On Thursday, the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and the Department of Music co-hosted a lecture titled "Investigating the Hacktivists of Anonymous." Parmy Olson, the author of We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency, visited Brandeis to talk about how she became interested in the groups known as Anonymous and LulzSec, as well as how she went about collecting the research for her book.

Olson's book, which explores the shadowy realm of anonymous chat rooms and the groups of computer hackers who met there, inspired a rather unconventional response: the creation of a ballet.

Peter Van Zandt Lane M.F.A. '08, Ph.D. '13, an adjunct lecturer in the Music department, created the ballet HackPolitik to create a visual representation of what he saw as a "tension between freedom and security" on the Internet. The ballet focuses on three of the people Olson came in contact with during her investigation. The characters have painted faces masking their identity and wear black on a black background, thereby physically embodying the shrouded culture of "hacktivists," people who hack for a purpose.

Lane said that he already wanted to compose a work based on the Internet, from both the appeal of tackling a very real and modern issue such as security online as well as how the anonymous online world felt like "a blank canvas," but had difficulty finding a story. However, when discussing his take on Olson's book, Lane said that when he read it, he found it to be "a version of the story that's consistent," and went on to create a ballet based on the book.

Olson, a writer for Forbes Magazine and a former reporter for BBC News, spent a year researching the world of the groups Anonymous and LulzSec, which are both groups of people who have never met except in online chat rooms under aliases and yet have hacked their way into FOX News, PayPal and even the homepage for the Central Intelligence Agency. The founding of these groups, as she found in her research, was the participants' search for amusement. Jake Davis, the founder of LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous, told Olson that, at the core "there is nothing that Anonymous won't laugh at or won't want more of." Anonymous is the group responsible for "trolling" and "memes" both of which are now ingrained trademarks of social media. Trolling the act of playing pranks on someone else via the Internet for either amusement or to provoke that person while memes consist of pictures with captions that somehow comment on the picture in entertaining ways.

For Anonymous and LulzSec, trolling was serious business and involved people from all parts of the world spamming or hacking into websites. The name "LulzSec" itself is shortened from "laughing at your security." Olson witnessed from her computer numerous attacks on web pages for the Church of Scientology, the X Factor and FOX News. Olson said that the most well known of these pranks was when the organization hacked into PBS News Network and changed the main headline to "Tupac Still Alive in New Zealand." She also noted that the article was very popular, getting thousands of hits. Olson said that a lot people had no idea that it was not real.

Olson also witnessed the dark side of the search for fun. In February 2011, she said that she "got a front row seat" to the attack on Aaron Barr, the chief executive officer of HBGary Federal, a company which sells security on the cyber level for the U.S. government. Barr was targeted by Anonymous because of an interview in which he claimed to have discovered the leaders behind the secretive group. Not long afterward, Olson received a message informing her about the cyber attack from the leader of Anonymous. The CEO's home address, telephone number and social security number were posted publicly on his Twitter account by members of Anonymous who had hacked into his account. Barr told Olson in an email a week later that he "was afraid to talk" because of the messages and verbal digs he encountered daily because of the hack.

According to Olson, researching a completely anonymous group of people was not simple. After the attack on FOX News, Olson wrote a blog article on her Forbes webpage saying that "the people who carried out this attack were the same people who attacked HBGary." She published their online nicknames and received a message telling her to take down the post.

Later, she discovered that "Sabu," one of the leaders of LulzSec, had become so enraged at her post that he vowed to "destroy Forbes."

Lane and Kate Ladenheim, the choreographer of the ballet, keyed into the idea of an Internet identity. In an anonymous chat room, a person creates an alternate identity, much like an actor plays a character. In the book, Olson found out that one of these characters, "Kayla," was actually a 24-year-old man and a veteran who fought for the British army in Afghanistan. As Kayla, he was a 16-year-old who taught herself how to hack from reading every book she could about computer coding. The action of creating an identity is inherently a performance, as Ladenheim noted, and she utilized this basic idea to bring the ballet to life. Anonymous and LulzSec were other platforms in which to play around with self-identification. The ballet thereby focuses on the ideas of identity, highlighting the amorphous nature of the Internet.

HackPolitik brings ballet into the modern era, successfully combining the traditional performance form with a contemporary story. The ballet also brings the world of anonymous hacktivists into the spotlight of the performance world, demonstrating the wide reaching influence of Anonymous and LulzSec.