The members of the hacker group Anonymous have become less than anonymous as they’ve been implicated in crimes from hacking PayPal to taking down the websites of entire cities. Suddenly we haves name and biographies for some of the people behind the Guy Fawkes masks; the face of the new institutional left. As shown in the Stephen K. Bannon film Occupy Unmasked, Anonymous acted as online enforcers for Occupy Wall Street, protected Wikileaks, hacked into the Department of Justice and even declared war on Israel.
This article is one in a series from Breitbart News that exposes the people behind Anonymous.
Just because Christopher Doyon aka Commander X is a currently a fugitive in hiding from the FBI doesn’t mean he hasn’t kept busy. Even on the run from the law, avowed anarchist Doyon is one of the most active, flamboyant and well-respected members of the Anonymous collective. Since jumping bail and slipping over the border into Canada last year ‘the homeless hacker’, has been part of a number of Anonymous “Ops” and even been a featured guest on leftist newscast Democracy Now! with his self-described hero Amy Goodman.
Christopher Doyon aka Commander X is the perfect example of the clear connections between elements of the the Anonymous hacker collective and “peace and justice movement” radicals that were behind the so-called leaderless movements such as the Animal Liberation Front and Occupy Wall Street. (Doyon has connections to both of those groups.)
Doyon is well known. He’s featured in the recent documentary about Anonymous and the rise of hacker culture We Are Legion. Partially this is because of his hacking resume but it’s also because Doyon seems to like the spotlight.
For a perfect example of the deceptive tactics used by criminal Anonymous members like Commander X to justify their cyber-assaults, look no further the hacking attack on the city of Orlando, Florida that happened in 2011. Orlando was one the Ops that helped get Doyon arrested that year.
Commander X issued threats to take down various websites in Orlando and he made good on those threats:
Last week, Anonymous emailed the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, warning it would take its website down last Monday, and did. Scott Fagan of the chamber, told station WKMG that the site was down because of the intentional overload of its servers–which is what a denial-of-service attack achieves, deluging and overwhelming a website with traffic so that it takes a site offline.
Now, stepped-up website attacks will come because the “city of Orlando has ignored our warnings,” Anonymous said.
Why did Christopher Doyon aka Commander X launch this attack on Orlando? The real answer is that he used a technique that will be familiar with anyone who paid attention to Occupy Wall Street; create an a conflict, get media attention and then attack the authorities based on the conflict that you’re created.
In this case, leftist activists created a conflict with the city of Orlando. Mainstream media outlets like ABC pushed headlines like “Arrested for Feeding the Homeless in Violation of New Orlando Law” in their coverage of the story, and the left blogosphere went predictably ballistic with headlines like “Orlando Florida declares feeding the homeless a crime, arrests advocates.“
In reality, this “issue” of Orlando making it “illegal to feed the homeless” was nothing of the sort. It’s a page from the Alinsky playbook and exactly the sort of artificial, contrived and purely symbolic confrontation that was seen time and again in the Occupy movement. Mike Thomas explains in the Orlando Sentinel:
…the group’s mission is about more than feeding the homeless. It could do that at any number of nearby locations.
Their mission is to rub the homeless in our faces lest we forget they are there.
“They can be seen by people who may never have given a thought that homelessness is a problem in the city of Orlando,” said the group’s attorney, Jackie Dowd, in 2008.
In fighting the ordinance, the group unsuccessfully argued in federal court that the city was infringing on its First Amendment right to “convey the message that society can and should provide food for all of its members.”
This is why Food Not Bombs has no interest in compromising with (Orlando’s mayor.) It is why they rejected his offer to arrange feeding stations in other parks, and even clean up afterward. It is why after Jackie Dowd appeared receptive to a negotiated settlement, the group dumped her.
The media and leftist did what they do, and then Doyon used it as justification to hack Orlando websites. He was busted for that among other crimes, including a hack of the California city of Santa Cruz.
Doyon was an active part of Occupy Santa Cruz and other left-anarchist groups like the Animal Liberation Front, as well as a group he heads called the People’s Liberation Front. In October 2011, shortly after his own arrest, Doyon called a press conference to address his federal indictment, in which he proclaimed, “I am not only a founding member of PLF (People’s Liberation Front), but I am its leader and ultimately responsible for all actions done under its flag.”
Doyon joined PLF in the 1980’s and participated in direct actions with the group. In its early days, PLF was small and secretive–about twelve to fifteen members.
In a lengthy profile about him in Ars Technica, Doyon recounted his earlier PLF days helping the Animal Liberation Front and admitted that (to the best of his foggy memory) that he’s an arsonist:
When Adama later asked his recruits to relocate with him to California, Doyon and three others followed. They spent the next few years traveling around the Northwest in a van, helping groups like the Animal Liberation Front release animals. “We would sneak up basically in the middle of the night on mink farms and free all these little animals,” Doyon tells me, though his memory of those days is fading a bit. “And I believe we burned a couple [of buildings] to the ground. They weren’t mink farms that we burned… the fuck did we burn? I think it was a lumberyard, or… fuck. I can’t remember now. There were a couple places that we set fires.”
By the mid 1990s, PLF shifted its focus to Internet activities and disclosing information online. By the late 2000s, it had expanded its structure to a more open membership and become affiliated with the hacker collective Anonymous.
After Doyon was charged with computer crimes in 2011, he jumped the $35,000 bail fronted by an attorney friend of his and fled to Canada with the help of an underground network of activists.
According to the same Ars Technica article, Doyon was heavily involved in many of Anonymous’ activities in 2011 while he was on the run from the FBI:
He continued to run throughout the summer and into the fall, and though it was bad for him personally, it was a heady time for Anonymous. The splinter group of hackers called Lulzsec had been on a rampage, garnering worldwide headlines. Doyon claimed to be the moving force behind Op BART, the Anonymous-led protests against San Francisco’s subway system that had cut off cell phone access to stations in anticipation of protests. He continued to work on ops related to the Arab Spring–black fax bombs targeting Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, e-mail hacks, DDoS attacks.
Doyon is a supporter of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. He also was an active part of #OpRollRedRoll, an attack on the city of Steubenville, Ohio over a rape that happned in August 2012.
While still a fugative, Doyon was behind a site called LocalLeaks, ironically named after accused rapist Assange’s Wikileaks. The LocalLeaks site became a key component in spreading massive amounts of non-pulbic information about the Steubenville case, most of which falsely accused local law enforcement of covering up the rape. The lies spread on LocalLeaks caused a media firestorm that ripped the town of Steubenville apart; at one point, threats agains the city caused schools to be put on lockdown.
Attacking law enforcement is par for the course with Doyon; he vehemently hates America and the police and soldiers that protect it. He’s openly “declared war” on America–and the frightening thing is that with nothing but free time and access to computers on his hands, X may be in a position to do some real damage.
Doyon once bragged: “Right now we have access to every classifed database in the US government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if….There’s a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth.” When pressed on this claim by the Ars Technica author, Doyon indicated that many employees trusted with such information have pledged their support to Anonymous, and he called the United States government “one of the world’s worst tyrannies.”
This article was written in extensive collaboration with Liberty Chick/Mandy Nagy.
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