When is #Anonymous not Anonymous?
Not for the first time, the Anonymous activist collective is suffering some brand issues. It turns out that claiming you are ‘leaderless’ and ‘decentralised’ is something of a two-edged sword.
It’s also a lie, of course.
The concept is that anyone can operate under the Anonymous banner. There are no committees to attend, no leader from whom you need to seek approval. If you want to mount an operation and call it an Anonymous action … well, go right ahead.
Or maybe not. We’ve just seen two examples of where that causes some problems.
The one currently grabbing headlines is the so-called OpFacebook. A YouTube video by ‘Anonymous’ promises that everybody’s favourite personal data aggregator will be “destroyed” on Nov 5. And the video has all the classic hallmarks of Anonymous - it’s sufficiently pretentious and bombastic that you can’t help wondering if it’s meant to be funny.
Only it turns out that ‘Anonymous’ isn’t Anonymous, if you see what I mean. The ‘real’ Anonymous (the one, remember, with no leaders or centralisation) has been denouncing this operation as a fake. ‘Sabu’ (@anonymouSabu), the non-leader of Anonymous (and also, as it happens, LulzSec) has been especially active in denouncing this as a fraud and is practically begging the media to pay no attention to it.
So how does that work, exactly? Surely the whole concept of Anonymous is that, if I call myself an Anon, that’s enough. Who is Sabu to call this a fake? By what authority can he assert that this is not an Anonymous operation?
I’ve recently completed a long feature about Anonymous and LulzSec for the journal I edit, Network Security. During the research, I had a couple of IRC chats with Anons, via the irc.anonops.li server. Part of this touched on the ‘leaderless’ nature of the movement. I wanted to know how that assertion can be supported when there is clearly some direction from a core group. For example, the channels found on irc.anonops.li are regarded by pretty much everyone as the ‘official’ IRC channels. Some of the channel topics are used to set targets for the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) - the DDoS tool used by Anons that has turned out to be so dangerous for its users. There are also channels used for co-ordinating operations that are not open to the likes of you and I - strictly invitation only. I wanted to know how this meshes with the leaderless concept.
I chatted with joepie91 who was at pains to point out that he did not speak in any official capacity, but just as one of many Anons. He did, however, have channel admin privileges in the #reporter channel set up to talk to the media, and most other people in the channel appeared to defer to him.
I asked him to explain a comment he made that, “anonymous =/= anonops”.
joepie91: anonops is just one network that is populated by Anons
joepie91: Anonymous is not a centralized entity
joepie91: there’s no member list, no ‘official representatives’, no leaders
So far so good. But I pointed out that someone gets to set targets in channel messages. The answer felt a little evasive, in that he largely just stated the obvious - that channel ops get to set the topics. But he also enlarged:
joepie91: if you don’t like operation payback, noone stops you from setting up a similar operation with similar targets but a different structure … if you disagree you can just walk away and set up your own … and noone will stop you
It seems that’s exactly what someone has done with OpFacebook. And now Anonymous seems not to like it.
But that’s not the only spat that’s been going on. When various Anonymous accounts were kicked off Google+, because they contravened the service’s rules on using real names, some Anons vowed to set up a social networking site just for Anons. It’s hard to see how the mechanics of social networking would fit with the idea of being Anonymous, but selah.
The result was AnonPlus, which has so far had a very sorry history. It started out using bog-standard forum software, but has mutated many times, shifting domains and hosting, constantly promising great things to come. With amusing irony, it has been hacked numerous times (as in the example above) and this led to a blow-up between Sabu and ‘higochoa’. Sabu, it seems, was particularly incensed at people believing that he, personally, had been hacked every time AnonPlus was defaced.
<Sabu> I am getting sick of hearing that *I* get hacked every week
In a more telling moment, Sabu says:
<Sabu> I suggest you either kill the project / stop using anonymous’ name
That suggests to me that Sabu feels at least some sense of proprietorship over the Anonymous brand. Maybe it’s time for Anonymous to decide whether it is genuinely going to embrace an anarchic policy of no enforced structure, or whether it should grow up a little and become a more organised activist force. The latter would be more interesting because, currently, its disorganised and chaotic approach is achieving very little.
