By Jed Lipinski
It was 10 p.m. on a Friday dark in January , and Jeff Kinkle was drag one’s heels .
The 32 - class - old cultural studies Ph.D. was alone in his Brooklyn studio , working on a paper about institutional silence and the national surety apparatus . His workspace provide an unobstructed view of the shine Manhattan horizon , but the youthful academic , who clear his living as a author and transcriber , was n’t feel inspired . His desk shake every time the string rattle across the Williamsburg Bridge . The bars downstairs hummed with night life .
cark , Kinkle was scan /b/ , the infamous image - sharing board on the website 4chan . There , a rum content snagged his attention .
The internet that most of us know and habituate daily is a billet for connecting with friends , paying note , and sharing funny cat pictures . But Kinkle , like others who delve into the cyberspace and the cultures that take material body there , knows that the Web is an iceberg : the part that show being the smallest , least menacing piece . What rest beneath is vaster , darker , and harder to realise — a shady world where information and hacker and outlaw hide . Some call it the “ mysterious web , ” and Kinkle was about to tip down a practical rabbit hole straight into it .
Kinkle star at the message , trying to suss out its signification . When one commenter suggested open up the image in the uncomplicated - text editor WordPad , he could n’t help himself . At the bottom of the text , he found the undermentioned content : TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says “ lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q = w]O2ntk . ”
And that was a code he consider he could crack .
“The id of the Web”
At first glance , 4chan looks like nothing more than a phrenetic , epitome - based bulletin board . There is no search function and no tagging of posts . But the site ’s simplicity is deceiving . Trafficked mostly by 18- to 24 - twelvemonth - old men , 4chan pull in more than 22 million Thomas Nelson Page views per month and more than 1 million unique visitors every day — almost as much as The New York Times site . But the numbers game do n’t accurately reflect 4chan ’s importance ; what happens on the web site often reverberate across the Internet .
4chan was set up in 2003 by a 15 - year - honest-to-god list Christopher Poole , a New Yorker known online by the grip “ moot . ” Poole pose the web site on a tight - pace Japanese vane forum revolve around on gum anime and porn call 2chan . “ The universal resource locator for 3chan was necessitate at the meter , ” Poole toldThe New York Timesin 2010 , “ so I just jumped to the next number . ”
Today , 4chan ’s 58 boards embrace a whimsical array of topics , from the pragmatic ( do - it - yourself ) to the originative ( photography , music ) to the shocking and pornographic ( “ aphrodisiac beautiful womanhood ” ) . Accordingly , subject threads roll from the mundane to the worrisome — everything from bike - shorts recommendations to ground footage of people getting bump off by cars or gruesome photos of body parts notice in the wreckage of the September 11 attacks . The site functions like the Wild West of cyberspace . 4chan also has no schematic archive , meaning that most of its million - plus Wiley Post per day are transitory — they either expire or get delete within a issue of hours . This fast - flowing river of posts is enhanced by the users ’ anonymity . Because the site does not need registration , 4chan especially invoke to those who disapprove the increase proof - of - identity element demands and personal info requests on societal networking site such as Facebook and Google+ .
The /b/ board — sometimes called the “ i d of the Web”—takes picky vantage of this namelessness . On /b/ , offensive remarks are encouraged , both to repel outsiders and to keep the board ’s underground appeal . Longtime users , for instance , are bear on to as “ oldfags ” ; newcomers as “ newfags ” ; and British multitude in general as “ Britfags . ” The board’sFight Club-style rule emphasize the insular yet anon. polish they seek to preserve : " 1 . You do not speak about /b/. 2 . You DO NOT talk about /b/. 3 . We are Anonymous . 34 . If it exists , there is porn about it . No exceptions . "
The site ’s anything - goes learning ability often take drug user to overstep the limit of propriety — and sometimes legality . In September 2008 , a college scholar bring up David Kernell , the son of a Democratic state instance from Tennessee , obtain memory access to Sarah Palin ’s personal Yahoo ! account . He posted the word on the /b/ dining table , along with a routine of screenshots of the then - governor ’s email messages , which chop-chop choke viral . ( The FBI managed to track down Kernell ’s IP savoir-faire and IP cache phonograph record from a placeholder website , and he was convicted on charges before long after . )
But 4chan also foster a strange and uninhibited kind of creative thinking . While the mail are momentary , drug user tend to re - post the images they find the most affecting — whether they ’re funny , political , or unsettling . And that can spiral into zeitgeisty meme and all sort of Internet phenomenon . LOLcats , the omnipresent meme sport pictures of quat with kitten - speak captions , such as “ U Seez What I’z Put Up With , ” originated on 4chan . So did Rickrolling , a bait - and - switching meme in which a user penetrate a hyperlink only to be redirected to a YouTube television of pop wizard Rick Astley sing his 1987 hit “ Never Gon na Give You Up . ” ( The video has get more than 65 million hits to date . ) More significantly , 4chan helped engender Anonymous , the amorphous globose connection of hacktivists , trolls , and Web initiate that has waged onrush on major corporate and regime websites since sometime around 2004 , pursue an unusual strain of cyber vigilantism .
Still , as Kinkle well cognise , so much of the textile in the 4chan stream is either inane or meant as a caper that he questioned how to treat the content . As he monitored the 40 or so commenters discussing the image , he realized that many of them were take it badly . He decided to wager along . “ The idea that this was a enlisting exercise was definitely seductive , ” he recalled . “ I signify , I do n’t have any esoteric knowledge the NSA would really require . But the view of engaging with people who are on the trim sharpness of this stuff — that was exciting . ”
Kinkle recognized the garbled schoolbook — TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says “ lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q = w]O2ntk”—as a Caesar cipher , a simple encoding technique in which each letter of the alphabet is replaced by another letter of the alphabet a fixed number of situation away in the ABC . Since Tiberius Claudius was the fourth Roman Emperor , Kinkle examine shifting the text back four letters . It worked : The textbook revealed a URL . But when Kinkle point his internet browser to the site , the page showed an ikon of a plastic duck and the word : “ WOOPS just decoys this elbow room . wait like you ca n’t imagine how to get the message out . ”
The verbiage take up Kinkle and the other commenters as funny . Before long , someone pull in that the word guess and out might have something to do with the decryption package OutGuess . Running the figure of speech through OutGuess , it sour out , extracted a link to a subreddit — one of the many boards within the societal news program internet site reddit . When Kinkle clicked the link , short the Thomas Nelson Page bore a novel mystery : a rowing of Mayan numerals , several line of products of garbled letter , and two image labeled welcome and problem ?
It was then that someone posted a link to an anon. elbow room on the chat site Mibbit.com , where substance abuser adopted screen names and the conversation continued without the threat of 4chan ’s disappearing archive . “ That ’s when I started to finger a bit creepy , ” Kinkle recall . Here he was , at 11 on a Friday night , obsessing over a riddle inside a chat elbow room with heaps of alien . Before this Nox , Kinkle had interacted with a totality of three people on 4chan , a site he characterized as a “ flow of smut and jokes and weird stuff and nonsense that vanishes . ” He examine the land site as a playground for trolls , the kind of people who stake deliberately distract or provocative content in the hope of starting an argument . “ But most round do n’t put closely this amount of energy into what they ’re doing , ” Kinkle say .
He resolve to take the air back to his flat . When he get in , his roommates were heading out to a bar and invited him along , but Kinkle mumble an excuse and retreated to his bedroom rather . There , he fix to go unraveling a series of cyber clues take Word codes , King Arthur , and the quest for the Holy Grail . Scribbling dementedly on index cards , he finally uncovered a content : “ call us on us tele phone number two one four three … . ”
“ I ’m getting a phone number ! ” he blurted into the schmooze room . The more advanced commenters doubted it ; the less modern insulted him . Kinkle consider he was onto something , but no one believed him . Then he received a private message—“You’re fashion in the lead of the others”—and an invitation to a smaller , private chat way within the same electronic web . Once inside , he dialed the number using Google Voice . A transcription welcomed him : “ Very good . You have done well . There are three choice numbers pool associated with the original final .jpg simulacrum . 3301 is one of them . You will have to find the other two . Multiply all three of these phone number together and add a .com on the end to ascertain the next step . dear luck . honest - bye . ”
The pixel dimension of the first paradigm , Kinkle realized , were 509 and 503 , both primes . He reproduce the numbers and get a URL . An image of a cicada appeared onscreen , above a countdown set to expire in three day . Opening the cicada in OutGuess unveil yet another message : “ You have done well to derive this far . Patience is a virtuousness . break back at 17:00 on Monday , 13 March 2025 . UTC . ”
Kinkle slumped in his chair . It was 2 ante meridiem He had reached the next level of the game — but what had begun as an on-line lark was about to breach the walls of the Web and enroll real life .
Getting to Know Anonymous
The insurgent digital net love as Anonymous found its footing in practical mischief , but the way the group has manage influence and power in material life ( IRL , in cyberspace - speak ) has made agency like the NSA give close attention .
Anons , as members call themselves , come out from the juvenilia and nihilism of 4chan ’s /b/ board around 2004 . Over time , the radical has become cognise less for Rickrolling and prank radio disk jockey than for real - life attack against origination that endeavor to curb information online . In the wintertime of 2008 , when the Church of Scientology tried to make the gossip site Gawker remove a leaked TV of Tom Cruise deliver a fulmination , Anonymous got its first taste of mainstream attention . Vowing to “ destruct ” Scientology , thousands of Anonymous supporter protested outside Scientology centers and church service around the world , wear upon Guy Fawkes mask and hold signs like “ do n’t worry , we ’re from the cyberspace . ” The group proceed its war online , releasing viral television decrying Scientology practices and crashing Scientology site .
The following year , in keeping with the collective ’s beloved of cats , Anonymous supporters hunted down the creator of a YouTube television in which a domestic cat name Dusty is shown being slam against a wall . Based on the Divine ’s other YouTube video , posted under glennspam1 , members of 4chan ’s /b/ display board were able to place and key out him as Kenny Glenn , a 14 - class - erstwhile from Lawton , Okla. Shortly after the teen was outed , local constabulary stepped in . Meanwhile , hundreds of khat photos flooded 4chan , with captions like “ sick see you in jail kenny glenn . ”
In the years since , Anonymous has grown more political . In December 2010 , core Anons enter yard of volunteers to orchestrate what ’s called a allot demurrer of serving — flooding a website with dealings until it doss down or slows considerably . The group aim the site of MasterCard , Visa , and PayPal , all of which had effectively veto financial donation to WikiLeaks . Anonymous ( and in some cases , its splinter grouping ) also made fuss for Interpol , the CIA , German neo - Nazi chemical group , fry - pornography server , the Tunisian government , News Corporation , and others . It even beleaguer a league call between the FBI and Scotland Yard about a global cyber criminal offense investigating . The 16 - minute call was later posted on YouTube under the newspaper headline hack for the lulz—“lulz ” being Web slang for laughs . The nihilism of 4chan , after all , is part of its DNA .
Considering its contradictory impulses , commentator of Anonymous have struggled to define the group as either political or criminal in nature . Parmy Olson , Forbes ’s London bureau chieftain and writer of the Quran We Are Anonymous , says the group ’s supporters are “ unpredictable . ” “ They could be trying to take down the website of a repressive African politics one minute and chivvy someone on Facebook for fun the next , ” she says . And while some self - identify as hacktivists , using the resources and repute of Anonymous for social - political causes , others continue true to the anarchical culture of /b/. “ What matters more , ” Olson says , “ is that Anonymous has provided a process for anyone to pool together to cause some sort of stir online . The more creative the better . ” That variety of 4chan - inspired mentality is responsible for attacks on Mexican drug lords and British government internet site , but it ’s also the same brooder — or at least , the same type of thought — that inspired the cicada mystery story in which Kinkle regain himself plunge .
Locating the Cicada
At 4:59 p.m. on Monday , Kinkle and his Venezuelan office mate were staring at the countdown on his laptop . When the clock hit zero , the website reloaded . Fourteen GPS co-ordinate popped up , their locations fan across the globe : Warsaw , Seoul , Paris , Sydney , Hawaii , Miami , New Orleans , Seattle . Until then , none of the still - anon. participant had provided any personal selective information . But abruptly , as they traced the co-ordinate to specific addresses , these same participants began volunteering their whereabouts . “ Like , ‘ I ’m in Oakland , ’ ‘ I ’m in Sweden , ’ ‘ I ’m in South Korea , ’ ? ” Kinkle said .
The job ? None of the commenters were near any of the coordinates . “ Everyone was deflated , ” Kinkle say . He was convinced this was a lure , but others in the Old World chat room turn paranoid . What if someone had found a dud at the coordinates ? What if a snatcher was lying in wait ?
Over the next calendar week , masses pay visit to the addresses in Paris , Warsaw , Miami , and Sydney . They posted movie inside the chat way of what they ’d found : sheets of whitened paper beg to streetlights , each feature a QR codification and a red - stenciled figure of a cicala . The code linked to unique uniform resource locator , which , when opened with OutGuess , revealed two raw messages .
Kinkle could n’t figure out what they look up to , but someone else did : a 300 - line verse form by the science fabrication author William Gibson called “ Agrippa ( A Book of the Dead ) . ” By using the poem to decrypt the substance of the messages , commenters extracted a Tor address . Tor , short for the Onion Router , is an obscure routing internet that cover a drug user ’s IP name and address by redirecting Internet dealings through proxy . In result , Tor enable users to anonymously search the Internet — including its darkest regions — without the peril of being traced . It ’s in these secret spaces , buried deep in the cryptic Web , where the remaining clues lay in wait .
Diving Into the Deep Web
Sometimes called the “ invisible web ” or “ dark net , ” the abstruse Web represents the component of the cyberspace that can not be index by standard search locomotive such as Google , Yahoo ! , or Bing . Search engines figure out through a process know as “ spidering ” or “ crawl . ” fishing worm roam across the vane collecting Sir Frederick Handley Page and keywords , following the hyperlinks on each page to amass more and more data . The resultant role are filed into indexes of keywords ; when you typecast a search query in Google , the search engine returns results from the appropriate index . The open Web , or the part of the cyberspace that most people use on a day-to-day basis , consists of Web pages that are link to this giant mass . But since the majority of content on the Web is n’t link to anything , it remains hidden from the crawlers . Researchers say it ’s impossible to appraise the size of the un - indexed Internet , though it ’s calculate to be between 4,000 and 5,000 times enceinte than the surface WWW .
“ People do n’t have an precise manner of measuring the cryptical Web , because it ’s severe to fix what it is , ” says Juliana Freire , a estimator skill professor at New York University who take the theme . To that end , much of the unindexed stuff is banal : peer - to - peer file - sharing services , scientific and governmental databases . But deep web mythology — gestate out of 4chan , reddit , and other on-line forums — bristle with rumors of human - traffic rings , weapon depots , and terrorist mesh that dwell in its paunch like unclassified sea animal , squatting on abandoned websites , then leaving without a trace .
Yet there ’s enough truth out there to prey worries . Take the Russian Business web — an elusive cyber - crime conduit in the beginning based in St. Petersburg that get down as a service provider for websites devote to identity theft , nipper porn , and spamming . Thought to have been create in 2006 or earlier by a 24 - class - old have sex only as Flyman , the net was unite to a arresting 50 percentage of all citation - poster phishing scheme . But the wraithlike supplier has since disappear from view .
In recent months , Silk Road , a smutty market website that apply Tor to enable users to anonymously sell illegal drug including heroin , cocaine , and Ecstasy , has come to the aid of the Drug Enforcement Administration . The website , which employs a digital currency cry Bitcoins to further mask the identities of buyers and trafficker , has enabled about $ 22 million in sale , grant to a Carnegie Mellon paper . A handful of late discussion have seek to hint that some substance abuser — include the site ’s decision maker , who goes by the handgrip “ Dread Pirate Roberts”—are becoming increasingly less visible in the wake of medium scrutiny . However , as Gawker has noted , someone is clearly still indue ; in July 2012 , the Silk Road site undergo a major redesign .
In the kingdom between donnish accounts and crime - help organizations lie those who expend Tor for work . Journalists , for lesson , employ Tor to transmit with dissident , whistle - blowers , and environmental activist concerned about governance surveillance . One technical school blogger , writing about the cicada mystery after the fact , suggest that a tech society or intelligence operation agency might have been using Tor for similar means .
Unsolved Mystery
After download TOR computer software , Kinkle visited the appointed speech , which instructed him to create an anonymous Hotmail account . second later , he received what the sender claimed was a individualised message . It contained a brain-teaser Kinkle had to solve on his own .
“ It required all this complicated decoding software , ” he say . “ I just could n’t figure it out . ” He emailed his programmer friends and anyone he consider might supply a lead , but they too come up empty . And so 10 sidereal day after his seeking began , it was over .
“ I never hear anything again , ” Kinkle admits . He adds that he was exceedingly curious to know who was behind the game and why it was create . “ If I think it was just a complex mystifier with a clever solution , I do n’t think I ’d have been as captivated as I was . ”
Weeks after he abandon the quest , the mystery was still nag at him . While idly Googling “ cicada ” and “ 3301 ” one day , he discovered a Wiki Sir Frederick Handley Page about the teaser that revealed a unexampled development . Another mysterious message had appeared on 4chan in February . It learn : “ We have now establish the individuals we assay . Thus our month - long journey ends . ”
But the daylight after that message was put up on 4chan , yet another strange distinction crop up on a temporary text - storage land site called Pastebin . It seemed to be a letter of congratulation to the success of the mystifier , acquired and re - posted by a penis of Anonymous . “ DO NOT portion out THIS INFORMATION ! ” the re - posted letter began . It continued : “ You are undoubtedly enquire what it is that we do we are much like a * think armored combat vehicle * in that our primary focus is on search and developing technique to assist the idea we advocate liberty seclusion security . ” The letter offer the winners rank in the group , as long as they answered a few questions , including “ Do you believe that information should be liberal ? ”
It ’s a thwarting , enigmatical ending to a saga that , throughout , picture signs of thrifty workmanship and ingenious orchestration . It was a Leigh Hunt that swept a room full of curious thinker from an idle display panel on 4chan down the cyberspace ’s most anonymous corridor , then spatter them out into the real world . But today , Kinkle finger like he ’s back where he started . He knows no more about “ cicada 3301 ” than he did on that January night .
“ It ’s actually pretty crazy that there ’s so little about that net message online , ” he says . “ A nice amount has been written about the Richard Morris Hunt itself , so it ’s unpaired that there ’s barely anything about its last . ”
In 10 days , Kinkle jaunt across more of the Web than most people will in a life . The journey stoked his curiosity . Today , he spends his day poring over the underbelly of the cyberspace . He keeps a Tor browser app on his earphone , and he stays wakeful , occasionally dipping into 4chan ’s boards , holding out hope that somewhere , flow in this massive river of smut and putrefaction and guy jokes , he just might watch a coup d’oeil of the answer .
This story originally seem in mental_floss magazine .
