( – promoted by odum)

Preface: This is my first diary here, and my first real writing since I left college almost 10 years ago. I apologize if this is overly convoluted. If I write more, it’ll probably get better. I wrote this after reading JulieWater’s post as I thought a rough background on the group Anonymous might prove interesting. My goal is to start a conversation on the ethics of protesting. I am not sure I succeeded in the following. I will not take offense if one of the admins deletes this. That having been said, through the rabbit hole we go.

On December 7th 2010, a group known as Anonymous burst into political consciousness with brazen attacks on Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and Swiss internet bank PostFinance in retaliation for shutting down payments or other services to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Wikileaks had just days earlier released a plethora of US diplomatic cables and various governmental and non-governmental organizations were learning on corporations to cease providing support and services to wikileaks. While these attacks gained breathless coverage in the American media, this was not by far the first time Anonymous had made its presence known.

Over the past few years, Anonymous has been involved in anti-scientologist protest organization and information dissemination, fighting porn filters in Australia, and even bringing down Gene Simmons’ (of KISS fame) website over anti-file sharing comments he made. For most people these battles flew under the radar, but for those paying attention it showed the clear signs indicating the creation of a new form of activism.

Anonymous describes itself as a decentralized group of concerned citizens of the world. If their beliefs can be generalized, it would best be expressed as a form of digital libertarianism. They have in general expressed their interest in the freedom of information (for example, information on the inner workings and perceived deficiencies of Scientology) and their belief that the laws of countries should have no place on the internet (filesharing/”piracy”, restrictions on porn, etc). However, since anonymous (at least publicly) has no formal leadership structure or organization, actions undertaken in their name occasionally seem to deviate from these generalities. Statements on their purpose have stated that they do it “for the lulz.” Their activities have been called hactivism by some, the combination of the words activism and hacking.

Their only known physical protest by the group took place in 2008 during Anonymous’ attack on scientology. After several days of intermittent distributed denial of service attacks against scientology websites, Anonymous organized protests at scientology offices in 93 cities worldwide. Usually Anonymous has kept to the internet. Their modus operendi has been to use a combination of exploiting security flaws, social engineering, and brute force distributed denial of service attacks to convey their “message.” Typically, a press release style announcement will be released in advance of the action to give a general warning, ultimatum, or reason behind their pending actions. Since Anonymous is a collective rather than an organized group, some of these announcements are never actually acted upon. Projects are undertaken by volunteers. If not enough people (or not enough people with the required skills) are involved, the projects fizzle as they would in any community. In this way, Anonymous represents something akin to the organization in grassroots political or revolutionary groups.

The fundamental ideas behind the organization and activity of anonymous have been around for quite some time. Ever since computers became commonplace home appliances, disgruntled people have been exploring vulnerabilities in systems for various purposes, some claimed noble. For example, many people attempted (and occasionally succeeded) over the years of obtaining unauthorized access to corporate servers with the intent on “freeing” proprietary information to the masses. Where anonymous has revolutionized the concept has been in taking on various larger societal issues and applying a decentralized organizational structure to ensure that the organization cannot be taken down by removing any known key player.

This has not stopped people from trying. Notably, over the past month, a story has developed around one security researcher’s attempt to unveil the leadership behind anonymous. Aaron Barr, CEO of HBGary Federal attempted to discover the identity of several people involved in the organization of attacks on wikileaks who he identified by following conversations in an IRC (internet relay chat) channel. He leveraged several social media websites, mostly facebook and twitter, to correlate login times between, IRC and the social media sites as well as comment contents to determine real world names behind digital handles. Whether or not he succeeded is a question we may never know the answer to. For whatever reason, Mr. Barr decided to contact a member of Anonymous to tell them what he had done. This resulted in an immediate and harsh retaliatory action. Through social engineering, a member of Anonymous managed to get “root” access to a server related to HBGary Federal and through several fairly common techniques managed to escalate their access to the point where they were able to retrieve 40,000 emails, delete 1 terabyte of backup data, compromise the HBGary Federal website, and obtain control over Aaron Barr’s twitter account.

So what is Anonymous? That depends largely on your point of view. Some would likely qualify them as digital vigilantes. Others would call them bored technologists. Their actions have thus far primarily been targeted at corporations and large organizations and their techniques have mostly been attempting to send a message via blocking access to websites. This activity is illegal in several countries, including the United States, but is it a morally justifiable form of protest?  

Further Reading:

Anonymous’ Wikipedia Entry

Anon News Network

ArsTechnica covers the HBGary-Anonymous clash