Are You A Gay Furry? If So, You May Have Already Hacked the Heritage Foundation!

Pervert Justice Shocked To Find Being Gay, Doing Crime In this Furry Establishment

SiegedSec, is that you? Or is that just fun times in Minneapolis a few years ago? Photo by dmuth. Used under CC-ASA 2.0

There is a group of hackers that describes themselves as gay furries (though I am personally dubious that this is a more important requirement than, say, computer skills and a low opinion of bigots’ right to data privacy) who call themselves SiegedSec (or siegedsec — or other caps versions, though SiegedSec appears “official”). They’ve been in the news before, hacking the Westboro Baptist Church among many others. Hacking Real America’s Voice (featuring the media stylings of Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk, among others) was their last big job in April.

The news from the last 24 hours is that the VERY ILLEGAL activities of SiegedSec breached a Heritage Foundation computer, taking 200 GB worth of data (about 1 laptop’s worth) early this month, of which 1% was released yesterday. The remainder will not be released for reasons of “ethics” and practicality. The ethics part relate to the goals of SiegedSec, which carried out the op as part of a political campaign they’ve named #OpTransRights. The priority is providing names and donation information for religious and political organizations hostile to trans equality, autonomy, or health care, not, say, releasing stored credit card information which might be used to commit financial crimes. The practicality part is that in any large download, some information is always going to be useless or irrelevant, as was the case here.¹

Cyberscoop, reporting on the Heritage Foundation hack, gives us this description of the timeline and data released:

The group says it gained access to the data on July 2 and released it to provide “transparency to the public regarding who exactly is supporting heritage (sic),” a spokesperson for the group who goes by the online handle “vio” told CyberScoop in an online chat Tuesday.

The data includes the “full names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames” of people associating with Heritage, vio said, including users with U.S. government email addresses. “This itself can have an impact to heritage’s (sic) reputation,” they added, “and it’ll especially push away users in positions of power.”

The hack was focussed on the already infamous Project 2025, giving hope that new glimpses into behind-the scenes conversations during drafting might become public. Sadly that (so far!) appears not to be the case.

The Intercept contextualizes the hack, helping readers understand why hacking Heritage would be included in #OpTransRights:

In his foreword to the Project 2025 manifesto, the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, rails against “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” and “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.” The playbook’s other contributors call on “the next conservative administration” to roll back certain policies, including allowing trans people to serve in the military.

“We’re strongly against Project 2025 and everything the Heritage Foundation stands for,” one of SiegedSec’s leaders, who goes by the handle “vio,” told The Intercept.

Heritage is declining to comment to media who contact them (a group that does not include PJ, lest cooties), while much of the internet is pointing and laughing at the image of a bunch of queers in full costume bashing their paws clumsily against keyboards and nonetheless gaining access to the deepest secrets of christian nationalism’s most moustache-twirly villains. Again, however, PJ must dash some hopes by informing our treasured readers that, contrary to popular perception, furries do sometimes doff their fursonas for sleeping, eating, bathing, procrastinating, hacking, and hot gay sex.

Even so, PJ, like, apparently, all of the internet, is vastly amused by this terribly entertaining hack.

Sorry. Hang on. This just coming in from our lawyers…

Ah, yes. PJ, like apparently all of the internet, is shocked and horrified by this immoral, illegal, and thoroughly condemnable crime. Please disregard any intimation otherwise.

1. One part of the download was an archive of Heritage Foundation’s blog posts, which are of course already public, though in the right hands the archive might reveal interesting edits.