The Gomorrah Gambit

Pro tip: in life as in software, always start with the Frequently Asked Questions. It will stop you looking stupid later.

Here are the top three questions for getting to know Azi Bello. Who the hell is he? What’s a darknet? What is wrong with the modern world?

We’ll take them in reverse order.

There is little inherently wrong with the planet in this year of our Lord two thousand and fourteen that a medieval peasant wouldn’t recognize from the wrong end of famine, rape and pillage. Thanks to a few centuries of unparalleled human ingenuity, everyone now gets to spend their time doing what only a few people used to do: reading, writing, trading, bitching about celebrities. The real novelty, however, resides in the fact that everything from child pornography and drugs to deadly weapons and even deadlier ideologies can be accessed on demand from several billion desks and pockets.

This is what darknets are all about. They’re the places you go to get whatever society doesn’t want you to get: the internet’s midnight zones, hidden in plain sight, accessed through tools that, if you’re doing it right, conveniently conceal your identity and location, alongside whoever you’re sharing alt-right hard-core Nazi Islamist disinformation porn with. Bad people, good times.

Naturally, the most popular software for doing all this was developed by the US Navy. As some hackers like to mutter, there is nothing the United States government likes more than fucking with global rivals to their industrial military-surveillance complex. What do Chinese dissidents, Iranian freedom-lovers, New Zealand geeks shifting soft drugs across oceans and the North Korean government’s discretionary procurement arm have in common? They all use The Onion Router, also known as Tor: an easily downloaded piece of software that will bury every click under dozens of digital relays between anonymous servers. It’s like an onion, if onions were world-spanning networks: layer after layer of packed concealment. It has also been known to induce tears.

Anonymity is the theory. In practice, unless a user knows their stuff, they might as well launch a website featuring full name, home address and a flashing gif reading NSA please target me! Being anonymous doesn’t make you safe. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog—but the trail of bone-shaped biscuits leading to your front door permits an educated guess.

Just ask Azi. Despite being a member of the hacking fraternity (very few ladies, rampant and rancid trolling by gender, toilet seats left permanently up) he goes under a version of his own name. AZ. People think it’s a pseudonym, because no security-conscious specialist in their right mind would ever, ever use anything linked to any aspect of their actual identity online, but it’s in fact just two-thirds of the name he got thirty-four years ago, south of south London, in the architectural equivalent of an arsehole, East Croydon.

Depending on what mood you catch Azi/AZ in, sticking so close to his real name is either a double bluff of rare cunning, a badge of pride, a mark of stupidity, or a mixture of all three. A high-functioning fuckup is how Azi usually describes himself. Good with big ideas, bad with little ones.

Today is a good day, because Azi is sitting at his desk eating Nando’s finest—half a chicken with chips, dowsed in his own Sriracha hot sauce to the point where he can no longer feel his face—sipping a mug of cold coffee, and pretending to be a neo-Nazi.

Specifically, he is chatting away in a members-only social media group, pretending to be a recent but impressively active member of a global political movement called Defiance. The group is pledged to protect the Western way of life from the mounting threat of Islam, while maybe, just maybe, beating up people of the non-white persuasion and blaming societal ills upon the Transnational Conspiracy of Persecuted Minorities.

Defiance-baiting is a side-project which Azi has been working on for some time now. If pushed, he would describe it as an obsession, but nobody is pushing him, so he pretends it’s a hobby. Nazis in general are bad news in good clothes. Smart neo-Nazis, with long-term ambitions involving the ballot box and a charismatic German figurehead affectionately known as Tomi, are a special class of trouble.

A political figure described in chummy abbreviation even by his enemies is worth fearing, Azi reckons—and this one is worse than any posh Brit. There’s a serious chance Tomi could play a leading role in the next German government. Unless, of course, someone were anonymously to release detailed and incredibly compromising information about him during the next two months. And wouldn’t that be a shame?

As Azi would be the first to admit, his base of operations is not your typical mastermind’s lair. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary garden shed. From the inside, it looks like a crummy, cramped garden shed, into which someone long ago wedged an oversized IKEA desk and a pair of folding chairs, followed by the contents of several second-hand computer stores—because this is exactly what Azi did. Van Halen splutters through a pair of hidden speakers. Dismembered laptops, PCs and external hard drives sprawl around three large monitors, garlanded by cables. The only concession to comfort is coffee: a Hario V60 Dripper brewing Union’s Revelation Blend on a tiny corner table, its wafting aroma Azi’s antidote to the dust-and-ozone fug of constantly running hardware.

Azi himself is sporting an oversized hoodie, trainers, jeans distressed by time rather than designer intent, and half a week’s worth of stubble. He might pass for a decade younger, borderline handsome, if he shaved and disarrayed his hair more artfully. But that isn’t going to happen any time soon. So far as he’s concerned, the material world is a largely regrettable series of coincidences. It’s what’s onscreen that matters.

Exhibit A in this lifestyle philosophy is the standard lamp Azi has been expertly unseeing for over fifteen years, its ragged chintz drooped above his coffee station. Exhibit B is the fact that two of the people he feels closest to—fellow hackers with the handles Milhon and Sigma—might be male or female, cynical teenagers or bored Gen Xers, and located anywhere on Earth that English-speakers and the internet are found together. He has a hunch that they’re both female, and a further hunch that Sigma has a soft spot for the enigmatic AZ, but he’s savvy enough to know that this says a lot about him and little about reality.

Overall, life is good, even if his alleged career in penetration testing has taken an increasingly distant back seat to neo-Nazi enticement. Three thousand unread emails lurk in Azi’s professional ProtonMail inbox, an impatient series of subject lines from his principal employer woven through them. Azi has started to regard these with abstract interest—as if they were a natural phenomenon whose accretion it would be a shame to disturb.

Because this is 2014, and zealots of all flavors have been using the internet since before web browsers were a thing, it is impressively difficult to get the members of groups like Defiance to admit that they would like to see brown, black and—oh why not—Jewish people repatriated with extreme prejudice, and that anyone who disagrees with them is equally expendable. Instead, they spend most of their time reminding each other to look reasonable, to make a strident public case that the elite have lost touch with ordinary decent people’s justifiable economic anxieties, and to avoid violence unless they’re certain it will be both discreet and decisive.

Azi has thus spent many months befriending some useful idiots who seem likely to tell him what is going on and to initiate him to higher levels within their hierarchy, so long as he, too, comes across as the kind of hearty ideologue who can’t help speaking his mind among friends. And he has a sweetener to drop into the mix—a guarantee that he is the real deal. Guns, drugs and darknet contacts. Or, to be precise, the expertly prolonged promise of all of the above—because there are some lines which aren’t prudent to cross, let alone turn into a profitable side hustle.

Between bites of wince-inducing chicken, Azi is busy showcasing a cornucopia of banned goods to one of the more evangelical young men of his online acquaintance, a recent British recruit from Blackpool called Gareth. Gareth claims to work in a betting shop and to spend all day watching Zionist front organizations buy up and then sell off assorted properties along his high street. Gareth also talks about international pedophile conspirators taking over children’s computers and using their webcams to watch them at home—but, because Azi knows of at least one occasion on which this has actually happened, he has chosen to file that particular concern in a part of his brain marked “worry about horrible shit like this another time.” It’s a compartment that has become alarmingly full in recent months.

So far as Gareth from Blackpool is concerned, Azi isn’t Azi. He’s a white, strikingly handsome man called Jim. And the story of how Jim came into being spells out the two most important considerations in Azi’s philosophy of hacking. First, you need to be so many steps ahead of your opponents that you’ve basically won before they even notice a battle has started. Second, whatever assumptions or expectations are out there, it’s your job to break them. You lie, you cheat, you beg, you borrow, you distract and deceive.

This is the hacker’s ethos: taking things apart and then putting them back together your way. You do it for the lulz, the naked curiosity, the chance to make other people look stupid and yourself feel clever. Plus, a bunch of neo-Nazis busy making the world a worse place deserves the mother of all hacks. A dose of righteous truth so vast and compromising that even their mothers will disown them.

Here is how Azi laid his plans.

Eighteen months ago, at the start of 2013, Azi found a dead child. As a rule, the best untruths begin with a truth, which, in this case, meant the name of someone very young, their dates cribbed from a Tooting headstone.

James Denison died on 8 July 1982, at the age of two years and two days. Dearly loved, forever missed, he sleeps with the angels now. He was born again on 27 January 2013, in time for his thirty-third birthday, with a new face and a new story told backwards through time.

How is a thirty-two-year-old man called up out of the air? First, Azi sent off for the death and birth certificates. A bit of research—sifting the debris of his mother’s life, her maiden name—a few very polite emails and letters, and the Register Office provided the lot. Azi had got his hands on some powerful paper, and so the real work began.

Let’s tell a story. It’s April 1982, and war is kicking off on a South Atlantic island nobody in Britain had heard about a few weeks earlier. The Argentine invasion of the Falklands is met by a force cobbled together from desperate pride and political expediency, eventually amounting to one hundred and twenty-seven ships. Somehow, by 14 June, the Brits have prevailed, and the Prime Minister is counting her patriotic blessings. These details are important. Accuracy matters with lies you’ll be telling for years.

It’s late June 1982. A little boy in Streatham, South London, is sick—very sick—and nobody thinks he is getting better. His dad is off somewhere, gone for over a year. His mum is wrecked by work and stress, cleaning in St. George’s Hospital, her mum helping out when she can, but nothing will rescue this situation, because little boys don’t recover from this kind of cancer.

Except, in Azi’s new story, this one does. A small box is buried under a stone in Tooting, joined nine years later by mum in a bigger box beside it, but this can safely be ignored. Life goes on.

The 1980s are now in full swing, greed is good, and James Denison is going to school. He moves around a lot, attending places that have since closed, or that have changed beyond recognition. An account registered to James’s shiny new Gmail address populates websites and forms with a path winding through primary school, eight GCSEs, A-levels in art, French and maths—and then, to everyone’s surprise, a degree from the University of Birmingham. Psychology, lower second class, documented by a certificate purchased online from a service that makes it look better than the real thing.

After his father’s death in 1999—the father who never got in touch, who drank himself into a carefully researched grave in Coventry—James is an orphan, on the cusp of adulthood. His student life makes no ripples. Time passes. The millennial wave breaks and subsides, the world’s disquiet turns digital, terrorist-haunted, muttering its fear on loop. James is now going by Jim, and Jim is starting to show a denser data trail: past employers, residences, a stalled career in office accessory sales. He travels a lot, but only in the UK: major cities, big enough for anonymity. He is nobody, but he’s a nobody you can look up.

It takes Jim a long time to get into the social media revolution, but once he does he is like a new man. He has a face that’s made for media, his thinning hair bleached blonde, his angular cheeks and chin lovingly blended from stock images by Azi. Jim looks good for his age. If you squint—and if you grew up watching television in the late 1990s—he looks a bit like Spike from “Buffy.” Handsome people attract more attention, but they also command trust and respect, and Azi is only too glad to cash in some of that white male currency for his own purposes.

On Facebook, Jim has one hundred and twenty-three friends who also don’t exist. They talk about politics, football, food, music. They’re bots: algorithms shouting at algorithms, following, liking, regurgitating borrowed words. Azi reckons there’s only one way to tell bots and people apart online, and that’s that robots actually pay attention to what other robots are saying. In fact, the bots’ appetite for relentlessly targeted banter is a winning strategy all round—responses without learning, repetition without understanding, the perfection of an echo chamber in which everything is said, and nothing is heard.

As for Jim, his politics have turned a nationalistic flavor of libertarian. He hates outsiders meddling in this country that hasn’t cherished him. His attitude to women can be divided into three categories: those he wants to protect, those he wants to teach a lesson, and those who need a good seeing to. The boundaries between these categories are not strictly patrolled. Jim is angry about almost everyone it is possible to refer to as “them.” He is tailor-made for Defiance.

Actual people start following Jim, start getting in touch: kindred spirits. On 6 July 2013, over sixty people wish him happy birthday—and a quarter of these people actually exist. Behind the scenes, Azi is busily crafting details beyond expectation. Content flows across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn. Less is farmed out to bots, more is written by Azi himself as he steps into this second skin, tightening it across his own.

In August 2013, Jim starts to buy bitcoins with a credit card that can’t be tracked. He runs an old laptop with the hacker’s operating system of choice, Kali Linux, on it. He has a fake postal address in an empty building, where mail is collected irregularly from an empty hall. He uses the Silk Road marketplace on the Tor darknet to procure the final pieces in his personal puzzle: a driving license and passport, faked to a good enough standard to fool expert eyes (fooling expert machines is another matter).

Jim exists. The world looks, and there he is. Weapons, drugs, they’re all his for the asking. An intimate knowledge of these things is necessary for Jim to become who Azi needs him to be. It’s easy if you know where to look in the darkness, in the place that understands you have a right to obtain whatever you can afford. One ounce of marijuana, Caramello: $215. One gram of cocaine, Colombian fishscale: $97. One gram of MDMA, white Mitsubishi: $37. OxyContin by the ten-pack: $248. One pack of Adderall: a wallet-friendly $6. All prices clearly stated alongside today’s bitcoin conversion rates, seller ratings, user reviews and feedback. Capitalism loves an honest marketplace, and this is one of the few places Amazon won’t be disrupting any time soon.

Other people behind false faces chat with Jim for hours about weapons, hacks, movies, politics, who they would most like to fuck, for how long, and with what tools. Jim and Azi play their parts, and it’s amazing to Azi what you can say when it comes out of somebody else’s mouth. Whores and faggots and buttholes, fucking and fisting and murder and suicide; wanking and weeping; tits and arses. Memes involving cartoon characters cracking Holocaust gags, pulling in a younger crowd. Azi thought he was a pretty cynical guy, but with every conversation, he is learning new things he doesn’t much like about other people, and himself.

Some days, it feels like the filth has lodged behind Azi’s eyeballs, tainting him with stains no shower can shift. On other days, worse days, he barely notices the friction between life and screen.

It’s September 2013. Jim now claims to sell a few items as well as buying. His reputation is becoming solid, backed by carefully choreographed actions and evidence. He’s becoming trustworthy—and trust is the killer app when it comes to twenty-first-century tech. Any script kiddie can hack machines. You can download ransomware and set it running armed with little more than a search engine and contempt for humanity. What Azi does is hack minds, faith, belief. He fools the world into whispering him its secrets.

October, November, December, a new year is born. The face on the fake passport and driving license, handsome with its perfect jawline, is easier to find and to believe in than Azi’s own. Jim has friends on Facebook, likes on Instagram, endorsements on LinkedIn: places Azi doesn’t exist in. He is a shadow, distant behind the noise.

The world trusts few things more deeply than appearances. And this is just as well—because Azi is counting upon its ignorance. Jim is tall, white and drunk on the superiority of his race. Azi is light brown, lean, running a pavement circuit most nights, until his mind has settled enough for sleep. When Azi hits the 2 a.m. streets, people either step fast to avoid him or ask if they can buy drugs. When Jim struts his stuff on social media, ordinary decent citizens line up to applaud. Jim and him, they’re a perfect twenty-first-century team.

What I want, types Gareth from Blackpool, movingly, is a fat Asian chick to let me cum on her face. Jim commiserates. Azi swears under his breath, chews a last cooling mouthful of chicken, and tries to turn the conversation towards more practical matters. U see that thing I wrote?

Azi knows that Gareth saw it. Everyone saw it, because by the standards of the group it was a masterwork to stand alongside Don Quixote, War and Peace and The Da Vinci Code: a rhapsody to the white, bright future coming their way once Defiance makes its strength felt.

Gareth turns serious for a moment. Your the man Jim gonna stand up for whats right. Azi can almost see the tears of patriotic pride streaking Gareth’s cheeks, and reaches for a matching solemnity. Someone got to say it right lol, someone got to tell truth about kike fags. Azi stares at the screen and, nauseatingly, catches himself feeling pretty proud of his composition. He came up with four hundred words of barely coded fascist invective, drawing inspiration from a noted white supremacist style guide that included such gems as “multiple enemies can be confusing, so always keep it simple and blame the Jews” and “it’s okay to say that Jew feminist bitches need raping as long as you don’t threaten to do it yourself.” Jim’s final few reflections on traditional Christian values resonated especially well with Britain’s core Defiance outposts.

Azi draws breath, types a fond farewell—later u wanker lol—and logs off. It’s almost time. Gareth and others have made introductions, discreet recommendations. Jim checks out on paper, and the organization’s more senior members have become aware that he has some tech skills, ways to get hold of things, a lot of issues he doesn’t want amicably resolved. He’s sent them scans of his documents, his history, doctored images of his attendance at rallies. He’s legit.

Another few weeks. That’s all Azi needs. That’s how long he has to keep going.