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> Aside from the validity of the charges, this manner of social justice never ever works for the people who try it.

I dunno, the Pentagon Papers had fairly significant political effects, I think. Stealing government documents and having them published overseas to embarrass/expose the state's actions was also one of the more effective tools used by opposition groups in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Do you really think stealing a state's documents is an attack on "freedom-loving people everywhere"? Is this always true? The Eastern-block dissents hated freedom, and damaged the cause of freedom by stealing/leaking Stasi documents?

I could certainly agree that the Stasi is much worse than the UK government, so maybe you could draw a line between a certain level of viciousness of the security state, past which document-theft becomes justified. But I don't see how you could make a blanket statement that it's never justified.

I would also make a distinction between breaking into a person's house and breaking into a government's office. Breaking into someone's home has a certain personal-threat aspect to it, and I'd consider homes to have a bit of a sacrosanct element that I wouldn't extend to state offices. So, probably not in favor of combatting a corrupt police force by breaking into the sheriff's home. But, combatting a corrupt police force by breaking into a police station and grabbing their files, as happened recently in Egypt, seems a bit different.

>In short, the minute I start deciding on my own when to break the law and disrespect other people's property rights because of a cause -- even a legitimate cause -- I become an enemy of everybody.

' [...] at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."'

Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from a Birmingham Jail -- http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...

If you want to argue that some of Anon's actions have been unethical, that's fair, and many people -- including some anons -- will agree with you. However, there are certainly times when breaking the law is justified in support of the rights of the people.

That's not what MLK is saying at all. You don't get to break any law simply because one of them is unjust. Instead, you have no moral obligation to abide by immoral laws.

If I feel like the speed limit is unjust, I should go about my business driving any speed I feel like. I do not, however, get to run over people while I'm doing it. If I feel like the law that protects my crooked neighbor's website is unjust, I have no obligation to support his privacy and private property.

I do not feel this way. I feel like my neighbor the person, corporation, or government entity uses their computer resources as an extension of their brain. As such, I frown severely on _anybody_ taking that property from them, whether through force of law or just trickery. To me you'd have a better case to have insiders physically take individual items that demonstrate and protest injustice and then publish them than this current tactic of scattering thousands of innocent user's passwords all over the web. I'm almost at the point where I consider the tactic of blanket attacks itself as being immoral. Not there yet, though.

This is an excellent reference, though. MLK disagreed with those who thought the system itself was unjust enough to declare war and make each other enemies. (I remind you of the phrase on the linked site "...These governments and corporations are our enemy....") During his life, he specifically and clearly separated himself from folks like the Black Panthers, who took this "enemy" position and look to me a lot like Anon's forefathers. MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail is probably one of 2 or 3 standard-setters in this arena. I encourage people to pursue this further.

I'm sorry I responded -- I know better. This is an emotional issue, and those of you who share my passion for freedom no doubt are going to try to beat what I've said to death. But I couldn't stand MLK's words being used in this fashion. He was making the exact opposite point. The laws he broke were unjust, not simply the ones that got in his way of creating social change.

EDIT: There is a simple unstated question that this thread brings out, though: are you an enemy of my country? (EDIT: I ask this because of the specific phraseology of the anon statement, the position of the Black Panthers, and some of the other comments, not as a means to heighten the tension.) It sounds like from reading many of the comments on the internet that some folks are -- or at least they'd like to think of themselves as such. They feel the system is so corrupt that they have made it their enemy. If that's the case, then we are enemies, and there's no more argument really needed. Kind of simplifies things up rather nicely. If not, then we should talk about practical and efficient ways to change things, because I share the view that things are off the rails and need changing.

I believe that some systems are bad but people are mostly good. That means that I respect those laws that deal with the privacy and dignity of the human being, including (for most folks) keeping their passwords and personal lives out of political battles. So email dumps and tactics like this are only going to piss me off further. Not sure if that was the intent, but that's what's they're doing.

But isn't the issue that what makes a law "unjust" might not be obvious when it's broken?

> EDIT: There is a simple unstated question that this thread brings out, though: are you an enemy of my country?

Why are you putting this on some kind of George W. Bush paradigm? The government and the country are not the same thing.

> They feel the system is so corrupt that they have made it their enemy.

I believe that the system is corrupt but that doesn't mean I've made it my "enemy." This line of thinking leads to any criticism of the government as being "unpatriotic." That's not a good road for the country to start going down.

>That's not what MLK is saying at all. You don't get to break any law simply because one of them is unjust.

That wasn't what I was saying at all, either: I was responding specifically to the sentence I quoted, and I explicitly clarified this: "if you want to argue that some of Anon's actions are unethical [...]". Ancestor had seemed to support a legalist position, which is, in my opinion, a disappointingly popular ethos.

>There is a simple unstated question that this thread brings out, though: are you an enemy of my country?

The question inherent in this question: who and what, precisely, defines "my country"? I'll bet at most a tiny minority considers themself an enemy of the food system. I'm quite a fan, though there is a serious need for reform in many aspects.

Two things:

First, Gandhi and MLK both benefitted from the fact that there were people prepared to be violent behind them, and they were representing a peaceful way forward as opposed to a mess and then having to give in anyways.

Second -- regarding your edit, everytime you try to break it down to a silly jingoistic binary sentiment like that, you're turning your brain off. Anonymous isn't against your country but they're very much against you being enabled to do that.

>"How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.

The problem with that line of thinking is that there is no universally accepted, objective standard of what defines a just and unjust law. Do we make those decisions based on Natural Law? How about on the teachings of Mohammed? Jesus? etc.

Making statements about the moral justice of a government's laws has to appeal to some higher moral standard and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of unity in that realm of the discussion. So what you consider to be a "just law" another might believe to be unjust, because their moral presuppositions are completely different.

>The problem with that line of thinking is that there is no universally accepted, objective standard of what defines a just and unjust law. Do we make those decisions based on Natural Law? How about on the teachings of Mohammed? Jesus? etc.

Everything every human does is solely their reaction to their perception. It is as possible to misperceive the law itself as it is to differ on ethical reality; this is irrelevant to the reasoning of any individual. The law is a fluid entity, created by humans, and it is obviously incomplete as evidenced by the fact that we keep modifying it. Furthermore, some notion of ethics has to exist in order to create any law at all.

There is a large body of work in the field of ethics, and it is not really unreasonable for most people to try to understand it. While many philosophers disagree on particulars or even the entire foundation, there are many common elements in the philosophy of people as different as Kant and Nietzsche.

So yes, you have to react to what you consider to be a just law, just as you have to react to what you consider to be the law -- how many people do you know who actually know the law? In practice, this does not usually lead to much difficulty, if all of the participants agree to use at least a little logic.

The best analogy I can come up with is language -- everyone speaks their own version of language (even when everyone is speaking the "same language), and if the rules are codified anywhere it is inevitably a tiny subset of the language that is actually used. Despite this, human communication has been quite successful over the past several millenia.

This is ultimately the responsibility of every person, to decide what actions are just and unjust and act accordingly. Yes, it's hard, and there is no universally accepted objective standard - but tough, you don't get a free pass anyway.

Feel free to take guidance wherever you find it - from the principles of the law itself, from your peers, your family, your elders. But consider Nuremburg, and consider the Milgram Experiment: ultimately the responsibility is yours, and cannot be shirked.

> Good grief, did we learn nothing from Ghandi

Civil disobedience is greater than violence? It's not like spreading information is violent..

> In short, the minute I start deciding on my own when to break the law

Ghandi and MLK broke the law, I doubt they would share your same sentiment. Sometimes disobedience is the only way. Ghandi was an anarchist, not sure if that discredits him in your eyes.

Where are you drawing the line exactly? Both Ghandi and MLK broke laws, and in many cases did so by disrespecting other people's property rights (sit ins, for one, are exactly this and often were against corporate entities as well as govt. ones).

Furthermore there was a fairly large segment of the civil rights movement that disagreed with MLK and thought the strategies he promoted would not lead to acceptance of "black culture" but instead the acceptance of blacks into "white culture" (ie: ok fine if you act and dress like us then we wont hate you). It's painfully clear that there are still massive inequalities in terms of the way people of different races are treated in the US, and I would argue MLK's limited success in getting rid of racism was at the cost of the introduction of even heavier, subtler and harder to eradicate classism (yes Obama is president, but we all remember the "is he black enough" debates).

So while I don't entirely disagree with you, let's not make it seem like there is obviously a right or wrong here, and that by simply "looking at history" we can we can see that. Usually I like your posts but this one really lacks nuance...at least it is appropriately tagged "rant."

>Good grief, did we learn nothing from Ghandi or MLK Jr.? There's a perfectly legitimate and effective way to denounce injustice.

You forgot to mention the French and American revolutions and that Ghandi and MLK had militant parallels (without which change likely would not have happened).

>But I hate even more people taking it on themselves to administer justice in this fashion.

You must also hate nearly every other successful social movement in history.

>If you make me pick, I'm going with broken security state over anarchists every time -- and there are hundreds of millions of folks just like me.

Yet you benefit from the social gains fought for by "anarchists" like the suffragettes and the labor movement.

Not that I disagree with you, but I would still like to read some good explanation why breaking into a private house is equivalent to hacking a website.

> Make impassioned speech then go break into the neighbor's house and scatter his secret documents all over the lawn

Sorry, but that's a pretty bad analogy.

« When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties. »

Article 35 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793.

>If the local sheriff is corrupt? I don't break into his house and publish his papers in the newspaper.

Substituting "office" for "house," maybe you should (break in and publish his papers). Does a corrupt LEO have the "right to privacy" while e.g. putting innocent people in jail, extorting businesses, tampering with evidence, etc.? I think that the rights of those whose lives are affected by a corrupt official like this trump the rights of the official to "privacy."

tl;dr: Don't abuse your power to clandestinely fuck up other people's lives then complain about your "right to privacy" when you're exposed.

Why is this the top, this is plain wrong. The context of activism throughout history has always led to some form of change, usually for the better. The reason is simple, drama, publicity and media bring about awareness.

Get you head out of your ass, nothing you said makes any sense.

You cite MLK and Gandhi but we also have to acknowledge people like Malcolm X were effective and influential while advocating an 'any means necessary' stance.

You fail to address who exactly the neighbor is. If it is a random home, the act would be silly and garner little sympathy for the attacker.

If it was the home of the mastermind hurting half the town and some of the documents represented parts of his plan to hurt, it would seem more justified.

lulzsec and anonymous have already had effects on how companies and governments act. Who exactly acted 'peacefully' and 'within the law' so far against these companies and managed to get anything done lately?

Aside from the fact that Gandhi and MLK both broke the law which has already been pointed out, there isn't much reason to have any faith in even the highest levels of American government. If all avenues of redress have been removed or obstructed by corrupt officials, what would you propose anybody do? Let's forget for a moment that what they're up to is actually non-violent civil disobedience for a moment and pretend it is something more: so what? "Violence is never the answer" is just a ridiculous platitude. It isn't true.