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Anonymous Presentation

Intro slide

  • Group of “Internet Vigilantes”
  • To understand who they are, must understand their history

History slide

  • Imageboard 4chan in 2006.
  • Imagine “Anonymous” poster was just one person

Intro slide:

  • I did my research on the online community “Anonymous”
    • Wouldn’t really refer to them as a “hacking” group, more like Internet vigilantes.
    • To understand who they are, really need to understand their history

History:

  • Anonymous was born in the unfiltered online imageboard 4chan.org in 2006.
    • 4chan is organized into topics, called boards, the /b/ board was for “Random” content.
    • The idea of /b/ was to post things that could not be unseen. Brewing place for trolls.
    • Individuals could post as “Anonymous”, and the entity got its name from the thought that there could just be one entity “Anonymous” posting all this stuff
  • At their core, they were trolls.
    • Social networking site called Habbo Hotel (you create an Avatar, walk around in a world. Rudimentary second life). Rumor of admins blocking dark skinned users.
    • People on /b/ heard, and all dressed up as the same avatar. Form Swastikas, block pool entrance.
    • There was a white nationalist, Hal Turner, who apparently was targeting a member of Anon
    • DDoS’d him, pizzas, sent utilities he’d have to pay for.
    • Ran him out of business.
    • Hacked his site revealed he was an FBI informant
    • So both of these are trolling, but have a small moral component to them. These people thought they were doing something moral.

Project Chanology:

  • Everything changed with Project Chanology.
  • This is where Anonymous got mainstream press.
    • Recall Tom Cruse video leaked, scientology DMCA’d Youtube and everyone who posted it.
  • Anonymous saw this as a censorship of the Internet; fought back.
  • They DDoS’d, they did phone calls to clog up their hotlines, they sent black faxes (to drain ink).
  • For the first time, they did physical protests.
  • Because Scientology is known for stalking and harassing their critics, Anons needed to protect their identity in person. So this is where the Guys Fawkes mask came from.
  • Interestingly, Church of Scientology has used methods similar to Anonymous to get its way. In order to escape tax exception (become a religious org), it got members to file thousands of lawsuits against individual IRS employees.

Cultural Rift:

  • This resulted in a cultural rift in Anonymous
  • Original group in it for the lolz, but now there was an influx of Hacktivists (people who were just motivated by something moral)
  • Some Anons wanted to restore their bad reputation by posting rapidly flashing animated gifs on epilepsy forums.
  • But it seems like the Hacktivists mostly won out.
  • Recall Paypal withdrawing donation acceptance for Wikileaks, so Anons attacked them.
  • Also attacked HBGary, and revealed HBGary’s proposal with Palantir to leak misinformation via Wikileaks. Proposal was for Bank of America, who somehow knew Wikileaks had docs on them.
  • Important to note that a very small portion of Anonymous is technically able. Many are just people who want to make a difference and using tools made by technically able.

Networked Individual:

  • This leads us to how it relates to what we’ve talked about in class.
  • Lee Raine’s Networked individual shows dramatic increase of users online
    • Really means a change in the way information is spread
  • Which means new fronts for rebellion and opposition to rebellion
  • For example, Egyptian and Tunisian people. The internet played a role in their rebellions.
    • Anons were involved with setting up dial up service. Tweeting on others’ behalf.

Astra Taylor:

  • Astra Taylor talks about the Debt collective and a group of people organizing to refuse to pay off their debts because they don’t think these debts are warranted
  • Have this wonderful quote “If you owe the bank a thousand dollars…”
  • Similar to Anonymous because it’s about the masses “owning” the man.
    • The idea that 10,000 angry people can send a message online against billion dollar corporations.
    • The idea that the masses have ultimate control, they just need to wake up and organize.

Citizen Four:

  • Going back to HBGary, Anonymous targeted HBGary because it was publishing false information about Anonymous’ “leadership”
    • Anonymous (specifically lulzsec, a much more technical group related to Anonymous) leaked all of HBGary’s emails, revealing the proposal with Palantir
    • Actually wanted to damage Wikileaks by tarnishing and threatening Glenn Greenwald. Which was completely absurd.
  • Glenn obviously key figure in Snowden leaks.
  • Also relates to Journalism post-snowden, with organizations going to very questionable lengths to silence leaks.

Tor:

  • Tor is an essential tool for both the technical and the non-technical players in Anonymous.
  • Actually what grants them as-close-as-possible Anonymity.

Six degrees of separation:

  • So PGP, which stands for Pretty Good Privacy, is a mechanism by which I can establish a secure communication with another individual (using encryption).
  • Relies on verifying identity of third-parties, through “web of trust”
  • Essentially, I need to trust someone who trusts you in order to talk to you.
  • Thus, would be impractical if people had to make many many hops to the person they want to talk to.
  • PGP is one of the many tools necessary for Anons to talk securely and untampered.

Memes:

  • Memes are sort of used by Anonymous as an informal way of identity verification and drawing boundaries between who is an Anon and who isn’t.
  • Sort of means memes sort of are the language of Anons.
  • They also both share their birth place: 4chan.
    • 4chan was purportedly responsible for creating or popularizing many popular memes, such as Rick rolling, Chocolate Rain, and lolcatz.
  • Anonymous isn’t an entity or website, it also is an idea, and by Dawkin’s description, it would be considered a meme.

Digital Cosmopolitan:

  • Zuckerman really wanted to spur inter-cultural political involvement with globalvoices.org
  • Because Anonymous is really an international collective, that means that they are at least trying to get involved politically with other cultures.