Nameless, faceless social activism in the Internet age
Do you remember the poem from V for Vendetta? “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”
It was a rallying cry against fascism, censorship and injustice. It used the Guy Fawkes incident in 1604 England, in which a group of conspirators were caught trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament and assassinate King James I, to protest tyrannical government.
The movie may have been fictional, but a community of decentralized Internet hackers has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask and rhetoric for their own brand of protest: it’s called hacktivism, and the hackers are called Anonymous.
Explaining what, exactly, Anonymous does can get technical. It involves things like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, redirects, typosquatting and all other forms of virtual sabotage. They hack into and disrupt website service to promote political ideals like free speech and equality.
They’ve been known to steal personal information and post it online, like in the case of Lt. John Pike, who pepper-sprayed nonviolent protestors at the University of California, Davis, and whose contact information was posted in a video by Anonymous.
More often, they use DDoS attacks to bombard targeted websites with external communications requests or access a targeted website simultaneously and repeatedly, so that its response time is significantly slowed or halted altogether.
Anonymous also communicates with the public by releasing videos, characterized by an actor wearing a Fawkes mask and a voice synthesizer reading political messages; their YouTube channel, The Anonymous Message, contains 64 videos with more than 4.7 million total views.
So whom do they target? Anonymous’ first hacking operation in 2006 became known as the Habbo Raids; in the Habbo virtual hotel/social network, Anonymous users flooded the site with African-American avatars. When they were banned from the site, they protested the action as racist. The group has since repeated raids on Habbo.
In 2008, Anonymous received global recognition for Project Chanology, a protest against Internet censorship and the Church of Scientology after the forced removal of a Church-produced video featuring Tom Cruise from the YouTube website. Anonymous launched DDoS attacks on Scientology websites, released YouTube videos and organized live protests outside Scientology churches.
In 2010, in response to lawsuits media giant Sony brought against coders who had hacked the PlayStation 3 system, Anonymous again used DDoS attacks against websites belonging to Sony, anti-piracy groups and targeted law firms. This protest was labeled Operation Payback.
Later that year, Operation Payback switched gears to show support for the much-beleaguered WikiLeaks by attacking major websites like Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Swiss bank PostFinance in retaliation for perceived anti-WikiLeaks behavior.
Much more recently, Anonymous responded to the proposed SOPA legislation (Stop Online Piracy Act) with Operation Blackout. They released an emergency call for public action via press release and influenced websites like Reddit, Google and Wikipedia to participate in service blackouts to demonstrate the consequences of Internet censorship. The tactic worked, with senators withdrawing support of the bill left and right.
Anonymous’ latest action was to eavesdrop on a Scotland Yard and FBI conference call in which officials discussed tracking down Anonymous members. Hackers recorded 17 minutes of the Jan. 17 call and posted it on YouTube; the FBI has confirmed that the recording is authentic.
“It’s equal parts scary and brilliant,” said technical writing graduate student Maya Seaman. “So far, I think they’ve made some very valid points with what they’ve accomplished. If this were science fiction, I’d just hope they don’t turn evil, let’s put it that way.”
Is this what we should expect political protest to look like from now on—hacktivism? Activists have moved into the Internet world, where so many people spend so much of their time now. Hacking attempts to capture the attention of people in their normal course of information consumption.
Hacktivism is an alternative to dead-end 20th century tactics like sit-ins, which worked in small local businesses of the past but have no relevance in a time of massive, global corporations that can afford to ignore the voices of small groups of activists. It offers the opportunity to protest without risk of physical harm or the need to travel. Hacktivism is similar to the open content movement; like Wikipedia, it allows many individuals with diverse areas of expertise to contribute their knowledge to a system, in this case a loosely organized group.
This is the future of activism, because people can’t fight corporations personally or in small collectives. The Internet gives us the opportunity to expose the inner workings of these companies and then spread the information quickly to people worldwide. Activists can preserve their anonymity so as to avoid persecution—a good thing if one considers their efforts noble.
More than the face of modern political activism, Anonymous has come to represent what we call the 99 percent—the common people, the masses—all of us who are not the elite. On Oct. 6, 2011, Anonymous released a video addressed to the 99 percent with a new take on their original motto: “We are all the 99 percent. We are all Anonymous. We are all legion. We will never forget. We will not forgive. Expect us.”
In a “Message to the World” video released Aug. 10, 2011, Anonymous appealed to the people: “We put our trust in hope and voted for change, and we received empty promises and frail leadership…but we will see the end of these crooks and these liars, and you can help.”
The movement has gone global. The elites are terrified, and they should be. Rome is burning, Greece is rioting, London is clenching its fist, France is grinding its teeth, America is already in the midst of a revolution.”
We don’t know who these hacktivists are, but they have shouldered the burden of representing 99 percent of the world without expectation of reward or recognition. Their actions may be termed illegal, but they are intended to bring knowledge and justice to the common man.
