Canadian hacker feels remorse for role Anonymous members played in rise of Trump

Globe and Mail

12-05-2025

More than two decades ago, a group of young, predominantly male internet users started congregating on an online forum called 4chan, where they circulated memes, co-ordinated pranks and orchestrated disinformation campaigns. A subset of them formed a loose collective that called itself Anonymous.
But what began as 'fun and high jinks' kicked off what Canadian hacker Aubrey Cottle characterizes as 'a chain reaction that resulted in the alt-right online culture wars and … essentially blossomed into the rise of Trump.'
Today, the 38-year-old resident of Oshawa, Ont., feels culpable for the role he believes that he and other members of Anonymous played in inadvertently helping Donald Trump become the President of the United States.
'It's hard not to beat yourself up constantly,' said Mr. Cottle, who describes himself as an 'anarchist anti-fascist' and is known online by the alias Kirtaner.
Mr. Cottle was arrested and charged earlier this year for allegedly hacking into and defacing the Texas Republican Party's website nearly four years ago, according to a U.S. criminal complaint unsealed in March.
His lawyers have called the timing of the charges 'peculiar,' noting in a statement that Canadian law enforcement's decision to co-operate with U.S. authorities came in the wake of Mr. Trump's return to office.
The extent to which members of Anonymous may have influenced the course of U.S. politics or benefited Mr. Trump is difficult to ascertain. Many of the causes that the hacktivists have taken on over the years have fallen on the left side of the political spectrum.
But the collective's tactics wound up informing a contingent of far-right users on the platform, according to author Dale Beran, who penned a book about Anonymous called It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office. Those alt-right users would go on to launch viral disinformation campaigns such as 'Pizzagate,' Mr. Beran said. The conspiracy theory falsely claimed that Mr. Trump's rival Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were running a child-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlour.
'There are many, many reasons why Donald Trump got elected to office,' Mr. Beran said. The internet culture spawned on 4chan wasn't the main one, he said, but 'it was a contributing factor.'
Mr. Cottle, who is currently out on bail, declined to comment on the criminal charges he's facing on both sides of the border. But during a wide-ranging, two-hour-long interview, he expressed remorse for how his early involvement with Anonymous may have contributed to what he considers to be 'many of the world's problems.'
'There's a lot of guilt, and I just had a drive to personally atone for quite a lot of mistakes and damage that I ended up doing to modern society,' he said.
Aubrey Cottle grew up in Toronto to the whirring of computer fans and the screeching of dial-up modems. He had a Commodore 64, a wildly popular eight-bit home computer, in his childhood bedroom. His father, a technophile who worked at a dial-up internet service provider, installed a modem next to Mr. Cottle's bed when he was seven years old.
'I literally grew up just completely immersed in the internet from the very, very, very early years of the internet,' he said.
At school, Mr. Cottle was the 'nerdy outcast,' he recalled. After years of bullying, he snapped at his tormentors during the seventh grade, threatening to kill the students who had broken into his locker and ripped up his Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering trading cards.
Mr. Cottle said he was arrested, then spent two years at a children's mental-health treatment facility located on a farm near Blue Mountain, on a cocktail of medications. Uninterested in socializing with the other kids, whom he described as 'really troubled,' he passed most of his time camping on the property with the youth workers and learning skills such as woodworking.
He was eventually transferred to a Toronto facility, he said. There, he met a fellow patient whose older brother belonged to a software-piracy group and taught him some basic hacking tricks.
Mr. Cottle met Christopher Poole, who would go on to create 4chan and was known as 'moot,' on an internet forum called Something Awful.
'A lot of internet culture came from that community,' Mr. Cottle said. 'It was a lot of really, really edgy people – people being edgy, but funny. Internet humour came from Something Awful.'
The moniker Anonymous came from the fact that users posting on 4chan were anonymous by default. That anonymity emboldened the site's users, and the platform was rife with controversial content, including pornography and gore.
The collective undertook its first full-blown hacking and harassment campaign in 2007. The target was Hal Turner, a neo-Nazi radio host. In addition to taking down his website, the group clogged his phone lines with prank calls and ordered dozens of pizzas to his home.
'I was vicious to that man, absolutely and utterly vicious,' Mr. Cottle said. 'I basically treated him like a plaything for months.'
According to Mr. Cottle, his campaign against Mr. Turner caught the attention of Canada's intelligence agency. An agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service paid Mr. Cottle a visit one day and tried to recruit him, he said. Mr. Cottle, who'd been playing video games with a friend and was decked out in neon-green raver pants and candy bracelets, ushered the suited visitor to his room, but never took him up on the offer.
CSIS said in a statement that the agency 'does not confirm or deny such claims in order to protect the sensitive activities, techniques, methods, and sources of intelligence that we rely on to ensure the safety, security, and prosperity of Canada.'
That year, Fox News aired a segment portraying Anonymous as a powerful cabal of domestic terrorists that had threatened to bomb sports stadiums. It included footage of an exploding van that, according to Mr. Cottle, had nothing to do with Anonymous.
Still, 4chan's traffic spiked after the broadcast. The site's moderators were unable to keep up, and its culture of playful misanthropy began to erode.
'That's when 4chan started truly turning into a cesspool,' Mr. Cottle said.
Years later, users on 4chan's far-right politics board started workshopping viral disinformation campaigns, according to Mr. Beran. One of the outcomes of that process was QAnon, a conspiracy theory put forward by someone known as 'Q' that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump was waging a secret battle against a clan of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. QAnon supporters were among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
'QAnon came off of 4chan, like Anonymous did,' said Mr. Beran, who described the movement as 'a reconfigured, Anonymous-style misinformation campaign … with some more right-wing derangement in it.'
U.S. authorities allege that on Sept. 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Anonymous hackers infiltrated Epik, a web-hosting company once known as a haven for deplatformed members of the far right. (The company has since changed ownership and announced early last year that it had cut ties with 'far-right bad actors.')
Gaining access to Epik allowed the hackers to deface the Texas Republican Party's website, replacing its banner with pornography, cartoon characters and a music video. They also obtained personal information from the site and made it available for download, according to the U.S. criminal complaint.
Authorities allege that Mr. Cottle bragged in Discord messages about being responsible for the attack, taunting law enforcement by directly addressing 'the fbi agents reading my discord logs.' The stolen Texas GOP data were later found on his computer, they allege.
In recent years, Mr. Cottle has participated in a number of online activities with political overtones. In 2021, he and several friends created fake accounts for Mr. Trump and other political figures on a not-yet-released version of the then-former president's social-media site, Truth Social, he said. They used the fake accounts to post what Mr. Cottle described as 'absolute nonsense,' including an image of a defecating pig.
Mr. Cottle has previously taken credit on TikTok for the 2022 hack targeting GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that was used to finance the truck convoy protests that clogged Ottawa streets that winter. However, he declined to comment on that incident during this interview.
Some time after the Epik intrusion, police raided Mr. Cottle's home and seized his computers. Deprived of his usual means of earning income, Mr. Cottle said he wound up living out of his car with his dog, Mabari.
Eventually, someone lent him a Winnebago motorhome, which housed him for a year and a half, he said. It was poorly insulated, and during the colder months he could see his breath and feel his toes going numb. The computer he'd acquired sucked up all of the power from the single extension cord he had access to. But gradually, he began to rebuild his life, finding work in the cryptocurrency space.
For years, nothing seemed to come from the police raid, according to Mr. Cottle's lawyers. By the time he was arrested, Mr. Cottle was living on the ground floor of a small house in Oshawa, outfitting it with colourful LED lights and a 100-inch television.
Mr. Cottle's next court appearance is slated for July 31. He's been charged in both Canada and the United States, and it's unclear whether U.S. authorities will seek to extradite him.
In the meantime, Mr. Cottle is watching what he characterizes as a full-fledged descent into fascism south of the border.
'I can't say that if my situation was not as it were right now, if I didn't currently have legal problems, that I would be able to just sit back right now and watch,' Mr. Cottle said.
But, he added, 'I'm not going to be hacking anything any time soon.'