I’m going to go out on a limb and let you know that they are probably indifferent about it and aren’t losing any sleep waiting for the cartel to come get them.
I’ll also go out on a limb and tell you that you don’t understand what Anonymous is.
I don’t really need to know what anonymous is in order to know that anyone who is known publicly as being part of Anonymous, right or wrong would be foolish to dismiss the danger it could have put them in. But then again they, like perhaps you, don’t have photos of dismembered corpses in almost every edition of the daily local newspaper.
My understanding of Anonymous is irrelevant to the point but it might be very relevant that the cartels may not understand or care to learn. If any two people in the world are “Anonymous members”, or have been identified as being members, or were ever reported as being members even wrongfully, and one of them pisses off the wrong people then both of them could be in danger. It doesn’t matter what their charter or lack thereof says they could be the boy scouts of America. It doesn’t matter that anyone in the world could do anything, and simply claim they were ‘Anonymous’ - the wrong people get killed for the wrong reasons all the time based on simple misunderstandings.
The media has decided what Anonymous is and individuals acting under that moniker have taken drug cartels to task in the media. It would likewise be in the media that some “anonymous member” true or not, was murdered in reciprocation. The message would be delivered as far as the cartels were concerned. How incorrect or misguided it was based on their understanding of the nuances of “Anonymous” as a movement or organization wouldn’t matter. As long as the media reported it as a drug cartel hit on an Anonymous member the purpose would be served.
I can’t help but think you’re missing a relatively core concept of Anonymous.
If the Zetas can buy their way out of opposition and criticism with torture, what do you think they’re going to do the next time they want something?
People commit acts of terrorism because of people who would roll over for them, who make it an effective way of getting what they want. If the Zetas are willing to torture and murder innocent people to get what they want, they need to be hunted down and exterminated, not kowtowed to.
So, you don’t understand what you’re talking about, but it doesn’t matter. Gotcha.
That you’d even talk about a charter, or lack there of is very telling that you don’t understand what Anonymous is on a fundamental level.
The media also decided that Anonymous was ‘hackers on steroids.’ That didn’t make it true. Remember when Anonymous decided to troll Scientology in real life? You know how nasty Scientology is about attacking it’s detractors, right? Any guess on how many lives of Anonymous were ruined by them?
I have said nothing of the sort in this thread whatsoever. You have manufactured that out of dust motes and moonbeams.
Given what you say about living in Zetas country, I think I understand where you’re coming from better. You are worried and scared, to the point where you are not able to clearly read what I’m writing and what I’m not writing.
No, I have a healthy respect for real danger wherever I may be and there is plenty in the rest of the world too. I have lived in places in the US I felt less safe overall than I do in Mexico. I wouldn’t draw the attention of a cartel by talking about the danger that people named as being part of anonymous could be in, but I sure as hell wouldn’t be too secure if I were a junior hacker bragging on the IRC scene about doing things in the name of Anonymous. If I already had my name and photo in the paper calling me an anonymous member, however unjustifiably, or had done things in the past that would make that even a possibility in the future I would probably already be on a plane to the US.
It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. There are dozens of people who have already been arrested by the FBI as “anonymous members”. Countless others would claim to be so and could be easily tracked by their online activity (as they aren’t actually very anonymous or necessarily have any skill at hacking or hiding their identities) and untold thousands who have been executed by cartels in cases of mistaken identity or wrong information. And if you think being on the wrong side of the Scientologists is even remotely comparable to being on the wrong side of the drug cartels it is abundantly clear why it is you who just doesn’t get what I am trying to say.
It is you who is missing my point, not the other way around. It doesn’t matter what shape anonymous takes, what the movement or the use of the name means to anyone. It doesn’t matter who can actually say they are communicating officially on their behalf, or who actually participates using the name with no real affiliation. It wouldn’t be of any consolation to the victims if they were wrongfully targeted by people who just don’t get it about what anonymous really means. You seem to hold some deep seated admiration for the anonymous movement that I simply do not. There is nothing deeper to ‘get’ about them, no difficult or elusive concept to understand here. They are what they appear to be. And anyone, like the dozens who already have their real names and photos in the news forever linking them to the name Anonymous, are now potentially in danger as the result of the actions of others who are using the name anonymous. That is a very simple concept to understand and, no, it doesn’t require any knowledge of anonymous at all to understand it well.
If the SDMB declared war on a drug cartel and got in the paper for it and the story went viral one wouldn’t need to “understand what The SDMB is all about” in order to understand very clearly that if they had used their real names while posting here their life may have been endangered by the “SDMB” (whoever they may be, whoever may be speaking for them, and whether or not their declaration of war had any teeth).
Check the link in post 38 and think again.
Go get 'em Tiger. Post your real name and tell them what you think.
It’s a third party, completely unsupported allegation that is about as meaningful as me posting a dozen random names and mugshots pilfered from Faces of Meth and claiming they’re members of Anonymous.
Actually, there’s a decent chance some of them really would be at that 
In fact, if it turned out the Zetas were indeed willing to kill based on so very little information and no indication whatsoever that they have anything to do with the AnonOp (not to mention, fly people all over the world to kill them, since none of these people is from Mexico - are the Zetas S.M.E.R.S.H. or something ?), and were I Anonymous, I’d mock up a similar page, only all the mughshots would be of identified Zetas & collaborators, similarly branded as part of Anonymous and similarly “outed” by some form of impressive authority.
That would be a very Anonymous thing to do.
I don’t think you followed the link I supplied or if you did I have no idea how you might draw the conclusions above. But the mugshots are people who were arrested for hacks that Anonymous took credit for. How do you interpret this as random mugshots of people with no indication they are linked to Anonymous?
If one person on the other side of the planet could make up for Mexico’s failure, you might have a point. But I can’t, so you don’t. Just like I can’t just publically announce my opposition to Israel releasing mass murderers and expect Israel to stop acting like dumbasses in response.
I know that’s what TPM’s website says. That’s sort of my entire point. How do you know it’s reliable ? How do you know it’s not something someone planted there for the lulz ? How could you tell the difference if it was ?
Oh right, I forgot. The Internet is Serious Business 
Good luck, I’m behind 7 proxies.
Publically displaying yourself picketing Scientology makes one rather more easy to actually identify than a random someone posting a video on YouTube, no?
You really don’t get it. There is no shape to take, no one who can communicate officially on their behalf, and nothing to really affiliate ones self with. It isn’t an actual movement.
I have no idea where you get that I have any admiration, much less a deep seated one from. The point is there isn’t anyone to actually ‘rightfully’ target. Some random anonymous, or excuse me, Anonymous person trolled on the internet. There really isn’t much more to it than that. It is rather sick and sad if this causes actual deaths in some random spurious attempt at retaliation.
This is where you pretty much ‘get it.’ There is nothing deeper about it and nothing to even ‘get.’
And this is where you lose it. Do you actually think Mexican drug cartels are going to try to hunt down and kill 16 teenagers inside the United States over this? Sorry, they are vicious and horrible, but they aren’t SMERSH.
When did I ever say it would be ‘rightful’? Several times I’ve said things like “it wouldn’t much matter to the victims, even if they were wrongfully targeted.”
Not that likely, as I said in my first posts in this thread, but much less farfetched than you and others seem to think. Unless it was a matter of significant financial losses, which they aren’t being threatened with, that would be very unlikely. But saying that is like saying lighting a match a good 10 or 20 feet away from an open gas tank is very unlikely to cause an explosion. It is possible. I cited the 16 arrested by the FBI for being Anonymous hackers to illustrate that they most certainly can be found and identified in some cases and when they are their names and photos become a matter of public record. The same thing could happen to someone claiming to be Anonymous Mexico or South America (the alleged, so called, purported by the media and the Anonymous twitter account, “leaders” of Anonymous Latin America spoke up about this). And these people might one day travel to Mexico for vacation, they could have family or associates in Mexico, etc.
You say that they have no official person who can make announcements on their behalf but they do have a ‘official’ Twitter account where they have announced other operations like the Paypal hack and others. It was on that channel that they later disavowed OpCartel as being authentic. Whoever it is that is typing the keys at the other end of that account seems to be generally accepted as an official voice of Anonymous, at least certainly by the press. If a Mexican hacktivist were to be exposed as “Anonymous” they might kill him like swatting a fly even if there was no financial threat to them from all of this just because it would be easy and they like to get the last word in media wars.
That is a moronic argument. The same could be said of any FBI arrest. The arrests are real, the charges are real, the indictments are a matter of public record. I think you are just wasting time, so here: let me Google that for you.
Well you voiced some pretty strong opinions indicating that anyone who wasn’t hunting down cartel members was kowtowing to them and teaching them they can get what they want through violence. its pretty easy to say that but much harder to demonstrate it. Why don’t you start a movement of your own? Start a blog. Recruit others, demand the Mexican people follow your advice and offer support and resources? It would take a lot of balls to do that even from Australia. Are you really suggesting that people in their immediate reach do anything other than try to stay out of the violence and hope the police and military manage to get the problem under control eventually?
Calling victims wrongfully targeted implies that there is actually someone to rightfully target.
Do you really think murdering 16 American teenagers inside the US wouldn’t both be difficult to actually do and have a huge price to pay financially if it should succeed? I assure you, the powers that be in the US would become much more interested in the Zetas than they currently are.
What you don’t get is ‘Anonymous’ is the faceless mask of the internet, oftentimes the worst possible displays of human emotions or caring. You or I could be Anonymous or claim to officially speak for it.
You are conflating two separate points:
As individuals, we have a responsibility to not reward evil actions.
As a society, we have a responsibility to punish evil actions.
I’ve never suggested anyone has a moral responsibility to become a vigilante. But attacking someone for doing so because the murderous, torturing terrorists will take offense is cowardice.
There are several interpretations depending on the context. In this context “rightfully” would mean actually participating in Anonymous, being on their IRC channels, posting news of their hacks as being Anonymous hactivism, following their twitter, facebook and other channels and participating. In this context “wrongfully” meant the media branded them as “Anonymous” or a friend told their friend that a another friend was Anonymous and the information got to the wrong person, etc., even though they were not involved in any of those activities. In the bigger picture there is no way to rightfully murder someone in retaliation for someone else trolling even if there is a direct affiliation.
And I assure you, the cartels couldn’t be in business if the drugs couldn’t be bought and sold in the US several times over after they are delivered. The marketplace that they operate every day is the US, not Mexico. Mexico is the warehouse and the US is the showroom floor. It takes monumental corruption on both sides of the border to allow that marketplace. There are unsolved murders in the US every day, so how could we know that they aren’t already doing so? And how do we know which powers that be in the US are part of the corruption any easier than they can in Mexico?
It’s still accurate to say that some persons claiming to be Anonymous put others at risk, some of whom might not even claim to be part of Anonymous and certainly any who do. And that person originally making the claim is known to the person(s) who have control of what is considered to be the official Anonymous accounts for twitter and facebook and IRC.
That is precisely my point. I’m glad you’re starting to get it.
Ah yes, more websites. Well, that’s certainly a way to show me to trust something found on a website ! They all say the same thing, it must be true !
You’re not clear on this whole “Internet is Serious Business” thing. Bet you dollar to donuts all of these news stories are based on one, maybe two original sources and cross-pollinated from there. How many hoaxes and scams have been spread that way, how many Onion pieces and April Day pranks have been re-posted by serious outlets ? By TV stations and print newspapers, even ? And those only get found out when readers/viewers go “wait a minute, that’s unbelievable”…
Note that I’m not saying this is all a scam and there most definitely never were any FBI arrests. Just saying: if that were the case, how would you tell ?
Besides, you’ll note that while all these reposts found on Google mention the arrests, none disclose the names or faces of the arrested. Only the TPM website does. So I’ll ask again: if this particular list of photos and names of Anonymous members arrested by the FBI was uploaded for the lulz, how would you go about telling the difference, exactly ?
Yes, as you say, in principle it’s all a matter of public record and TPM mentions they obtained them through FOIA requests so anyone could get them… in principle. But first, one would have to give enough of a shit to do it and then, well, there’s a sort of tradition among criminal organizations: they don’t go through official channels, they don’t go nosing around the bloody FBI and when they go looking for information they definitely don’t leave any paper trails such as, I don’t know, notarized FOIA requests. Even *less *so if these were people destined to be disappeared in the very near future.
And if they’re criminal organizations in foreign countries, they don’t even get to do FOIA requests in the first place anyway. Remember: scary Mexican thugs, not S.M.E.R.S.H.