Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine

Author:Yasha Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

Down the Rabbit Hole

The year was 2014. On a warm and sunny November morning, I woke up, brewed a cup of coffee, and sat down at my desk to watch a couple of surfers make their way down to Venice Beach. I had just returned from Ukraine, where I spent a month reporting on the slow-grinding civil war and brutal economic collapse that was tearing that country apart. I was jet-lagged and weary, my mind still fixed on the horrific images of war and destruction in my ancestral homeland. I looked forward to a bit of rest and quiet time. But then I checked my email.

All hell had broken loose on the Internet.

The threats and attacks had begun sometime overnight while I slept. By morning, they had reached a vicious and murderous pitch. There were calls for my death—by fire, by suffocation, by having my throat slit with razor blades. People I had never met called me a rapist, and alleged that I took delight in beating women and forcing them to have sex with me. I was accused of homophobia. Anonymous people filed bogus complaints with my editor. Allegations that I was a CIA agent poured in, as did claims that I worked with British intelligence. The fact that I had been born in the Soviet Union didn’t do me any favors; naturally, I was accused of being an FSB spy and of working for Russia’s successor to the KGB. I was informed that my name was added to a dark net assassination list—a site where people could place anonymous bids for my murder.75 The roaming eye of the Internet hate machine had suddenly fixed on me.

Things got even weirder when the Anonymous movement joined the fray. The collective issued a fatwa against me and my colleagues, vowing not to stop until I was dead. “May an infinitude of venomous insects dwell in the fascist Yasha Levine’s intestines,” proclaimed the Anonymous Twitter account with 1.6 million followers.76 It was a bizarre turn. Anonymous was a decentralized hacker and script kiddie movement best known for going after the Church of Scientology. Now they were going after me—painting a giant target on my back.

I paced my living room, nervously scanning the street outside my window. Reflexively, I lowered the blinds, wondering just how far this was going to go. For the first time, I began to fear for my family’s safety. People knew where I lived. The apartment my wife, Evgenia, and I shared at the time was on the first floor, open to the street, with expansive windows on all sides, like a fishbowl. We contemplated staying at a friend’s house on the other side of town for a few days until things cooled down.

I had been on the receiving end of vicious Internet harassment campaigns before; it comes with the territory of being an investigative journalist. But this one was different. It went beyond anything I had ever experienced. Not just the intensity and viciousness scared me but also the reason why it was happening.

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