When the Electronic Frontier Foundation\u2019s John Perry Barlow tweeted last December, \u201cThe first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops,\u201d many in the mainstream media rolled their eyes and dismissed his words as hacker hyperbole.<\/p>\n
But the events of the past few days, in which the hacktivst \u201cgroup\u201d Anonymous launched a major campaign called Operation Anti-Security, show that many more Julian Assanges are indeed waiting in the wings\u2014ready, willing and able to continue what the embattled WikiLeaks founder started when he released a trove of classified State Department cables on the Internet last year. And governments and corporations will find these leakers far more difficult than Assange to capture or control.<\/p>\n
The first new batch of classified documents leaked last Thursday came from Arizona law enforcement and Border Patrol, in protest of Arizona\u2019s anti-immigration policies. The next day, Operation Anti-Security released massive amounts of information from NATO, the U.S. Navy, the FBI, and AOL.<\/p>\n
Anonymous has successfully leaked information before, including more than 10,000 \u201ctop secret\u201d emails from Iran\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on June 3 and emails from Bank of America in March, but the new campaign will be exponentially larger.<\/p>\n
As law enforcement and news organizations raced to identify the main instigators, LulzSec, a highly active six-person splinter group, announced that it was disbanding, though its members remained active under the Anonymous banner. The move was seen as an attempt to shift attention away from members\u2019 identities so that the contents of the leaked documents would instead become the story.<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, meanwhile,60,000 people joined Anonymous\u2019s Twitter feed in 24 hours (the total was up to 100,000 by 3 p.m. Sunday). Anonymous \u201chas gone from the background of hacker culture to the forefront of global politics,\u201d writes Kris Notaro, from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. \u201cThey demonstrate the power that is ours to have if we have the ambition to grasp it.\u201d Though the hacktivists are no longer underestimated, they\u2019re still misunderstood. They are often depicted as a nefarious cabal of criminal masterminds, but in reality they are young political activists who have found a way to use their tech skills to make a serious impact on a global scale. In the process, they have taken traditional protest methods, such as civil disobedience, shock tactics and mass coordinated action, to a new levels of effectiveness.<\/p>\n \u201cYou’re a poor guy behind your computer with other people you don’t even know, and all together, we can fucking DDoS [distributed denial-of-service attack] any organization,\u201d explains \u201chayop,\u201d an Anonymous member who runs Operation Leakspin, a project aimed at raising awareness of potentially important and previously overlooked WikiLeaks cables. \u201cNATO considers us a \u2018global threat\u2019 and the biggest cyber-attack danger after Iran. No one can stop a DDoS attack, even the CIA.\u201d<\/p>\n Hayop adds, \u201cYou feel very powerful when you’re asking yourself, \u2018Which bastard am I gonna fuck up? Monsanto? Bayer? or Tepco?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the closest parallel to Anonymous is the anarchist Black Bloc Movement, best known as the black-clad protestors who smashed windows at Seattle\u2019s World Trade Organization demonstrations in 1999. Both groups operate under a leaderless resistance model, maintaining anonymity, and bring a \u201cby any means necessary\u201d approach to protests.<\/p>\n When they take down Sony PlayStation\u2019s website or expose government officials\u2019 personal information, they have a much bigger impact and notoriety than when they smash a Bank of America branch window, the hacktivists have learned. A secret IPO address is more effective than bandanas over their faces. The media pays attention. People get scared.<\/p>\n How scared? Gregory Evans, a former apolitical hacker\u2013turned\u2013security expert, told London\u2019s Channel 4 News,<\/a> \u201cAnonymous is more dangerous than Al Qaeda.\u201d<\/p>\n Anonymous would tend to agree. \u201c#DearGovenment There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place. #antisec\u201d a member tweeted last week.<\/p>\n In Defense of WikiLeaks<\/strong><\/p>\n Anonymous first gained fame for coming to the defense of WikiLeaks by crashing the websites of Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Amazon when those companies blocked Assange\u2019s supporters from making contributions to pay his legal bills and keep WikiLeaks operating.<\/p>\n The hacktivists have since thrown themselves into an array of issues, including censorship and privacy, racial profiling, the revolutions in the Middle East, and the global financial collapse.<\/p>\n Anonymous has brought down government and financial websites in countries around the world, including Australia, Malaysia, as well as Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt in support of antigovernment protests. They have hacked Monsanto, Bank of America, and Koch Industries, one of the largest funders of right-wing political causes and candidates, including union-busting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.<\/p>\n When Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of supplying WikiLeaks with much of its classified content, was tossed into solitary confinement and treated in a way that some equate with torture, Anonymous threatened to hack Quantico military prison\u2019s website and release employees\u2019 personal information. Members recently warned Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that if he didn\u2019t resign, he\u2019d be targeted, too. Meanwhile, LulzSec crashed the CIA website and hacked websites of Fox.com, the U.S. Senate and Infragard, an FBI affiliate.<\/p>\n There have been countless smaller cyberattacks as well. To protest arrests of Food Not Bomb members in Florida, last week Anonymous crashed Orlando\u2019s Chamber of Commerce websit<\/a>e and posted \u201cBoycott Orlando” on a Universal Orlando Resort website.<\/p>\n A Leaderless Revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n Anonymous members joke that journalists\u2019 first misguided question is usually: \u201cTake me to your leader.\u201d But there is no official hierarchy, though some members are obviously more active and influential than others.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s a concept that anyone can use to organize an operation,\u201d emailed hayop, whose operations have included cyberattacks on chemical companies and the Algerian government. \u201cHowever, there is one common goal: protect freedom, human rights and privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n The leaderless resistance model makes it more difficult to disband the organization through individual arrests. \u201cAnonymous is like an hydra. When you cut off one head, ten ones grow instead. No one can stop Anonymous,\u201d hayop says.<\/p>\n \u201cYou cannot arrest an idea, neither a movement,\u201d tweeted Anonymous on Saturday.<\/p>\n Members\u2014mostly young males in their teens to their 30s\u2014are estimated to number in the low hundreds at slow times to thousands during peak activity. \u201cThere is a very big turnover,\u201d hayop says. \u201cPeople join for one cause and they leave after.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\nMotives Remain Misunderstood<\/strong><\/p>\n