How Aaron Barr revealed himself to Anonymous
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
To me the statement 'Information wants to be free' isn't the statement it appears to be. It is a statement of policy and intent, not of literal fact.
It is not a true statement because I actually believe that every piece of data in the world literally should be available in the public domain, it is a true statement because the only way to achieve the alternative is to lock down and destroy a world of freedom and information that I have come to love with an abiding passion.
Successfully solving the problem of securing private government data from anonymous release over the internet requires that the internet as it exists now be destroyed.
Stopping me from freely copying music that exists on my computer requires that full control of my computer be unavailable to me.
Successfully solving the problem of ensuring centralised and secure online identification of individuals to stop online libel destroys the freedom of anonymous political dissent and organization.
I am deeply sympathetic to the political ideals of 'Anonymous' not because they are always right but because the nobody else in any position of authority or power appears to even recognise the problem.
Effectively, I am sympathetic to 'Anonymous' because there is no way for me not to be without also being against the freedoms that make them possible.
Oops.
Otherwise, none of it really makes sense. You can't investigate the friends of somebody on Facebook without knowing WHO the somebody you're investigating is. So, he had to at least have ideas for leads for people to start stalking.
I think we can all agree that correlating random activities across all Facebook users (whose profiles are public, which is of course another catch) would be really close to impossible with one reluctant developer and an 'analyst'.
For a parallel example, look at Al Qaeda. People keep trying to make all of these Al Qaeda in X groups as one giant organization when in fact the only thing they have in common is the name and idea. 50 years ago there'd almost always have to be a personal connection for a group's idea to spread to another group. Now with the internet and other means of cheap and easy communication, it's easy for these ideas to spread anonymously. Anyone who identifies with these groups can take the ideas and run with them without the original group even knowing.
Law enforcement and governments are going to have a hard time figuring out how to deal with this, as their old tactics of decapitating the group's head doesn't work when there is no head.
At any rate, none of these new decentralized systems are actually leaderless. The leaders are just hidden. Wikipedia is a good example.
CommanderX may or may not be in a similar position.
If you are inclined to believe that CommanderX is a criminal mastermind, then the conversation could certainly be interpreted that way. Personally I struggle with the idea that a criminal mastermind would simply reveal himself to anybody who asked him about it.
My own interpretation of that conversation is that CommanderX said what he thought Aaron wanted to hear, and implied things that flattered his own ego.
Which speaks not at all to the actual level of involvement CommanderX may have had in the events that transpired, or his knowledge of them.
- Is CommanderX really a mastermind behind Anonymous?
- Is CommanderX on IRC the same person that Aaron contacted on Facebook?
I was commenting on the latter question. The conversation seems to imply that the 'CommanderX' from IRC is the same person he was talking to on Facebook, regardless of his/her level of involvement in Anonymous.
..especially if you're not above them in the food chain.
- Thomas Jefferson
Or is that a vacuous snark?
But, I'm a socialist. Would also use the terms family, tribe, society, etc. instead of the purposefully biased "mob".
Likewise control of commons exists on an individual level as well -- if you are near a certain amount of water, you are generally free to own and control it. To the extent that you don't secure and maintain your property, your ownership is a vain deed.
Rearing and teaching of young is a really easy one, commonly given to individuals. Do you think all children should be taken out of individual households and placed in government-run child-rearing centers? That's what this one sounds like, and that is horrifically scary and ridiculous.
Edit: Just to clarify, I agree if you mean mob as in an actual mob. However you're replying to a parent who's talking about government, so that led me to think you're implying government is some form of a mob.
A representative government with powers endowed to them by the people and working within the limits of a codified legal system is very different from a mob.
Although I'm intrigued by the whole drama unfolding, I don't know that we can say there's justice/liberty in what the mob does if when one person did the same thing we'd say otherwise.
It also makes me uncomfortable that I'm a bit nervous posting this point. This is not progress. This is not good. This is mob rule. We should be fighting this, not applauding it.
And surely they're not getting a pass on the actual legal repercussions. The FBI took dozens of doors over the earlier DDOS's - I'm sure that they are quite keen at rolling up this incident into what is likely a very well staffed task force.
- A group of people that decide to do something is not necessarily a mob.
- Anonymous is just a description for a set of people. The set of people most likely to participate in these raids. The entirety of Anonymous doesn't participate in each and every raid. Just the raids that they have the time, and motivation to do. If you can describe Anonymous as a mob, then you can also extrapolate that to the entire population of the planet. The entire planet of a group of people where sometimes some people decide to form a group and do things based on common interests.
Anonymous did what their target did. It was no more legal or illegal. If you want to punish them fine, but make sure you punish both criminals equally.
As we see in Egypt, fighting within the laws (which are just a list of rules made up by people in control) doesn't always give you the option to win.
--Napoleon Bonaparte
Why is mob justice any worse than a justice system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge?
Why is mob justice any worse than a system that allows secret evidence which cannot be questioned or examined by the accused?
Would altering or abolishing a system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge be a good thing?
Either the justice system approves of this, or the rules of the system prevent it from taking action, either way it's broken.
If you disagree with a comment that attempts to give thought to the issue at hand, please explain why you believe those thoughts to be wrong. This will force you to consider their thoughts and help others do so as well.
As long as we're going all Socratic, why does the question of which is "worse" even matter?
We know what mob rule looks like. It's a failure state of human governance. Supplementing an imperfect system that can be metaphorically likened to mob rule with actual mob rule is not progress. I am not advocating for peacefully standing by while being beaten; I'm saying this is a bad tactic.
If you are concerned about injustice in the world, you can't make a more just world by committing your own injustices. No two people agree on how bad an injustice is; even if you think such things can be objectively measured somehow it is obvious that people in the real world don't agree on those objective measurements. Group A hits for 1 point, Group B measures that as a 2 point injustice and strikes back with a 2 point injustice of their own, Group A sees that as a 3 point injustice and strikes back with 3, and so on forever, until someone breaks the cycle. No amount of retaliation will ever make the society of A and B just, even though in my hypothetical example both sides are acting with perfect restraint and proportionality. (As you might imagine, this is the most unrealistic assumption my model makes.) However you intend to get to a just society, that's not it.
Your second statement is at war with your first. Clearly, people can compare injustices, or else there would be no such thing as "more just". They don't have to be able to assign scores to injustices, they just have to reason that an injustice they can't choose can be replaced by one they can choose. That's pretty much how justice works.
Your example was also shit. While it is common to escalate injustice as a game strategy, that's neither a hard rule nor how it's usually done. In my experience, pardons are far more common, and are in fact closer to theoretical optima. Eventually, someone breaks the cycle (pretty unjust, right?), and the injustices in the world dramatically reduce. And then there's all the undervaluations of injustice you ignored - the traditional justification for secrecy.
You missed the switch to differing valuations between two different people, it seems. You spoke as if either we're only talking about one person doing the comparison or you've casually assumed there is the objective metric I explicitly mentioned in play. No contradiction.
"Your example was also shit."
And you're just looking for reasons to tear something apart without doing the hard work of examining what was actually being said. Your nits are irrelevant to my point. I didn't give a treatise on the full value of how to create justice in the world, I'm speaking to the example at hand of how "Anonymous" retaliated and how people are applauding it when they shouldn't be. No wonder you consider it "shit", you're not even willing to grapple with what I said. You haven't fairly valuated it in the first place.
No, I refuted the importance of it. My point was that while there might not be a universal, metric, objective measure of injustice agreed to by all involved, we don't actually need one to make social decisions (funny how three of the four qualifiers I used are essentially the same). Near Pareto efficiency exists for justice, and beyond that, numerous partial orderings have been developed over the millenia, based on perceived necessary conditions for the existence of societies.
Your nits are irrelevant to my point.
Then I must have misunderstood your point. It seemed to me that you claimed retaliation is always unjust and perfectly proportional retaliation is one-upmanship, and I don't agree at all. Since that's how I saw your argument, that's what I replied to.
You still are. The core point is different people will measure things differently. The point is that what Person A sees as a minor injustice that he committed against B, B sees as a major injustice because it happened to him. There's an old quote attributed to Mel Brooks where I found it online, though the core quote has been around longer than that: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die." That's the part of my point you're missing (and I do not think merely disagreeing with), people valuate injustices that happen to them much higher than things that happen to other people, let alone their enemies. Part of why I think you can't be disagreeing with it is this is undeniably true; people are not neutrally scrupulously fair on any level when it comes to their own possessions or desires. Everybody carries around an enormous self-bias, for various reasons, not all of them even bad.
Yes, society has come to some basic agreements, but that's not relevant to my point. I explicitly stated that retaliation isn't always unjust, and for another I also explicitly said that while each side perceived its retaliation as just the net effect is an unjust spiral. The perceptions are not the same on all sides. Every major conflict in the world is between a righteous and holy side that only commits justifiable and regrettable retaliation against the bad guys who inexplicably engage in acts of pure, unadulterated evil just for the fun of it and just won't leave us alone... and this describes the beliefs of both sides. Sticking the happy side of this label on "our side" with Anonymous is not something I'm ready to do, not ready to overlook the means to their ends, however wonderful the ends may be.
And none of this is a refinement of or a contradiction of anything else I've already said, just trying to lay the same basic point out yet more clearly.
That doesn't matter. Sure, people do disagree on things that involve them personally, but they aren't the only ones acting. Very often, people make judgements about matters that may later involve them or people they empathize with, on either side. These future people may or may not have had previous experience with the thing, but all that is required for them to act so as to lower expected injustice is that they empathize with someone on both sides. This act can be both unjust and reduce injustice, as long as the process is ongoing (so that the expected injustices and participants materialize).
One possibility is where a plurality of constituents agree either on a course of action, or believe an individual is qualified to act in their best interest. Obviously, this system has flaws (what happens when an elected person behaves selfishly?), but I'd argue it's more fair, in general, than a self-selected group executing their own agenda. We can't vote Anon out of power if we happen to stop believing their actions are just.
> Why is mob justice any worse than a justice system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge?
It's not, but are you insinuating that it's okay to subvert an unjust justice system using any means necessary? Or any means that work? Or am I reading into this? I don't think the US justice system is so broken that it needs to be fixed by extralegal means, but maybe I'm naive.
> Would altering or abolishing a system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge be a good thing?
Altering that system would be a great thing! Abolishing it, I believe, would not. If you're suggesting anarchy as a viable replacement, I'm honestly curious if you can point to any examples of large-scale anarchy that worked well? Again, I might be reading too much into your question, and you might have meant simply replacing it with another system that is not anarchy.
Thanks for your reply.
adrianwaj is Anonymous if you so chose. You could release a Word Document with "Aaron Barr" in the author field declaring a war on Egg McMuffins and sign it Anonymous. You probably would get no traction and be ignored...
Or a week later you might read about a bunch of 16 year olds throwing Egg McMuffins to the Elephant at the Bronx Zoo wearing woody wood pecker masks while singing Christina Aguilera's version of the national anthem.
There is no "Anonymous" in the sense of a coherent group. There are only specific acts that received enough interest to garner outside attention.
When you say "If they tried" you are missing the point. You could try.
The argument lies whether the acts are actually unsavory, otherwise unsavory, if the perception of being a threat is correct and whether that threat is valid enough to justify a response. So when if ever does Jihadism/Anonymous go to far?
So Anonymous is really just a mask that can be put on. There is nothing that can keep either group in check except for how aligned each one is with the core values that it seeks to defend, and how that tension resolves. Why doesn't Anonymous rail against Jihad? Where people that might otherwise be labelled racist, however accurately or not, could then proceed with their actions without having that inhibition.
They do, on a small scale. Some folks create some blasphemous cartoons of Muhammad and post them on imageboards. Some people print them out and post IRL.
Pick anything and you'll probably find a group of people waving the Anon flag and rallying against it.
TLDR answer: It just hasn't got enough traction.
Treating Anonymous as a coherent group with a coherent leader is the same thing as saying "Humanity today DDOSes MasterCard", "I'm publishing a list of humanity's leaders", etc. It's a completely meaningless misnomer; there is no cohesion to humanity whereby one could direct any significant portion of the entirety of humanity, just as there is no cohesion to Anonymous -- it's just a group of people without definition or mission statement, and it is too broad to mean anything.
Heretofore most participants in "Anonymous" raids, etc., have been users of 4chan or similar message boards, but again, that's a very expansive and large group, there is no significant percentage of its users involved in any one attack or following any one leader or chain of command. It, like our previous example of the entirety of humanity, is too broad of a definition to have meaning.
An organization is not an organization until you have leaders and subordinates with definable positions. Before that, it is just a bunch of guys talking about ideas, some liking some, others liking others, and coming and going as they please, some involved in one event under the one marshal and then going to one held by another. That is not an organization, but a bunch of drifting, undecided people. And that's what Anonymous is, too.
You do not have a terrorist or criminal organization just because someone can drop in to a common forum and get a bunch of script kiddies to act as his personal botnet for a single event. The participants are not initiated into his group and they have no obligation, affiliation, responsibility, or position in it, they are just guys who heard an idea, thought it was cool, tried for a while, and moved on.
Things that involve scientology, wikileaks, involve lulz (uploading porn into YouTube), censorship or counteracting actions against the board get the most upvotes and galvanize the most people into action. There is no leader, but on certain items, there is someone that posts, and there are a few key contributors to the outcome of the item.
On that note, does an anonymous (not Anonymous) news.arc exist? Say an anonymous HN? (IE in effect randomizing usernames for each posting ...maybe public randomizing, but privately tied to the one user, that way users can have some degree of vested-ego, ie regarding karma, but publically be without inhibition-- maybe downvoting on the front page too, and more than -10 downvotes per comment)?
Is the cloak and principle that is called Anonymous an outcome of 4Chan?
Maybe it'd work whereby instead of just randomizing usernames, you'd just give the karma score of that user, (or rather their average comment score, or average comment score per day.)
I am definitely interested in going to a more anonymous forum, but which still has in-built controls against trolling. Given the age of this forum and my time on it, I want to start fresh with a new username (or username system) for some reason, but feel this is not the place to do it, and neither is 4Chan.
So the karma score on a comment would look like:
+/-xx | +/-xx.x | xx.x
comment score / avg comment score per day at time of posting / hours ago since comment posted capped at 24: items shut down after 24 hours.
You'd see if a person has excelled themselves in any one of their comments -- or it may be a troll comment from a smart user, which can also be funny or interesting. So when a comment is first posted, you look at the second number to see it's worth reading, after a while you can look at the first (or the second, or, one's own evaluation of the differences between the first two, or the three.)
There'd be no username tied with a comment, but you could see an extensive comment history privately, and you'd get a self-replying randomized daily email address that you give to someone if they want to see your metrics. Or instead, each comment has a <a href="randomnumber">user</a> link to show the profile page without (or without, not sure) comments, and has a customizable field.
> While #Wikileaks seem to have some problems: #Anonleaks will be launching very soon. To start it will release 27000 mails of greg@hbgary.com
- @anonymousirc
Go read it and upvote it, if you didn't see it yesterday. Good stuff.
So when that comment talks about OODA, all of a sudden with this system the top of a hierarchy can intervene in the bottom, and the bottom knows what the top is talking about. The hierachy becomes a set of intersecting rings of different sizes, there's no top of bottom anymore.
But I think it's a false choice. Certainly we can acknowledge the mob that's Anonymous is a phenomenon that is not in our best interests. Surely we can acknowledge that having to choose between censorship and crime is a false choice, right? I don't have to choose between supporting the government in buying a new fire truck and letting my house burn down, do I?
The problem is that there is no gradient with computers.
I either control my computer, or I dont. There is no middle ground.
I can either surf the internet and post anonymously, or I cannot.
Nobody in power is fighting for my right to do those things.
Everybody is more concerned about their own petty little secrets than about the freedom that I care about.
'Mob Rule' has a bad name, but the simple truth is that democracy and freedom is based around it. Warlords and Dictators, oppressive governments and totalitarian states dont exist because of 'Mob Rule', they exist because of the absence of it.
Eqypt is just now fighting for 'Mob Rule', and it is doing so with a mob.
'Mob Rule' is just another name for democracy.
Sometimes the mob can be ugly, when they hang witches or crucify innocent people, but it can also be awesomely constructive.
Freedom is like that.
I don't see how this choice is analogous. Anon has yet to threaten my interests, at least to any degree that would concern me. However, they have been a thorn in the side of those who have threatened my interest to a greater degree. This kind of battle is part of a healthy society.
I think democracy is rooted in the ability for a group of citizens to bring significant and disruptive challenges to institutionalized powers. Democracy is a social agreement in which all remains well as long as fairness more or less prevails. Currently, Anon seems a reasonable check.
Also, IMO crime is not something that shouldn't happen. It is just something that should carry risk and consequence. At times, crime should be committed. The protesters in Egypt are committing a crime. In some real ways, economic for one, their actions are disruptive and hurtful. But, they had to weigh the consequences and come to a decision.
"Democracy" doesn't have a darned thing to do with "fairness". Democracy means exactly one thing: the strength of the majority to force their will upon the minority. There's no reason to believe that the result will be fair in any known moral system, and plenty of historical examples where it hasn't been fair.