Anonymous Under Civil War?

Stoobalou writes "Civil war appears to have broken out in the ranks of headless 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous, with claims that a rogue admin has seized control of two key sites used to coordinate the loose-knit group's online direct action. The news follows speculation that a breakaway group of Anonymous members was responsible for the hacking attacks on Sony's PlayStation Network and Online Entertainment Network, which saw personal information, including credit card details, stolen from as many as 100 million users' accounts."

Comments

Penny

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/

Re:Penny

[clang_jangle]

These "Anonymous" people just seem like a bunch of silly drama queens. It's sad that so many people see some sort of revolutionary spirit brewing there. In reality it's all about the LoLz for some and cheap ego glorification for the rest.

Re:Penny

[The Archon V2.0]

These "Anonymous" people just seem like a bunch of silly drama queens. It's sad that so many people see some sort of revolutionary spirit brewing there. In reality it's all about the LoLz for some and cheap ego glorification for the rest.

You know what's really sad? That the closest thing we HAVE to revolutionary spirit is Anonymous. People only see the revolution there because everyone else is too busy with the bread and circuses.

Civil war?

[mr100percent]

I don't know if I'd call that civil war, more like dissension in the ranks, or mutiny or barratry, and a greater than average amount of anarchy.

Now if you wanted to see Anonymous in Civil War, you should hear the Boxxy story. She managed to divide the indivisible.

Re:Civil war?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, Civil War is bullshit and the author should be ashamed of himself. It's just the usual Internet drama that happens in every single community at regular intervals.

Re:It was only a matter of time

[gl4ss]

well.
if ANYONE who uses a pseudo-name online has a disagreement with anyone who has a pseudo-name online, then anonymous are fighting.

stop calling any specific group anonymous. everyone is anonymous and anonymous is everyone.

Newsflash!

[Anonymous Coward]

In response to accusations from Sony, Anonymous denies the allegations and blames everything on Anonymous... uh the other Anonymous.

Not News

[Yeknomaguh]

This happens literally all the time. Its not even remotely news. Some part of "Anonymous" is always attacking some other part. Someone gets their feelings hurt and takes down a website or two. They get their name dropped and they fall off the radar. It isn't "civil war"; it's actually just the way Anonymous works.

Is it really civial war?

[realsilly]

It sounds to me that there are individuals who don't follow the same ideology as a majority of the group called Anonymous. But since the word Anonymous is the generic word for "The concept of many online community users generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known" (from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)), how can you discern on sect from another.

If you are Anonymous in the collective term, then where one goes, you all go. It is part of the concept of Anonymous. True that only a small sub-group has made the decision to perpetrate a company and steal information, but their actions reflect on all those who associate themselves with Anonymous. If Anonymous as a whole disagrees with what some members do, punishment will be within and will likely be pretty swift.

This to me is not Civil war, but punishment for breaking of the ranks.

Re:uhhh...

[youn]

A hacker collective? That's like spiders suddenly becoming social animals.

well to be fair, they did invent the web :)... they are social, just among themselves ... no facebook though

Re:It was only a matter of time

[Yeknomaguh]

This crap happens ALL THE TIME. Anonymous "turned" on itself years ago. Infighting keeps us strong, routes out the cancer, and confuses the hell out of outside enemies and newbs like you.

What?

[bmo]

Oh fucking please. Anonymous was a cohesive group that is now in "civil war"?

Anonymous is /b/ on 4chan and a bunch of other chans. There is no "leadership" - there is more or less "consensus" for varying values of "consensus" when it comes to a protest or a network attack. Anonymous is about as cohesive as a fist full of jelly.

>Ryan

Ryan is extremely angry because a small group of Anonymous rescued all the old data from Encyclopedia Dramatica by getting it from archive.org before Ryan could get it deleted and then put up their own mirror of the old ED wiki. That's what this is about. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Here's the rebuilt ED wiki, hosted in Switzerland:

http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Main_Page

That Ryan is raging buttmad over what "Teh Internets" has done "to him" is delicious irony.

--
BMO

Re:What?

[circletimessquare]

There's a fallacy in your thinking: that any group, bearing any label, can proceed without some sort of organization. Even a mob takes its cues form certain charismatic/ loud/ exemplary actors. Anonymous is not immune from this observation. But this doesn't stop dreamers and mythologizers from thinking about anonymous in dreamy ways that may be romantic and inspiring, but simply isn't real.

Anonymous has a structure, and that structure is simply its most active members, coordinating with each other. You can kill this rudimentary structure, and hurt anonymous. Yes, you can do that. 90% of what anonymous does is dome by 10% of its "members". If you were to profile who that 10% were, and take them all out at once, (not one-by-one, there is an organic retirement/ replacement continuum at work here) you would destroy anonymous.

It would of course reconstitute itself, but if you continued this "observe most active members, and then take them all out at once" tactic at a regular tempo, you would kill anonymous, dry the well, poison it, and prevent it from refilling.

Most assuredly, you can kill anonymous, all romantic dreamy notions of what anonymous is to the contrary.

"Anonymous is about as cohesive as a fist full of jelly."

Yes, that's an accurate metaphor. Please note that jelly actually has some cohesion.

You can kill Al Qaeda. You can kill the borg. You can kill anonymous. It takes effort and a longstanding commitment, and the most effective longterm methodology is to neutralize what motivates its organic membership. But for all the romanticizing dreamy anarchists out there: you just don't understand the intrinsic nature of human social organization. We self-organize, and this is a strength we reply on subconsciously, and a weakness to exploit.

Re:What?

[circletimessquare]

if you were to analyze anonymous's larger domain of overlapping grievances, you would characterize what anonymous is about. and you would also describe the motivation that brings people together under the banner of anonymous. this list of grievances can accurately described as internet freedoms. so, for example, anonymous has nothing to do with islamic militant fundamentalism, which, like anonymous, is also largely organic in nature and self-organizing around a set of grievances, also mostly "anonymous"

now if you took away what motivated anonymous: passed a set of laws and enforced them in regards to internet freedoms to the satisfaction of most people identifying with anonymous, then anonymous would dissolve and cease to exist. neutralize the motivation, neutralize the movement. a movement exists to satisfy a grievance. once the grievance is satisfied, the movement becomes history

then, for the cachet, imagine that some islamic militants started calling themselves anonymous. would you agree that that was still anonymous? of course it isn't the same anonymous, islamic fundamentalism, ANY religious fundamentalism, is no friend of internet freedoms. but according to you, it would be the same anonymous, because according to you, anyone can claim the mantle

no, you have to be fighting for internet freedoms to claim the true mantle of anonymous

Re:What?

[circletimessquare]

i'm not interested in killing anonymous

i'm interesting in dispelling the dreamy mythology of wanna be teenaged anarchists about the supposed untouchability of anonymous and anarchist activity in general

Re:What?

[bmo]

You are misunderstanding what I meant and believe that I am somehow a dreamy idealist.

I used to be one about 30 years ago. Not anymore. I read "The Disposessed" in high school and liked the "structured anarchy" in LeGuin's book, but it was clear even at that age that both planets in the book were gedankenexperiments and nothing more. I was also a Marx fan too. Then I grew up.

Anonymous is not hierarchical. There is no formal admissions process to Anonymous. You either join or you do not. You can lead a group or you can be a follower. You can join for 5 minutes and 10 minutes later, start shouting that "this is stupid and not fun, guys" or you can start your own "faction" with your own idea. Leaders and followers can be interchangeable in the space of 15 minutes. You can watch it happen by lurking in /b/ and in irc. This is how it actually works. It's not some sort of fantasy of how Anon operates.

The way Anon operates is unique to the age. The reason why we never saw this before is because communication used to be more difficult. Old Baader-Meinhoff or IRA shenanigans with cell structure and cloak-and-dagger message passing in the dead of night are passe'. Post something anonymously on a popular message board on a website and the world can read it without the message pointing directly at the originator. Entire discussions can be held with everyone being named "Anonymous" out in public. Enormous amounts of people can be organized in the space of an hour. That's what makes Anon effective (for various values of effective). 15 years ago, Anon would have been impossible to pull off, partly for technical reasons and partly for cultural reasons.

To kill Anonymous, you'd have to kill the *idea* of the flash-mob first, which is what Anonymous grew out of. You also have to kill anonymity on the net. The powers that be are working on the latter, but I think a technical "solution" anonymity is impossible without shutting down the internet and the phone system entirely. "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" - John Gilmore. Not only is that true of the 'Net, it's also true of people in general. It's the "don't effin' tell me what to do" reaction, which is in full force in Syria and Libya right now as an example. People are willing to risk death for "FUCKYOUIWON'TDOWHATYOUTELLME" to quote RATM.

--
BMO

Re:What?

[bmo]

>what the internet does to the functioning of anonymous is indeed new, but its a twist, not a fundamental recompositioing of human sociology.

It really is fundamental. Anonymity does something to human behavior that nothing else does. When we are not anonymous, we are self-censoring. When we are truly anonymous, we aren't. It's the "Greater Internet Fuckwad" theory in a nutshell. People tend to say/do what's on their minds. We've never had such access to anonymity coupled with the free access to communication in all of human history. We were always part of the tribe, the town, the city, the county. And if you fucked up, you were ostracized at best or stoned at worst. This is new/different. People can make new associations on the Internet without any of the responsibility that goes with them. Fuck up? Just create another "identity." In the case of Anonymous, you don't even need to create another identity - you just ignore whatever you've said in the past as if it never happened, because that was a "different" Anonymous.

Sherry Turkel has had a lot to say about all of this over the past 20 years.

You are dismissing all of this with a hand-wave saying it doesn't matter.

This makes you look like you are a stuffed shirt - an aristocrat looking down his nose at the peasants, that your arguments in a vacuum (as opposed to Sherry Turkel's research) are somehow based on reality.

I suggest that you go read "Life on the Screen" by Sherry Turkel. It's a little bit dated, but the same basic themes still apply. Then I suggest that you take that concept that all organizations are hierarchical and chuck it in the trashcan of history.

--
BMO

what

[dragonhunter21]

Rebellion: Resistance to or defiance of any authority, control, or tradition.

Mutiny: Revolt or rebellion against constituted authority.

How can you rebel when there's no leadership to rebel against?

This is, at best, a schism, and anon has survived schisms before- see Boxxy or the Scientology protests.

Re:How'd have thought...

[horza]

Law is only loosely related to justice. Laws can be used to persecute people, and justice can be obtained by going outside of the law. The suffragettes also used civil disobedience, and also had internal warfare from women that believed a woman's place was in the kitchen and out of politics. They still managed to get the vote for women, and in retrospect we now see society as a better place for it.

Not that Anonymous are the suffragettes any more than they are a bunch of anarchist computer network destroyers.

Phillip.

Total Annihilation of Anonymous?

[SJHillman]

What began as a conflict over the transfer of Anonymous from DDoS to identity theft has escalated into a war which has decimated a million scriptkiddies. The Hacktivists and the Rogues have all but exhausted the resources of 4chan in their struggle for domination. Both sides now moronic beyond compare, the remnants of their fad continues to harass Sony, their idiocy fueled by over four thousand years of inbreeding. This is a fight until their mothers tell them to get off the computer. For each side, the only acceptable outcome in the complete elimination of the ROFLs.

Re:It was only a matter of time

[Riceballsan]

The real fact is there isn't a way to define anonymous, and blaming all of anonymous for the actions of one group is ridiculous. Sony calling anon evil for the actions of this group is more or less no different then calling all Christians evil for the actions of Westboro baptist church, anyone can be a christian, and even take some portions of the christian beliefs out of context, yet you don't see the media or anyone hounding Christians as a whole for the actions of one group that claims to be Christians. All Anonymous means is one who dosn't give their identity, and by that logic most bankrobbers, murderers, serial killers have been anonymous since long before the internet was ever born.

Re:How is this possible?

[jeff4747]

Couldn't you trivially make something hack proof by running the server in a VM, and using a hardware authentication system for accessing the server that runs the VMs?

No.

How are hackers going to get past a measure like that?

Well, VM software isn't free of exploits. Nor are the other hardware and software used in your proposed solution. Plus, the infrastructure required to use RSA-style dongles isn't cheap.

Making it hard to break into isn't the same as making it impossible to break into.

Re:Stealing IP addresses?

[SuricouRaven]

Anon's sites arn't actually illegal to view, so no need for a proxy unless you're bragging about your 1337 ski115. When it comes to the DoS, Anonymous relies on hideing in numbers. When you've got 10,000 script kiddies attacking, plus a couple of skilled attackers with botnets, then it's just not practical to track down and charge even a small fraction of those IP addresses. Expensive, time-consuming, and by the time it's gone through the legal system Anonymous will be on to a new target anyway.

Anonymous is rock and roll

[jollyreaper]

I grew up in a conservative Christian household so I got the full scare story on the ebils of rock and roll before I dipped my toe in the other side. From the Christian POV, rock is monolithic. There's the titular head represented by Satan who is coordinating everything in a top-down hierarchical fashion from AC/DC, Ozzy, and Alice Cooper on down to the Beatles and Pat Boone. Even the most banal, lite rock-friendly artist is promoting Satan's message of substance abuse, loose morals, easy sex and enjoyment of life. Drug messages are backmasked into the music. Sex permeates the videos. Album jackets and psychedelic posters all have their hidden symbols and meanings; it's fun to take a trip, put acid in your veins. (supernaut!)

Then you look at it from the other side and shit, it's just a business. Rebellion is popular so you package it, commoditize it and sell it. Satan has nothing to do with it unless that's just a personal nickname for soulless assholes in suits. You really think it takes a prince of darkness to sell people on the idea of having fun and getting laid? Puhleeeeeeeeaze. Some rocker can declare he's doing something in the name of rock and roll, critics can argue about what rock is, how it should be, but they're all just tossing ideas into the collective memetic cess pool. There's no ecumenical councils trying to establish rock orthodoxy, no pope of rock to excommunicate you if you aren't doing it right.

It's the same thing with Anonymous. There's a vague, poorly expressed ideal with everyone supporting their own irreconcilable interpretation of it. You can't really have a civil war amongst people who were never unified to begin with. That's making the fundamental mistake of assuming Anonymous is top-down, hierarchical, and organized. Organized anarchy? That's as oxymoronic as Christian rock.

A False Flag Operation

[SplicerNYC]

This "rogue" group stinks of HB Gary.

Re:A False Flag Operation

[Cl1mh4224rd]

HB Gary is Anonymous. Sony is Anonymous. The RIAA and MPAA are Anonymous. You see, the funny thing about a non-organizational organization like Anonymous is that anyone can claim to be a member.

Re:How is this possible?

[synthesizerpatel]

It's not like when crackers hang out on IRC they freely share every exploit available to them. They hoard the secrets, share when it's advantageous or trade when someone has something they want. There's always 'something' out there waiting to be hacked. Especially if you're using off the shelf forum, services, or linux distros.

Also, it's a lot easier to preach being secure than it is to actually be secure. Since for anonymous to function without everyone getting clinked up in FPYITA prison they're missing out on the whole 'authentication' part of authorization how secure can anything be? You authenticate that I'm the fake person I say I am? Great. That'll do you a lot of good.

So thats how. There's no such thing as hack-proof, and really, no such thing as anonymity. The FBI is probably monitoring the 'interesting' parts of anonymous and will kick down doors en mass in 6 months or a year after they've rooted out who's a teenager and who's actually a foreign agent. (Sorry teenagers, your doors will be kicked down too, tough lesson but you know not what you do..)

Consider this: If you were part of an foreign agency intent on disrupting American commerce (or committing crime) - wouldn't it be easier to just infiltrate anonymous and rile them up to go attack targets to spread cyberterrorism investigators thinner so that your agency could conduct their activity with that much less attention?

The non-car analogy would be calling in a bunch of fake 911 calls on the east side of town 30 minutes before you rob a bank on the west side.

 

Re:How'd have thought...

[LWATCDR]

Please. Comparing Anon to the suffragettes is just going way over the edge. Anon is nothing more or less than a street gang. They use intimidation and threats to exert power. Yeah it would be a real shame if something bad happened to your network. When you have people afraid to make statements critical of them they are no longer just protesters they are a threat to peoples freedoms. Like the freedom of speech.
They also become a boogie man for more restrictive anti hacking laws. And by hacking I mean things like modding devices that YOU OWN! And what everybody that confuses this vigilantly gang like activity with civil disobedience, forgets is that Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Susan B Anthony where not anonymous. Now the KKK the rode out and lynched folks that did things that they didn't like, that terrorized people into silence they where anonymous. You are drawing the wrong parallel from history. Of course the Klan saw and still sees themselves as heroes just like Anonymous does.

Re:It was only a matter of time

[dkleinsc]

Sony calling anon evil for the actions of this group is more or less no different then calling all Christians evil for the actions of Westboro baptist church, anyone can be a christian, and even take some portions of the christian beliefs out of context, yet you don't see the media or anyone hounding Christians as a whole for the actions of one group that claims to be Christians.

Or for that matter, calling all Muslims evil for the actions of Al Qaida (maybe a couple thousand people out of a population of well over 1 billion, or about 0.0002% of Muslims). But it sure happens far more than you might think.

Re:It was only a matter of time

[DurendalMac]

You missed one big, key element: Sony has a central leadership structure. Christianity does not. Various sects may, but not Christianity as a whole. Enough shit has gone on at Sony that you can tell it's rotten to the top. A lot of these things wouldn't have happened without upper management knowing about it.