Jake Davis, who as "Topiary" in the hacking crew LulzSec was involved in breakins to a number of websites culminating in a hack of the Sun's news site - and subsequently sentenced to serve time in a young offenders' institution - says his intention was only to prompt debate about how marketing and mass use had overtaken internet security.

In a series of answers on the Ask.fm website, Davis has been responding to questions from users about his involvement with the notorious group, whose members received sentences varying from community service to a number of years in prison. ("Sabu", the New York-based Hector Xavier Monsegur, who acted as a ringleader for the group, has had his sentencing adjourned twice since January, as he is still believed to be acting as a witness for the FBI in a number of cases.)

Davis's responses are often laden with irony, sarcasm and wild invention, as befits someone who ran the social side - particularly the Twitter account - of LulzSec, which still has more than 330,000 followers but to which he says he no longer has access. He is also banned from using virtual machines, leaving the UK, or associating with former members of LulzSec until they have served their sentences.

Origins and purpose of LulzSec

Asked about the group's origins, Davis says: "I thought the idea of Anonymous at the time was the right idea and always saw LulzSec as a sort of pretty little firework that could sprinkle into nothing so that we could start focusing on the real issues, like the freedom of journalists, drone strikes, censorship, spying, etc., but that's not how the third party cookie crumbles. It's a strange one to answer in terms of the "difference" between the two "groups", it's all just separate tabs in the same window, if you can picture the concept. I just want accountability for the real shadowy criminals such as those at the NSA right now. Thankfully now we seem to be paying attention to people like Glenn Greenwald at a mainstream level and there's no need to wave the top hat and monocle [the symbol used for LulzSec's Twitter account and other communications] around any more."

He explains: "We invented LulzSec during a very bored conversation on some abandoned IRC server. It was "Lulz Leaks" but then I forgot all of the passwords and we had to change the name. The top hat and monocle image was chosen at random from one of my Reaction Face folders with several thousand other, unrelated pictures. From there it was a case of making it up as we went along. I wouldn't even call it a conspiracy because that implies some level of organization. It's fantastic that companies are securing themselves and that we're taking Internet privacy seriously at a mainstream level now, even though LulzSec was fundamentally a waste of time."

He adds that "It seems like LulzSec was a small-time hacking group prior to that [30 May 2011] article [on the PBS website claiming that rapper Tupac Shakur was alive in New Zealand] being posted. It was one of the incidents that pushed it up a notch, yes, along with The Sun fake story [in June]. I always wanted to find a way to engage a public debate about the absurdity of how Internet marketing and mass social "cyber flocking" had far overtaken Internet security, through a series of whimsical and relatively harmless pranks (Westboro Baptist Church, etc.) but unfortunately the people with the skills wanted to cause pointless carnage, probably to comply with orders from their FBI handlers." ("Sabu" had been arrested by the FBI on 7 June 2011 and persuaded to become an informant.)

Davis professes that "I don't care about Hector in the slightest. Not even a little. I have no strong feelings one way or the other."

Choice of name

Why did he call himself "Topiary" (and "@atopiary" on Twitter)? A film, he says: " I chose "Topiary" after seeing a film called Primer by Shane Carruth. I checked his IMDB page and found he was working on another film called "A Topiary", and I thought, in these exact words, "that's p. sweet, that's a p. sweet word, I'm going to use that p. sweet word", and I did. It just so happens that I didn't clear it from my IRC client nickname history and that's just the name I was using at the time. I actually met Shane at Sundance London earlier this year and he knew about the handle and Anonymous - he's actually a big supporter of free information activism and so we had a couple of drinks. Nice man, but it turns out A Topiary is now being scrapped because it's too confusing for mainstream media."

Suspicions about Sabu and arrest

But he says he was suspicious about Sabu, who disappeared for 24 hours due to his arrest by the FBI. "There was a story about his grandmother dying that the FBI must have made up for him, which was a little strange as it had three variations and morphed as it needed to be. Apart from that he just wanted to engage in a lot more hacking than before, constantly referring to everyone as his 'brothers' and saying things like 'we're all in this together', obviously under orders to make other hackers all seem like close friends to him and each other. It's incredible A) how stupid everyone else was (including myself) and B) how callous the FBI can be in its efforts to make examples of anyone not showing signs of being a 'good citizen', even if it means teetering on the fence of illegality themselves."

He accuses the US law enforcement agency of trying to entrap him. "The FBI intended to entrap me via Sabu for as long as possible to incriminate my activities at the highest level. One week I told Sabu that I had no intention of involving myself in any more crime (organized by him) and that I wanted to switch to helping the activist movement solely through art and writing. That same week my home was raided. It's nothing new, we were just another set of pawns in the FBI 'strategy'".

His questioning by Scotland Yard consisted mainly of being asked about the contents of browser tabs which he had had open at the time of his arrest in August 2011. "Just a lot of 'What is this video?' 'Does it hold any relevance to LulzSec?' 'So just a video you happened to be watching at the time?' while pointing to a piece of paper of a printed out screenshot of a paused YouTube page. They did this with every single tab/page/window I had open, which must have been around 50. Can't argue with the thoroughness of the investigation but it was a dull exercise for everyone involved."

He says that rather than being convicted over any of his LulzSec activities, the main cause of his sentence was the hack of the Westboro Baptist Church early in 2011, in which he took part in a phone call live on air while the "church" was hacked.

Out of reach

Although the LulzSec Twitter account is not offline, he says he can't get at it: "The password for ‎@LulzSec was actually in an encrypted passwords file already open while my home was raided, and the computer forensics officer took a screenshot of it. The account is now legally accessible only by Scotland Yard / FBI / GCHQ / whoever, but yes I could still log into it, though it would probably be breaching some mysterious small-print I'm not aware of. Technically it would be considered hacking into someone else's account if I even signed into ‎@atopiary which may be a separate crime within itself. Crazy world, sexy anonymous text. Crazy world." He adds afterwards that "Looking back, it's actually remarkable how popular that account was - shame on everyone, really."

Sentencing

Davis says he is still serving his sentence: "My sentence was 3 years and that's after half of my charges (two counts of fraud) were dropped. I was never guilty of these anyway. My guilty plea (a year in advance) knocked off another year (i.e. a third). The time I served on a nightly curfew knocked off another 328 days, and the fact that I managed to fully rehabilitate myself and find work despite being legally banned from accessing even an email address during a strict police bail stretching two years while preparing for a trial that never happened fully proved to the judge that I wasn't a real criminal. If I had snitched on Jeremy Hammond (I didn't even know who Jeremy Hammond was at the time) I wouldn't have even received a prison sentence, which, as you now know, was 3 years in its raw form. 3 years for being a spokesperson with no hacking knowledge. In fact, I'm still technically serving my prison sentence for another 11 months in the community, and I'm highly restricted with file and association orders stretching into July 2018."

Mystery of the Bitcoins

When the British members of LulzSec were sentenced in May, we noted that there was a remaining mystery over the location of a number of Bitcoins that had been sent to the group's Bitcoin address ("wallet").

Davis deals with the suggestion that "Avunit" - a still-unidentified member - made off with them. "Highly unlikely. I believe the BitCoin account (called CoinGobbler) stopped working after I was arrested and the police took control of it. At the time we received around 700 BitCoins in donations, which right now would be worth around $88,000 and at a peak (for example, 5 months ago) they would be worth $186,000. I can't confirm that the full 700 still exist because I believe Sabu squandered a large portion of those, probably using them to buy servers with which to entrap other hackers for his FBI superiors."

Book writing

He said that he would consider writing a book about his experiences with the group, but "I would only ever consider writing a book if Mustafa Al-Bassam, Darren Martyn and Ryan Ackroyd were writing it with me, and I can't legally communicate with those three until next year. Naturally all proceeds would go to charity." The trio were other members of LulzSec - known online respectively as "tflow", "pwnsauce" and "kayla".

He is highly critical of his portrayal in the new book "We Are Anonymous" by the journalist Parmy Olson, complaining that "she constantly tried to guess what people were thinking 'behind their screens'". He acknowledges that "I was a very, very stupid and gullible child a few years ago (as you can imagine) and she took full advantage of that… The short version is I gave her a lot of information, a bulk pile of it, and she sculpted it into a very messy ice statue of a horse falling into a pool of custard and horribly drowning, again and again, until all you're left with is horsey custard steak."

Future plans and other arrests

But he says he doesn't plan to become an activist. " I'm not confident or knowledgeable enough to become a voice for anything as important as digital activism. It's flattering that so many people seem to think I know what I'm talking about, but it's really, really easy to sound informative and inspiring through the Internet."

He adds: "I was a very stupid young man and I regret 95% of what I did, but now I have a massive trail of job offers, a solid group of friends that supported me during the two year Internet ban / electronic tagging / trial / prison sentence, and a beautiful elusive mating partner that likes the version of me that has come out of the storm rather than the version that caused it. That's an impossible question, though if you're thinking of being Anonymous / Lulz Security version 2, then I suggest you find some other avenue for your creative juices… All that I ever did as part of LulzSec / Anonymous was banter and play games. I think that it would be a terrible idea to go down that route again, knowing the temptation and intense competitiveness I unfortunately acquire from being on the Internet. Been there done that - it's a shame to see others in the same cycle thinking they're exciting and new. They are not. They are banal and covered in bees."

A Shetlander, Davis says he plans to go back at least to visit: "I love the fire and passion of the Shetlanders and will definitely return for a visit this year. It's pretty much the maximum distance I can legally travel until next June, so why not?"

Asked whether the police are searching for anyone else who was involved in LulzSec, he says: "Maybe searching, maybe waiting until it's in the public interest to prosecute. It's a very strategic game - the court system is a sort of live theatre performance. I'm almost certain they know the identities of nearly every hacker that surfaces around the social networking world but there's too much of a chance for plausible deniability for the sneakier ones. It's not my place to go into great detail about my co-defendants, but the sheer ridiculousness with which they conducted Ryan Ackroyd's arrest was almost a Hollywood satire."

But his anger is reserved for David Cameron and his criticism of Ask.fm, the site on which the discussion appears: "David Cameron is an absolute wet-lipped Eton-spawned fleshnugget with no actual perspective on global policy. I hate the Tories with a burning passion reserved for the Westboro Baptist Church. The fault of cyberbullying lies with the parents, like all fault for everything, especially the troubles in Syria."