Anonymous Isn't Anonymous Anymore 407
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently some small security firm has been able to determine the real identities of several key Anonymous hackers which is resulting in a ton of arrests. From the article: 'An international investigation into cyber-activists who attacked businesses hostile to WikiLeaks is likely to yield arrests of senior members of the group after they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic communications, it is claimed.'"
Senior member of Anonymous? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course Anonymous isn't anonymous. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Senior member of Anonymous? (Score:5, Insightful)
What people who identify with Anonymous believe it is, and what it really is, are not necessarily the same thing.
In reality, Anonymous is a movement that involves people. It did not appear out of nowhere -- someone had the idea and a small group of people liked that idea and it grew from there. We can call the person who had the idea a "founder" and the people who are deeply involved with the movement "senior members". These are words that describe real things that exist. Sorry if they offend your mystic ideas about Anonymous being a magical spirit that lives in the internets or something, but some of us are more interested in people and activities than in the propaganda they spread.
Re:Senior member of Anonymous? (Score:0, Insightful)
No, it's all a pretty reasonable conclusion. Sorry, kid. You'll have to grow up just like everyone else, even though there's an Internet now.
Probably not 4Chan Script Kiddies (at the root) (Score:5, Insightful)
But maybe they take advantage of the angst and ego of those Script Kiddies, empowering them to be "real hackers" by doing the tough part and giving them the tools to carry out their operations. Who's to say there is even one "anonymous". Get a group of would be hackers together in secret, let them talk to one other member of a group claiming to be Anonymous, and BAM.. all of a sudden, they are part of Anonymous. It's just a word, a battle cry or flag at this point.
There are people out there with deliberate intentions and incentives to execute these attacks. They are just using the 4chan type to further their goals.
From TFA: "few hundred participants in operations, only about 30 are steadily active, with 10 people who "are the most senior and co-ordinate and manage most of the decisions"
That just about fits this type of hierarchy.
Outside of "terrorism" (if you can call this that), this system is employed time and time again.
1) Person or small group has Political/Economic Agenda that would not benefit Society as a whole, but needs to engineer support.
2) They get a few Champions that back a stance on a cause that is unrelated, but has a large number of supporters (immigration, abortion, same sex marriage, FREEDOM OF SPEECH). It's best when it's a black/white yes/no issue that has a population divided roughly 50/50. That way, the support group is large, but the opposition is as well. Without a viable opposition, you cannot rally together for a cause.
3) Wrap your own agenda into the priorities of this "front" clause. Bam. You've created an army fighting for something they don't care about.
Not sure what my point was here really. Just noticing a pattern. Though I would love to believe in the idea of true "freedom fighters" who genuinely feel they are protecting essential Liberties, I cannot help to think that there has to be a selfish person at the top of it all.
Re:apparently? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Is it so hard to tweak the Internet to make DDoS impossible?"
Yes.
you need sociology 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
anonymous is a movement. as such, it follows certain sociological rules. #1: in any movement, there is a small group of core fanatics, and a much larger group of one-offs and on-and-offs. same with wikipedia, or al qaeda, or drug gangs, or a whole set of other movements
now you could take out a portion of the core competency, and nothing will change. but if you tracked and profiled the core competency over time, and took them all out at once, you really would cripple the movement. yes, you would really cripple anonymous. that they are everyone and no one is mythology, not sociological fact. they are not the borg from start trek
however, since the "cause" of anonymous is so simplistic, others would quickly fill the void and anonymous would be back in action in no time. again, same with wikipedia or al qaeda or drug gangs, etc. but maybe not forever. if law enforcement keeps siphoning off the core fanatics, after 2,3,4x, anonymous will definitely be less influential. if you keep siphoning off the regular crop of persons who can do something with the idea of anonymous. law enforcement can profile, and cripple anonymous, by tracking its core competency, forever, and constantly hamstring it: the core fanatics of anonymous is a well that slowly refills over time. if law enforcement is constantly draining the well, anonymous as a potent force is permanently dimmed
the point is, you don't understand sociology, nor anonymous, if you don't understand that what anonymous is is primarily a core group of fanatics, with a much larger ring of sort-of-interesteds. remove the core, and you at least temporarily cripple the movment. continually remove the core as it tries to grow back, and you have permanently decimated the movement and weakened it to ineffectuality
Re:identity's? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for taking care of the obligatory comment bitching about the /. editors. We need at least one per thread.
Seems a hell of a lot more logical to me to blame that on the "editors" who can't handle elementary-school English, not on the users who point it out. The former is the entirely preventable cause; the latter is the nearly inevitable effect.
Re:Senior member of Anonymous? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is the trick though. only a small percentage of any given group is actually capable of organizing even part of that group.
After a while it will always be the same 1% of users who are organizing things and guiding the rest into doing something Those are the "founders" while for 4chan's anonymous that group might be a few hundred people over the last 15 years only a dozen or two will be current.
What I find interesting is that idiots who attack with anonymous use facebook. Now that is a contradiction that is perfect for 4chan users.
Re:Senior member of Anonymous? (Score:0, Insightful)
QQ moar retard. What are you, 12, and you're backtalking someone who's been on slashdot for more than a decade? Can you really not figure out what "oldfag" means? If this kind of idiot is the new slashdot, then even the comments on this site won't be worth coming here for.
Re:identity's? (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like an intelligence posting designed to bluff people and control the postings from Anonymous and other friends of Julian. One way or another it is time to act up in regard to keeping Julian and Wikileaks free to operate and free from persecution.
Re:Senior member of Anonymous? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:you need sociology 101 (Score:4, Insightful)
"If you remove the core group, you cripple the movement"... this is the kind of thinking that drives the Egyptian internal security to round-up and torture the "core group" of pro-democracy protesters.
Except that it doesn't work that way, anymore. Pre-internet, it used to be that people organized around direct personal connections, and indeed you could break a movement by taking out key individuals, thus breaking its structure. But post-Internet, people organize around issues, and do so without knowing each other, and as long as the issue is there, there will always be someone else to be the "fanatic".
This is how Egyptian crowds spontaneously formed armies of 20,000 strong to fight off pro-regime thugs in Liberty square last week. There are no obvious leaders, no "core", and arresting those who appear to be driving the process, e.g. those who started the facebook pages, or journalists, only makes things worse.
If you don't get this essential aspect of Internet-driven smart crowds, you don't get Anonymous, which represents a form of pragmatic goal-oriented anarchist organization that takes the flash crowd idea to an extreme level. "Anonymous", it's right there in the name. You could be 10 years old, or 70, it doesn't matter and so everyone can participate, at any level whatsoever. There is no core group, by definition, no-one knows anyone else except by temporary memory. It's an internal security service's worst nightmare.
Anonymous is not much more than an idea of what is possible, and when you attack an idea you only make it stronger.
Re:Senior member of Anonymous? (Score:5, Insightful)
More like his grandfather's UID if you ask me...
In any case, the perception that a group is democratic and there are no specific movers and shakers is flawed for any group.
Also, the perception of anonymity on the web is deeply flawed. There is a reason why the folks that build Cavium based gear are making good money ya know... However the evidence obtained that way is unusable for normal courts. None of these exists you know and no data goes to no such agencies and other abbreviations without an official budget.
So, a "small security firm" appears out of nowhere and presents key evidence.
Yeah, right and I am the tooth fairy.
Time to reread "Other Days, Other Eyes" I guess... The final bit... Where the inventor of slow glass was called to find an evidence for something where there was already evidence, just nobody wanted to confess where it came from...
XKCD (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.xkcd.com/834/ [xkcd.com]
Re:really anonymous, or just named Anonymous? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:you need sociology 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an interesting case you make, but I seriously doubt that experts in the field properly comprehend the sociological forces (if any) that apply to the Internet, let alone 4chan. They're working on it, and it's going to take one talented and speedy researcher to provide us with information that will remain relevant for very long.
IMHO, 25-50 years from now, if our society isn't in ashes, someone is going to write one hell of a definitive work on how the Internet has no sociology (as we knew it), disables most sociological pressures (like shame), and allows people with truly bizarre ideas to find enough peers to reinforce their fetishes/pechants/whims etc. with lethal force, because they are so completely disconnected from the consequences, and can remain fully socialized in appearance whilst being something quite else behind a keyboard.
I'm just glad that all they can do with the thing right now is launch DDoSes at commerce and disseminate restricted information. At the point where they can kill people, they will, and will think of it as "just for the lulz." Some people, absent significant social restriction, behave that way. They're usually loners. Those people in a group, connected by the Internet, I don't know where that leads.
Don't underestimate this trend by claiming it to be "sociology 101." Sociology 101 doesn't inform us of anything regarding this, because basic sociological assumptions become invalid when the interactions occur on the Internet. This is new bleeding-edge ground, and will not be covered in the survey course. It is a field unto itself.
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Toro