Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church

elashish14 writes "The Westboro Baptist Church stated earlier this week that they would be picketing the funerals of the victims of Newtown Connecticut's tragic shooting in an effort to bring awareness to their hate messages. In response, the Anonymous hacker collective has hacked their website and posted the personal information of all of its members."

Comments

Kudos

[benjfowler]

Happy to see Anonymous making themselves truly useful for the first time since Operation Chanology. I can think of nobody more deserving than a kick in the arse than the Westboro mob.

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Picketing the funerals of kids is not acceptable.

Re:Kudos

[spire3661]

Wait. This is vigilantism, and while I would happily convict them if caught, I cant say they are wrong. Just as I can absolutely abhor capital punishment carried out by the state, i can also believe in repaying a personal vendetta in blood, i jsut dont expect to be let off if caught.

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

Making your point about your views on the matter on a blog, or in a newspaper/newsletter, in a letter to the editor, or just on the street corner to whoever will listen is free speech. Picketing the funeral of elementary school students is more than just rude, it is disruptive of a privately funded memorial service. This is hardly anything foreign to our free speech protections; you can picket outside of a politician's home, but if you're doing it at 3 AM with a bullhorn, or sitting outside and shining in a strobe so as to disrupt the occupants of the house, you're not so protected.

Re:Kudos

[nschubach]

All speech is free speech. If you start classifying what is and isn't "hate speech" you only serve to erode away what Free Speech really is.

Do you classify "Hate Speech" by popular opinion? If so, then burning a cross in someone's yard was at one point not considered "Hate Speech." So who's the inevitably curator of what you classify as "Hate Speech"? Is it the government? What if you say that our Electoral College is fucked up and should be replaced... could the Government classify that as "Hate Speech" against America?

This whole "Hate Speech" movement is really starting to concern me. It's censorship.

Re:Kudos

[DNS-and-BIND]

...and this is how it starts. "I support freedom, but group X is so bad that they're not even human." Having now established the fact that people can be classified as subhuman (untermensch) based on their religion, the rest flows naturally from there.

Re: Kudos

[Vanderhoth]

When your 8 year old kid is killed in a school shooting feel free to let people walk around you, while your burrying them, yelling that your kid is burning in hell eternally. Till then maybe you should show a little compassion for the people it's actually happend to.

Re:Kudos

[benjfowler]

I think there's a distinction between 'freedom of speech', and 'freedom to spread hate'. People don't always recognise the latter (which is why there are so many laws against hate speech).

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

I've often made the comment that just because it's right, doesn't mean it's legal. Just because it's legal, doesn't mean it's right.

Westboro (I refuse to align them with a church or religious denomination, and I wish the media would as well) is doing that which is legal, yet not right. In response, Anonymous is doing what is right, yet not legal.

This, too, will be the first time that I congratulate Anonymous on being more than useless.

Re:Kudos

[disambiguated]

Off topic. We're talking about common decency here, what does the law have to do with it?

Re:Kudos

[dgatwood]

You have it backwards. Having established that it is acceptable to call gays subhuman because their religious beliefs demand it, the rest flows naturally from there. We saw in Germany during WWII what happens when the seeds of hate are not weeded out.

No one is calling Westboro less than human because of their religion. People are calling Westboro less than human because their actions betray a decided lack of humanity.

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US at least, hate speech is protected by the constitution. Direct quote from Wikipedia: "Laws prohibiting hate speech are unconstitutional in the United States; the United States federal government and state governments are forbidden by the First Amendment of the Constitution from restricting speech." In the United States, there is no (nor should there be) a distinction between these two things, legally. It is only illegal to act on hate, in the form of some other criminal activity.

It's pretty typical, really. People are all for freedom of speech right up until the point where it actually matters: people saying things that you or "the public" find offensive or unacceptable.

The people of Westboro are not only mistaken and committing acts of evil, but they also give me and every other Christian a bad name. Yet I will not ask that their speech be legally restricted in any way. Like everyone else in America, I have the right to ignore them and/or encourage them, legally, to not speak that way or say those things.

And by the way, it irks me to no end how much people care about hate. Hate is a feeling. It can't do anything. If your doctor HATES you, but otherwise gives you normal service when you're at the hospital, who cares if he hates you? Likewise, if a girlfriend in a fit of jealousy kills her boyfriend because she LOVES him too much to let him talk to other girls, who cares how much she loved him? You might care personally, but legally, the emotions should not matter. Human beings are only fit to judge actions, not the feelings behind those actions. Hate and criminal activity are often associated, but they are not the same thing, and neither necessarily causes the other.

Re:Kudos

[epyT-R]

If you demand censure of someone's speech, you allow him a loophole to demand the censure of yours. Westboro baptist' right to free speech is the same right we all share. Attack theirs and you attack everyone elses, including your own. This right is far more important than the melodrama they cause..

I think westboro baptist is a joke. They should not be taken seriously. 90% of the 'bandwidth' given to their message comes from the overly sensitive sorts when they demand legal protections for their butthurt feelings on national tv. Just ignore them.. They're morons who are not worth losing liberties over.

Re:Kudos

[Progman3K]

No, I don't want the WBC people to be hurt.

I want them to realize the suffering and hurt they've caused.

Re:Kudos

[circletimessquare]

and freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences

if you traffic in hate, you reap what you sow

Re:Kudos

[symbolset]

Concur. It is so unfortunate that we have folk like the Westboro Baptist Church to hold up as examples of why speech must be free. Their members should be ashamed of themselves. Their actions are despicable. They appear to be organized to make the worst possible use of free speech.

The law protects them from the government. The government cannot act against them. We, their neighbors, can choose to not associate with them - to not shop in their businesses, to not employ them, to not let them in our homes. So by showing who they are, Anonymous had done us a great service.

But to engage some arm of the government in shutting them up - no, I'm not in favor of that and would never be.

They seem so determined that they will not change. Shunning them might motivate them to behave in a more civilized way.

Re:Kudos

[JasoninKS]

Oh they fully realize it and they take joy in it.

Re:Kudos

[FatRichie]

Though I'm not the AC that which you're responding to, I feel you're berating his use of Wikipedia when what you should be directing your conversation at is his point of view.

Legal argument aside, he used Wikipedia for what it's very good for: citing factual or directly inferred information, not information up for thats typically debatable. And the reason Wikipedia is good for that is because the users (are supposed to) cite their information.

In this case, his one sentence quote is backed up by citing four separate court cases.

If you don't like his argument based off of that information, that's fine. But to deride him for using Wikipedia, and then imply his resulting argument is faulty because no good can come of Wikipedia is frankly BS. Note: I'm referring to your opening and closing statements, not when you actually get to the issues at hand.

I apologize for venting my Wikihate frustrations towards you specifically, but I finally have time to reply this one of many, I feel, unwarranted assaults against a very useful source of information.

Wikipedia, like all things on the internet must be taken with a grain of salt, but unlike almost all other things on the internet, at least Wikipedia tells the user on what the information is based.

/rant

Re:If nothing else.....

[poity]

Just the opposite, I see it as a test for those who claim to be champions of the freedom of expression.

Re:ignore instead of feed

[davydagger]

"I figure once a few of those members have protesters of their own driving to Westboro, KS and showing up at their homes, schools, and everywhere they go,"

Its been done. They are all lawyers. They provoke people for the sake suing them. They all live comfortably, but they don't work.

The best thing to do with a troll is not to feed it.

Re:If nothing else.....

[meta-monkey]

What about the rights of the victims' families who don't want to be subject to harassment at a funeral? You have the right to say what you want, but you don't have the right to force me to listen to you by screaming your message outside my house.

WBC's freedom of speech should not be infringed upon. They should not be thrown in jail for their speech, or fined. But "free speech" does not mean "forced listening."

Re:ignore instead of feed

[hendridm]

It's difficult to ignore them as you're walking into the funeral home to say a final goodbye to your child who was just shot in the face at the elementary school they attended.

Re:lawsuits

[cdrudge]

Even though most people, including me, disagree with their opinions that should still be able to picket and print whatever stuff they want.

Whatever they want? At what point does it cross over from them exercising their freedom of speech to infringing on others rights not to give a fuck, to feel safe, or not to be harassed? Even with freedoms, there are limits to how far those freedoms extend.

Freedom from gov't consequences not fellow citizen

[drnb]

You would destroy all of the freedoms so many have died for you to obtain -- if only because a group is using speech you deem unacceptable. Shame. Shame on you sir.

I think you are confusing the perspective of ACLU lawyers with the perspective of military veterans. As for the combat veterans I have known they seem perfectly fine with the notion that some speech will get you a kick in the ass or a punch in the face from your fellow citizen.

You seem to have made the error that freedom from government consequences somehow implies freedom from consequences from your fellow citizens.

Re:Very Odd Coincidence

[spazmonkey]

They are all the same families, and the list is legit. You have to remember its a family business, not a church per se. Not only are they all related, they are mostly lawyers. Old man Phelps finally got disbarred, but his offspring and in-laws are mainly lawyers too, and they file for the church now. Its a lawsuit mill, and its a family business. The ones that go out and protest are only the bait to get either adverse crowd reactions and/or official denials of permits so that the lawyers can file suits against cities and universities for either failing to protect their people from crowd harassment or for 'violating their civil rights' for not giving into their usually pretty unreasonable protest demands as to exact time and location. They especially love universities, as invariably there are students that throw stuff at them or spray them with water, colleges are usually for more prone to settle than some other entities, and its a freebie two-fer anyway as there are usually city or county law enforcement involved as well in 'failing' to protect them from that, so they get two entities to sue for damages instead of just one. The 'Church' makes up to several million dollars a year on the settlements to all the nuisance suits, and have hundreds going at any one time, more than 1000 concurrent ones at some points in the past. Its strictly a business model.

Re:Kudos God Win

[circletimessquare]

right

and we can't legalize gay marriage because then we have to legalize pedophilia and necrophilia

and we can't legalize marijuana because then we have to legalize meth and crack

the slippery slope is a form of fear based logical fallacy

i can tell the difference between homosexuality and necrophilia. i can tell the difference between marijuana and meth. and i can tell the difference between political speech and hate speech

the slippery slope is an idea that only works in a world where nobody can think and identify different topics. therefore, the slippery slope never works as a persuasive argument