The cyberhacker group Anonymous is apparently siding with the Palestinians in the latest flare-up of violence.
Frankly, I wonder about the wisdom of that. If they actually manage to do any harm, they’ll wind up on the top of the Mossad’s hit list. And while I know the computer magic they pull on TV crime shows isn’t real, I’m pretty sure that someone like the CIA, MI6, or the Mossad, can figure out who these guys are if they really want to.
“If they really want to.” which I doubt is much, considering the effort required to track someone down who really knows how to hide his tracks. Then what? They kill one person of how many thousands located literally all over the world?
It’ll be the same situation as it is with spammers. Sure we definitely have the means to catch them, but there are so many of them, each with such little individual impact and significance in the bigger picture, what’s the point?
:smack: It’s not magic and it’s not that hard to cover up yourself.
Seeing as how Anonymous managed to take down the Mexican druglords last year, Israel should be very, very worried.
The Israeli officials don’t sound the least bit surprised or deterred, and they probably have to deal with more serious threats from, say, Iran on a daily basis. I wouldn’t expect this to be a major event for Israel or most of the Anonymouses.
Anonymice? =)
People are upset that bloody kid pictures are usurping their usual cat pictures. And anonymous generally uses their power for good.
Anonymaterati.
CosAnonostra.
Anonymous isn’t really a “group” in any meaningful sense anyway. It’s a mantle that you can take up if you want to. It has no leadership structure, no hierarchy, no unified goal. Certain projects may have leaders and followers. Many projects likely involve the same people, but saying that "Anonymous did something’ is pretty meaningless. This is evident in that Anonymous has done both terrible and wonderful things. Pretty much the only linking factor between any two random Anonymous projects (that aren’t obviously related like the various Scientology attacks) are that the people behind it probably are on 4chan, but that’s about as close as you’ll get to an underlying commonality between its “members.” One Anonymous “member” could very well be completely uninvolved in 90% of its projects, and in fact actively oppose them. This is why they say things like “Anonymous is legion”. You’re never going to stop Anonymous because even if you arrest every single damn person associated with an attack, there’s a good chance literally none of them know even 10% of the people associated with other projects people using the same mantle have pulled.
Most of what you said wasn’t inaccurate, but I take issue with this. Anon as a whole tends to have ethics. One person can’t do something and say, “lol anonymous did it,” because unless the activity fits in with anon’s ethics, it will be decried by anonymous as a whole. Obviously there will always be lone script kiddies wreaking havoc in anon’s name, but cyber attacks of this magnitude *cannot *be perpetrated by one (or even a dozen) people.
At a public level, yes. But I don’t consider myself exceptionally well informed about Anonymous and even I know about the little pissing match it had with itself across the internet about whether Project Chanology was “a betrayal of Anonymous” or “a righteous cause worthy of the Anonymous mantle”.