Anonymous: The Digital Taliban

The hacking lifestyle seems so grand. Sitting in a basement, eating Doritos or the occasional Funyun, and smelling of Bayer to sooth your carpal tunnel. Sleeping all day and coding all night. Washing only once a week (after their 10 hour long WoW raid) gives them the power of George Hotz aka 'GeoHot', a fallen brother in their campaign to fight criminal activities by corporations and governments.

GeoHot was recently in a lawsuit over hacking the PS3 and posting videos of it on his blog. Naturally, Sony didn't like this so called infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) as well as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. With a scene ripped right out of the movies Hackers, Sony issued a court summons stating that George Hotz never hack again. The court order might have stopped GeoHot but it did not stop his online group of friends, collectively named Anonymous.

Anonymous used Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms to band together and form their alliance, share useful files, and plan out their attack. Once Sony took legal action against GeoHot, Anonymous issued a threat to Sony saying it would attack the company because of its lawsuit with George Hotz. Soon after the threat was issued, Anonymous used a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack because Sony had "abused the judicial system in an attempt to censor information about how your products work," among other criticisms.

The attack commenced between April 16-17th, leaving 25 million SOE and 77 million PSN user's personal information vulnerable. Two days later, Sony realizes a security breach has been made but do not inform the public. On April 20th, 2011 Sony decides to shut down their network citing technical issues - later saying they are 'rebuilding the network' to make it more secure.

Naturally, Anonymous denies all responsibility of the PSN outage. However a statement by the group reveals more details about how exactly this operation works.

“If you say you are Anonymous, and do something as Anonymous, then Anonymous did it, just because the rest of Anonymous might not agree with it, doesn’t mean Anonymous didn’t do it.” - Kayla (Anonymous hacker)

This decentralized, organic operation has similarities to terrorist groups. No established leader per se, responsibility is given to the whole of the group instead of radical individuals, and obvious differences in groups agenda. While these characteristics seemed to be shared by both organizations, Anonymous has gone on record saying they are not out for customer's personal information.

We are Legion. So they say.

Anon's mission is "...trying to fight criminal activities by corporations and governments, not steal credit cards." They are in this cyber-war simply to prove points, stop internet injustice, and maintain privacy across the web. Their latest threat against mega-corporation Viacom is because the company tracks millions of IP addresses for monetary gain, infringing upon the rights of citizens.

Technology hackers might not be a new fad, famous technology hacker Cap'n Crunch used the similarly named cereal's free whistle to make long distance phone calls back in the time before cell phones. So hacking to get around corporation's restrictions is not a new thing, but the way Anonymous has done it so openly and blatantly has gotten the attention of Congress.

Are we seeing the start of a new revolution? One done solely online? With the recent uprising in the middle east being propelled by Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites Anonymous' ideas are being transported through the world via the internet. Users are waking up to their government's oppressive privacy restrictions and corporation's greedy means of tracking consumers for advertising purposes. If we intend on having the internet stay free then we must support Anonymous and their ways for they are here to help the common people, not misuse them - that is the job of the corporations and governments.

For a full breakdown of the Anonymous vs. Sony events head on over to IGN.