The beginning of what many believe to be the founding of “Anonymous” begins on a cold night of November 5th, 1604; when a man named Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up Parliament and King George the 1st as an act of rebellion and reform from the government’s oppression. Fawkes was involved in a radical political group that believed that their government was oppressing their basic rights as human beings and wanted to return a catholic to the throne. Why does this important piece of history matter? You may think, “ how could we ever condone the acts of terrorism on our government? “ Our are we missing the big picture? I do not condone violent acts of terrorism to ensure pain on others, but I do believe in liberty, in freedom. How much of that do we have? How much freedom does Anonymous think we have? A great quote by Howard Zinn once went, “ But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is… to tell the truth. “ Let’s first understand though, what Anonymous is.
Anonymous is a global group that work in the shadows of today’s society promoting ideas such as; freedom of speech, access to information, transparency and stands with movement of anti-authoritarian and anti-corruption intent. They claim that entry to their group is easy, simply hid your identity when commit rebellious acts on the internet and viola, you’re a member of Anonymous. Many have called this form of rebellion “Hacktivism”. Anonymous has commited many acts of hacktivism, one example is slandering the Church of Scientology for committing forms of censorship with videos on Youtube. They directly called out Scientology on Youtube telling them that they would destroy their organization via hacking, black lettering, etc. Anonymous is a group of vigilante’s, this makes this group more elusive and hard to track because there is no hierarchy to this organization, there is no leader. That is why this group is so fascinating to me, anonymous isn’t a radical group, it’s people that are oppressed and wish not to see others oppressed. They promote the ideas that we as the people have overlooked in our life. We all say that we are against, so are we part of the group too? Personally, I lean more to the right and would consider myself mostly a libertarian, I believe in separation from state and federal government. A quote from a movie based of Guy Fawkes and his acts called, “ V for Vendetta” contained the quote, ” people shouldn’t be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people. “ I’ve decided to break down this paper into how we look at Anonymous, how they look at us, how we perceive our world and how they perceive it.
One of the first occurrences of Anonymous that I remember was there attack against Sony. When I was around 12 years old I remember one of my friends saying that he wasn’t able to do online gaming with his Playstation 3 for almost a month because of problems with their online gaming feature. It was only until I started researching this year that I found that this was because of the cyber attack committed by Anonymous. Nathan Chandler wrote a piece for HowStuffWorks that I was able to read more on the issue. The article contains almost seven pages of logistics and examples of Anonymous and the cyber attacks they’ve committed including their attack on Sony. The reason why Sony was subjected to this attack was because they had to tried to implement a piece of software with their PS3 model. For some reason, Sony withdrew the software and put a patch on it to not be used where later a man had then found a way to make it available to their users. (Chandler) Sony then sued the man for tampering with the PS3 system, even when Sony said they would offer this software. Anonymous became outraged and tampered with Playstation’s online feature and crashed the servers for a month so no one could use online multiplayer. Resulting in a huge dip in Sony profits. Some believe that it was over the top and others sided with it, either way, justice was done in the eyes of Anonymous.
Wade German for Radio Free Europe addressed the same basic knowledge we know. Anonymous is global hacktivist group that will commit cyber attacks on, what they view as, corrupt governments. To elaborate on how the conduct their attacks the will often implement a DOS or denial-of-service on websites. They even made an attack like this on the C.I.A. website where they also added a DOS. Many nations such as the U.S., Netherlands and Britain have conducted raids to help stop this terrorism. (German) All of it transpired from PayPal and MasterCard freezing the funding to a site called WikiLeaks. Wikileaks is a website dedicated to publishing government secrets for the public to see. Attacks were then committed on PayPal and MasterCard where the government took action in sweeps where almost 20 people were arrested. (German)
Jason Murdock wrote an interesting topic for Newsweek entailing a situation between Anonymous and QAnon. It outlined and talked about how the group is at odds with the QAnon group. QAnon, for a little background, is a group that is believed to be lead by an insider within the government that is holding information on president Donald Trump. The insider is labeled as “Q” who also made the outrageous claims of “Pizzagate”. Pizzagate was a claim that Hillary Clinton and other higher ranking Democrats were involved with a pedophlia scandal within a pizza establishment in Washington D.C. (Murdock) Where Anonymous comes into play is the fact that they view this group as toxic and see it as spreading lies and poisonous knowledge to the less fortunate. It’s interesting because we have seen how Anonymous has reacted to injustice from corporations and governments but now we see how they view injustice with false lies from others of their ilk.
Another source I found was one from an ABC article, they talk of how Anonymous released information such as credit card numbers and the phone number of Donald Trump. I found this whole article interesting because it showed that Anonymous isn’t bias, they are set in morales. I had suspicions, as do others, of this being controlled by an organization. ABC talks about how the group doesn’t only go and slander other groups via hacktivism, they also use their hacktivism for good. They helped the Arab Spring uprising by keeping internet access open for people on the ground in Egypt and Tunisia.
Elizabeth Weise wrote for ABC and was the only source I found that talked of the history behind the mask. The article starts off though with them talking of how the group operates as usual, they also include when the group released names and information of those associated with the KKK. (Weise) Following that, Weise speaks of Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up Parliament all those years ago. She also speaks of the videos that Anonymous put out. When they put out their Youtube videos they always use a man in all black with the Guy Fawkes mask and use a computer generated voice to project their message. This allows no voice recognition and adds a creepy tone to their video.
Anonymous has the right intentions, provide equality for all and make sure it stays there. There methods are questionable but I think we can respect a group that wants to stand to oppression. Anonymous