They wear masks and bulletproof vests, and they change their driving route on their way to the office. They take back entrances, hide their identities and rarely tell people what they do for a living. Not all of them have it this hard, but for people who work for abortion providers and companies like Planned Parenthood, anonymity can be the only thing standing in the way of those who want to stop their work through any means necessary.
On Monday morning, hackers published a list of 333 names and email addresses of people who are allegedly associated with Planned Parenthood. It’s the most recent installment in a long history of anti-abortion activism, where doxxing isn’t just a tool of shaming and invading privacy but the first step on the road to ruining lives — or ending them.
On Monday afternoon, Planned Parenthood released a statement acknowledging the hack and blaming “extremists” who “have called on the world’s most sophisticated hackers to assist them in breaching our systems and threatening the privacy and safety of our staff members.”
The inside story of the Planned Parenthood attack: The information was leaked by a small hacking group called 3301, an international group of five hackers and friends with various motives and interests. They say they’re affiliated with the notorious Lizard Squad and other hacking groups, and are sympathetic to incarcerated hacker heroes like Rory Guidry, whom they’d like to see set free.
“We have a lot of future targets,” Jansson, one of the members of 3301, told Mic. “We’re going to be here for a while yet.”
“I guess [abortion providers can] just buy a gun,” one of the hackers told Mic. “That’s what America is good for, right?”
Planned Parenthood is 3301’s first publicized target. Two members of the group have strict anti-abortion beliefs, whereas Jansson is just more interested in the challenge of finding vulnerabilities in major systems that claim to be totally secure. Not that Jansson doesn’t have his own political beef with America.
“Corruption, racism, the fact they act like [they’re] the world police,” Jansson told Mic, listing his grievances with the U.S. “Also the fact people think Donald Trump would make a good president is crazy.”
Jansson said that the group has information about women who received abortions at Planned Parenthood facilities, as well as the Social Security number of Planned Parenthood’s CEO, but they don’t plan to release that information — at least not yet. Jansson said he insisted to the team members in charge of leaking info that they only dump the information of workers, not actual abortion-seekers. He trusts that his team won’t leak that info.
This hack wasn’t a sophisticated work of evil genius. Essentially, the team found out that Planned Parenthood was using an old piece of software — an outdated version of CONCRETE5, Planned Parenthood’s content management system — and hit it where it was most dated and vulnerable. The websites of NGOs and municipalities are notoriously easy to exploit.
But even if this is a one-off attack (as opposed to a concerted and consistent effort to take down abortion clinics and family service providers), it’s part of a long history of doxxing and exposing abortion providers and their allies. It’s a gruesome war as old as the Internet itself.
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