THREE
Operation Vatican
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“For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.”
~~ John 3:20
Wednesday - December 5, 2012 approx. 4:15 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
Of all the Heads of State in the world, the Pope is probably the loneliest throne of power. Not only are you the spiritual head of an anachronistic celibate male only and dying religion, but the absolute monarch of a kingdom smaller than most pro golf courses. In that insane world of hyper-isolation and power, the Pope's butler has always held a special place. Being one of a handful of individuals who can enter and leave the Papal presence with impunity, and holding the highest security clearances possible - almost all the Pope's butlers were deeply honored and highly titled. But more than that, almost all of them ended up becoming the Pope's closest confidante and in many cases the closest thing to a best friend a man in that position can have.
This is why it came as a double shock to the world when on May 25, 2012 Pope Benedict's butler Paolo Gabriele was arrested for the largest leak of classified and secret Vatican documents in the history of Christianity. When he was arrested he had yet more stolen documents on his person. He became the first person in a very long time to actually be housed in the Vatican jail, a single cell normally used by the Swiss Guard for storage. The documents that Paolo Gabriele was charged with taking were removed directly from the Pope's office and living quarters, photocopied within the palace - and then leaked to Italian media. These documents showed how contracts were awarded to favored companies and individuals and also highlight allegations of internal power struggles with the Vatican’s bank known as the Institute for Religious Works. Paolo Gabriele faced 30 years imprisoned in a single cell in a country so tiny he would be the only prisoner, making his internment essentially solitary confinement - a gross violation of his international human rights.
On October 6, 2012 Paolo Gabriele was found to be guilty of theft of secret documents, and was sentenced to 18 months and ordered to pay legal trial and investigation expenses. The ancient jail cell he was originally housed in was traded out for a more modern one built specifically to house Gabriele. Since there are no other prisoners within Vatican City State this meant that Paolo Gabriele would for all intents and purposes serve his entire sentence in solitary confinement in direct violation of his rights under the UN Human Rights Accord. But make no mistake, Paolo Gabriele was no criminal. He was a whistleblower and a hero cut from the same cloth as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning. His disclosure as huge for the Vatican as Snowden's or Manning's were for the USA. And not only did this man betray his "country", but he defied his faith, his God, and His Vicar on Earth. Even more than that, the Pope was his charge and his friend.
And despite months of me and my Crew lobbying everyone from WikiLeaks to the main stream media to stand up and defend this hero, no one wanted anything to do with him. And as Christmas approached and I thought about this poor man spending the holidays locked alone in a room in the Swiss Guard basement, I couldn't take it any longer. And so in the wake of Op Israel, my Crew and I launched Anonymous Operation Vatican. We prepared the usual website, and wrote up and blasted a Press release and accompanying video.
Anonymous Press Release: Operation Vatican
Wednesday - December 5, 2012
Greetings World --
The Peoples Liberation Front and Anonymous are joining forces yet again to defend whistle-blowers and fight for transparency in government. This time in the most unlikely of places, the Vatican City State. This spring, a book was published which detailed massive corruption and wrong-doing in the highest levels of the Pope's administration. It was entitled "His Holiness" by Gianluigi Nuzzi. The book relied heavily on a massive cache of documents apparently leaked directly from the Pope's apartment/office at the Holy See.
In May of this year, Paolo Gabriele the Pope's butler was arrested for photocopying the massive trove of documents and delivering them to Nuzzi for use in his book. Today, Mr. Gabriele was convicted by the Vatican courts and sentenced to 18 months in an Italian prison (the Vatican does not have one) for this alleged disclosure of sensitive and secret material. The fact that Paolo Gabriele was almost certainly aided by someone high up in the Vatican government, most likely a Cardinal -- was never investigated by the Vatican police. Instead, Mr. Gabriele was given a very quick "trial" in a Vatican City courtroom and summarily sentenced to a year and a half in prison. The computer technician Claudio Sciarpelletti has been convicted of assisting in the disclosure and has been sentenced to two months.
Anonymous and the Peoples Liberation Front will not stand by while whistle-blowers who expose corruption in governments or corporations are persecuted and imprisoned. Whether it be Bradley Manning in the USA or Paolo Gabriele in the Vatican City State, risking everything to bring transparency to the world is an act of extreme heroism -- and deserves to be defended at all costs. The Pope is an absolute monarch, and as such has the ability to instantly pardon Paolo Gabriele and Claudio Sciarpelletti. We DEMAND that the Pope do so AT ONCE.
Until this one simple demand is met, Anonymous and the PLF will wage a relentless campaign. We will also work closely with Anonymous Italy to organize ground protests in St. Peter's Square, especially during outdoor Papal "audiences". The Roman Catholic Church should have nothing to hide, and nothing to fear from transparency. FREE Paolo Gabriele NOW!
We Are Anonymous
We Are Everywhere
We Are Legion
We Do Not Forgive
We Do Not Forget
Your Holiness Benedict XVI, it is too late to EXPECT US!
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Anonymous Operation Vatican website: www.OperationVatican.tk
Peoples Liberation Front: http://www.LegionSecurity.cf
Anonymous Global: http://www.AnonymousGlobal.org
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Our goal was not only to gain a pardon for Paolo Gabriele as stated in the Press Release, but to launch such a brutal strike on Vatican cyberspace that the Pope would be forced to relent and meet our demands before Christmas so he could be home with his family for the holidays. But one problem confronted us immediately. The Pope and the Vatican appeared to have some sort of magic aura which protected them from public criticism. Anonymous Operation Vatican was turning out to be the exact opposite of Op Israel. It was an audience and supporter free Op! No one, not even the main stream media - wanted anything to do with Anonymous Operation Vatican. I suppose it was the religion factor that had everyone, even our fellow Anons and Hacktivists, too spooked to join the fight.
But my Crew and I were prepared to take what little help was eventually offered (most of which came eventually in the form of Mid-Eastern Anons and Hacker Crews), and do the job ourselves. After all, the Vatican cyberspace was very tiny and extremely poorly defended - why would we need more than a half dozen hackers to remove it all from the Internet? And we set to work doing just that. With OpNoPro at my side, and my Crew primed and ready - we began the strike on the cyber-domain of Vatican City State. We began with an E-Mail Bomb and Black Fax attack.
An E-Mail Bomb is a crowd-sourced strike. Essentially the goal is to enlist help on the Internet to send as many messages as possible to every single Vatican E-Mail address (which had already been harvested, along with the Vatican fax numbers). Participants would be provided with a kit containing everything from the hundreds of E-Mail addresses to suggested text and images to attach to eat up more bandwidth. E-Mail Bombs were generally dropped when it was night time for the target organization, to maximize the damage. This way you could flood the inboxes and servers while everyone slept, peacefully oblivious to the violence being done to their servers. E-Mail Bombs made a huge mess for any organization successfully targeted, and the clean-up could leave the system down for days and even weeks.
Black Fax was a similar attack in that it was crowd sourced flooding. We would provide a kit via social media and on our websites that contained everything from web URLs where you could send international faxes for free, to suggested fax documents to send, and of course, every fax number in the Vatican. The name for this form of strike came from the old days when fax machines were like printers which sat there and printed out whatever was sent to them. Those days are passed, and even in a world as archaic as that of the Vatican, they had long since moved to mostly electronic fax inboxes similar to E-Mail. So the times of simply sending black pieces of paper (from which the attack got its name) in a Black Fax campaign in order to run out the ink and paper were gone, and we could send pictures, memes, and our manifesto instead.
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Thursday - December 6, 2012 approx. 6:00 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
This morning the takedown of the Vatican network began in earnest. As the Italian and Vatican media (nearly the only MSM to have reported on Op Vatican) began to take notice that something was afoot from the consternation of the Vatican security and IT people, my own Crew and other hacktivists were slowly infiltrating the Vatican network, laying back doors, exfiltrating data, and setting the stage for probably the most dramatic cyber attack the Vatican has ever seen. OpNoPro manned the IRC and tried to keep order in the small but lively Op Vatican channels. I fielded media interview requests and networked and interfaced with the various hackers, cells, and crews working the Operation. I also worked with my own Crew to target our own chosen front in this battle, the Swiss Guard. But our scans had left me with the conclusion that they were so insecure and unmanned that it was more a question of which way we wanted to fuck them up first, rather than if we could mess with them.
I decided to task my Crew with further exploits into the Swiss Guard network while I distracted the defenders with a solo attack. The scans had shown that among the numerous vulnerabilities within the Swiss Guard network, some were almost laughable in their simplicity. The network was served from old unpatched apache boxes within the Swiss Guard compound that were Slowloris susceptible. With a single Slowloris Canon fired from my laptop in New Brunswick, I was able to turn all of the public-facing aspects of the Swiss Guard's network into a smoking crater in cyber space in about ten minutes. It took them several days to recover from that attack alone, but it was just a smoke screen. Under cover of my fire, lasting approximately twenty-four hours, elements from Africa and the Mid-East infiltrated the databases of the Swiss Guard. Over the coming days they would use that access to pulverize the Swiss Guard with punishing waves of E-Mail dumps, followed in step and beat by defacements of their public facing pages.
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Friday - December 7, 2012 approx. 7:00 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
The decimation of the Vatican network had begun to spread beyond the central government targets. Obscure Saint's websites being hosted in nunneries on Windows XP boxes were being owned at a hysterical rate. Archbishops and Cardinals lost their web presence to laughing and jeering hackers wearing Guy Fawkes Masks. Nothing was sacred, and nothing was safe if it ended with the .va domain name. This morning we received an encrypted message from a Vatican insider who wanted us to know what was happening at the highest levels in the Papal Palace:
"You guys have no idea the effect you have had. The entire upper echelon of the Curia are in a complete panic over the rolling cyber attacks. They are actually afraid (because someone told them to be so) that you might turn off the electricity in the Vatican. Keep up the great work, a few here are laughing at them and with you. Our man will be free soon.
P. S. When the Holy Father was briefed on you, they told him you were called Anonymous and your motto was 'We Are Legion. We Do Not Forgive. We Do Not Forget. Expect Us', he turned very pale. When they showed him a picture of the mask, we thought he would faint, and he ended the meeting unexpectedly. The whole biblical connotation thing, you know. He was really rattled and they even called his physician."
Not many people begin their day by opening up an E-Mail like that. If our source was to be believed, we had terrified the Vatican, and even the Pope himself. Good. I investigated this "source" as best I could, consulted my team, and using some small validating evidence the source had sent, we judged him/her to be legitimate. We began to wage a relentless and separately manned information campaign designed to play to the prelates worst fears about "Legion" who had become the "demons in their wires". Across social media, in particular on Twitter and Facebook, we began a merciless campaign of memes, re-tweeting the worst of the child sex scandals, banking corruption, basically anything we could, all branded up with the "Legion" Mask and our darkest iconography that the Pope had actually been shown a picture of - so we had been told by our "source". If the old white men who ran their little religious kingdom, who feared transparency so much they would imprison one of their own in a broom closet, were that afraid of us, we would make them yet more afraid. The oldest propaganda machine on earth was about to have its first run in with the Internet, and be handed its ass in an epic faceplant.
In many ways we began to fall into a very similar pattern as the just concluded Anonymous Operation Israel, with the obvious exception of scale. Both our target surface as well as our participation was minuscule compared to Op Israel. Which actually came as a welcome relief to be honest. It is much easier to control the message and attack vectors to achieve precise results in a smaller Op. We definitely had our own little, admittedly audience free, smashy smashy party going on against the Vatican. And strangely, the sort of emotional motive seemed to be very similar to Op Israel, pent up aggravation at an ancient and seemingly implacable evil that was finally being laid low, however symbolically - and served just a little justice in the process. It was a fun Op. But I began to wonder from all the rumors and leaks if the poor old Pope would survive the chaos being inflicted on a part of his kingdom he couldn't even understand.
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Wednesday - December 12, 2012 approx. 5:30 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
Today we were going to deploy what was at the time a relatively new information weapon, but which has since become a standard hacktivist tool; namely a "Twitter Storm". Originally there was even an Anonymous created software to help people participate in a Twitter Storm. I'm not sure why such an automated approach has fallen out of favor, or if Twitter simply made it more difficult to utilize their API for such "malicious" purposes. A Twitter Storm is a crowdsourced action designed to create a huge wave of attention rolling across social media, namely Twitter and secondary, Facebook. Its principal purpose is to either cause a particular set of hashtags to trend, usually globally, on Twitter, or to hijack someone else's trending hashtag such as say #Superbowl - and ride their wave for effect. Sometimes both of these principal effects are engaged in truly massive worldwide Twitter Storms that can make the news cycle for days. It was and remains an extremely effective tool if applied properly.
To run a Twitter Storm you put together a "kit", usually in a place like PasteBin. The kit contains instructions and goals for the Storm, suggested Tweets to copy/paste during the Storm, and tips for being the most effective. The start time and duration of the Twitter Storm will then be disseminated along with this starter kit via social media. Retweets don't work, all tweets must be unique to count towards the trend. Thus the idea of automation. But many people who can only participate part time in Anonymous Operations love to help with these sorts of crowd-sourced strikes. If the timing and preparation is right, they can make a huge impact.
Today we had just the right moment, that history had just handed our little Op. Because today, for the first time in history, the Pope was going to get a Twitter account! And we knew from the press release that he was going to send his first Tweet in person, so a concurrent Twitter Storm using both the #FreePaoloGabriele as well as hijacking the hashtags the Vatican had suggested, could actually result in the Pope seeing the Storm and having it explained to him what we were doing to his little publicly broadcast social media ceremony. Luckily the Internet had seen the lulz in disrupting the Popes well choreographed entrance into social media, and the pre-Storm hype indicated many thousands of activists were raring to go with witty Tweets, and not a few humorous (and sometimes tasteless) memes. The Twitter Storm against the Pope was a resounding success, and the disruption of this little media event remains a pivotal moment in the effort to free Paolo Gabriele.
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Friday - December 21, 2012 approx. 11:30 AM ET - "Safe House" Fredericton, New Brunswick - CANADA
Our goal was to free Paolo Gabriele from his Swiss Guard basement room "prison" before Christmas so he could be home with his family for the Holidays. I will admit that until early this morning, I was beginning to despair that our strike on the Vatican would fail, at least in our deadline we set in our demands. All that changed to elation among my Crew this morning when our "source" within the Vatican dropped one last leak on us. One short sentence:
"He will be freed later today, and pardoned by Papal Decree."
And now we awaited the fateful announcement from the Vatican Press Office. It came late in the morning. By lunchtime we were getting drunk and watching live television video of Paolo Gabriele being led out of his Swiss Guard "prison" cell and greeted by his adoring family. He gave a brief statement, and he was unapologetic for the leak, which had shown massive scandal at the Vatican going back decades. And Anonymous had just knocked up another victory against a powerful global foe. And in the process made yet another very powerful enemy, one that had its own legacy of "never forgetting" going back two millennia.
While Operation Vatican was a bit personal for me, in that it never really gained traction among my fellow western Information Activists, I still feel very strongly it was absolutely the right thing to do. If we are going to stand vehemently and militantly for whistleblowers who leak material on governments and corporations, we must afford the same defense to those who bring transparency to the world's religions - and especially one that is unique like the Vatican in that it is also a legal Nation State. I will never see Paolo Gabriele as anything less than equally as heroic as Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. And for him, he didn't just betray his government, but his Faith, his Pope, boss, and friend, and quite possibly his God. It took huge amazing courage, and his lack of defense while we Information Activists so openly fought for Manning was simply unacceptable to me.
Not long after Anonymous Operation Vatican bent a Pope to its will and freed a whistleblower, Pope Benedict resigned the Papacy, something that has only happened one other time in the two thousand year history of the Catholic Church. He left the Papacy looking positively haggard and haunted - nearly dead actually. I would love to think that in some small way Anonymous Operation Vatican helped to hasten this wicked old man from the Throne of St. Peter.