Essay on Anonymous

HABEEB IT!
By ████████ ███████









English 2 Honors
Miss ████
Febuary 17th 2012

████████ ███████
Miss ████
English 2 Honors
Febuary 21, 2012

    The world we live in today is a corrupt one. National governments, international buisnessess, local authorities, and even plain citizens are all effected and dominated with lies and deception. .Many crimes are committed that go unheard of, many wrongdoers are left innocent. In a day and age where almost all social and political interaction is conducted digitally, things like vigilantianism and sleuthing are practiced online. Most of these actions are pursued by social interaction experts, undercover FBI agents, and other governments. But a large portion of this crime fightning isn’t by the officials – it is by groups of secretive, genius hackers, who work as a collective to stop corruption, and bring travesties to justice. Some of these operations, as they are called by the most well known groups, Anonymous, LulzSec, and AntiSec, are on a global scale, such as identifying bank of america’s fraud scheme,  and taking down FBI.gov and CIA.gov, or on a personal scale, such as identifying and arresting an internet cat killer or identifying internet child pretadors. Not only do these operations bring the guilty to justice, but to the attention of the masses through clever tricks and often offensive schemes, all for their own enjoyment. Many claim for these “hacktivists” to be evil and have a malicious intent, but it is just the opposite. They support freedom of speech, expression, liberty, and free will. They cannot be controlled, or stopped. They are all anonymous. They are a legion. They do not forgive, they do not forget. They should be expected.
    The three main collectives of web vigilanties, Anonymous, LulzSec, and AntiSec, all work in very different ways and are organized much differently. This is important to how they function as a collective, as an idea, and as a group and a team. For example, Anonymous isn’t really a “group” at all – you can’t join it. It is more of a state of mind, a belief, an idea. Anybody who wishes to remain anonymous, and fight for justice, is in a way “in” Anonymous, but then again is not. Anonymous has no leader, but there are a few select people who are community leaders that help keep operations organized within the anonymous community. On the other hand, LulzSec is a small, elite team of hackers from the United States that cannot be joined, or helped, but receives massive amounts of support from their fans because of their humor and appeal to the public, while still getting their message across. Finally, there is AntiSec, a group which is both Anonymous and LulzSec combined, working together as a force to end internet censorship and promote freedom of speech. Seperately, all three of these groups have been very successful in getting their points across, no matter how insignificant their operations are. Contrary to common belief, not all of their plans are set on huge controversies, like censorship, corruption, freedom of speech, and other things. Some of them are petty issues that only seem to matter if you are a member of the hacking group’s web culture. The three hacktivist groups all thrive off of a deeply rooted, intertwined and evolving internet subculture, sometimes referred to as troll culture. This was popularized on English imageboards such as 4chan, 7chan, and 420chan. These cultures often involve excessive, extremely graphic adult language, mostly offensive, calculated precisely to offend and disturb those who do not understand their humor or appreciate their sadistic sarcastic ways of treating each other. The most well known and notorious home of internet culture is 4chan, and more specifically 4chan’s /b/ board, which is 18+, and notorious for shocking and completely disturbing material, and a hint of black humor and cleverness. Gawker once claimed that reading /b/ will melt your brain. It is well known and documented that the Anonymous collected originated from 4chan’s /b/ board, since posting without defining a username leaves you as “anonymous,” creating the running joke that it is a single person named “anonymous” posting over and over on the board, rather than many thousands of separate people named “anonymous.” Many of the operations anonymous participates or organizes are designed and thought out on this board, and through Internet Relay Chat systems.
    Many of the operations that groups like Anonymous prepare have more than one goal. One of them is obvious – to get the point they wish to make across to the public mainstream media, so that society may voice it’s opinion – but the other is sometimes more humorous, or even playfully malicious. One example is the “Habbo Raid of 2006,” one of the first operations Anonymous ever created. The reason behind this operation was a story on a local news channel in Alabama that a 2 year old was not permitted to go swimming in the pool at an amusement park, because he was AIDS positive. Outraged with this inhumanity and cruelness, Anonymous decided to take action. But instead of a news report, or a press conference, 40-50 users of 4chan’s /b/ board registered accounts to Habbo, a free online game generally aimed at 12-16 year olds at the time which was a 2.5D online virtual hotel, where teens could hang out with virtual friends, chat, play games, and buy furnishings for their rooms. The Anonymous members all created Avatars on Habbo which represented large, black men with an afro hairstyle, wearing grey suits. They were all identical. They then proceeded to move their characters, and surrounded the pool outside the Habbo virtual hotel. When users of the game asked why, the Anonymous collective answered with “The pool is closed, due to AIDS.” This annoyed many members, causing them to quit Habbo. On top of this, to provoke the Habbo staff, the Anonymous members babbled nonsense and internet speak, things that only the 4chan subculture would understand, leaving the Habbo members dazed and confused. The Anonymous members also maneuvered their characters to form formations representing swastikas and other offensive shapes. This led to all of the Anonymous members being banned. After being banned, the Anonymous members cleverly reported the Habbo administration for racism, after a mass ban of characters with black skin. This grabbed the attention of the media, and the story of the 2 year old being banned from the pool made national news.
    Web vigilanties shenanigans are not always on the levels of local news stories, however. They can span to worldwide events, and global politics. In the 2008 presidential election, an anonymous hacker cracked into Vice-President Cantidate Sarah Palin’s personal email account, and posted the user information on 4chan’s /b/, where almost immediately somebody took it, and changed the password, leaving Sarah Palin locked out of her email. However before the hackers had an opportunity to take an advantage of any of the information that might have been in the account, the account was terminated by Yahoo, for having many thousands of people trying to log in unsuccessfully. The entire operation was regarded as an “epic fail” by the internet subculture community, and was frowned upon, as one of the greatest successes combined with the greatest failure in Anonymous’ history.
    In January 2012, the file sharing website MegaUpload was shut down by the United States government and the FBI on counts of copyright infringement and illegal file downloads. The owner of the company was put into custody, and the website is now owned by the U.S. government. Outraged by this violation of free speech, and freedom of information, Anonymous struck back with one of it’s largest attacks in the history of Hacktivism. Anonymous, in collaboration with LulzSec and AntiSec successfully took down the sites for justice.gov, universalmusic.com, riaa.org, mpaa.org, copyright.gov, hadopi.fr, wmg.com, usdoj.gov, bmi.com, fbi.gov, Anti-piracy.be/nl/, ChrisDodd.com, Vivendi.fr, andWhitehouse.gov. On top of this, they released huge files including the personal information of many of the supporters of the bill SOPA – Stop Online Piracy Act – and the Protect IP Act, causing the sadistically humorous members of 4chan to pester their home, work, and cell phones, and send black faxes and emails to them, and even sent Mormon missionaries to many of their houses. Many of the supporters of the shutdown of MegaUpload and supporters of SOPA and PIPA proceeded to switch opinion viewpoints, in fear of Anonymous releasing their personal information. These switches caught the attention of media specialists and journalists, finally sending a message to the public that  internet censorship and privatizing digital information is wrong, and no matter what, it would continue on. Collectives like anonymous would always exist, and now because of Anonymous’ actions, people are starting to understand that.
    In conclusion,


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this is an essay written by an anonymous student at my school. personally i agree with most of the things he is saying.
anonymous is not a group
anonymous is a state of mind