X 'Anonymous' hacker Commander X nabbed in Mexico, deported to U.S.
A group of homeless men and women in California were protesting the city of Santa Cruz’s decades-old prohibition against overnight encampments in August 2010 when police officers attempted to disband the rally by detaining the protesters.
Among those arrested was Christopher Doyon, then a
45-year-old vagabond, according to local press reports. Doyon — who goes by the
online moniker “Commander X” — also happened to be a member of the hacking
group, Anonymous, and three months after the protest, someone knocked out Santa
Cruz County’s website, according to a 2011 federal indictment unsealed Monday.
It took more than a decade for the U.S. to get Doyon into
custody. He was deported from Mexico on June 11, according to the Department of
Justice. He’ll face charges for both the cyberattack against Santa Cruz County
and for ducking those federal charges back in 2011, the Justice Department said
in a statement after Doyon appeared before a federal judge in San Jose.
Although Doyon escaped U.S. law enforcement for the last 10
years, he didn’t shy away from telling his story. In a documentary produced by
the Canadian public television channel TVO called, “The Face of Anonymous”
Doyon is seen waving a copy of the indictment. In an interview he did with TVO
prior to the airing of the documentary, he claims to be the first American to
win political asylum in Mexico, while admonishing the U.S. for its social and
political inequality.
He said a group of elites who don’t want to see any street
people, or tents, took over Santa Cruz and that city isn’t the exception in the
U.S.
“It’s going on in cities all across America,” he said. “It
always has been. Santa Cruz just happened to be my home. It’s where I
encountered it.” Dayon described the Santa Cruz hack as a sort of digital
“sit-in.”
Doyon initially fled from the U.S. to Canada, where he spent
most of seven years living on the streets in Toronto, according to the
documentary co-producer Ian Thornton. Thornton encountered Doyon panhandling
and became intrigued enough to do the film, he said.
When asked if he still dabbles in political computer
hacking, or hacktivism, Doyon said, “Those days are over.”
“I do Twitter and that’s about it,” he added.
According to a 2014 interview with the New Yorker, Doyon
described himself as an activist first — likening himself to 1960s political
dissident Abbie Hoffman — who simply used technology as his “medium of
dissent.”
He said he moved to Santa Cruz in 2010 to join a social
movement called, ‘Peace Camp,’ where he ultimately became a leader until the
summer protest that led to his arrest, according to the New Yorker.
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