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Member Claims Anonymous "Might Well Be the Most Powerful Organization On Earth"
wasimkadak writes in with an interview with Anonymous member "Commander X" in which he talks about how the hacktivists are the most powerful group on the planet. "Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, sits atop a hillside in an undisclosed location in Canada, watching a reporter and photographer make their way along a narrow path to join him, away from the prying eyes of law enforcement. It's been a few weeks of encrypted emails back and forth, working out the security protocol to follow for interviewing Doyon, one of the brains behind Anonymous, now a fugitive from the FBI. Doyon, who readily admits taking part in some of the highest-profile hacktivist attacks on websites last year — from Tunisia to Orlando, Sony to PayPal — was arrested in September for a comparatively minor assault on the county website of Santa Cruz, Calif., where he was living, in retaliation for the town forcibly removing a homeless encampment on the courthouse steps. The 'virtual sit-in' lasted half an hour. For that, Doyon is facing 15 years in jail."
It's funny how if a group is *actually* powerful, you never see them making claims that they're powerful. Their actions say more than words.
Anonymous are just poseurs. Not only are they poseurs on world-scale power, they're poseurs on computer hacking, all they know how to do is run DoS attacks. They're an embarrassment.
Anonymous is another (clearly not the first) example of what I'll for lack of a better term, call a "virtual nation".
It's obvious that the internet allows rapid worldwide communication. It's also obvious that it allows new aggregations of people to sort themselves out - that you can draw together like-minded people from all over the globe.
What's less-than-obvious is to call these aggregates "virtual nations".
But take a look at it from a slightly different perspective. People whose primary news source is Fox news live in the Unites States of America, and are quite proud of the fact. People whose primary news source is NPR also live in the United States of America, and are also quite proud of that fact. But when you ask the two groups of people what they thing the United States of America really is, beyond simple geographic attributes, you get two very different answers, two very different sets of allegiances. It's almost like they live in different nations. Perhaps in some sort of virtual way, they do.
But perhaps the best and worst example of a virtual nation is Al Qaeda. There is a group of people whose allegiance has little to do with physical boarders. Their sense of belonging, their cause, their peers transcend the mere physical. (Note that interesting characteristics don't make it good, and in this case, far from it.)
Anonymous is a less mature, less cohesive, less dangerous version.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
They're best known for DOS attacks, but Doyon claims in the interview that they do much more than this. For example, the article mentions gaining access to sensitive email databases. He claims they often don't even need to hack to obtain these, that they're being provided by people in governments/corporations.
Whether it's true or not, I don't know. All I'm saying is that the claim to power is based on more than website defacing that they're best known for.
The fact that they even attempted to DDoS EC2 shows they are nothing more than script kiddies. EC2 is not a PIII in Amazon's broom closest. It's a large scale server infrastructure designed by some of the smartest hackers in the world explicitly to withstand incredibly high traffic. Any legitimate hacker could have explained that to them, but they managed to get well passed the planning stage of their little DDoS with not a single one of them mentioning it?