"Cosmo, for his part, remained adamant that the Twitter hack had been his group's doing, and we stayed in touch even after the story had blown over. Unlike his peers at Anonymous, Cosmo rarely masked the fact that he's just a screwed up kid. The lazy attempts to shock with a Hitler-themed hacker homepage, the occasionally offensive, arbitrarily bigoted tweets—the online attacks that didn't seem to follow any coherent agenda. Cosmo hacked like other high school kids spray paint walls or set off smoke bombs. Sabu wanted the terrorized respect of the entire Internet—Cosmo just wanted to piss people off and scare adults. Always friendly, good at what he does, but essentially just a punk, and very much a child.
But he still committed adult crimes. And so it wasn't long until Cosmo was arrested, caught in a credit card fraud dragnet this summer. His crew's site was seized by the FBI. He was pulled out of school. Court dates replaced class. His laptop was snatched by the police. But he always managed to crawl online somehow and respond to my messages—he reached AIM through an iPod he concealed from the cops, and sent me emails from a hidden Kindle. When he couldn't get to me himself, someone else—a "friend"—spoke on his behalf. He always found a way online.
Then came the sentencing, and for a teen whose life is the Internet, it was about as harsh as you could imagine: a probation period that bans Cosmo from using the Internet or any of his gadgets for the next six years. The news was swift, and I knew he'd be gone soon.
I took to Twitter, where we'd first talked, and asked him if he was still out there." |
