
How Aaron Barr revealed himself to Anonymous - ibejoeb
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/virtually-face-to-face-when-aaron-barr-met-anonymous.ars
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bandushrew
I am sympathetic to the side of 'Anonymous' because the only way to stop them
is to destroy the freedom of the internet.

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.

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jdp23
"The next day, February 6, the attacks turned serious, and Barr realized the
extent of what Anonymous had done to him and to his company, which was
currently in negotiations to sell itself to a pair of interested buyers."

Oops.

~~~
ajays
My guess is (and I haven't read the emails, or any non-public information),
Barr was hoping for a massive amount of (positive) publicity, followed by the
inevitable rich rewards of a much higher buying price. What better way to get
this publicity than to take on the current Public CyberEnemy #1, aka
Anonymous?

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philthy
Makes you wonder what kind of security company has such a sophomoric SQL
exploit on their website + someone in a power position who claims to be able
to locate and identify the actual owners of a social network profile solely by
guess.

~~~
pyre
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.

~~~
missinlnk
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.

~~~
yters
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.

~~~
stoney
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.

~~~
cema
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.

~~~
pyre
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.

------
mmaunder
[23:56:51] <n0pants> Moral of the Story: Don't drum up business by banging on
a hornet's nest.

..especially if you're not above them in the food chain.

------
fleitz
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government
fears the people, there is liberty."

\- Thomas Jefferson

~~~
jerf
“There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an
individual, but permitted to a mob” - Ayn Rand

~~~
cagenut
"the opposite of anything ayn rand says" -me

~~~
jerf
Which specific thing should be permitted to only mobs that is not permitted of
individuals?

Or is that a vacuous snark?

~~~
njharman
Taxing, ownership of life fundamentals (land, air, water), rearing/teaching of
young, use of electromagnetic spectrum, governing.

But, I'm a socialist. Would also use the terms family, tribe, society, etc.
instead of the purposefully biased "mob".

~~~
jerf
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised at the number of people who had a difficult
time identifying who I mean. I'm actually a little-l libertarian and no great
lover of government, so I understand the knee-jerk inclination, but why would
I be _stretching_ for the definition of a mob when there is another thing that
can be called a "mob" in the story with no stretch at all?

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adrianwaj
Anonymous could provide a lot of red meat for Wikileaks if they tried, I
think. Or would that not be a leak anymore but a theft? Anonbreaks - Wikileaks
in overdrive.

~~~
parfe
There's a lot of misunderstanding of what Anonymous is.

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.

~~~
adrianwaj
Sort of like Jihad? Except here only for otherwise clearly unsavory responses
to perceived threats against freedom vs otherwise clearly unsavory responses
to perceived threats against Islam?

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.

~~~
cookiecaper
Anonymous is not an organization. It is just a bunch of people without a
leader who hear someone suggest something, hear someone else give
instructions, and then do it because they think it sounds smart. It's just
like any other bunch of people doing that for any other thing, it doesn't have
to be a DDOS or harassment. It could be religion. Some guys hear Muhammad or
Buddha speak, think they're pretty smart, and decide to start doing what they
say for a while; the group is not the taste-testers, but the devoted
followers. Anonymous is the undefined mass; people with leaders in IRC rooms
are the individual organizations plucked from an undefined, unorganized mass.

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.

~~~
adrianwaj
Not unlike setting up a news.arc forum called Anonymous and letting people
upvote ideas to do certain things and anyone can join, and anyone can upvote.
A forum like this doesn't exist per se, but that's the archetype. There'd be
no (or optional) usernames either.

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?

~~~
fader
A lot of what makes 4chan work is the _lack_ of karma. There's no way to keep
score on who said something popular or unpopular in the past, so each post or
comment is necessarily evaluated on its own terms. I don't see a way to add
karma to that without destroying that flatness.

~~~
adrianwaj
"each post or comment is necessarily evaluated on its own terms" there is some
extra overhead in doing that, and makes the user experience discontiguous for
posters and readers.

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.

------
DanielBMarkham
I know some commenters support Anonymous because they would rather have that
kind of chaos than government clamping down even further on the internet, and
I agree.

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?

~~~
bandushrew
Im very sorry, I have no idea what you are trying to say.

~~~
lhnz
He's opposing a viewpoint that assumes that you can only have extremes which
strengthens the belief that there are only two choices (two-valued
orientation). Perhaps take a read of <http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_1.html>
("The Edge of the Circle")? Do we really need to have complete anarchy or for
the government to have complete authority? Seems like a bit of a slippery-
slope fallacy to me.

~~~
seabee
aka a "false dichotomy"

------
ddkrone
The interesting bit is that these "security" companies actually work with
various government agencies and get tons of taxpayer money. Most politicians
are clueless about what computer security means and have even less of a clue
about cyber terrorism so companies like HBGary continue to proliferate even
though they offer absolutely nothing for public well being.

