The 'Hacktivist' Comic Isn't Actually About Anonymous

Weeks after House of Cards appeased hacktivists and Anonymous with its more-accurate-than-most portrayal of what it’s like to be someone in that community, Alyssa Milano’s comic Hacktivist has gone and disappointed with its off-base and unrealistic hacking magic. Not to say that the comic isn’t entertaining, well-executed, and pertinent to the twenty-first century but … when it comes to actual hacktivists it leaves much to be desired. (Spoiler alert now in effect.)

The first chapter of the comic opens up in Tunisia with a group of activists including a young woman named Sirine running from military types. Later, in an undisclosed location, Sirine and company get help from a master hacker named .sve_Urs3lf, who on their behalf, has hacked the Tunisian government's internet firewall in order to help one of Sirine’s activist friends, a professor, broadcast a speech to the rest of the country. Tunisia then erupts in mass protests, the desired effect, and the whole thing is a nod to the Arab Spring.

The reader is then transported to San Francisco where we learn .sve_Urs3lf is really Nate Graft and Edwin Hiccox, the creators of YourLife, a social network with 600 million users that functions a bit like Facebook. Unlike Facebook, however, YourLife is a “decentralized social network, connecting you without Big Brother watching” which stores user information “on your device” where it is “protected from piracy or surveillance by our State-of-the-art cryptographic hash table.”

So, a privacy advocate’s dream where data isn’t sold to the highest bidding advertiser, basically, except a “cryptographic hash table” is an odd way to describe something as encrypted. Cryptographic hash tables are typically used to store data and decode anything that is encrypted with a cryptographic hash function. In other words, a cryptographic hash table can be used to recover a password, and break encryption, not the other way around. Oops. In addition, storing user information on an encrypted device does not make it impenetrable to government spying. Not that this matters by chapter two, however.

“I had some great creative consultants; hackers and members of Anonymous,” said Milano in an interview with the Daily Dot.  “It was important that I got this right. We couldn’t fake it." Who these consultants were and what kind of critique or advice they gave is unclear, as there is no mention of Anonymous and any actual hacking is not shown.

“The heroes here are real men who don’t have superpowers,” continued Milano in the interview. Which again, is an odd thing to say, considering the two main characters in her comic book very much appear to have computer superpowers. Besides hacking into the Tunisian Internet, later one of them sends out a mass text to everyone in San Francisco to attend his party so they can witness him turn on all the lights in every building in the city. Not only can this one entrepreneur and businessman hack into a foreign government, he can also hack into a telecommunications database (or their cellphone towers; it is unclear how he did it) and into a city’s electricity grid like it ain’t no thing.

The  CIA Cyber Command agent that approaches the YourLife co-founders describes the party’s antics as “hacking as a magic trick, antisec porn,” and not ironically. The agent also stresses they are “big fans.” As for why the CIA is approaching the YourLife co-founders? They need their help to bring down the Tunisian government, among others.

By chapter two, Nate Graft and Edwin Hiccox have agreed to give their network over to the government, making the big speech Graft gave about how free YourLife is from Big Brother in the middle of chapter one pointless. The duo decided to help the CIA in exchange for amnesty, which is somewhat realistic, for that time they hacked into the Fed (presumably the Federal Reserve Bank).

.sve_Urs3lf really can hack the entire planet it seems, and puts Zero Cool’s abilities to shame. At one point in the second chapter Graft yells at the CIA agent, who is complaining they are not working fast enough in the Middle East, “what we do isn’t fucking magic, it’s social engineering.”  Okay, but what about everything else the duo has done already? Also, the Arab Spring protests come off in the comic as mostly being the work of the CIA (or at least having strong support from them) and not the actual people of Tunisia, Egypt, etc.

As for labeling Hacktivist as a comic book tribute to Anonymous, that’s more than a bit disingenuous. Gabriella Coleman, an academic of the hacktivist collective at McGill University and author of related works including an upcoming book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: From 4chan Lolcats to Anonymous Everywhere, took issue with Milano’s interview in LA Weekly where she wondered, "What if Anonymous was one guy who was using an organization as a front?" (The front organization in this case being YourLife.)

Coleman’s response? “It is a shame that is the question motivating the comic because Anonymous is at root a collective force” wrote Coleman in an email, who continued,“anyone who knows even the smallest bit about Anonymous would not pose the question as naively as she did… I hope for future issues they consider interviewing actual hackers and see Anonymous for what it is: a disruptive protest collective.”

According to LA Weekly, “Milano was inspired by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who is also her son's godfather," which again is problematic to Coleman. “The fact that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was a model from which she was working is an affront to those who hack and are in jail like Jeremy Hammond,” wrote Coleman. Hammond, for those unfamiliar, was part of the hacking collective LulzSec (the AntiSec offshoot) and imprisoned after FBI informant Sabu turned him in. Hammond has also implied he hacked into foreign government websites under the direction of Sabu, and by proxy the US Government. Hammond is currently serving 10 years in prison, with no amnesty granted for work he unwittingly did for the government.

It’s fine if Milano wants to make a fanciful and admittedly engaging and pretty comic about an incredibly elite duo of hackers and the Arab Spring, but touting it as having authenticity because she hired unnamed consultants or because it is based off the co-founder of Twitter comes across more as a disservice to Anonymous than a celebration of them.