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The Dangers of Anonymity:

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Some people believe that one mans terrorist is another mans 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 selfproclaimed 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

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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 Churchs attempt to censor actor Tom Cruises 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 Churchs 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 groups concealment is manifested by a sense of superiority; a superiority

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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 MansfieldDevine 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 theyd 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. (MansfieldDevine, 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,

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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 members 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 its 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

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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)