34856893457934

There were two main aspects of the LulzSec arrests the Feds needed to pull off for the takedown
to work properly. First, it was imperative that they capture every suspect at the exact same time, even
though they were all in different states and countries. They had to ensure that the hackers didn’t alert
anyone else about their arrests, or the entire operation would fall apart. The FBI had pulled this part
off seamlessly. But it was the second detail, which was equally important, where they had failed
dismally: It was crucial to capture each suspect on his or her laptop with the computer open. If the
hackers closed their computers and those computers were encrypted, the data inside would be locked
away forever. Even with the fastest and most advanced FBI computers, it could take more than a
thousand years to figure out the password of a properly encrypted machine.
One of the most important LulzSec targets that the FBI planned to arrest was also allegedly the
most dangerous member of the group. His name was Jeremy Hammond, and he was a political activist
and computer hacker who had been arrested more than half a dozen times for protests against both
Nazis and Republicans, for breaking into private servers around the world, and for releasing
information to WikiLeaks.
Fast-forward to the night of the LulzSec takedown. The plan was as follows: Tarbell would go to
Ireland to oversee the arrest of one of the LulzSec team’s youngest hackers, a spritely nineteen-yearold.
An FBI team in Chicago would be stationed, ready to pounce on Hammond. Senior agents in
New York would watch live video feeds of the other arrests. Given Hammond’s ties to political
advocacy groups, and his several previous arrests, there was a chance that the hideout he was in
would also be full of other activists, some with violent records. So at the last minute a higher-up at
the FBI decided to send in a fully armed SWAT team to get Hammond on his computer. It would be
the first time the FBI would use a SWAT team to arrest someone on a laptop.
It was early evening when the FBI trucks tore into the Bridgeport area of Chicago and a dozen
men in bulletproof vests with machine guns descended on the single-story brick house where
Hammond was hiding. The wooden front door flew off its hinges, and the agents stormed inside,
throwing a flashbang grenade into the kitchen on the left and then scurrying into the other rooms with
weapons drawn, screaming, “FBI! FBI! FBI!” But in the few seconds it took the SWAT team to reach
the rear of the house, where Hammond sat, the dreadlocked hacker had calmly pushed the lid of his
laptop closed, and there he sat at his desk, his hands in the air and a locked computer in front of him.
It was the equivalent of doing a massive drug bust and the suspect flushing the drugs down the toilet
before the cops made it into the bathroom.
While all the agents were upset about the laptop incident, Tarbell was particularly tormented by
it. He didn’t make mistakes. Ever.
And yet here he had.
Thankfully, there was a silver lining to the Hammond incident. Maybe it was an accident, or
possibly laziness, but for some reason Hammond had not encrypted his laptop properly, and the FBI
forensics lab was eventually able to get inside using a special brute-force technology that tries every
password imaginable until it guesses the correct one. It took the government’s supercomputer six
months to figure out that Hammond’s password was “chewy12345.” But Tarbell knew that being able
to crack the code was pure luck. Most, if not all, experienced hackers and people on the Dark Web
encrypted their laptops with much stronger passwords for this very reason.
Now as Tarbell sat there in the Pit talking to his coworkers about how they would approach this
Silk Road case, he assured his team that if they did go after the Dread Pirate Roberts, they wouldn’t