The Rise of Anonymous

I was thinking about writing a legends article for this group because in many ways they are, however I reserved judgement this time because they don’t quite fit the bill. In fact they don’t really fit into any category because their motivations… aren’t individual ones. The only people who haven’t heard of this group by now probably have little understanding of the Internet and indeed the virtual world in general. So  for those readers I’ll try and introduce the idea of exactly who or what anonymous is.

Anonymous is arguably the world’s first ever superconsciousness, a gestalt entity comprised of hackers and cyber activists from around the world. The entity has no leadership, no evident direction  or intent but nevertheless acts with a high degree of unison when trying to achieve certain indescript goals. They are in a way an example of an anarchic, digitized global brain and act as a cohesive entity in much the same way a flock of birds acts as a cohesive entity. And this is interesting because they are an example of a true anarchy that actually works. The name “Anonymous” has since become used as a mass noun to describe the group. This name arose from the image posting boards of sites like 4chan and 7chan whereby every poster on those boards is not required to register and so posts under the moniker anonymous.

They have been described by the media in various ways – most notably as hackers on steroids and cyber terrorists treating the Internet as though it were a real life video game and their prowess is certainly powerful in this arena. Through their collective actions, the organisation has now become powerful enough to shake governments or at the very least be a major pain in the ass. For instance during the 2010 – 2011 Tunisian protests, Anonymous assisted the Tunisian people by delivering DDoS attacks against 8 Tunisian websites taking them offline. Anonymous then proceeded to attack Egyptian government websites during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The group is currently involved in on-going operations  in Libya and Iran and aims to prevent those countries from censoring information from the Internet as well as disrupting government misinformation. I pointed that the Internet was a crucial factor in my  earlier article about the Middle-East. Anonymous are an instrumental part of that factor. The group has also conducted other major operations against countries including Operation Titstorm in which they attacked the government of Australia over its proposed censorship of the Internet.

Anonymous are perhaps most well known for the now infamous project Chanology which saw them declare all out war against the Church of Scientology. The impetus for the project was supposedly the church issuing a copyright claim against a leaked video of Tom Cruise acting like a complete fucknut but more likely Anonymous were just beginning to recognise their potential and were looking for a quarry worthy of their mettle. Chanology saw the group identify with a purpose which has gone on to become the core tenet of their loose ideology – that of preventing Internet censorship, which they now seek to crush in all its forms. The initial salvos of Chanology began on January 21st 2008 and saw multiple DDoS attacks against Scientology websites, massive numbers of prank phone calls and black faxes. It wasn’t long before the activities of anonymous drew the attention of the fabled ‘wise beard man’ who is apparently the only person anonymous have ever listened to. He cautioned them against conducting illegal activities against the church and said they would be far more effective if they protested peacefully. Beginning in February 2008, members of anonymous protested in more than 93 cities world wide all wearing masks from the film V for Vendetta to protect their identities.

The goal of project Chanology

The first message from wise beard man

In recent months, the group has launched attacks against MasterCard, PayPal, Amazon and other organisations who supported the oppression of wikileaks as well as sought vengeance for the perceived set up of Julian Assange (legends article to come). Anonymous has been noted by some observers to be the successor to the wikileaks crown and if that happens, there’ll be pretty much fuck all anyone can do about it especially in light of their attacks against the bank of America and the computer security organisation HBGary Federal - the company favoured by the US government for keeping its information intelligence secure.  The Anonymous attack on HBGary Federal humiliated the company causing massive damage to its public image. Hacktivists working for Anonymous managed to steal a large amount of sensitive data from the company including thousands of emails and data stored on its servers. They also hijacked the company’s website and posted the message “You brought this upon yourself. Let us teach you a lesson you’ll never forget: Don’t mess with Anonymous”. The stolen data exposed company activities including a planned smear campaign against wikileaks and the data was later published on P2P networks effectively destroying their public reputation. The company has since failed to meet revenue projections and the parent company HBGary Inc has begun sales negotiations. Operation Leakspin similarly involved wikileaks and took a second look through intelligence data released on wikileaks for potentially overlooked cables / information and the further promotion of that material on the Internet.

Below: Messages from Anonymous

 

Is this group good or bad? I’m not entirely sure, some of their actions are good but some of the actions attributed to them whether through disinformation or because of the actions of some anonymous members are not. In this respect they would have be classified as a neutral force in the world, the collective unconsciousness of the people who comprise that group – a chaotic neutral force. In their wake they leave pandemonium and in general scare the shit out of anyone who ends up on the wrong side of them. It’s interesting but it seems now a virtual certainty that groups like this will soon begin to seriously influence the course of human history and that for me at least is a fascinating development. In the age of the Internet we probably should have seen something like this coming yet for some reason we just didn’t. The rise of anonymous was to some extent an unexpected side-effect of the information age although the enjoyably terrible film Hackers did to some extent predict something like this. And as for the future, well with digital native generation now reaching adulthood expect to see  a lot more weird shit like this going on in the future.

Below: Members of Anonymous protest