Anonymous Under Civil War? 301
Stoobalou writes "Civil war appears to have broken out in the ranks of headless 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous, with claims that a rogue admin has seized control of two key sites used to coordinate the loose-knit group's online direct action. The news follows speculation that a breakaway group of Anonymous members was responsible for the hacking attacks on Sony's PlayStation Network and Online Entertainment Network, which saw personal information, including credit card details, stolen from as many as 100 million users' accounts."
Penny (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/ [penny-arcade.com]
Civil war? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if I'd call that civil war, more like dissension in the ranks, or mutiny or barratry, and a greater than average amount of anarchy.
Now if you wanted to see Anonymous in Civil War, you should hear the Boxxy [knowyourmeme.com] story. She managed to divide the indivisible.
There was never one anonymous (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like there is no true scotsman, there will always be someone up to good and use someone elses name as the blame, Just like how a buddist symbol was hijacked for Godwinite purposes, there will be a lot of anti sony users pretending to be anonymous.
Were there lulz involved in hacking Sony? (Score:3, Insightful)
Given how much it has cost them in terms of PR, and how many "gamefags" are pissed off about not getting their PSN fix, the answer is probably "yes".
Therefore some of the less "moralfag" anons may well have had a hand in it. A bit like the schism over scientology protests and all the other things. Anonymous has a limited attention span due to any activity becoming "totally gay" after a while.
I find the whole thing hilarious.
Not News (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Civil war? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, Civil War is bullshit and the author should be ashamed of himself. It's just the usual Internet drama that happens in every single community at regular intervals.
Dissension always points to government invovlement (Score:2, Insightful)
Anytime a civil war breaks out in a Latin American country, one side is always funded and instigated by the U.S. government. Instigating dissension as a means of disrupting an organization is an age-old government technique that J. Edgar Hoover turned into an artform. Looks like our government boys have finally taken an interest in Anon, and the discrediting campaign is in full swing now.
Is it really civial war? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds to me that there are individuals who don't follow the same ideology as a majority of the group called Anonymous. But since the word Anonymous is the generic word for "The concept of many online community users generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known" (from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)) [wikipedia.org], how can you discern on sect from another.
If you are Anonymous in the collective term, then where one goes, you all go. It is part of the concept of Anonymous. True that only a small sub-group has made the decision to perpetrate a company and steal information, but their actions reflect on all those who associate themselves with Anonymous. If Anonymous as a whole disagrees with what some members do, punishment will be within and will likely be pretty swift.
This to me is not Civil war, but punishment for breaking of the ranks.
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:4, Insightful)
what (Score:5, Insightful)
Rebellion: Resistance to or defiance of any authority, control, or tradition.
Mutiny: Revolt or rebellion against constituted authority.
How can you rebel when there's no leadership to rebel against?
This is, at best, a schism, and anon has survived schisms before- see Boxxy or the Scientology protests.
Re:Civil war? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How'd have thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Law is only loosely related to justice. Laws can be used to persecute people, and justice can be obtained by going outside of the law. The suffragettes also used civil disobedience, and also had internal warfare from women that believed a woman's place was in the kitchen and out of politics. They still managed to get the vote for women, and in retrospect we now see society as a better place for it.
Not that Anonymous are the suffragettes any more than they are a bunch of anarchist computer network destroyers.
Phillip.
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a fallacy in your thinking: that any group, bearing any label, can proceed without some sort of organization. Even a mob takes its cues form certain charismatic/ loud/ exemplary actors. Anonymous is not immune from this observation. But this doesn't stop dreamers and mythologizers from thinking about anonymous in dreamy ways that may be romantic and inspiring, but simply isn't real.
Anonymous has a structure, and that structure is simply its most active members, coordinating with each other. You can kill this rudimentary structure, and hurt anonymous. Yes, you can do that. 90% of what anonymous does is dome by 10% of its "members". If you were to profile who that 10% were, and take them all out at once, (not one-by-one, there is an organic retirement/ replacement continuum at work here) you would destroy anonymous.
It would of course reconstitute itself, but if you continued this "observe most active members, and then take them all out at once" tactic at a regular tempo, you would kill anonymous, dry the well, poison it, and prevent it from refilling.
Most assuredly, you can kill anonymous, all romantic dreamy notions of what anonymous is to the contrary.
"Anonymous is about as cohesive as a fist full of jelly."
Yes, that's an accurate metaphor. Please note that jelly actually has some cohesion.
You can kill Al Qaeda. You can kill the borg. You can kill anonymous. It takes effort and a longstanding commitment, and the most effective longterm methodology is to neutralize what motivates its organic membership. But for all the romanticizing dreamy anarchists out there: you just don't understand the intrinsic nature of human social organization. We self-organize, and this is a strength we reply on subconsciously, and a weakness to exploit.
A False Flag Operation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Penny (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How'd have thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please. Comparing Anon to the suffragettes is just going way over the edge. Anon is nothing more or less than a street gang. They use intimidation and threats to exert power. Yeah it would be a real shame if something bad happened to your network. When you have people afraid to make statements critical of them they are no longer just protesters they are a threat to peoples freedoms. Like the freedom of speech.
They also become a boogie man for more restrictive anti hacking laws. And by hacking I mean things like modding devices that YOU OWN! And what everybody that confuses this vigilantly gang like activity with civil disobedience, forgets is that Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Susan B Anthony where not anonymous. Now the KKK the rode out and lynched folks that did things that they didn't like, that terrorized people into silence they where anonymous. You are drawing the wrong parallel from history. Of course the Klan saw and still sees themselves as heroes just like Anonymous does.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
if you were to analyze anonymous's larger domain of overlapping grievances, you would characterize what anonymous is about. and you would also describe the motivation that brings people together under the banner of anonymous. this list of grievances can accurately described as internet freedoms. so, for example, anonymous has nothing to do with islamic militant fundamentalism, which, like anonymous, is also largely organic in nature and self-organizing around a set of grievances, also mostly "anonymous"
now if you took away what motivated anonymous: passed a set of laws and enforced them in regards to internet freedoms to the satisfaction of most people identifying with anonymous, then anonymous would dissolve and cease to exist. neutralize the motivation, neutralize the movement. a movement exists to satisfy a grievance. once the grievance is satisfied, the movement becomes history
then, for the cachet, imagine that some islamic militants started calling themselves anonymous. would you agree that that was still anonymous? of course it isn't the same anonymous, islamic fundamentalism, ANY religious fundamentalism, is no friend of internet freedoms. but according to you, it would be the same anonymous, because according to you, anyone can claim the mantle
no, you have to be fighting for internet freedoms to claim the true mantle of anonymous
Re:A False Flag Operation (Score:4, Insightful)
HB Gary is Anonymous. Sony is Anonymous. The RIAA and MPAA are Anonymous. You see, the funny thing about a non-organizational organization like Anonymous is that anyone can claim to be a member.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are misunderstanding what I meant and believe that I am somehow a dreamy idealist.
I used to be one about 30 years ago. Not anymore. I read "The Disposessed" in high school and liked the "structured anarchy" in LeGuin's book, but it was clear even at that age that both planets in the book were gedankenexperiments and nothing more. I was also a Marx fan too. Then I grew up.
Anonymous is not hierarchical. There is no formal admissions process to Anonymous. You either join or you do not. You can lead a group or you can be a follower. You can join for 5 minutes and 10 minutes later, start shouting that "this is stupid and not fun, guys" or you can start your own "faction" with your own idea. Leaders and followers can be interchangeable in the space of 15 minutes. You can watch it happen by lurking in /b/ and in irc. This is how it actually works. It's not some sort of fantasy of how Anon operates.
The way Anon operates is unique to the age. The reason why we never saw this before is because communication used to be more difficult. Old Baader-Meinhoff or IRA shenanigans with cell structure and cloak-and-dagger message passing in the dead of night are passe'. Post something anonymously on a popular message board on a website and the world can read it without the message pointing directly at the originator. Entire discussions can be held with everyone being named "Anonymous" out in public. Enormous amounts of people can be organized in the space of an hour. That's what makes Anon effective (for various values of effective). 15 years ago, Anon would have been impossible to pull off, partly for technical reasons and partly for cultural reasons.
To kill Anonymous, you'd have to kill the *idea* of the flash-mob first, which is what Anonymous grew out of. You also have to kill anonymity on the net. The powers that be are working on the latter, but I think a technical "solution" anonymity is impossible without shutting down the internet and the phone system entirely. "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" - John Gilmore. Not only is that true of the 'Net, it's also true of people in general. It's the "don't effin' tell me what to do" reaction, which is in full force in Syria and Libya right now as an example. People are willing to risk death for "FUCKYOUIWON'TDOWHATYOUTELLME" to quote RATM.
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BMO
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony calling anon evil for the actions of this group is more or less no different then calling all Christians evil for the actions of Westboro baptist church, anyone can be a christian, and even take some portions of the christian beliefs out of context, yet you don't see the media or anyone hounding Christians as a whole for the actions of one group that claims to be Christians.
Or for that matter, calling all Muslims evil for the actions of Al Qaida (maybe a couple thousand people out of a population of well over 1 billion, or about 0.0002% of Muslims). But it sure happens far more than you might think.
Re:It was only a matter of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
>what the internet does to the functioning of anonymous is indeed new, but its a twist, not a fundamental recompositioing of human sociology.
It really is fundamental. Anonymity does something to human behavior that nothing else does. When we are not anonymous, we are self-censoring. When we are truly anonymous, we aren't. It's the "Greater Internet Fuckwad" theory in a nutshell. People tend to say/do what's on their minds. We've never had such access to anonymity coupled with the free access to communication in all of human history. We were always part of the tribe, the town, the city, the county. And if you fucked up, you were ostracized at best or stoned at worst. This is new/different. People can make new associations on the Internet without any of the responsibility that goes with them. Fuck up? Just create another "identity." In the case of Anonymous, you don't even need to create another identity - you just ignore whatever you've said in the past as if it never happened, because that was a "different" Anonymous.
Sherry Turkel has had a lot to say about all of this over the past 20 years.
You are dismissing all of this with a hand-wave saying it doesn't matter.
This makes you look like you are a stuffed shirt - an aristocrat looking down his nose at the peasants, that your arguments in a vacuum (as opposed to Sherry Turkel's research) are somehow based on reality.
I suggest that you go read "Life on the Screen" by Sherry Turkel. It's a little bit dated, but the same basic themes still apply. Then I suggest that you take that concept that all organizations are hierarchical and chuck it in the trashcan of history.
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BMO
Re:Penny (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what's really sad? That the closest thing we HAVE to revolutionary spirit is Anonymous. People only see the revolution there because everyone else is too busy with the bread and circuses.