For those of you who don't know who or what The Anonymous is, it's a large "anonymous" group of self proclaimed "hacktivsts" who try to work for the great good of our earth by cyberly protesting. Now, I'm not talking about protesting as in posting things on blogs or anything like that, I'm talking about a more radical or extreme form of protesting on the Internet by launching full on operations in efforts to combat their "enemy" or "target." The Anonymous has fought various groups, companies and even countries. Common things they do as an attack are Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (better known as a DDOS' attack or dos attack) which is when you flood a server with packets causing it to deny any incoming traffic. SQL injecting in order to find administrative access and or passwords. Rooting servers in which the sites are actually held on which consists of gaining root access to a server by hacking, and finally defacing a website which means that you basically take the face of a website so to speak and put your own on there. Usually when The Anonymous defaces a website they have a clear message they want to spread by doing this. For example, in the case of The Westboro Baptist Church. During a talk show called MidweekPolitics on YouTube with one of The Westboro Baptist Church representatives (Shirley Phelps-Roper) and a representative from The Anonymous (Topiary which may or may have not been arrested its all up to third party speculation at this point) Topiary single handedly defaced one of their websites (downloads.westborobaptistchurch) mid-interview. After the host David Pakman calms Shirley down so Topiary can speak, he says "I was just gonna say just in the time that Shirley was blabbing her religious preach I actually did some business and I think if you check downloads. westborobaptistchurch.com right now you'll see a nice message from anonymous" the talk show host did confirm that.
Link to the video here: Anonymous Vs Westboro Baptist Church on MidweekPolitics
Moving on, today, The Fifth of November. Many press releases going all the way back to before March stated that there will be an attack on the social networking site Facebook for selling personal information to corporate sponsors. If you aren't aware the term "corporate sponsors" means Companies who want something and in return they pay for it or sponsor the company for whatever they want. In this case, our personal information which is why you could see why all the anonymous and most of the world is pretty pissed off, but. If you were on Facebook today you probably noticed that it was still fully operational and functional. Furthermore Anonymous or The Anonymous went on to say that it was all nonsense and there was no actual operation or planning for the attacks. Accordingly Facebook was never down, thus all the press releases were either fake or The Anonymous decided otherwise before the operation took place.
But I do leave you with a question to answer in the comments down below.
Do you believe being a "hacktivist" is a good alternative to being a political activist, out of fear of being beaten down by the authorities or arrested?
My Opinion:
Personally I think it is great if you are willing to risk your future as you would being a part of a riot take the occupy movement for example, even though it is over the internet you can still get in serious trouble that could potentially ruin your life. At the same time I feel that being an political activist in person or on the internet is extremely important. However I do look at the situation with a completely different approach. I always think along these lines, I will be as successful as I can so that I can change the world when I get there. End the corruption, End the endless pollution that is fed into our minds through the propaganda, End the mindlessness of the world. Begin the new era, Begin the era in which intelligence is of at the utmost of value, Begin the reconstruction of society.
So after this post you may believe I am a member of The Anonymous, but no I am not. I believe it is currently to risky and you can't be of huge importance if you go to jail for something like this. However I do support their morals and ideas, and I do thank the ones who are brave enough to be members of this group. In my mind they are like rebellion soldiers the internet and I thank them for proudly serving the rebellion. In all seriousness though I am not a member but I do support them.