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The Dangers of Anonymity:

We Are Legion

5/6/2012

Paul Hankewicz

Hankewicz 1

Some people believe that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. This idea

is explored in many publications by journalists, writers and philosophers. In particular, a virtual

collective of anarchic activists known as Anonymous use the internet as their medium and have a

history for retaliating against corporations. Many are concerned that Anonymous is taking

advantage of the internet because they are free to express themselves without any consequences.

Many are concerned that Anonymous behaves more like a terrorist group rather than a self-

proclaimed freedom fighting vigilante group. The anxieties surrounding the ‘hacktivist’ group

Anonymous issue an alarm in contemporary society due to their criminal behaviour for personal

ambition.

The Anonymous are a virtual collective of anarchic activists that use the internet as their

medium and have a history for retaliating against corporations. Originating on an uncensored

and unrestrained image board (a type of forum website) known as 4chan, users are free to remain

anonymous and discuss any topic of interest in a sub-board usually designed by a specific

abbreviation accompanied with slashes surrounding it ie. Literature would be /lit/, Videogames

would be /v/, etc. However the notoriety of the website and where the true mayhem originates is

from one particular board, “It's out of /b/ that swarms of gleeful online troublemakers--trolls, in

Internet parlance--occasionally issue forth to prank, hack, harass, and otherwise digitally provoke

other online communities and users.“ (Dibbell) /b/ is the random board, where any topic of

interest appears and trolls are internet users who purposely create trouble by posting

controversial comments/images that tend to provoke the readers into having an emotional

response. For example, one internet user showing false data on a forum that an important website

like Facebook will be shut down in order to create panic. Therefore due to their incessant nature

to create trouble and their deep roots in Anonymous, it is clear that they are hedonistic as well as

Hankewicz 2

attention seeking in their vigilantism. They gained significant reputation during ‘Project

Chanology’ in 2008, which was a protest against the practices of The Church of Scientology.

The catalyst for this operation was the Church’s attempt to censor actor Tom Cruise’s online

video about his obsessive love for scientology due to negative publicity. As a response to this,

Anonymous members wore their iconic Guy Fawkes masks (as popularized by the concurrent

film V for Vendetta) and staked around the Church of Scientology in a picket line to protest

against the church and censorship. In addition to this, the Anonymous members played childish

pranks such as sending black faxes, prank calls, and denial-of-service attacks (which blocks the

Church’s communication) to disturb the Church of Scientology. These attacks ended with legal

matters and two of the Anonymous members arrested for hate crimes against the church, this was

one of many matters in which "[Anonymous]’s ambitions are often couched in terms of

uncovering corruption and fighting oppression and use the vocabulary of revolution, even though

their activities are commonly perceived as little more than juvenile stunts or vandalism [...]

These were particularly evident during the pro-Wikileaks campaigns which, famously, brought

minor grief to the likes of MasterCard and PayPal." (Mansfield-Devine, “Anonymous” 8)

Many are worried Anonymous is taking advantage of the internet because they are

free to express themselves without any consequence. With their hidden identities and masks,

they believe they have become invulnerable to social norms and law. One law scholar by the

name of Dr. Saul Levmore, believes that “Anonymity is important in order to avoid prosecution,

and in some cases to escape unpleasant social sanctions.” (Levmore 53) As Levmore stipulates,

concealing an identity especially in cyberspace allows an individual to behave in a deviant

manner because it enables the person to avoid detection for any crime. In addition to avoiding

detection by law, the group’s concealment is manifested by a sense of superiority; a superiority

Hankewicz 3

complex. The American Heritage Medical Dictionary defines ‘a superiority complex’ as “a

psychological defense mechanism in which a person's feelings of superiority counter or conceal

his or her feelings of inferiority” (TheFreeDictionary) This definition generalizes the group as an

individual with such a complex, because they are against powerful bodies of authority and they

risk being exposed and sent to jail. Vigilantism is generally blinded with self-righteousness and

this almost always results in being caught followed by persecution. What separates Anonymous

from other vigilante groups is that they are leaderless and behave like a collective conscience,

but they co-ordinate each other in a haphazardly way. Journalist Steve Mansfield-Devine went

undercover to witness the online chat room discussion between Anonymous members, and what

he discovered was surprising. Organization is a tedious process for the hacktivist group;

Anonymous members tend to be nomadic between chat rooms because their servers tend to get

shut down by the government. In addition to this, discussion between members occurs at a rapid

rate and a majority of members appeared obnoxious and incomprehensible and as Mansfield-

Devine observed “Picking any kind of consensus out of this anarchy would have been

impossible. To say that the ‘group’ decided on the next target is not credible. Somewhere, a

person or small group of people, made that decision. Perhaps they were guided by what they’d

read in the channel. It seems more likely that they seeded the channel with their own ideas for

targets and used the eagerness of the members to launch attacks as a justification.” (Mansfield-

Devine, “Anonymous” 8) Despite this fact they still manage to form a consensus and due to the

rise in technological innovation, we are faced with an information age and according to Dr. Joss

Hands, “[Information technology] creates information as the great commodity of the network

society- a commodity that can become, in some senses, truly universal because it is able to

contain, in digital form, all the variations of human creativity.” (Hands 43) As of now,

Hankewicz 4

Anonymous applies minimal damage to its opponents but if they adapted to become more

articulate and organized, they can be a dangerous force.

Many are also concerned that Anonymous behaves more like a terrorist group rather than

a self-proclaimed freedom fighting vigilante group. The hacktivist group Anonymous deploys

various tactics to keep its adversaries disrupted but at the cost of harassing innocent people.

Consequently, this creates tension between Anonymous and law enforcement and tend not to be

taken seriously in court when one of their members are arrested. An example of one technique

that tends to be popular with the group is the ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’ (abbreviated LOIC) is a

dormant program that runs on every single Anonymous member’s computer and is activated by a

command word in the programmed Anonymous chat room. What the LOIC tends to do is flood

signals from every used computers to a chosen website to be disrupted. This has also become

known as ‘Distributed Denial of Service’ because the website chosen will be unable to be

accessed while flooded with heavy interactions of every computer running LOIC against it. This

can be very dangerous if used on a website connected to global economics and these “attacks

illustrated a fact of life known by any student of DDoS attacks – that it’s all about numbers.

Cybercrime gangs using DDoS as a blackmail tool, or state-sponsored hackers using it as a

weapon of war, will deploy botnets comprising tens of thousands of machines focused on a

single target” (Mansfield-Devine, “Anonymous” 8) This simple weapon can create chaos in

economics and actually was attempted by one particular Anonymous cell. The website targeted

in this case was the electronic money transfer site Paypal because they previously froze the

account of whistle blowing website ‘WikiLeaks’ due to violations of use and its divulgement of

private information. Even if the Paypal Corporation did or not deserve being targeted is not the

case because “the organizations targeted by [Anonymous] are not the only victims. The spilling

Hankewicz 5

of personal details, such as login credentials, email addresses and even physical addresses puts

many innocent people at greater risk of phishing, spamming and ID theft. Or worse. The attacks

against Arizonian law enforcement, for example, have put into the public domain sensitive

information about police officers.” (Mansfield-Devine, “Hacktivism” 11) The dangers are clear

and the stakes are high, another social implication is that "If hacktivists are achieving this level

of mayhem, imagine what real hackers might do. Their apparent high frequency of success is

most likely a result of them going for the weak, finding sites and servers with poor security."

(Mansfield-Devine, “Hacktivism” 8)