Facebook, Privacy, wikileaks anonymous 2

Who is anonymous?  What do they stand for?  What can they do?

Anonymous Flag

Perhaps Chris Landers from the Baltimore City Paper, in an April 2, 2008 article said it best, when he said this about anonymous:

[Anonymous is] the first internet-based superconsciousness.  Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group.  How do you know they're a group?  Because they're travelling in the same direction.  At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely.

Anonymous claims to be a leaderless organization.  Thus their symbol has a person in a business suit with out a head.  This organization is part of a phenomena called "hacktivism."  Hacktivism is the use of computers and computer networks as a means of protest or to promote political ends.  Of course this can range from the peaceful organization of people and sources to illegal activities to disrupt computer networks.  We provide for you some videos on the subject of hacktivism, which subject also spills into wikileaks, cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare.  If you cannot see the embedded video, here is the link: http://bit.ly/oEIgho.

See These Pages: FUTURISM TECH TRENDS SINGULARITY SCIENCE CENSORSHIP SOCIAL NETWORKS eREADERS MOBILE DEVICES


Wikipedia gives us a good outline of the different activities of hacktivists.  The source for some of this information is en excellent website called attrition.org.  We list them here:

1. Defacing Web Pages - between 1995-1999 over 5,000 websites were defaced.
2. Web Sit-ins - hackers attempt to send so much traffic fo a website that the overwhelmed site becomes inaccessible to other users in a denial of service (DNS).  Lately, a varian of this kind of attack can be done on a specific location such as a government building using a large number of geo-tagged videos on Google Earth.
3. Email Bombing - the sending of thousands of emails with large attachments to a specific email address.
4. Code - a well known example of software would be encryption software like PGP. which can protect the emails from being read by unauthorized people or entities.
5. Website Mirroring - It is a technique that copies the content of a censored website and posts it to other domains and subdomains that are not censored.
6. Geo-Bombing - a technique in which a youtube video can be geographically tagged so as to show up in Google Earth  and thus finger a culprit that is being protested.
7. Anonymous blogging - blogging using free email accounts the masking of your IP address, to hide your identity.

We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. Anonymous Slogan


Apart from this information we do not know much else about anonymous, since they are, anonymous.  We include a set of videos produced by or about anonymous.  The display of these videos does not signify our endorsement of their activities.  It is merely informational.  If you cannot see the embedded video, here is the link: http://bit.ly/otLryj.

Now that we have said what there is to say about anonymous (no matter what the reader may think of them), we shall move on to wikileaks in the next article in this series.  Then in the final article we shall attempt to see if the statements that anonymous and wikileaks make about sites like Facebook are true or not.