The Internet, despite the vague conception that events on it do not affect real life, has taken on an influence in political life which is unmistakable, and defies continued attempts to relegate interactions on social media to triviality.
The events now called “Arab Spring” — the protests in Egypt, Libya and the Middle East — have proven that social media has started to play a central role in political protest, organization and motivation.
Social media is being used to supplement, or even replace, dependence on traditional forms of media for some kinds of protests. The protests in New York have spread to places like Chicago and even Albuquerque.
These protests, in addition to being physical occupations of a place, are also taking on an Internet life.
On Sept. 27 the hacker group Anonymous issued an online warning to the NYPD: “We are hereby calling for an immediate apology and resignation of NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelley and the supervising officers involved … If our demands are not met by October 6, we will unleash hell on your phones, your servers, and anything else we can find.”
Anonymous has also asked NYPD officers to join the protesters on Wall Street, telling them: “We invite you to join us and stand with our cause in solidarity. An enemy of our enemy is our friend. Join us.”
Anonymous has been responsible for several online DDoS attacks, including the temporary shutdown of PayPal over its withdrawal of support for WikiLeaks, a website dedicated to publishing leaked government and corporate documents. Anonymous also released confidential emails from Bank of America’s servers.
The Department of Homeland Security released an unclassified warning on Sept. 2 cautioning dissatisfied former employees of businesses that Anonymous has announced attacks on. One such attack has been planned against Facebook on Nov. 11 of this year; participants in the attack were told not to respond to any baiting Twitter or email messages asking for access to the information they may have saved before they left the company. The release also warns these ex-employees of the potential for blackmail.
Anonymous has demonstrated repeatedly through various attacks that members are capable of accessing logs of Internet behavior deemed to be private, such as porn-viewing habits and personal correspondence.
The potential for social engineering to allow Anonymous members to get access to that information is staggering, and DHS is rightly worried about it. Unhappy people are chatty, and people who have been fired may carry grudges.
Not surprisingly, it is easy for people who are not familiar with computers or security to disbelieve the potential for Internet behavior to affect offline protests and offline events. We associate the Internet with chain emails, bad jokes and cat pictures (often accompanied by bad jokes). Anonymous’ choice to publicly advocate for the protesters is an interesting one: Can political radicalization really reach both on- and offline?
Their history says ‘yes.’ The attacks they have performed over the last three years have increasingly accompanied a generalized political statement, professing support for or criticism of the behavior of institutions like banks, governments, businesses and individuals.
As a former member told the Baltimore Sun, because the organization is loosely organized and distributed all over the world, the group can perform attacks more anonymously, distributing the individual attackers and making them more difficult to locate.
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While its membership is distributed, its behavior is not. It is able to coordinate and organize massive numbers of attackers to carry out its threats. Some experts on security have taken to calling members “hacktivists.” The name is a signal of the growing awareness that the Internet, hive of scum and villainy as it is so often called, has developed a political life of its own.
Members of Anonymous have been responsible for the arrests of pedophiles, as well as attacks on any organization they believe infringes on the First Amendment, including one man’s private website dedicated to reducing vulgarity on the Internet.
In its earlier forms, Anonymous targeted anyone it felt insulted Anonymous itself, leading to the group defacing a hip-hop site due to a “diss” on a forum.
There is a difference between the no-doubt cold protesters camping out in parks and on the corner of University and Central, and Anonymous: the protesters carrying signs are considerably less of a potential threat than the hacktivist collective.
The threat from last week ends with the following: “We are Anonymous. We do not forgive. We do not forget.”
It will be interesting to see, though history bears out that they are serious, if Anonymous will continue to support the protesters, and what political agenda the collective continues to follow.
