When you sup with the devil
use a long spoon.
IP addresses, chat logs and plain text passwords purporting to belong to members of Anonymous have been posted online. The data, posted to paste2.org, appeared around the same time on Tuesday that a semi-official news outlet used by Anonymous (Anonops.net) was "hacked" to point at a site mocking the hacktivist collective ( …
Name a point in time during which Anons were not at war with eachother. There is no "membership," there is no "leadership," and byt he gods there certainly isn't moral, ethical or any other type of unity. They are largely directionless: a hive mind without a queen.
Anons will always fight each eachother. They have always fought eachother. They have always fought everyone else. They will always fight everyone else.
For the lulz.
I'm amused that there are still people out there that don't realise that the "anon" group, the mass of the group that the public know and hear about, the ones who generally carry out all the DDoS attacks, are in fact an organised group with leaders.
There are a handful of people who operate anonops and anonnews. Arguably (before the proverbial shit hit the fan) the two largest anon sites in operation. This handful of people led the group time after time, throwing out anyone who would question them.
> I'm amused that there are still people out there that don't realise
> that the "anon" group, the mass of the group that the public know
> and hear about, the ones who generally carry out all the DDoS
> attacks, are in fact an organised group with leaders
I'm amused that you think cowards can be organised.
And that if, you are, in fact someone that knows about Anonymous, then posting about it and drawing attention to yourself just shows how foolish you are. You are too young to have ever heard the phrase "Pride goeth before the fall".
I'm equally amused that you misquote an already commonly misquoted phrase.
FWIW the phrase you want is "Pride goes (or "goeth" if you want to pretend to be olde worlde) before a fall", though the original text translates more closely as "Pride goes before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." Saying "...the fall" sounds more like you're American and talking about autumn or that you're not aware of the difference between definite and indefinite articles?
If you're going to tell people how foolish they are, you could at least ensure that your quotes are correct.
No they don't. No self respecting anon has a "leader." Anons fight amongst themselves all the time. They aren't organised, they aren't a "group" with "membership" and you can't "throw out" someone from an organisation they never JOINED.
Anons choose to participate - or not - when they choose. If some douchefuck on Anonops decided to ban someone from the channel for disagreeing with them, then that Anon would start up a new channel and grief the asshat that banned him. Other anons that got banned would drift towards the "let's grief the douchefuck" channel and anon would have a private little civil war for a while.
This happens ALL THE TIME.
Is it possible that some anons hacked Sony? Sure! Does that mean “anonymous” hacked Sony? No. I don’t think you understand that there is no group. There is no membership. There is no individual making decisions at the top of the pile that all “Members” follow whether they like it or not.
One person proposes something. Others agree or disagree. Those that disagree go on to do other things. Those that agree may – or may not – participate in whatever was proposed. Usually, any given proposal for any form of mayhem, protest or any kind of hyjinx will attract less than 10% of anonymous. So 10% of anons agree with the idea in principal, of which maybe 10% participate…for a big, well accepted op.
At any given time there are literally dozens of different ops being run by dozens of different groups, protest being planned by dozens of other groups and hundreds of thousands of Anons not participating in any of it because nothing has yet caught their eye.
(The scientology protests at their very beginning is the one true exception to the above. Those protests attracted a huge % of anonymous that liked the idea, though only a very small % actually participated.)
So here’s an idea: why don’t you spend some time on Anonymous servers, in Anonymous chat rooms. Talk to anons. Learn about them. And FFS…
…LURK MOAR.
Where would you find full contact details for 650 "members" of Anonymous?
And what constitutes a member? As I understand, it's not a club. There is no member list. Anyone in the world could do anything and if they wanted to claim to be acting on behalf of Anonymous then clearly they could. To prove my point, Anonymous actually told me to post this message.
I'm not sure I buy all this senior member business either. Obviously there are going to be people more involved in it than others, but until you can give me names, they aren't senior dick.
And also, how can you claim the group has splintered? Anonymous is an emergent behavior, not a group. They don't get together for tea and biscuits.
Not only would they not have a "members list," but they wouldn't likely log their (likely illegal) chats for the FBI, et al to find later. Black hats like these might be lacking some (hopefully) common social well-being characteristics, but they're by no means idiots. The 650 IP addresses is likely usernames and attached last-logon IPs at the worst, be it to the site, or just to IRC channels hosted on the server.
is a few idiots who didn't protect themselves will get questioned by the police. The others are all behind proxies and will lead to a dead end.
Also, just talking in an IRC chat is not illegal, something has to connect those people to something illegal. Just visiting an Anon IRC chat or forum is not going to get you in trouble unless you do something illegal!
trying to get that to fly in court (Especially in the US)...
For a conspiracy to exist, some action needs to be taken. And then anyone who was talking about it could be considered conspirators (Can be very hard to prove just by an offhand conversation).
By your logic the US government could pretty much arrest anyone who has commented on the Faux News website.
Conspiracy can be very hard to prove...
I think you slightly misunderstood the story.
Contact details weren't released, just IP addresses and matching names. Which could essentially allow law enforcement (and others) to track down personal contact details.
As for leaders/senior members. When there's only a few people selecting targets, choosing what news to be published to the main anon sites/chat servers, silencing any questioners and such like, it would suggest that there is very much a leadership thing going on.
Is this in reference to the recent spat with the encyclopedia dramatica guy who was butt hurt because anon ripped his wiki so he couldn't milk the new fags marketing revenue?
Honestly there was more drama and warfare over the longcat tacgnol affair.
And that was silly given that TACGNOL was obviously superior in every way!
http://maddok.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/longcat-vs-tacgnol.jpg?w=1600&h=1200
Wars were raged! For like a whole day. And that's nothing when compared to milhouse is not a meme, oh my.
And given "anon" is built out of factions from multiple different "anons" who traditionally flame each other for the lulz to hone their skills for when they do something hilarious, like reporting every street light in the south east was broken, or when they ravaged habbo, or when they found the girl that was having sex with her dog and emailed her pictures to the principle, or the cockmongler, or don't mess with football or the never ending stream of cat pictures. Too many moralfags now days for epic lulz. Oh how long it has been ~~ damn like 6 years or so since I left anon -.-
And keyboard on head! and the Hal Turner raids, and their eventual defeat in their first live raid. Ahh the glory days. And trolling storm front. Then there's lemon party and meat spin.
Failure to understand any of the above means you don't know anything about anon.
Which is probably for the best.
Well I'm popping to Mexico to get some soup.
You can't expose the Anonymous members. It's not a collective, a club or a party, much less someone's personal army. You can expose individual people, thus making them non-Anonymous, but the main idea is, and will stay, Anonymous. The idea won't be forgotten. Expect it.
They are real IP addresses, real IRC logs, even showing the nickserver commands, with passwords.
I'm guessing some lame bedroom "haxors" all collectively shat their pants.... I think that's the FBI at the door, they want to talk about what you have been upto in your bedroom, when you should have been doing your homework... Something about a cannon?
Anonymous is an amalgamation of people which warps and changes on a second by second basis. There is no command structure, no members, no seniority, no ranks. Even calling "it" a group isn't correct; there are no meetings, no co-ordination, no list of members.
You cannot create a list of members, because there are no members. There exists only the potential behaviour within anybody to participate or to not participate.
Anonymous represents the true power of anonymity combined with mass-communication, as mentioned previously; its a behaviour of people when there is no risk to their identity - where you can say and do anything without being personally judged.
The flag (or rather the shield) of anonymous can be used by anyone for any purpose at any time. This is your "splintering" as despite majority ruling (for the most part) the lack of any formal command structure (or informal) means people can do anything they want.
I love it when groups like Anon. get all shouty about people having their details swiped from places like Sony - "You shouldn't have supported Sony in the first place!", then get all shouty when THEIR details get nicked from... where-ever.
Yes, XKCD is spot on, as usual.
Pot, meet kettle.
It won't be overly long now:
Some security professionals, who say they are working in a voluntary capacity, have forwarded internet chat logs and internet addresses of alleged Anonymous members to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. These experts said they had fielded questions from the FBI about the alleged rift and about possible leaders on both sides.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0f21fe98-7b3a-11e0-9b06-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss
Unless said FBI^H law enforcement finds a way to deactivate the meme of Anonymous, then even arresting anyone anywhere in the world who had ever used the word "Anonymous" will not preclude the possibility of such entity reappearing after some time.
They could try infiltration, had this been an organized group... but alas, it is not.
Where is my Borg icon?