That is how the cyberguerilla operated

The stairway is in darkness and I trip over the fifth step. I'm going to walk into an apartment in Barcelona on condition that I don't reveal where I am or who I'm with. The aim is to contact, through a computer system that my companion considers safe, with several of the heads of Anonymous, a platform that has been labelled a cyberguerrilla outfit. This is a blind date: I don't know how many of them there will be and I don't even know if they're members of Anonymous. I've arrived 20 minutes early, and outside on the pavement I've mentally reviewed what I've read about them. The immortal grin of Guy Fawkes, the character popularised in the comic and the movie V for Vendetta, --which I suppose is one way of communicating with the world-- is flooding the Internet. By way of this character, I've learned that this group of netsurfers create operations, under the name of Anonops (Anonymous Operations), that aim to wage digital attacks on the organisations that have attempted to censor Internet.

September 10 saw the start of Operation Payback against the American Cinematographers' Association, to return the attack that, according to Anonymous, the ACA had launched against certain websites in the name of the struggle against piracy. In the first week of December, when Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and PostFinance began to withdraw their services from WikiLeaks, they became the target of another operation by Anonymous, which they named Avenge Assange. In a matter of hours they deadlocked those companies' corporate websites. And the operation, they tell me during our interview, is still in full swing.

In three crazy days of searching, they appear and disappear in all corners of the net. I've found their manifestos, in countless languages, on Facebook, on Twitter, and even in a blogspot. On YouTube, Guy Fawkes explains their reason for existence: “We're conducting peaceful campaigns in favour of freedom of expression everywhere in the world. We're not hackers, we carry out symbolic actions.” The Anonymous manifestos also appear on YouTube. In them, they state the target of the attack, the website and the starting time of the operation. In many technological forums it's said that they have a past --and perhaps a future-- as hackers, but right now they're something else: a cyberguerrilla group in the form of a swarm. In fact, the operation they've set in motion is very simple: thousands of users connect to a website at the same time until they bring it to a standstill.

The information published in the press pointed to a website (4chan.org), but all I've found there are pictures of naked girls and other oddities of digital life. Not my idea of the way to go.

Now I'm walking up these stairs and I feel clumsy. My companion hasn't even looked at me. As we go up, he insists to me that they're “not hackers,” because no-one was unable to use their Visa card while the company's website was down. What he says reminds me that in a lot of forums there's talk of “digital protest.” I remember Guy Fawkes' words: “We have a dark past.” Anonymous claimed to have made the attack on Sarah Palin's personal e-mail in September 2008. Are they the same people?

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I act as if I know more than I really do, and I ask him if the connection will be safe. He laughs. We reach the room. The air is stuffy and there's a smell of dirty ashtrays. The computer is connected to something that reminds me of Matrix. Suddenly the cursor moves and I read “Hello.” I'm connected to a chat in which there are five, no, seven other people. The interview will be a collective enterprise --just like Anonymous itself, they say. Each person will mark his or her contributions in a determined colour until they all believe they've reached an agreed response. They're used to doing things this way. Me, at the beginning, I only see colours: blue corrects green; brown adds information.

I lose the thread several times. I understand that they're not only fighting for Julian Assange; their war, they say, is for an Internet free of censorship. I ask them if they think the establishment misunderstands them and talks about hackers because there's too much age difference. They're in no doubt: an age gap certainly does exist. I pray that Orange or Telefónica or whatever operator this computer is working through doesn't go down, and that the others, although I'm not at all sure who they are, don't appear. I haven't smoked for four months, but right now I could go though a whole packet. Nobody will appear, but the connection will fail several times. The interview is over, and I've got more questions than before. One thing I am sure of: Operations Payback and Avenge Assange are still in progress, and Paypal, Mastercard and Visa continue to be their targets.