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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that irks me is: If his methods were so off, then how did he have the Facebook profile of 'CommanderX' to be able to have the conversation in the logs? Did he determine that through his methods, or was that a proxy profile that CommanderX uses that is not hidden (i.e. freely given)? Just something that doesn't seem to fit with the idea that his methods were not able to identify anyone associated w/ Anonymous.

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His methods were flawed in that he thought he had pinned CommanderX as a leader of Anonymous, not that he couldn't figure out who these people were. He was trying to make Anonymous this centralized group when it isn't.

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.

Bin Laden doesn't have anything to do with leading AQ?

At any rate, none of these new decentralized systems are actually leaderless. The leaders are just hidden. Wikipedia is a good example.

I think it depends on what you mean by "leading". As I understand it, Bin Laden is a kind of "thought leader" to the AQ movement - sort of how you could say Mick Jagger leads the rock n roll movement (terrible example!). No doubt BL has a lot of influence over AQ and used to be very active, but I very much doubt that he's still involved in deciding who gets hit and how. I suspect he could be removed with no noticeable impact on the movement.

CommanderX may or may not be in a similar position.

I would say Bin Laden is more in the position of giving out "grant money", so to speak, if I understand it correctly. He is more of a financial backer than a "thought leader", and I am certain he is not alone in that position.

IIRC, the Afghans see/saw him as a hero from the war with the Russians. Apparently there are stories of him bravely manning the front lines, etc. Whether those things are true or not, being a folk hero brings something to the table when one of the major factors to success is recruitment.

He was both, but now he has no funds. Or, at least, no means to get at those funds. Read "The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright.

They are leaderless in the fact that there is willing cannon fodder to take up 'arms' at will. The action is similar to a 'pick up where others left off mentality'.

You are assuming that 'CommanderX' had a clue what he was talking about. A perfectly reasonable interpretation of those logs simply assumes that 'CommanderX' rather liked the idea that Aaron thought he was some kind of super criminal, and didn't see any reason to deny it. A second perfectly reasonable interpretation of that conversation is simply that 'CommanderX' thought Aaron was a twat and pretended to be some kind of leader for the 'lulz'

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.

There are two issues:

- 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.

Who says it really was CommanderX behind the facebook profile?

Exactly!

From my reading, there were multiple efforts in play -- he was 'infiltrating' Anonymous with multiple personas, and (if my reading is correct) trying to correlate that information with Facebook data.

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'.

here is a link to the actual report http://plf666.limewebs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18

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