Anonops #6: Anonymous en de MO-revoluties

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Op donderdag 3 maart 2011 10:11 schreef truepositive het volgende:
Begint al goed zo vroeg op de dag

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DAY 9 - get the message? - www.godhatesfags.com www.godistheterrorist.com www.westborobaptistchurch.com - #TANGODOWN ALL YOUR DOMAINS. #wbc

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http://www.thetechherald.(...)with-attack-on-BREIN

Anonymous, while continuing their actions to support protestors in North Africa, the Middle East, and Wisconsin, has resumed their most infamous operation to date - Operation Payback. On Thursday, the mass protest started with a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on the Dutch anti-Piracy organization BREIN.

The attack on BREIN (anti-piracy.nl) started just after 12:00 a.m. on Thursday morning Eastern Standard Time. In a matter of minutes, 10 people using the LOIC software Anonymous is known for, were able to take the organization’s website offline.

From that point, it remained offline, only appearing intermittently around 04:00 EST. At the time this article goes to press, the domain is offline.

BREIN is the Dutch acronym for Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands. It’s also the Dutch word for brain. They have been linked to Hollywood anti-piracy efforts, and were selected by Anonymous for recent actions against a large Warez domain that impacted a legit business in the crossfire.

While targeting a Warez (illegal software) Topsite, BREIN seized several servers from hosting provider WorldStream. Among the equipment seized were servers owned by a legit ISP with no connection to the illegal software domain. According to reports, the ISP owner lost $138,000 USD worth of equipment in the BREIN raid.

TorrentFreak has more information here, including allegations of BREIN installing backdoors on the seized servers and hijacking the ISP owner’s GMail accounts.

In addition to the Warez raid that snared a legit business, Anonymous is also targeting BREIN for Operation Payback’s resurrection because of their involvement with the takedown of 11 Usenet related domains.

While the Usenet domains also included access to illegal software, BREIN’s actions resulted in cutting Usenet connections to legitimate groups, removing their right to communicate in the process. In all, the Usenet raids by BREIN impacted nearly a million people.

Right now, Anonymous is using the DDoS attack on BREIN to build momentum. They plan to stick with smaller targets until support grows. Once that happens, then the sky is the limit for them when it comes to selecting a new target for cyber protest.



“Since early 2011, Anonymous has busied itself with very successful operations which it can be very much proud of. Not only has Anonymous proven that it is a force to be reckoned with, it has grown in strength and diversity, and it continues to gain numbers and attract attention from all over the world,” a statement from Anonymous reads.

“Operation Payback has now begun its "researching" phase, due to some actions taken by some copyright organisations, including "BREIN", who have censored popular sites on the internet over the past couple of weeks. This censorship can't be taken lightly, it is time to avert some attention to them and enable them to [realize] that this kind of censorship will not be tolerated, Anonymous style.”

Operation Payback started as a campaign by Anonymous against the anti-piracy efforts of groups such as the RIAA, MPAA, ACS Law, AiPlex, and AFACT. In addition, the operation has also taken on, and taken out, MasterCard, Visa, the Swiss bank Post Finance, PayPal, and others.

Update:

Five minutes after this story was published, Anonymous started targeting ifpi.org.

From their domain: "IFPI represents the recording industry worldwide, with a membership comprising some 1400 record companies in 66 countries and affiliated industry associations in 45 countries."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk(...)d&utm_medium=twitter
While larger companies can afford blanket protection from computer criminals, and the national infrastructure receives an "extremely good" protection service, Williams warns that smaller businesses, universities and individuals are still dangerously exposed to criminal rings from around the world looking to steal everything from cash and identities to intellectual property.

"We are very concerned at the extent and growth of cyber crime. It is getting to be an increasingly larger problem," said Williams. "The agencies policing this are bringing all of their skills and capacity to the table to fight this. If we don't, it will have such a profound effect on share prices, on investment, and on how much the government has to spend on pensions. It is big stuff."

A Cabinet Office report released two weeks ago and written in conjunction with private firm Detica, a subsidiary of weapons manufacturer BAE Systems, estimated cyber crime losses at £27bn.

Williams conceded there were real problems with collecting cyber crime data but she said £27bn was a conservative estimate of the losses.

She drew attention to the increasing youth of online fraudsters and her fears that e-criminals, including politically motivated hackers or 'hacktivists', may be too readily sucked into breaking the law because of a lack of human interaction.

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>> Here is some information that I have gathered that we can think about including. Of course using Palantir and automating some of the collection will make this a lot more powerful and complete.
>>
>> 235 Linked in Profiles currently employed with H&W
>> 68 LInked in Profiles of Partners currently with H&W
>> Corporate email address structure: abarr@hunton.com (first initial, last name @ hunton.com
>>
>> email addresses are great to use to see if people have used them to sign up for other accounts, for example jwoods@hunton.com signed up for a sabre.com account using this email address (the UVA football team - his alma mater).
>>
>> or
>>
>> Bob Tata and his wife, Anne Ferrell, live in Virginia Beach with their four children, Peyton, Carter, Riley.
>> Also found a spam list containing other possible email addresses for btata.
>> btata56207@msn.com
>> btata@att.net
>> btata@bellsouth.net
>> btata@hunton.com
>> btata@massed.net
>> btata@msn.com
>> btata@usa.net
>> btata@worldnet.att.net
>> This is a rather large group that just gets larger through associates, attorneys, etc. Lots you can tell about individual people from social link and artifact analysis. For example. John Woods does rarely uses his Facebook account. 95%+ of his friends are from his hometown/high school. To get to him I would create someone from his past, find someone he went to high school with on Classmates.com that doesn't have a FB profile and create him/her. Either that or I would go through a professional association, but thats harder to pull off.
>>

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AnonOfTheAbove RT @Arktist: FYI: nsa.gov is National Security Agency domain/site. IRC fm there is either mis-use of Internet site or NSA is interested in #Anonymous 18 minutes ago via TweetDeck

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AnonOfTheAbove RT @Arktist: Repeating my question of late last night: Why was someone fm nsa.gov domain in an #Anonymous IRC chat last night? Whose side is (s)he on? 18 minutes ago via TweetDeck

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There is no Anonymous

If you are talking about the Anonymous from 4chan, then there isn't any group like that. That implies to much organisation, a hierachy, an organization.

The idea originally was related but NOT the same to "I am Spartacus". And many people don't even understand that statement.

The "I am Spartacus" statement is this: "I hereby declare that I am the person you are seeking and accept all responsibility for my actions." If you state this, you BECOME Spartacus, you are it and LOOSE yourself with it. You can't say, "I smallfurrycreature represent Spartacus", you surrender yourself to the cause and become it. In the movie, the people all nailed up, are ALL Spartacus and by doing so the idea of Spartacus if not the person becomes invincible. No matter how many Spartacusses you nail to a cross, there is always one more just around the corner. It is the undying hero, the person dies but the idea goes on.

This doesn't sit well with our individual culture.

Anonymous takes this even further, if people understood it. You cannot state "I am Anonymous" for this is silly. The moment you tie yourself to this concept, you are no longer anonymous. You can speak with a thousand voices, you can at best be one voice representing a thousand but never a thousand. You cannot be anonymous only be a non-significant part of it.

The real idea behind it all on 4chan was to give a name to the movements/actions that were observed. It is like watching the migration patterns of animals and calling them Bob. Just because it now sounds like a person doesn't mean that a wildebeast migrating represents Bob or is controlled by the motives of Bob.

Does any of this rant matter

Yes. The Muslim brotherhood, are they the protesters in Egypt? Some western "news" stations would have you believe this. BUT this has NOT been an Islamic revolution. It might or might not become one but the protests where NOT guiden or orchastrated by them... some PROTESTERS might have been but not the "protest". It can be hard to grasp the difference. It is the difference between the resentment of the masses and individual grievances. Same as the protests in Tunesia were not about a closed vegetable stand or in Egypt about the beating of a youth or in France about cake or in the USA about tea.

Anonymous is not a group that exists on 4chan in /b/. If anything it is the behavior of individual but unknown people who use the web to do something in a minimally organised way to have a far reaching effect. It is the mob effect on the internet.

That means that there is no point in ousting its leaders. You can get the leaders of one mob and might even be cheered for that by the mob next to it. Anonymous cheers cat killers and hunts them down. It is not a singleton, it is a class. You can spawn things from it but almost by its nature, the moment you do that is ceases to be the idea and it becomes Anonymous XYZ the group.

Anonymous doesn't have its hands on anything and has its hands on everything because we can all be Anonymous and we all aren't.

But media doesn't grasp that since they need to put a face to the name. But ultimately this means that Anonymous will just get more legenday. Strike one group down and another will take its place. Just as killing a few hundreds protestors, and arresting/torturing far more, did NOTHING to stop the protest in Egypt. Or killing all the buffalo stopped Bob.

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http://www.zdnet.com.au/a(...)ak-afp-339310749.htm

Reticent judges and slow legal frameworks are passing out soft and unbalanced charges to online criminals including members of the Anonymous collective, a move that is frustrating the Australian Federal Police

Australian members of Anonymous — a loose online activist collective responsible for a string of devastating cracking and denial-of-service attacks — were caught last year after they helped bring down the Prime Minister's website under Operation Titstorm.

The operation was a response to the Federal Government's mandatory internet content filtering plan which the collective fiercely opposes.

The AFP launched an operation called Whisk to look into the online attacks and netted two Anonymous participants using intelligence from the Defence Department's Cyber Security Operations Centre.

Both men, Melbourne resident Steve Slayo and Newcastle resident Matthew Gordon George, faced 10 years imprisonment for "causing unauthorised impairment of electronic communication to or from a Commonwealth computer" but received a good behaviour order and a $550 fine with a recorded conviction respectively.

Those penalties are not enough, according to one AFP officer involved with the case.

"Judges are not willing to hand out tough sentences," AFP High Tech Collection and Capability manager Grant Edwards said. "They don't understand the threat."

Catching Anonymous members is not the problem because Internet Protocol addresses can be traced, Edwards said, but rather the lack of understanding of the severity of the crime.

"It is difficult to create laws against cybercrime," Edwards said, citing problems of tracking perpetrators overseas.

"Unless we understand the impact, we can't create the laws. The issue is also the speed to create these laws," he added.

The AFP's High Tech Crime Investigations unit is charged with investigating and prosecuting individuals for attacks against Australia's critical infrastructure and information systems. It works in collaboration with the Cyber Security Operations Centre and the newly fledged CERT Australia.

Judges are also handing weak and unbalanced sentences to paedophiles charged with holding online child pornography, Edwards said.

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To illustrate the problem, Edwards said one paedophile charged with holding 200,000 child pornography was sentenced to 14 months in jail, while another caught with 100,000 images was sentenced to four years.

The AFP said in a statement that "activities such as hacking, creating or propagating malicious viruses or participating in DDoS attacks are not harmless fun [and] can result in serious long-term consequences for individuals, such as criminal convictions or jail time".

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http://www.scribd.com/doc/49979252/IRC-Intro

IMPORTANT!!!
Communicating via IRC is NOT a crime in any way. Is talking in Japanese on the phone a crime?FUCK NO! If someone says otherwise, smack them with a giant fishbot.

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http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/02/on-anon.html

As I've described in a lengthy introduction, I encountered the phenomenon of Anonymous, often described as a "looseknit online community of hackers," in the virtual world of Second Life. I've detailed three major incidents that defined my involvement, starting with a comment on their offensive art; then moving to abuse reports on their violations of the Terms of Service inworld; and progressing to regular documentation of their raids and posses against me, my tenants and others in the virtual world. In time, I began to follow their activities elsewhere on the Internet, but I don't claim any special expertise or knowledge; I just claim common sense and a basic willing to report the truth -- something that is often absent in the treatment of Anonymous by the mainstream media and various blogs, whether by tech specialists, "progressives" or conservatives.

1. The most fundamental truth about Anonymous is that they lie: they lie about little things and big things; they lie about lying; they lie about lying about lying -- and so on.

2. Anonymous is not a looseknit movement. It's very structured, in fact. It has very rigid cultural norms and rules; it has very strict lines of communication. It is a cult and its members behave like cult members and its leaders behave like cult leaders. To describe Anonymous as "loose," like, say, a Facebook group that "likes" Coca Cola or Lady Gaga is "loose," or a group that teens make on Facebook with names like Didyouhearthatstupidthingmrhallsaidtoday is "loose" is to not get it about gangs, cults, dysfunctional movements of various types -- they are all about rigidity; they are all about very, very stiff and not fluid relations. Anonymous is often described as some really versatile franchise that enables the franchiser to pick from a huge menu of options. That would be like saying a McDonald's franchiser can put out baked home-made sweet potatoes instead of standard frieds made in standard Fry-Max with standard seasoning. It's simply untrue. You have only to watch and look and stop reading tripe in the media.

3. Anonymous is not anonymous. First of all, Anonymous are people like your best friend's son or your uncle's coworker -- you know them. Secondly, they are definite people with definite identities who do very specific acts -- those who rise to the level of actually leading and perpetrating attacks are not so great in number, are known, especially inside the movement, and are identified by law-enforcement and intelligence and even journalists or casual observers. They trip up and expose themselves many times; they are exhibitionists and want to be caught many times and be heroes/martyrs. If Anonymous were really so, it wouldn't have to tell you. That's all.

4. Anonymous are caught; they go to jail. The man who broke into Sarah Palin's mail account was sentenced to one year. Five Anonymous activists were arrested in the UK over the WikiLeaks scandal; there are many others who have in fact been arrested and known. Nearly all the dozens of people in SL are known and identified and banned several times over.

5. Anonymous is not legion; its numbers are fairly small. To be sure, the lookie-loos and the day-trippers and weekend w-hatters may seem like a lot of people at times, but even they fit into the usual online power curve of 10 percent of any community who do anything at all while the rest watch, and are a tiny percent of that 10 percent (less than one). Anonymous numbers have been fairly accurately assessed by some smart people who have noticed a thing that they all inevitably do and have tabulated it, and put the numbers ranging from about 8700 to 12,500 around the world, with seasonable and episodic variations -- but with only about 700-800 who actually plan and execute major attacks. Like Wikipedia and other online cults, there is a tiny number of collectivized leaders, sometimes turning over frequently, who make major decisions.

6. 4chan.org is a big part of Anonymous. Saying 4chan.org is a mere images board where people trade jpeg pictures is like saying the SDS was merely a student group that discussed textbooks. The main action at 4chan.org is the long chats in forums where the pictures are merely a kind of prop to the chat. 4chan.org is where attacks are planned and coordinated; 4chan is where people can get links to the various other chat places and IRC channels and pastebin.org chatlogs. If the authorities want to cut to the chase and stop fooling around with expensive security firms that embarrass themselves by doing retarded things like going in an IRC chat and deciding they now have a list of Anonops, they could more strategically simply call in Ken Lerer, the owner of the holding company of Huffington Post, and Christopher Pool, the owner of 4chan.org whom Ken Lerer has hired as an adisor on what is "cutting edge," and have a chat with them about what is on their servers. They will deny involvement in DDOS attacks but will in fact have inevitably participated in them, and they can stop them by having 4chan take a public position and by backing it up with bans and blocks. They won't do that. That's the problem. See no. 7.

7. Anon is not reformable. Members of Anon never truly leave the organization when they claim to; they may cease griefing expeditions for a time but always come back. They lie about reforming; they are never sincere. Think "Eddie Haskell".

8. A popular griefing mechanism of Anon involves a dramatic claim of a come-to-Jesus moment when a griefer realizes "the error of his ways" and "quits griefing". After his confession and altar-call, he "reforms" and takes up an activity like "volunteering for Relay for Life" at the American Cancer Foundation or some other charity. This is always fake, and is merely another operation. After gulling innocent first-timers and even gullible repeat-believers, they come back and grief again -- Lucy and the football, Charlie Brown.

9. You can never know enough about Anonymous. You are always wrong, and always off balance.You said they were in this faction; they were in the other one. You claimed they were behind this hacking; they were actually not, but behind another that didn't have their fingerprints. You are stupid; they are clever. You don't get it; they are on the inside. You thought you were a specialist; guess what, you were played. Anonymous is all different than you say! Anonymous is all wonderful! You aren't!

10. You can never hope to keep up with the memes and inside jokes. You thought "cool story bro" was the joke of the week? You are hopelessly behind the times and a newb and a feeb. Oh, you hope to establish your savvy by indicating that in fact it's "You mad bro?" this week? You couldn't be more wrong. 4channer girls are laughing hysterically about "Perhaps....dresses?" this week...and you aren't...but you're a girl, aren't you?

11. Anonymous are thought to be closet gays, or gays unhappy with their sexuality, or ambivalent bisexuals, or transgendered males changing to females. Perhaps some of this is true, but there is another factor that explains more about their character and their sexuality: they are autoerotics. They have come to find online-assisted masturbation so compelling that they attracted to other men not because of homosexuality, but because of insular autoeroticism. A real homosexual is capable of falling in love with another man or at least of affection; the Anonymous is a narcissist in love with himself and his online reflections. Other people are toilet paper to him.

12. Far from being anarchists in the details of their online lives, Anonymous in fact are finicky and particular and heavy control freaks. They like order and repetition. They crave the incessant repetition of the same pictures and words over and over again like toddlers having to see the same video or hear the same story again because it helps order their chaotic nervous systems and cope with their overstimulation. They are not free; they are under heavy constraint. They need to do the same thing over and over and over again *in the same way*, like obsessive-compulsives and bear striking resemblance to them. They can repeat the same griefing action incessantly, day after day, with crushing boredom and regularity because it sooths them not only to get the same reaction out of another person and annoy them, but also to gain a sense of power from the routine. That this makes it easier to catch them doesn't seem to bother them; their need for repetition is GREAT.

13. Far from being loose-knit, the Anonymous movement is very structured. It has strict codes of conduct, definite lines of authority, very precise marching orders. Many an observer, close or far, has mistaken the Politburo-like "democratic centralism" of the movement, where a topic or action might be discussed "freely" in a group as being "loose knit"; in fact, the rituals and procedures for the topics and debates are very limited, and bear no resemblance to open parliamentary debate or Roberts Rules of Order; they are a cult, even if not listed on rickross.com

14. Many people think that Anonymous is successful because it has lots of people and can easily and flexibly decide in an uncoordinated way to do various actions -- as noted, it is considered to be a kind of vast franchise where ideas spread like wildfire and get acted upon. In fact, Anonymous doesn't work like the flu or a viral video, but works like an army -- there are recognized cult leaders and recognized signals of authority. While any effort to try to isolate some badge or code of authority would fail, there are markers and signals that a few key individuals develop and spread with rigid connivance.

15. One of the more retarded things a certain faction of Anonymous tried to do was start a caper that involved hacking a weather site and claiming that they were trying to "hack winter" and "make it spring." This action was taken directly after the hacks (yes they are hacks) of Amazon, PayPal, etc. and was designed as a counterspin against a growing public dislike and distrust of the movement -- a period when it was ceasing to be cool and being now alarming. This dodge and feint was a flop and convinced nobody and never attracted significant following among the ranks to catch on. Anonymous always reverts to ugly, horrid form -- it is not evolving or getting better, and more than the Lord's Resistance Army is "getting better".

16. In the same way, a false flag operation (FBI or other foreign intelligence or freelance security operatives mounting an action made to look like Anonymous and confuse them) mounted not long after the Paypal attacks, implying that now a "new" Anonymous was being born that would focus on political causes like attacking the Egyptian government's sites wasn't typical and wasn't convincing. This effort of hostile outsiders or possibly an insider faction hoping to distract the public with a positive message wasn't typical. Whether it had significant backing or whether it was just a cynical dodge, soon the b-tards were back hacking and slashing again like they always had and this dodge made no difference.

17. Nobody can stop or call off Anonymous or deflect them. The confused and babbling John Perry Barlow, now in his dotage, that he had "called off" people that had "misunderstood" or "overreacted" to his call to war in cyberspace is absurd (and an admission of guilt -- how can you "call off" that which you claim you hadn't "called on"?)

18. The movement has not changed or matured or evolved. Some members are visibly associating themselves with the Egyptian cause; but the same or other members are going around harassing online worlds and communities with horrible obscene and racist content, and attacking the firm HBGary, and telling the female executive to show her tits in chat messages. All the ugly and disgusting behaviour continues; all the racist and sexist talks continues everywhere, merely distracted from.

19. The fight against Scientology was not a fight for freeodom or human rights or secularity against religious cultism; it was a competition by one cult with another, by a newer online cult by an older one that was among the first to harness the earliest forms of the Internet for its cause. It's a gang war for turf, and not a liberal struggle for rights for all.

20. Anonymous have a concerted plan to fan out to forums and argue with people who criticize them in various formulaic ways -- lying, obfuscating, challenging the critic's credentials, or using the Saul Alinsky tactics, as they conservatives call them, of picking out some feature of the target and exaggerating it, or picking out some aspect of the issue and insisting that it's in the target's own interests to agree with them, or part of the target's own values to concede their point. Always and everywhere, Anonymous tell you that you are wrong about whatever you think of their movement; that you don't have that facts; that you mixed something up; that you have laughably taken something too seriously.

21. Anonymous often word-salads or obfuscates various technical issues; they describe themselves as having "2,000 nodes" (Jacob Appelbaum), something giving precise numbers to lies to make them seem more convincing.

22. Anonymous are not teenagers are young men only. In fact, many are 30-40-50 year old men, some with prestigious IT jobs or academic or media jobs. Anonymous is a professor or an executive, not just a kid in his mom's basement.

23. Anonymous is penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies. This wasn't hard to do given both the ostensibly loose nature of the movement *and* the rigid culture which makes it brittle and unable to resist undermining -- it is very easy captivated or manipulated in fact. The Russian FSB seems to be obviously at work here, and there are quite a few examples of the use of sites with the RU address, various Russian cultural features, not to mention of course the Soviet memes, which are sometimes adopted as a joke, to tweak what they see as fanatical critics invoking their Leninism, but which also has its roots in actual belief systems.

24. Anonymous has what is called the "bro code". This brotherly set of ethics, if you will, chiefly involve never reporting on a fellow member to authorities such as police. When this appears to happen, it is often part of an elaborate caper that is itself merely setting up the next griefing operation. Those appearing to turn state's evidence may be involved in merely a more elaborate form of social hack.

25. Probably 75 percent or more of Anonymous hacks are social hacks that don't involve actual computer programming skills. They involve spying on or simply observing people and gathering clues about them to use to guess or attempt to produce their password or to find some other aspect of their lives online or off that can be accessed.

26. But Anonymous themselves have the same propensity for leaving enormous numbers of clues to their identities and activities online that they are not particulary good at covering up. They have a propensity, like all totalitarian movements seeking total power, to document their crimes as a form of narcissism and cultic reinforcement. Often, they make tapes of phone conversations; they compulsively save chatlogs; they make video tapes of themselves griefing or planning to grief, and they can't help showing off, online and in real life. The videos in particular often contain telltale clues to their locations and corroborating evidence that helps establish who they are despite careful work by their enablers to hide their real names (*waves to Mullet Handelsohn*).

27. The downfall of many an Anon is the victory dance. The victory dance usually has to follow each griefing posse or raid or major DDOS attack or other hacking operation. It is an essential part of the ritual and has to be participated in and documented. It is no fun crashing a server or hacking into an email system and publicizing its contents if you can't go somewhere afterwards and have a party to wash down the success, as it were; the victory dance often involves elaborate manifestations of the memes and catch phrases, where not only is the story told and retold, but those who didn't participate and who may even keep strategic distances from the actual perpetrators may show up, on a guest appearance, to tacitly give their nod of approval in some way. Somebody who elaborately hid his tracks with proxies while griefing might log on from his home to go to a victory dance by mistake.

28. Anonymous always tries to minimize the damage they have caused. They scoff and snort outright at anyone putting costs to damages; they decry the "Internet as srs business", they say that victims are "butthurt". They always remind people that online life isn't real; if they are crying about a rape in cyberspace, they are indignantly told to grasp the horror of real rape. An online virtual rapist thrusting a giant penis in somebody's face in Second Life might simultaneously also angrily tell you on a forums that his sister was raped; that we have no idea of the pain and how dare we compare these utterly unlike things. This pixel peniser might in fact even volunteer for a group in SL doing real-life fund-raising for victims of domestic violence, just to show you what a good guy he is, and laugh all the while at your protestations that his behaviour is inconsistent and unfair.

29. Anonymous always tells you that they never forget, that they remember slights and punish them for ages, relentlessly. Yes and no. Anonymous are capable of planning an elaborate raid, but suddenly logging off in boredom because something better came up on TV. They may stalk you for months and suddenly stop, because they got bored or simply found a jucier target. Some of them are methodical and repetitive, but just as many have ADHD.

30. Anonymous talk a good game and brag a lot; they vowed to take down AT&T just because their site was blocked for a time when it was a victim of a DDOS attack. They made the most violent and horrible comments about AT&T and its executives, but stopped short of any RL violence or even hacking attacks once AT&T executives made a statement that the site had only been temporarily blocked. In fact, Anonymous often stops short of crossing that blood-brain barrier called of "taking it to real" -- going into real life to pursue somebody online. They don't mind getting b& but they don't want to go in the real-life paddy wagon downtown.

31. Anonymous never shows solidarity to their fellows when arrested. It's as if they died in World of Warcraft and their characters got teleported home to respawn later if the right potion is found. They never mention them. They never defend them. They never sign petitions. They never speak to the media about them. They never try to reason with anybody to get them out. They turn their backs on those fallen behind enemy lines, and never look back, like brave little soldiers in war. An arrested Anonymous is easy to break because he has no solidarity, no brotherhood, nothing like an old-world mafia to fall back on. This is both a strength and a weakness of Anon. To be sure, Anon might laughingly make graveyards of banned avatars or mentioned banned people in reverential tones but they never cross the street to actually defend them.

32. Many times Anonymous claim they do things just for laughs -- for the lulz. Other times they imply, but never rally specify, that they are engaged in some short-term goal of "doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do," i.e. fighting Scientologists or the Egyptian government. The reality is that Anonymous has a very conscience and very specific purpose that is very deeply and zealously felt by every cult member: they wish to prevent anyone from using the Internet in any way they think it should not be used, and especially not to take it seriously.

33. Sometimes Anonymous is believed to be a new cutting-edge progressive movement, some sort of new form of online democracy. In fact, Anonymous is profoundly conservative. Its structures resemble more of an 18th or 19th century Masonic Lodge than they resemble casual Facebook groups in the newest form of social media. Anonymous has leaders; it has followers. It has codes; it has rituals. It has a certain way of doing things; and has ruthless conformity procedures.

34. Anonymous is most ruthless to its own people. It will use the most outrageous pressure tactics. If somebody's parents have to be called up to harass a young person out of line, that will be done; if somebody fails to conform, they can be harmed at their job with a deliberate harassment tactic or pizzas can be sent to their door or even the SWAT team of the local police urged to storm the apartment.

35. Anonymous is often described as having "16 year old girls" in it. These are more than likely men in drag, i.e. 30 or 40 year old men taking on the persona of a 16 year old girl. This is very, very common. There are, to be sure, real 16 year old girls, but not that many of them.

36. Although they are styled as anarchists at heart and indeed do hew to the traditions of Bakunin and others, they are in fact strict legalists, always and everywhere fanatically invoking law and rules and procedures. On every forum, they will invoke TOS regulations, even the most obscure paragraphs; on any chat discussion they will cite Constitutional clauses or Supreme Court decisions or various arcane agency regulations with superior and smug glee; they can be the most assiduous abuse-reporters on any platform and take keen delight in bringing down someone else on a technicality. Always and everywhere, this apparenty legalism is a sham -- it is lawfare that exploits law to wage a war; it is a distraction from their own inherent lawlessness. They are legal nihilists, that is, they do not care to have any rule of law over themselves. They prefer "rule-by-laws" that breeds arbitrariness rather than "rule of law" that would imply some higher power to which they were accountable.

37. While they pride themselves as being Anonymous, faceless, colourless, melting into the crowd, in fact, the b-tards cling fiercely to identifying marks -- groups they join, nicknames, memes, pictures. If a moderator of a board were to rule that the name Anonymous or Anon E. Moose cannot be used, or rule that no pictures of suits with question marks over the heads can be used, or no Guy Fawkes masks -- that is, to behave like a high school principal in New York City might behave to demand the removal of gang insignia -- they will erupt into an uproar of outrage about the suppression of their free expression and the supposed hysteria and drama and "security theater" sins of the moderators. They will downplay the significance of insignia that in fact they hold dear. The most important thing is the group and its name.

38. I could go on and on.

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Op vrijdag 4 maart 2011 21:17 schreef Odysseuzzz het volgende:

[..]

Het is ook nog eens totale onzin.
Maar dat zie je wel vaker met de combinatie second life en bloggers. Die denken dat ze antropologie aan het bedrijven zijn.

quote:

http://www.myce.com/news/(...)ilitary-brass-40933/

The clandestine hacker group known as Anonymous has been quite busy lately.

Yesterday we discussed how the group’s myriad operations might be affecting its overall impact – something an alleged member quickly countered in the comment section. Now we’re hearing new reports that the secretive members are focusing on military personnel in addition to the corporate executives they’ve long battled.

The New York Daily News wrote about Anonymous’ renewed efforts, citing a post at DailyKos. The statement made by Barrett Brown read, “The decision to charge Bradley Manning with a capital offense in addition to other charges is a provocation, and Anonymous is set to respond accordingly.”

Bradley Manning is the U.S. Army soldier charged with passing on classified, top-secret information to whistleblower site, WikiLeaks. More charges were recently added, including “aiding the enemy.” Manning faces life in prison if convicted.

In the past, Anonymous stood up for the controversial site created by the controversial man Julian Assange, going so far as to launch DDoS attacks against companies fighting against it – such as MasterCard. While the hacker collective promised to continue fighting against “corporate execs involved in plots against WikiLeaks,” its threat against the U.S. military for arresting and jailing Manning is certainly a new wrinkle in the ongoing story.

What type of cyber attack will be launched, and against whom? The statement specifies “military officials,” which suggests officers and other high ranking members.

Considering Anonymous’ recent shutdown of HBGary, a security company which saw CEO Aaron Barr resign last week thanks to a truly bizarre saga, there are no doubts the group will follow through with its promise. Just how much chaos it will cause is unknown.

quote:

http://www.myce.com/news/(...)mpaign=related_posts

The United States Department of Justice’s (DOJ) handling of the Wikileaks investigation is drawing criticism not only from Anonymous, a vigilante activist group that has been fighting against censorship involving the leak of US diplomatic cables, but also from an 85 member European Parliament group known as the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.

The European politicians organized a protest on Wednesday against the DOJ’s attempt to obtain private information from Twitter about close Wikileaks supporters including Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Jacob Appelbaum, and Iceland Parliament member Birgitta Jónsdóttir. They planned to call upon the EU to request clarifications from the US government about the Twitter subpoenas.

The United States Department of Justice’s (DOJ) handling of the Wikileaks investigation is drawing criticism not only from Anonymous, a vigilante activist group that has been fighting against censorship involving the leak of US diplomatic cables, but also from an 85 member European Parliament group known as the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.

The European politicians organized a protest on Wednesday against the DOJ’s attempt to obtain private information from Twitter about close Wikileaks supporters including Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Jacob Appelbaum, and Iceland Parliament member Birgitta Jónsdóttir. They planned to call upon the EU to request clarifications from the US government about the Twitter subpoenas.

“[Our group defends] the right to offend which is an essential part of freedom of expression, and we will stand with those who come under pressure to freely express their views,” said German European Parliament Member Alexander Lambsdorff at an event back in July which hosted both Assange and Jónsdóttir.

Meanwhile, Anonymous released a new video on their blog Wednesday which announces global protests to take place on Saturday January 15th “in defense of Wikileaks and freedom of expression”. That video contained the following message:

“Beneath this mask there is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof. We believe that free speech is non-negotiable. The quality of an idea matters more than its authorship and the radical notion that information should be free. We are done waiting for someone to save us from tyranny and censorship. The internet needs champions and we will rise. We didn’t start this to destroy a cult. We took on a cult to defend free speech. Tens of thousands strong, we lie in wait as the real battle approaches. We are Anonymous, and so are you. Stand up and fight. Every city, everywhere, January 15th. Expect us.”

All of this comes as worry grows that Wikileaks’ founding member Julian Assange may face the death penalty in the US if Swedish officials are successful in extraditing Assange to their country where he faces allegations of raping two woman. Assange’s defense attorney, Mark Stephens, outlined his concerns in a 35-page legal document released on Tuesday.

“It is submitted that there is a real risk that, if extradited to Sweden, the U.S. will seek his extradition and/or illegal rendition to the USA, where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere, in conditions which would breach Article 3 of the ECHR,” Stephens states in the document. ”Indeed, if Mr. Assange were rendered to the USA, without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty. It is well-known that prominent figures have implied, if not stated outright, that Mr. Assange should be executed.”

Lately, I have been talking with others in my local community about Wikileaks events and how the case should be handled, and the responses have been quite mixed. Some believe that the information contained in the leaked diplomatic cables should be openly published and that the government should learn a lesson about transparency from the situation. Others believe that the cables represent stolen property and should never have see the light of day. The situation is dividing not only Americans, but citizens around the world on views of government control and freedom of expression.

My personal feelings are mixed on the matter. While I believe that the actual theft of the cables is wrong, I don’t necessarily agree with the US government’s response on the matter. Since the cables were already out, I believe that government officials should have taken the opportunity to assist Wikileaks in redacting personal information contained in the cables before they were published, rather than taking the hard stance which caused cables to be published with information intact that has put some of the people involved in grave danger. Should Assange be severely punished? Is the US treatment of PVC Bradley Manning wrong? These are questions that I’m having difficulty answering.

What are your views on the Wikileaks situation? Let your opinion be heard in the comments.

quote:

http://torrentfreak.com/o(...)er-anonymous-110304/

Oh, Oh…BREIN Boss Says He Will Go After Anonymous

Earlier this week, anti-piracy group BREIN was subjected to a DDoS attack which took their website offline. BREIN boss Tim Kuik said he believed that supporters of the now defunct Usenet portal FTD were behind the attack.

Just hours later, Anonymous – the infamous loose-knit collective of Internet activists – announced they would revive Operation Payback, the series of actions that took down many anti-piracy related websites in the latter part of 2010.

One of their first targets was announced as BREIN and sure enough yesterday a DDoS attack took down the Dutch group’s website yet again. It’s not known if the attack earlier this week was Anonymous-linked, but there’s little doubt that the overwhelming traffic experienced by BREIN yesterday was.

News site NU.nl is now reporting that BREIN boss Tim Kuik has told them that information will be gathered on the attackers and they will be reported to the authorities.

In fairness, Kuik probably has little option but, as framed by Stephen Colbert this week, if he wants to stick a part of his male anatomy into the Anonymous ‘hornets nest’, that’s his business. Just as long as he knows it might sting a bit.

quote:

Op vrijdag 4 maart 2011 23:13 schreef truepositive het volgende:

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Alg_anonymous_blue_normal anonleet RT @TheLibertyLamp: @AnonymousRx || tell BREIN 2: "BRING IT ON...BITCH" #AaronBarr #LULZ #Anonops #4chan #420chan