Hector Xavier Monsegur, the charismatic former Anonymous hacker who engaged in defiant political acts around the world from his Lower East Side apartment before becoming an FBI informant, has spoken out in his own defence, insisting that he was not responsible for the arrests of several of his “hacktivist” peers.
In an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS News, Monsegur, who operated under the internet handle “Sabu”, responded to his many detractors in the hacking underworld, who see him as a “rat” or super-snitch. He said that his three-year turn as an informant for federal agents did not entail fingering anybody or handing over names of his Anonymous fellows.
“It wasn’t a situation where I identified anybody. I didn’t point my fingers at anybody. My cooperation entailed logging and providing intelligence. It didn’t mean ‘Can you please tell me the identity of all your mates,’” he said.
Monsegur was sentenced in May to time served – equivalent to seven months – despite the fact that federal prosecutors estimated he had notched up more than $50m in damages in his Anonymous hacks. The judge thanked him for his “extraordinary cooperation”.
That cooperation involved helping the FBI nail eight prominent Anonymous and LulzSec hackers including Jeremy Hammond, the then No 1 most-wanted cybercriminal in the world on the FBI’s wish list, who is now serving a 10-year sentence for his role in breaching the private intelligence firm Stratfor.
Sealed court documents obtained by Motherboard have revealed that Monsegur was directing Hammond and other hackers to attack Brazilian government and corporate websites at a time when he was secretly working for the FBI, raising questions about the extent of his activities globally on behalf of the bureau.
Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist at McGill University who is the leading academic expert on Anonymous, said that she was struck by Monsegur’s failure to offer an apology to his former peers in the hacking world. “His defiance is what made him such a valuable asset to the FBI, but it is this same defiant attitude – his refusal to apologize or accept even an iota of responsibility –that has made him a pariah in the wider Anonymous community,” Coleman told the Guardian.
Coleman’s new book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, which gives the most detailed version yet of the Anonymous story, was based in no small part on extensive interviews with Monsegur – at a time when she was unaware that he was an FBI informant. In a recent blog post she remembered his “defiant and revolutionary attitude. His calls for people to rise up were routinely directed towards his ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.”
Yet his substantial impact on the Anonymous underworld was made from a tiny apartment in the impoverished projects of the Lower East Side, where his self-taught facility with computers led him into hackingto help his grandmother pay her bills by stealing credit card information. He was at the forefront of audacious raids such as the posting of an Anonymous open letter on the website of the Tunisian prime minister during the 2011 uprisings, hacks into major companies such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal in protest against their refusal to take donations to WikiLeaks, and a breach of the FBI subsidiary Infragard, which is what finally led federal agents to his door.
Of the Tunisian hack, he told CBS News: “It was amazing. I saw finally I was able to do something that contributed to society regardless that I was at home in the Lower East Side in the projects behind a computer.”
Dressed in a brown check shirt and brown trousers, with his beard and hair closely cropped, Monsegur looked relaxed and confident during the interview. Asked whether he had feared getting caught when he was at the height of his Anonymous activities, he replied: “Not necessarily. After you’ve been hacking for so long, you reach a point of no return. Regardless of you fearing they are going to get you one day, it’s too late.”
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