Christopher Weatherhead

Activism and Anonymous

Christopher Weatherhead, known by his online alias Nerdo, is a British activist, hacker, and technologist. He became a prominent figure within Anonymous, the loosely organized international hacktivist collective, where he was reported to hold a position of seniority within the group's leadership structure.

Operation Payback

Weatherhead played a significant role in Operation Payback, a coordinated series of cyberattacks carried out by Anonymous against organizations whose policies or views the group opposed. Within that broader campaign, he was particularly associated with Operation Avenge Assange, a targeted effort focused on disrupting PayPal and other payment processors. The operation was motivated by those companies' refusal to process fund transfers to the Wau Holland Foundation, which raises money for WikiLeaks, even as the same companies continued to process payments for other organizations, including neo-Nazi groups. Weatherhead was reportedly instrumental in taking PayPal offline for a period of ten days, an outage that resulted in an estimated £3.5 million in losses for the company.

The attacks on PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard took place in December 2010. In January 2013, Weatherhead was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his part in those denial-of-service attacks.

Privacy International

Following the completion of his prison sentence, Weatherhead shifted his focus toward human rights and digital rights work. He went on to work for Privacy International, a UK-based human rights charity. At Privacy International, he became notable for his advocacy work relating to targeted advertising and data protection.

Weatherhead v. The United Kingdom

Weatherhead was a party to the European Court of Human Rights case Human Rights Watch (and Others) v. The United Kingdom. As a result of that case, he was awarded compensation and received an apology from the British Government after it was determined that he had been unlawfully surveilled, in violation of his Article 8 rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.