Anonymous: the biggest Internet shit storm EVER!

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Remember, remember the 5th of november
the gunpowder, treason and plot.
I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

November the 5th,
Hadopi vs anonymous
The biggest Internets shitstorm EVER.
For great justice (and lulz)

We are anonymous.

We are Legion
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.

Expect us…

At the moment Wikileak and Julian Assange are being cracked down upon from many (obvious) sides. Julian has been arrested for sexual molestation charges in Sweden, Wikileaks has been kicked out of Amazon and many datacenters and ISP’s and now all major payment providers do an EDoS (Economic denial of service) by blocking all support payments to Wikileaks. Also Twitter is in a tough spot, on one hand they cherish their reputation as a platform for revolution but when it comes more close to home that reputation all of a sudden seems to crumble. Many accuse Twitter of blocking #Wikileaks and #Cablegate from their trending topics and it seems they do have a point. A representative of Twitter responded with the following statement:

“Hi – I work at Twitter on trends and other projects. Twitter hasn’t modified trends in any way to help or prevent wikileaks from trending. #cablegate was trending last weekend and various terms around this issue have trended in different regions over the past week. Trends isn’t just about volume of a term but also the diversity of people and tweets about a term and looking for organic volume increases above the norm. I hope this helps.”

To be honost, after reading this post I really just don’t buy that crap, also because it’s different from the first official reaction from Twitter which stated that the algorithm favors news over old news which was quickly refuted by some other examples like the oil spill and Justin Bieber which both trended for weeks..

But the shit definitely hits the fan now, ANONYMOUS declared all out war on all who censor the Internet and attack Wikileaks and they mean business. The casualties in this what we now call Web War I so far:

-  The Mastercard.com crashed;
-  Visa.com crashed
-  The website of Swedish prosecutors crashed
-  The site of Swedish bank PostFinance crashed
-  Paypal’s blog all crashed;

On the other hand Anonymous own website at anonops.net has been taken down but in reaction to taking down anonops.net the provider responsible for that is now fighting some severe digital repercussions.

I would say so far it’s a small 1-0 lead for our anonymous Internet Guerrillas but the fact remains that they still haven’t succeeded in bringing down the main PayPal platform. But the Anonymous group, which seems to be closely related to image board 4chan (known for pictures of open minded and underdressed Japanese girls), seems to be growing and offer a simple “do-it-yourself-DDOS-kit” for those sympathizing with their war but lack any skills in digital warfare.

Whatever one might think of Anonymous, their opinions and instruments they use, I do think they have a point. Why do VISA, Mastercard and Paypal block payments to Wikileaks? Well, according to Paypal it’s simple government pressure. At the Le Web event in Paris Osama Bedier, Vice President of Paypal, answered the question on why Paypal suspended Wikipedia’s account as follows: “The State Department, the US government basically wrote a letter saying that uuuhh Wikileaks activities were deemed illegal in the United States. And as a result our policy group had to make the decision of suspending the account”. So why is it deemed illegal while most lawyers agree that since Wikileaks didn’t steal the information they leak themselves and that publishing it is not perse a violation of the law? And what about “alls suspects are innocent until proven guilt in a court of law”, did I miss something?

No I’m definitely not a revolutionaire or a rebel but I kinda like and cherish Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

After the Patriot Act there now seems to be a law in the making that would seriously limit the press agencies and though you can have long discussions about the Patriot Act, freedom of speech is for me untouchable.

At running the risk to be labeled gullible, I see the Internet as the ultimate platform for freedom of speech and would like it to remain just that. In the West we all bash China for their Digital Wall but recent events prove that actually Western governments are tempted to build their own information wall to prevent their dirty secrets to reach the public or protect economical interests. In that attempt governments will resort to any means and use mass propaganda to explain us that all that is in the people’s best interest and of course has nothing to do with preventing corruption or scandals to surface. I’m glad to see that not only Anonymous is fighting this development but also Wikileaks payment gateway Datacell is suing both Visa and Mastercard for violating the agreement with their customers.

In the mean time I don’t think that Anonymous will be able to do much dammage though it would be interesting to see how succesful they will be in bringing down Twitter which seems to be really good lately in doing that themselves.

Anyways, back to operation Payback and Anonymous leaving you with some theatrical PR (notice the subliminal message at the end???)