Finally, I am proud to say that this is the very last blog post I will ever be doing for this class. It has been a long ride on this roller coaster and I am glad to be finishing with a very interesting topic for my final post. In this blog post I will be speaking on a hacktivist group called group called Anonymous. I had first heard of this group in my SRA 471 class when they had most recently tried to shut down Facebook in November. I will get back to that specific event after I have gone over the background of the group. They are defined as an international hacking group, spread throughout the internet, initiating active civil disobedience, while attempting to maintain anonymity. The group itself originated in 2003 on the image board 4chan; basically in an online community. Since 2008, the Anonymous collective has become increasingly associated with collaborative, international hacktivism, undertaking protests and other actions, often with the goal of promoting internet freedom and freedom of speech. Actions credited to "Anonymous" are undertaken by unidentified individuals who apply the Anonymous label to themselves as attribution. After a series of controversial, widely-publicized protests and distributed denial of service attacks by Anonymous in 2008, incidents linked to its cadre members have increased. In consideration of its capabilities, Anonymous has been posited by CNN to be one of the three major successors to WikiLeaks.
I find this group very interesting because they create civil unrest and achieve their political goals through extreme circumstances. Below, I am going to discuss one major event that this group has made the news with in this past year. The first event was against the Bay Area Rapid Transit System in San Francisco. According to Anonymous:
“Anonymous will take the following actions over the next 48 hours.
1) We have begun at once a massive Black Fax and E-Mail Bomb action, where we will fill every inbox and fax machine at BART with thousands of copies of our message that this outage was unacceptable.
2) Tomorrow, Sunday - August 14, 2011 at High Noon Pacific Time we, Anonymous - will remove from the internet the web site of BART located at www.bart.gov for exactly six hours. That's twice as long as they shut off the cell phones for.
3) On Monday - August 15, 2011 at 5:00 PM Pacific Time there will be a physical protest at the Civic Center Bart Station. Expect us !
We sincerely hope that this series of actions will serve as a warning to BART and every public organization in the USA to NOT engage in this sort of dangerous and human rights violating behavior”.
After seeing Anonymous in action I started to follow them a lot more closely and hoping to hear them in the news whenever I possibly could. The time I heard of an Anonymous attack was when they had threatened to shut down Facebook because they told the public the government was getting information from Facebook, and that was violating privacy. Below is a video on this attempt:
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