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Internet Vigilantism, Justice, and The Impact on Society
Posts
Sure, Anon is a disorganized crowd lacking any central political tenets, meaningful long term goals or even meaningful long term membership, and the justifications for it's individual actions are typically the company doing something that has raised the ire of a mob.
I'm less defending Anon than seeking for it's actions and nature to be properly describe. Calling them a "terrorist group" is inaccurate on both counts, and using the term terrorism, in today's climate, seems intellectually dishonest and/or ignorant. At the least it is hyperbole.
Not only that, but if there's an intrusion, it costs money restoring the system back to a state of trust.
You don't think that people who are acting against the state ostensibly don't engage in terrorism against the public?
Umm... are those things a DoS?
defacement does have a cost. They do have to pay an employee to revert it to the last back-up, and that can take hours.
Then they need to have a security expert come in and fix the problem that allowed it to happen, which was exposing their customer's computers to attacks from malware and possibly exposing their customer's information to other threats. That can take days of work by someone who should be charging them quite a bit per hour.
And of course, in addition to these direct costs, they've lost their customer's trust. Because their customer are now aware of how poor the security on the site was, and probably don't understand that this might not include the security of the information which they have trusted the operators of the site with.
I don't think anyone is arguing for putting Anonymous in double-gitmo or something. I think the point people are making is these aren't just some kids dicking around with scripts and breaking into stuff for funsies.
So, you aren't ignorant, and are intellectually dishonest. Fantastic. Glad we cleared that up in this one instance.
I'm also willing to agree that DDoS probably doesn't meet the definition of terrorism, in and of itself.
Combine it with their other activities and, yep, terrorist group.
This is a huge thing in the insular circle of the gaming community. One wrong comment cause pitchforks to raise and torches to be lit, and amazon/metacritic ratings to go down. The easiest way to incite? Dont rate a game within the 7.5-9.5 on the 1-10 scale. The examples are endless, the dead island folks, review scores in general, sim city, the new consoles,used games, the list goes on.
Yeah, sorry. I meant to edit that. Thought I had, but apparently didn't submitted it while my phones been being hammered by recruiters for some reason.
It was pointlessly rude.
I'm not a fan of Anon. I do sort of like descriptions of things that are accurate, and well... americans have allowed a lot of horrible shit to be carried out in the name of fighting terrorism, so I feel it is a label that should be used sparingly.
But why? I think that our reluctance to use the label is the bigger issue.
1) The bigger issue.
2) There is a difference between a suicide bomber acting for international political change and kids shutting down a website because they don't like the company's level of customer service.
Terrorism has political and social goals.
What are Anon's goals?
Anon tends to be technoanarchistic, and thus directs a good amount of their ire towards entities that they feel are "regulating the internet" or restricting the flow of information (which is how Wikileaks was born.) The movement as a whole does have goals, even if the rank and file might not be able to articulate them.
I respond to the posts I respond to, Casual. Nothing else.
@Hacksaw
This isn't really comparable
The forums social atmosphere is more like... a house party. Yeah you can get dogpiled and yelled at but its by people in a social atmosphere
It's not a campaign of harassment
Imagine if the stupid shit you said was linked to your real name then put on Tumblr/Twitter with links to all of your family's online shit and then you got 10,000 e-mails and phone calls about how you're a misogynist douche and should commit suicide
I really don't think you'd have the same reaction
Organizations do not have to have fixed goals and a strict command structure in order to have goals and a de facto hierarchy. Al Qaeda has never had a strict command structure or fixed goals yet this does not preclude them from being a terrorist organization.
Anon certainly isn't Al Qaeda but they are not shielded from the label simply because the structure is less defined
A question, the answer to which reveals the obvious damage:
How does one operate a DDOS attack?
Furthermore you can't actually stop people from using the service you're picketing.
It is closer to a sit in, if random people were grabbed off the street and forced to sit in against their will (and somehow knowledge).
And don't forget Anonymous's early focus on Scientology. 'They' have political and social goals, though their follow through is a bit shoddy. They're terrorists, but in the same sense that backwoods militias are terrorists. Somebody should probably look into them eventually, but they're not exactly a dire threat to the world as a whole.
For a counterpoint, the Weather Underground was a terrorist group that's hard not to cheer for in retrospect. Terrorist is a loaded word, and it carries frightening connotations, but it's fairly useless as a judgment of morality and ethics.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
Isn't this more or less a de facto outcome given the technology though, Cass? I mean, you have a culture full of people that fundamentally want to hurt 'bad people', and shaming them is a means of hurting such people that's not only considered acceptable, but lionized by certain large demographic groups, and now you have technology that allows them to do this at the press of a button and on a large scale. This jsn't some malicious choice that's being made by a group - it's a deterministic outcome given the ingredients that've been tossed into the blender.
It's a problem, but I don't think we can actually solve the problem without creating a much worse situation.
I'll agree we probably can't fix all the issues, but we could probably get laws on the books, if they don't already exist, to curtail certain aspects of doxxing. I'd think given that privacy is a right in the US, could probably pass laws that allow the authorities to come down hard on people when they pull this shit against people who aren't considered public enough figures and when the bitchfest against such people doesn't deal with a matter of public concern.