Scotland Yard Has Been After Anonymous For Months

jhernik writes "Scotland Yard has confirmed it has been investigating Anonymous since before the WikiLeaks wars broke out. The Metropolitan police has been investigating Internet vigilante group Anonymous, since well before its current online reprisals against companies not supporting WikiLeaks. 'Earlier this year, the Metropolitan police service received a number of allegations of denial of service cyber attacks againat several companies by a group calling itself Anonymous,' a police spokesman told eWEEK Europe UK. 'We are investigating these criminal allegations and our investigation is ongoing.'"

Comments

Obligatory

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

If Anonymous is made up of random people who care about the issue of the moment, how do you investigate them over time? I can't see how they would all care about the same things, as it's not like Anonymous hires people to do stuff.

Unless there's some sort of "Anonymous Hacking, LLC" I haven't hear of...

Re:Obligatory

[bberens]

That may be true, but there's bound to be a relatively small core of people who are controlling the botnets. Those people might not be involved in every "Anonymous" attack, but they will likely participate semi-regularly in them. Those are the people they're after. Not joe idiot who downloaded the little flooding app.

Excuses

[DarkXale]

They're just using it as an excuse to browse 4chan.

Re:Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Me!? Why would they want me?

Ohhh... my username.

Re:SO fucking stupid.

[Magada]

Anybody can be a member, for any amount of time. There are no central lists, no membership rosters.....in many ways the organization doesn't exist, it;s a "dis-organization."

That never stopped the United States from chasing Al-Qaeda all over the globe. It makes good sport for the hounds, really.

England's been after Anonymous since Franlin&P

[ron_ivi]

Worth noting that Anonymous lost England the Colonies in North America, and they've probably been after them ever since.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
"Thomas Paine has a claim to the title The Father of the American Revolution because of Common Sense, the pro-independence monograph pamphlet he anonymously published on January 10, 1776; signed "Written by an Englishman", the pamphlet became an immediate success."

http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/l3_wit_name.html
"Benevolus — While in England, Franklin penned a number of letters under the name of Benevolus. These letters tried to answer some of the negative assertions made by the British press about the American colonists. These letters were published in London newspapers and journals. "

Perhaps those are the Anonymous guys that England's really still mad at.

Re:SO fucking stupid.

[Terrasque]

One of the better descriptions I've heard:

[Anonymous is] the first internet-based superconsciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they're a group? Because they're travelling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely.

From the wikipedia page.