I love how the press in general has been successfully trolled into believing that "Anonymous" is a centralized organization with membership lists or something. The clue is in the name, guys.
I got a chuckle scrolling down and seeing "Whodunnit?" as a section header. It was nice knowing I didn't have to start reading the article to know its quality.
Do they really believe what they write? Maybe it is just plain laziness and they are okay with being wrong as long as they can fill their quota of articles?
It is entirely possible for a centralized organization with membership lists to still call itself "Anonymous." It's become nothing but a gimmick that can be picked up by anyone, or any number of groups. Get some Guy Fawkes masks and hoodies and make threats on Youtube and put out press releases. Congratulations - you're Anonymous.
It was never anything but a gimmick. That's the point! Anonymous began as a joke on 4chan, pretending that all anonymous users were actually the same person and then laughing as Anonymous argued with itself. The joke has exploded beyond anyone's dreams; Anonymous has successfully convinced millions of people that it really is, or was, a well-defined entity. But the only requirement for joining Anonymous is to say "I'm Anonymous." That's why it's called Anonymous, y'know?
This particular writer has written an entire article about how this hack wasn't done by Anonymous, only someone claiming to be Anonymous, so this particular writer at least is under some comically mistaken impressions. He even quotes the hacker trying to explain it to him--"you know that everyone can claim something and use Anonymous name as a banner”--and he still doesn't get it.
This single hacker says his motives were political, and that he is not happy about Turkey's ongoing involvement with the ISIS. Did he expect the visitors to websites in the .tr domain to infer this crucial piece of information on their own? How can you effectively protest with an attack, if the purpose of the attack is not made clear to the public.
IMO, the Anonymous video (even if it falsely claims responsibility) was much needed in this situation, assuming that the end goal is to raise awareness and mobilize people against the ISIS and its supporters.
If this story is true, I think he is an idiot attacking the tr domain. Who is he punishing?. And really why?
This is debated over and over but I am quite baffled with the allegations that government deliberately and purposefully aided ISIS, even today. I have yet to see any convincing evidence on this. Sources of such allegations are mostly from usual suspects such as Gulenists or pro-Kurdish far left circles. Last month Russia joined the club as well. Related news were published in Gulenist media (especially their English press) and Turkish Left leaning groups support it without questioning the motives because they share the same sentiment (hate for Erdoğan) and purpose (removing him at any cost). Erdoğan deserves a lot of the criticism but current "hate wave" against him is far from rational IMO.
interesting that before Turkey/Russia conflict everybody knew and wasn't really bothered, ie. business as usual, that Sunnis in Middle East, primarily Saudis and Turkey, do aid ISIS. In particular, ISIS fights Kurds and Assad - thus doing Turkey's and Saudis' bidding (Saudis need Assad gone because he blocks the Saudi gas pipeline to Europe and this is one of the reasons why Russia has been supporting him all this time :). Turkey and Saudis are US allies, while the other side - Shia like Assad, Iran, Hezbollah - are enemies of US. Everything was going great until Russia moved in and pooped the party :)
Beside global goals, like making itself important again by actively supporting the anti-US side, one of the practical Russian interest is in breaking up the flow of really cheap oil - from ISIS to Turkey to Ukraine's Odessa refinery (thus also hitting Ukraine too. In 2014, amid Russia/Ukraine conflict, Russia stopped sending its oil to the refinery, and that huge refinery has since then found another, even bigger source of oil, from Turkey :). Like Russia, Ukraine is a very corrupt state (and Odessa governor is the former president of Georgia - Saakashvili - with deep "business" ties to Turkey from his time in Georgia. It is very interesting story in itself on who, why and how put him into governor chair of strategically important large region of another, completely unrelated, country :) so nobody is asking questions about the oil provenance there, and as result there is 2 stage "laundering" of final oil products - first dilution of ISIS oil into "legal" Turkey oil and passing the result through the refinery (plus selling a lot of that cheap oil and its refined products into "no much questions asked" markets of Eastern Europe like in particular Ukraine and Poland. You may have already heard about extremely cheap supposedly Saudi oil hitting market in Poland. That flow of cheap oil negatively affects ("dumping" is the keyword here) Russian oil sales into these next-door markets and thus hits Putin's regime where and when it really hurts, and thus all this "cold war" between Russia and Turkey, and i personally have no doubts about who attacked the Turkish Internet :)
When a government starts putting newspaper editors in jail [1], what other proof do you need? Erdogan is now so internationally discredited that even The Economist, stalwart of Western establishment, routinely aligns Turkey with "Russia, Venezuela and other illiberal democracies" [2].
If you live in Turkey and you care about your country, you should really think about finding alternatives to Erdogan and his cronies.
Of course I am not defending jailing journalists. But there is something a little deeper here. During 2013 and 2014 there was an unprecedented political power struggle between Erdogan and Gulen ( http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_4_fethullah-gulen.html ) whose cult has/had deep roots in the government especially in the police force, bureaucracy and justice system. They control many media outlets. After the breaking point, their sole aim was to overthrow Erdogan from his position, either because he started to block their spreading in the state, or because he simply did not want them anymore.
So they throw whatever they have in their hands, probably with a lot of manipulation. They attacked him and his family quite strongly with corruption claims (I would take them more seriously if there wasnt another motive behind all that). One of the attack point was about Syrian conflict. Probably government was supplying logistics help to the rebel groups fighting with Assads government but using their people in the key points they actually interfered with this action and presented this as if Government is helping IS. These journalists in question were also used as a proxy for spreading this. Now that Gulen has lost the battle big time, Government is taking his revenge by making some of their supporters lives miserable. But although they are now in the shadows they are silently continuing their attacks. From my point of view, Gulen's secret cult's utopia is more dangerous than Erdogans bravado. At least he is honest on what he says, no matter good or bad.
At first I too was most sceptical of the claims, however the speed and logistics of the ISIS franchise is very difficult to explain as a self funded exercise. Having another front open up against syria and the kurds is a very attractive thing for the Turkish government, as is an excuse to bomb the living daylights out of the kurds.
Isn't this a logical fallacy? "ISIS gets logistic support so Turkey must be providing it" does not sound right to me. Granted, government was hesitant to take any action when there was a fight between IS and Syrian Kurds, but this does not mean helped IS at all.
On the bombing issue, it was PKK who broke the truce.
Turkey was publicly pushed into invading Syria, something they wisely declined to do.
However allowing our "allies" to fund sectarian violence[1], from which the ISIS franchise grew seemed like a good compromise: Assad gets heat, and so does Kurdish nationalism.(PDP were starting to make real inroads in mainstream politics, so undermining them was a bonus, along with the right wingers) At the time it seemed like a good idea. "Islamism" eats it's self in the place where lots of the prophecies are based.
However, it didn't pan out like that.
[1]loosely the west and our oil rich friends, not just Turkey.
Angry kids with a little knowledge and a lot of righteous rage are very, very prone to believing that the world's problems can be fixed by righteously destroying things. It's how Daesh gets so many recruits.
I don't think it was Anonymous. During the operation against ISIS on social media, Anonymous tried to DOS one of the ISIS propaganda websites (Isdarat). They couldn't muster more than a few Mbps.
This attack on Turkey is an example of Russian "active measures."
Edit: By the way, the entire tr TLD is managed by a single DNS server at METU. That was the target of the attack.
Could be trying to pass the buck to script-kiddies though. If I were trying to stay actually anonymous, I'd let the "Anonymous-branded" account take the credit
They do serve as a nice distraction, yeah, but when the "hacktivist group" is named for the default name on a website with millions of users and no discussion of or interest in "hacktivism"[0], you don't really have a hacktivist group.
[0] I used to surf 4chan and follow various Anonymous twitter news feeds; I eventually realized that /b/ was full of edgy teenagers and most of the things that made Anons famous were sheer flukes.
Great reporting, they also reached out to Subcommandante Marcos but he was unavailable for comment.