Eps 23: Anonymous

`

Host image: StyleGAN neural net
Content creation: GPT-3.5,

Host

Carla Fisher

Carla Fisher

Podcast Content
As racial tensions continue to make headlines in the US, the hacktivist group Anonymous is back in the spotlight, and a social media grab associated with it promises retribution for the death of George Floyd. In a video posted on an unconfirmed Facebook page, a spokesman wears an Anonymous mask with the caption: 'We are Anonymous. Guy Fawkes accused Minneapolis police of having a "terrible record of violence and corruption" and threatened to expose their "many crimes," TIME reports. Since then, the group has been accused of cyber attacks that have fallen into the hands of a number of US law enforcement agencies.
The group has been described as a "decentralised online collective" that fights censorship and state control and promotes freedom of expression.
The increasing political communication and fundraising on the Internet has raised additional questions of anonymity. Many people who use it for political discourse do so by posting on websites that their identity will remain secret. Those who wish to remain anonymous can use various methods, such as location abroad, which makes their identity untraceable.
Although anonymity can be achieved in some jurisdictions outside the United States, it may not matter whether federal or state laws require disclosure of personal information such as email addresses and phone numbers when Internet users take additional precautions.
According to documents obtained by Edward Snowden from the National Security Agency and leaked to NBC News, a secret British spy unit created to conduct cyber attacks against Britain's enemies has been waging war against hacktivists Anonymous and LulzSec. The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who stole confidential information from websites. However, the blunt instruments used by the spy agencies to target hackers also cut off communications between political dissidents who were not involved in illegal hacking.
In one case, JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to jail for stealing data from PayPal and helped identify a group of hackers responsible for attacking a government website. Anonymous is a loosely organized Internet group that began as a protest against the government's handling of the Iraq war and other political issues. Members of anonymous communities collaborate in encrypted Internet chatrooms and share information about their activities.
Anonymous is best known for its attacks on the government - affiliated groups such as the US Department of Defense and the National Security Agency.
The original problem that prompted Anonymous to target TikTok appears to have been the misrepresentation of Anonymous as "TikTok" itself. Anonymous members have spoken out against the accounts, which they say are compromised by the lack of a central feature. In one case, someone belonging to the group objected to the Twitter account being monetised as a brand and told us that he did not appreciate false flag representations.
TikTok is now one of the most popular social media accounts in the world with more than 1.5 million followers.
The hacking group has recently claimed responsibility for two high-profile incidents, but its actions are not as shocking as they once were. On May 28, Anonymous released a video claiming to target police departments across the United States. The famous Anonymous cartoon of Guy Fawkes resurfaced after the terrorist attacks in Paris and New York in November 2014.
On May 30, the group claimed responsibility for destroying the Minneapolis Police Department website, breaching the police department's database and forwarding 798 emails and passwords. Anonymous has been blamed on social media for the hack, which saw the Minnesota Police Department's website go offline for several hours as the site was overwhelmed with traffic from the hacks. Some news outlets speculated that Anonymous had hijacked Chicago police scanners to play "Tay the Tays," a 2007 song that served as the groups' unofficial anthem.
On May 30, an anonymous person leaked hundreds of gigabytes of internal police files in a massive hack of the Chicago Police Department website.
This is not the first time Anonymous has taken part in protests against racial discrimination in the US. In 2014, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, he attacked the website of Ferguson, Missouri City Hall and threatened cyber attacks on police and local governments if protesters were harmed. However, it was revealed that local and state law enforcement groups had spread poorly researched and exaggerated misinformation in response to protests in New York City and Minnesota, and had made efforts to monitor the protesters "social media activity.
Anonymous is known for launching a Distributed Denial of Service attack, in which hackers flood a website's servers with data that causes it to crash and become inaccessible. It is not known whether the attacked servers also host other websites or whether all other servers are run by the same ISP.
In 2011, a loose global collective called Anonymous organized an online campaign called Operation Payback, targeting a number of US and British government websites, as well as the UK government. The hacktivists protested the arrest of Chelsea Manning, who had stolen thousands of classified documents from government computers in the US, US, and Canada and was punished by punishing companies that refused to process requests from websites that published Manning's documents. They also targeted sites belonging to the U, S, UK and government agencies, including websites belonging to the FBI, CIA and GCHQ.