Building a Better 'Anonymous?' 119
An anonymous reader writes "A hacktivism panel at the DefCon hacker convention was conspicuously missing its star member Aaron Barr, who dropped out under legal pressure from his former company HBGary Federal, debated how Anonymous could channel its efforts for the greater good. Members of Anon attending the discussion chimed in, too."
I guess I don't belong. (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you leave Anonymous because you don't agree with something it did, then you don't belong in Anonymous," Housch says.
The problem with Anonymous being so unstructured, (which isn't a bad idea) is that anybody can do anything under that brand. As much as I like the thought and the idea of Anonymous, when they attack innocents I can't be associated with them. That's off target. Oh, they don't attack innocents you say? Well you look at those massive password dumps and tell me that all those folks are "wrong doers". I guarantee that MOST of those users are regular Joes (possibly even members of Anon!) who are just trying to make a pay check. Guilty by association doesn't work for entire corporations from top to bottom. Hell, I saw a mySQL dump of passwords for a nudist colony tweeted by Anonymous. Really? A corrupt nudist colony? When you're THAT off target, that's the kind of BS that's going to be used against you. "Chaotic" is the perfect description of Anonymous, and I don't see how it will be anything but. It's unfortunate.
This is why I don't call myself a member of Anonymous, and don't see myself being a "member" anytime soon. Good messages, poor execution.
Re:Posting anonymously for obvious reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like some freak kind of retard-lensing. The area where constructive interference of the Eternal September is at peak value.
Re:Anon (Score:2, Insightful)
Progressive Anarchy? Possibly, but really everything I've seen so far regarding the Anonymous movement seems to indicate that they're the left's equivalent of the Tea Party. Only difference being that the political left has all but been entirely marginalized and shut out of policy discussions while the hardcore right now has a bit of a choke hold on government, as the default fiasco showed.
Anonymous is supposed to be an idea, a "feeling" and not a centralized movement. It's the crystallized form of the political dissent built up on the left from being progressively shut out of the discussion and debate about the future of the world. More and more government is tending towards the authoritarian, and more and more we have loud cockbacks of frothing fecal matter like Santorum who are trying to turn back the clock and send us into a new dark age of human social interaction.
Just like piracy is considered an economic metric of complete market failure of pricing in a given area (if people pirate, obviously your goods are too expensive for people to care to buy them) I think this kind of hacktivism is a sign of political failure to address the concerns of the people. When people feel shut out, when people feel violated, and when they feel like they have nothing to lose, they fight back. Sony is a great example of this. There efforts to squelch anyone with the PS3 keys, which each PS3 owner has a right to own seeing as it's embedded in THEIR console.
Sony is not vulnerable legally, nobody has the cash or the time to take on a giant. Connectix/Bleem showed even if you were more than willing they would drag the case out so as to leave the poor plaintiffs in financial ruin despite winning the case. In this case it finally became too much, and the powerless struck back against Sony, hurting them the only way they knew how, their pocketbooks. Sony has now suffered millions of dollars in damage and possibly more depending on how some of their legal business with insurers fairs.
They have now seen that they are no longer untouchable, that there is a price to pay for certain actions, and that there are some problems that no amount of money can make go away. I agree very much with the rest of the above though. Right now is always the most important time in history to start changing for the better. Anonymous is all of our collective psyche, a giant ocean of Lulz with which we sail on and we are all but waves upon that ocean. No single wave changes the motion of the ocean, but if enough work together they form a Tsunami, and we all know what those can do in the right places.
So if Anonymous is simply decentralized social/political/economic rage, it must crystallize into something much more coherent and focused if it is to survive. This can happen if enough people decide to make some very public, high profile actions and set the overall tone of Anonymous in the above manner you describe. It must take a page from the only other type of decentralized mass movement: Standalone Complex.
We are all individual pieces acting together for the same ideal, find a part to play, or get out of the way.