managing different operations that was serviced by technical teams who provided support for the various operations.

The division in interests came into sharp relief in 2011 with the hacks of HBGary and HBGary Federal, which occurred around the same time that AnonOps was actively supporting the social revolutions of the Arab Spring. When some members, surprised by the ease with which HBGary was hacked, wanted to hack other corporations for amusement and for the purpose of exposing their poor security, it became clear that this kind of recreational hacking had to be separated from the political activism that was increasingly becoming the mark of Anonymous and AnonOps. Out of this division Lulzsec was born.

“The name Anonymous had become so synonymous with political activity, even if it was quite subversive and chaotic,” says Coleman. “[But] they started accessing data that had no political message. Lulzsec became the banner of doing it just for the laughs or for exposing bad security. Most of them were quite serious about their political causes, but also just loved to hack for the heck of it.”

Sabu’s Reign

Anonymous was a loose collective with a decentralized command and leadership that fell to whomever had the skills or personality to seize it. Hector Monsegur, an experienced hacker who never finished high school, had both.

Monsegur, as “Sabu” had been part of a faction that, among other things, supported social revolutionaries in the Middle East. But he also had a hidden history of hacking for fun and, occasionally, profit–something that recently came to light in court documents. And so in May 2011 he shifted his attention from political activism to corporate and government hacking through LulzSec, which he founded with five others and led from his apartment in a public housing complex on New York’s Lower East Side.

Over 50 days, the group targeted media outlets, government agencies and private companies in an ongoing campaign that included a headline-grabbing hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment. During this time, Monsegur was a brash and bold leader who boasted loudly about LulzSec’s activities over Twitter.

“For many people he was a very symbolic figure. Although Anonymous claimed to have no leaders, it definitely had celebrities. Sabu was probably one of the biggest,” says Olson.

Offline, Monsegur was an unemployed, 28-year-old who bore the difficult responsibility of tenderly caring for two little girls, his cousins, who were left on their own after their mother was jailed.

But online, as Sabu, he was a temperamental man who was charismatic and friendly but was also feared as much as he was loved, Olson says. He regularly used his influence to his advantage.

“People loved giving vulnerability information [about web sites and servers] to LulzSec because they might get a pat on the head from Sabu,” Olson says.

The LulzSec logo.

But Sabu’s reign didn’t last long before it unraveled.

Aided by hackers who “doxxed” him by leaking information about his identity onlinethe feds came knocking on his door on June 7, 2011 asking questions. Monsieur quickly admitted his guilt, although he hadn’t yet been charged with any crimes, and even confessed to criminal activity the feds didn’t know about. According to court documents, he flipped immediately and was already helping investigators target his cohorts the next day.

Rumor spread that he’d been arrested–fueled in part by his online disappearance for 24 hours after the feds seized his computers and by the previous doxxing. But despite this, many in the community were in denial and resumed their communication with him once he re-appeared.

“The people in Anonymous are not hackers,” Olson says. “They’re just young people getting seeped up in this with no real understanding of hacker culture and the fact that informants are a huge part of hacker culture.”

This, she says, was their undoing. “I think that part of the reason it fell so quickly is that it was built on this superficial foundation of believing in this cause, but not really understanding the risks and consequences the way perhaps people who had spent years in hacker culture and hacker communities would have understood.”

Not long after Sabu returned online, he disbanded LulzSec to form AntiSec, announcing in a tweet sent on June 25, 2011: “We are working under the #antisec flag now gentlemen. LulzSec will live on forever as a successful operation. Much love to all.”

Monsegur, fully in charge of this new group whose work was now being directed by the feds, led AntiSec in a series of new hacks, including the December 2011 breach of the private intelligence firm Stratfor that resulted in thousands of the company’s emails being leaked online.

The hacking campaign continued for nine months until Fox News publicly exposed Monsegur in March 2012 in a story identifying him as an informant. Confirmation of what many had suspected for a long time hit Anonymous hard.

“That’s when people stopped going on the IRC channel. It was like tumbleweeds [in there],” Olson says. “People just became paranoid. They realized they couldn’t really trust anyone in Anonymous anymore.”

Three months after becoming an informant, when speculation about his work with the feds was still just that, Monsegur had talked about the possibility of being arrested in a phone call with Olson. He told her the feds “have no way to prove where I am or what I’ve done” and said he had no fear of going to jail should he ever be caught.

“If I get caught, I will plead guilty to the charges,” she says he told her. “All these kids want to play hacker, but when they get a visit from the police they all turn over. They would love to get a confession out of me. The truth is that the only way is if they use my kids against me. If they say they’ll take my kids away. I will not assist them. I will go down as a martyr, not a snitch.”

Notably, he also told her, “the FBI gives [informants] immunity to hack. You don’t understand [the] corruption.”

The reference is significant, because the FBI has been accused of using Monsegur to direct Jeremy Hammond and others to hack multiple victims. Hammond, who was convicted of hacking Stratfor, has said Sabu directed him to hack the company and provided a list of other targets.

“It is kind of funny that here they are sentencing me for hacking Stratfor,” Hammond told The Guardian last year, “but at the same time as I was doing that an FBI informant was suggesting to me foreign targets to hit.”

While Hammond was sentenced to ten years, Monsegur was sentenced on May 27 to time served – just seven months – as a reward for the assistance he gave investigators.

Authorities say he helped them nab at least eight of his former colleagues. Hammond’s lengthy sentence, no doubt, is intended to send a message to other hackers that their sentence will be severe if caught. Sabu’s sentence sends a different message, former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch says.

“Once you’re caught, you want to be the first one to testify” against your colleagues, he says. Because once prosecutors have secured the cooperation of one suspect, he says, they won’t be so eager to make deals with others. Sabu’s sentence also suggests that hackers who can provide extensive technical assistance to authorities in the way that Monsegur did stand a greater chance of leniency than run-of-the-mill suspects who have no special skills.

“If you’re caught in a scheme that is sophisticated and difficult for the government to understand, you have a better chance of mitigating your sentence [by providing expertise] than if you’re the average mope getting caught in some kind of criminal enterprise,” he says.

Whatever message the sentences of Hammond and Monsegur send, it remains unclear what long-term effect they will have on Anonymous.

Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka “Sabu,” leaves federal court after having been granted a sentence of time served. Photo: Andrew Gombert/EPA/Corbis

Where Anonymous Goes From Here

Olson says that Monsegur’s betrayal scarred Anonymous to some degree and has had an effect on it. But she says the movement was also a victim of its own success and notoriety.

“The catch-22 of Anonymous is that for it to be successful, it has to get a lot of attention,” she says. But it also “becomes so much easier to track them when people try to get notoriety.”

She suspects the collective is having trouble finding its footing without new leaders to move it forward. She believes most people are reluctant to expose themselves to the same risks Monsegur did. “Nobody else really had the balls to try, and perhaps rightly so, to fill that leadership vacuum because they could see very plainly that there are huge risks to trying to be a leader, even a symbolic leader,” she says.

The problem lies in part to the fact that the qualities needed to lead Anonymous are antithetical to maintaining anonymity. The job requires someone who is charismatic to inspire people to support a cause, but who also has the skill and discipline to maintain anonymity. It is difficult to master both of these equally.

But Olson cautions against writing off Anonymous. The collective has ebbed and flowed over the years, taking long breaks between attacks.

“I wouldn’t write off their existence completely just because they’ve gone quiet,” she says. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

Don’t be too quick to write off Monsegur, either, she says. He may well be back. Hacking, Olson says, is a game where people switch sides with some regularity. It’s hard to see Anons welcoming Sabu back, but Olson isn’t ruling out the possibility that he’ll be back in the game in some way.

“The internet has a short memory,” she says, “so a couple of years from now, he can reinvent himself. Who knows what he’ll be doing?”

Three Short Reviews of Three Short Reads

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Six days in to my month of reading only single-serving content like Kindle Singles, I feel like I’m behind. I’m only through three titles, which kind of defeats the purpose of an encapsulated experience every time you sit down to read. Despite it being Summer Reading Season, I still have a job; and this week was particularly busy, what with all the Apple news, visiting asteroids, the revamped Obamacare website and other excitement.

OK, enough apologies; here’s what I got into:

The Rover , by Drew Magary

I love Magary’s work, especially his stuff on Deadspin, and I was interested to see if he could bring the casual tone of his online work to fiction. He did! This is a neat story about a bored older man and his emotional attachment to a space vehicle that lands in his yard. It’s only 23 pages long—about perfect for a bedtime story—with a narrative arc a lot like an 80s movie: improbable event occurs –> protagonist has an adventure stemming from that event –> minor twist ending.

No Exit , by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Yes, this story ran in WIRED and you can read it for free. But hold that click! The Kindle Single version is an extended cut, significantly longer than what you’ll find online or in the magazine—and it’s absolutely worth two bucks. Hell, I work here, I get the magazine for free, and I shelled out. No Exit is an amazing reality check on the popular mythology of Silicon Valley. You think it’s all piles of easy money and baby billionaires? Well, OK, there is a lot of that, but Lewis-Kraus’ beautifully written piece offers a rare glimpse of the grind that goes with the gold rush. At 48 pages, this one took me two sittings, but it’s just about right for a day at the beach.

Baghdad Country Club , by Joshuah Bearman

This came out in 2011, and I heard so much about it at the time. Then I read it, and, honestly, I shrugged. BCC tells the story of an entrepreneur who opens a bar in Baghdad’s Green Zone, and all of the acrobatics that feat required. The details are fascinating. But the story trips over those details a lot, and the arc doesn’t flow. It’s almost like you can feel the writer (who also wrote the WIRED story that became Argo ) struggling to make use of his amazing reporting. And the reporting is amazing. One fun note: I bought the 42-page piece off The Atavist and sent it to my Kindle. Then, when I sat down to read, I noticed it started at Chapter 2… See, the story begins with a video, which my Kindle couldn’t play. So read this one on your iPad, or watch the video on your laptop like I did. Then crawl into bed. (You can opt for a text-only version, but the video is pretty cool.)