On the online image-based bulletin board called 4chan, an idea was born. As people post by a name people know today as a group of people that When Bay Area Rapid Transit decided to cut cell phone service in attempt to disrupt and dispel protests over the agency's shooting of Oscar Grant in 2009 and, more recently, Charles Hill, the peaceful protesters weren't the only ones pissed off.
Hacker collective Anonymous also took offense to BART's actions and decided to hack into the agency's "myBARTway" website and released over 2,000 e-mails, usernames, and passwords—crazy, right? Yes, but it's on par with Anonymous's past exploits and hacks that have targeted governments, security firms, rap websites, and consumer electronics companies all in the name of freedom. If you look at the group's track record, a lot of its hacks have been inconsequential, while a small number of them have been big.
Then in 2007, Stephen Michael Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications, and Digital Economy for Australia, went on a crusade to censor the Internet to block malicious content which included child pornography but wound up encompassing any website that displayed sex, drugs, or violence. In protest, Anonymous used a denial of service attack to take the Prime Minister's website offline for about an hour.
There's nothing harsher than a hip hop message board. Anonymous learned this the hard way in 2008 when members of the group discovered some members of SOHH's "Just Bugging Out" forum were taking shots at the group. Anonymous's response happened in three waves: First, they flooded the site's message boards forcing it to shut down, then they hit 'em with a bunch of DDoS attacks which crippled the site, then it went in for the kill and defaced SOHH's homepage with racist slurs and images.
The site was then taken down and the FBI was contacted to investigate the nature of the attack, which SOHH employees saw as a hate crime due to its racist nature.
Small but growing traction right? Or was this just the beginning of something bigger?
Let us take a look.
In January of 2010 we saw some action In response to YouTube suspending the account of an Anonymous member who uploaded music videos to his channel, Anonymous encouraged all of its users to create fake user accounts, create videos containing a mixture of porn and safe-for-work images, and upload them to YouTube under friendly names. There's no telling how successful the attack was, but the BBC reported that one 12-year-old who viewed one of the videos and responded: "I'm 12 years old and what is this?"
Anonymous is for the people. All the people. Even the ones that like watching porn featuring small-breasted women. In response to the Australian government passing legislation that would block porn featuring female ejaculation and women who looked underage due to their lack of Twos, Anonymous threatened to, and then shut down the Australian Parliament House website and almost took down the Department of Communications website in February of the same year.
Moving into December, When the U.S. Government demanded that WikiLeaks stop releasing top-secret diplomatic cables to the public, several companies that supported WikiLeaks in the past turned against the website by freezing accounts and shutting down the site's servers. Anonymous decided to step in on behalf of Julian Assange's cause and declared war on Visa, MasterCard, PayPal for refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. On December 8, 2010, both Visa's and MasterCard's sites were taken down by the group.
In January of 2011, we saw The Tunisian Revolution, which led to the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was fought over several things—government corruption, unemployment, poor living conditions—but a major sticking point was the lack of freedom of speech. A major instigator in the protests was a WikiLeaks wire that described, in detail, the corruption present in the Tunisian government. Anonymous recruited several Tunisian hackers to help take down eight government websites with DDoS attacks.
Moving into February we also witnessed the Fine Gael Website Attack.
Looking at the list of victims hit by the hacker group, the Fine Gael seems like a pretty small fish, but the hack was pretty epic nonetheless. During the 2011 Irish General Elections, Anonymous took over the group's new website and posted the following text: "Nothing is safe, you put your faith in this political party and they take no measures to protect you. They offer you free speech yet they censor your voice. WAKE UP!"
Then after claiming to have infiltrated Anonymous, HBGary Barr and its CEO Aaron Barr got hit with one of the hacker group's strongest attacks to date. Anonymous first took over the homepage of the security company and replaced it with the above letter which read in part: "You brought this upon yourself. You've tried to bite at the Anonymous hand, and now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face." The group went on to shut down the company's phone system and hack into the company's e-mail system, making public over 68,000 private e-mails which included presentations, information on competing firms, and info on HBGary Barr's plans on taking down WikiLeaks. It didn't stop there. The group took over Aaron Barr's Twitter account and posted his home address along with his phone number.
As most of us know 2011 was a big year for Anonymous. They brought to light issues that most of the public would not have put eyes on by bringing attention to them using Hacktivism. For example,
To expose Bank of America's alleged corrupt and unfair mortgage practices, Anonymous leaked a trove of internal e-mails reportedly sourced from a seven-year employee of the bank on bankofamericasucks.com. While seemingly a big deal, the drop failed to make much of a splash since BoA was already in the news for shady loan practices and the e-mails did not show any obvious wrongdoing.
In April of the same year, we all could probably remember when a different Sony website was getting hacked every week? Or when the PlayStation Network was shut down for what seemed like the second half of the NBA season? That all started with an attack by Anonymous on April 2. After Sony decided to take George Hotz to court for creating and distributing software that allowed PlayStation owners to run homemade software on their consoles, Anonymous launched #OpSony and took down the PlayStation Network. The rest, as we saw, was history.
These are some of the highlights that we all remember and stick with us as we remember anonymous.
Not too long after an operation #OpPedoChat was in full effect. This birthed a new breed of Anonymous.
Most attacks in this operation were merely Cyber Attacks on websites that hosted things like child porn. As we can see in the history of Anonymous, the idea was to use Hacktivist tactics to disrupt the services of their targets to achieve the goals in their operations. One goal was the “Lulz” while the other was awareness and disruption.
Nowadays what we see in the collective is a total 180-degree turn from what we have witnessed in the past. If you follow groups that put on the mask you will learn that most have Political Agendas.
Something that Anonymous made clear they did not and would not have.
In the current times, most members of the collective are just acting social justice warriors that use Twitter as a platform to send their signals. Behind that, you will find some who try to make money off the banner of their so-called social justice wars.
Today we see these persons acting as if they can change the world by simply jumping onto a wagon that has long since passed them by. Promoting censorship has never been the way of anonymous.
Begging the government for a slightly better enslavement has never been the goal. That is where it has
gone. If you must ask why Here is your answer.
The movement once known as anonymous has been co-opted by the social justice warrior brigade.
These known people have become the hypocrisy of activism by going against the grain and doing such things as working with law enforcement to bring down “Online Sexual Exploitation”, and they write the definition to better achieve their goal in practice. The lulz boat has sunk under this storm.
In the end, it’s all about power. And, too often, it’s easy to assume power by cynical opportunists and/or young, unaccomplished, under-educated, otherwise-powerless people with limited near-term prospects.
Social Justice Warriors expect their numbers, aggression and noise levels to intimidate targets and silence dissent. Social Justice Warriors succeed far too frequently. Decent, reasonable people need not be intimidated. The best responses to social justice warriors are to question, to resist, to push back. If they could deal with difficult questions, logic or active resistance, they wouldn’t need numbers in the first place. Social justice warriors are left-wing progressives who exert a powerful influence upon culture. Maybe that is the reason why more people who call themselves anonymous members are in support of the Anarcho-communist agenda. It appears that the internet hate machine has clothed itself in a new wardrobe.
A(A)A is the first specifically libertarian communist grouping to emerge out of Anonymous, the worldwide hacking network most famous for retaliation operations actions in late 2010 to the attacks on Wikileaks by the US Government as we talked about earlier in this article.
They claim, A(A)A is not a 'split' from Anonymous, but rather a group that works inside Anonymous's decentralized and open structure, focusing on anti-capitalist targets and solidarity initiatives.
Here is the text of their original communique:
“In the last few years, Anonymous has gained increasing notoriety for its action against websites, agencies, and organizations that promote censorship and control. It has helped spread information and supported protesters demanding freedoms and rights.
But the popularity of the movement, the attention it brings along, and the structure it has engendered threaten to push Anonymous away from the decentralized, collective movement it has been. As decisions become more centralized and newcomers jump on the bandwagon, Anonymous risks becoming yet another ineffective reformist group, fueled by well-meaning rhetoric but subject to third party interests and paralyzed by its fear of authority.
This is why we, as members of Anonymous and anarchists, have decided to start an autonomous group to help spread the ideas of anarchism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and self-organization within it. We want to provide the skills, tools, and experience of direct action in the streets, and take advantage of the new resources and techniques of hacktivism.”
Here comes the double-edged sword of contradictions. They say things like newcomers jump on the bandwagon though that is exactly what they are doing in a ditch effort to take over the idea.
These social justice warriors are worried that censorship and control are what they are up against.
In the text following, they seem to contradict their ideas by stating they want to help spread the ideas of anti-racism, Though the speech of others under the guise of free speech should come first under the original anonymous idea. So here it is. Presented with the proof that the anonymous idea has shifted to become that of a social justice warrior agenda.
If we recall when anonymous defaced SOHH's homepage there were racist slurs and images used in the defacement. Isn’t this the very thing that A(A)A claims to be against?
I mean again the site was then taken down and the FBI was contacted to investigate the nature of the attack, which SOHH employees saw as a hate crime due to its racist nature.
As we take a gander to look at a press release that was written kicking off #OpKKK it states
“We are not oppressing you, Ku Klux Klan. We are not here to strip you of your Freedom of Speech. Anonymous will never strip you of any of your Constitutional rights. There is no “hate speech” exception to the Constitution. In a free society, we do have a duty to protect free thought, even when especially offensive. Your hateful ideas and words remain yours to keep. You are allowed to speak and in kind, we are allowed to respond. You are legally free to live and be any which way you choose to live and be. Keep in mind, it is not illegal nor oppressive to hurt your feelings. With that said, we are stripping you of your anonymity. This is not a threat, but rather a promise.”
As we can see the act of free speech has been long supported by the collective, but in recent times the social justice warriors have made it a point to disprove this point with their actions by supporting censorship by reporting what they do not agree with on platforms like twitter.
Speaking of twitter, we can look at the account that has had some pull in terms of following with 171k+ followers @YourAnonCentral, This account tweeted on October 10, 2017
“Fact check: #Anonymous supports #Antifa and has done so for decades, often engaging in anti-fascist action. #MMM2017 #MillionMaskMarch”
https://twitter.com/YourAnonCentral/status/917787068390084608
- YourAnonCentral
Most of you probably know what anti-fa is but here we will give a good description.
Antifa is an Anarcho-Communist Movement That Explicitly Endorses Violence Antifa is a revolutionary Marxist/anarchist militia movement.
That should make you wonder about anonymous since the original idea was to not support any political agenda. But that is the theme we see with anonymous today.
Now let's take a look at some verbiage, the definition of the word anonymous is
1: of unknown authorship or origin.
2: not named or identified.
3: lacking individuality, distinction, or recognizability.
To be anonymous you would have to remain or be unknown first. If you are not unknown, you can not be anonymous. The reason for bringing this up is to prove that most people under a metaphorical mask are just as known as Micheal Jackson. Pseudonymous is when you use a fake name. Let us get that straight.
That in and of itself is the point of saying that anonymous is now a group that acts as a social justice warrior faction. People who do good do not need a trophy to know it and to continue to do good.
People that want recognition are of the other side of that spectrum. They never truly do good.
The premise of them doing anything is for their gain and following. Activism online is dead due to this.
Contrary to popular belief, the internet hate machine has been dismantled by outside ideas and agendas.
Mostly the outside agenda is consistent with egocentric acts or competing masses in a popularity contest to monetize the idea.
One great example of all these things is a Pedophile hunting group calling themselves “The Dragons Den”.
The Dragons Den is run by a known person in this community to be egocentric and manipulative.
Danielle Hutton, who no longer calls her self a member of Anonymous, Is a known person that used to. She was doxed by her peers for many reasons mostly because her agenda consists of money and followers. She claims to fight for the kids though filling her time judging others based on their lack of interest in doing twitters job of censoring pedophiles. The anonymous idea was to use Cyber Attacks on websites and hacktivism to bring attention to issues like pedophilia online. Hers is sitting on twitter and reporting people she “Thinks” or “Knows” to be pedophiles. Considering most know what happens when one's account on twitter gets suspended, she knows best because she has done it multiple times now. They just go on and make a new account.
So now that we have concluded the left direction of the anonymous movement lets consider some other directions.
Again I can not fail to mention enough that the original idea of anonymous was to fight the institutions and tyrannical corporations and governments, removing the political part entirely
Mostly found in the political section on most news websites, QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters.
National media outlets rushed out stories explaining that Q referred to “QAnon,” an anonymous internet poster who claimed to have inside information revealing that, despite outward appearances and all evidence, Donald Trump is a brilliant tactician working to take down a pedophile ring run by a cabal of Democratic and Hollywood elites and then some.
This caught the attention of most of the Social Justice Warriors already calling themselves anonymous on social media. As the word “anon” short for anonymous follows the letter Q these followers flocked to the attention of yet another co-opted agenda.
This brought about a lot of issues within the anonymous collective, or at least the ones left still calling themselves members of an unofficial, majorly contradicted live-action role-playing platform.
The reason is that some of the people who were still active after years of dedication to the collective knew what anonymous stood for, to begin with.
Now I think we should ask a question, What is divide et impera?
It is Latin for divide and rule, in politics and sociology it is gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy. The design of such was defined by Niccolo Machiavelli who was an Italian war strategist that taught divide and rule.
When you’re faced with a multitude of opponents arrayed together, Machiavelli suggests the old divide-and-conquer rule (“divide et impera”). In the third book of The Art of War, Machiavelli says that a military leader should try to divide the forces of the enemy into weaker parts, primarily by making him suspicious of the men he trusted. Suspicion erodes unity. Machiavelli knew from his reading of Livy that the Romans used this technique to create their empire. For decades after World War II, the Soviets successfully used a similar tactic to divide Western nations from potential or lukewarm allies, by creating suspicion as to their intentions.
I find it very notable here that there has always been someone with a louder voice to come off as a leader in these sorts of groups. Those self-appointed leaders are the ones that yell the loudest until their following grows enough to start leading people into the opposing direction. The main word used to describe people of this nature is “Shill”. Now whether they do it for money or just followers we may never know, But one thing is certain. It should spark interest. Let us take a look at a great example from the anonymous collective.
This is an account from twitter known as @YourAnonNews. If you look this account had been the signal boost for anonymous for a long time, they built a following and eventually started to have the sort of political opinions being published before our very eyes. Doesn’t that make you think about what you just read in the above few paragraphs?
Because we know Napoleon used divide-and-conquer successfully in many battles: he divided the enemy troops so no portion was stronger than his army; he disrupted their communications so they couldn’t coordinate their attacks, and he separated the leader from the troops. His enemy crumbled.
The powers at be, that anonymous has for so long fought against, has very well divided the collection of anonymous into more than two groups. Now their movements are less coordinated and less effective.
In conclusion, Anonymous is dead. It died when the lulz boat sank under the waters of dive and rule.
Now the anonymous collective wears a Warner Brothers produced mask as its new clothes.
