Anonymous. - Blog 8

Last week in class, we watched an incredibly interesting documentary of the group called Anonymous.

They are a group of people that have a talent in working with computers. They use their computer skills to protest and try to effect groups that break Anonymous' set of morals or breaks what they think are human rights. They have protested against a white supremacist, the Westboro Baptist church, Master Card and Visa, the Church of Scientology and the list goes on. When they were protesting against the white supremacist, they would send him pizza, industrial materials, etc. and he had to pay for that all. This eventually led him to go bankrupt and he was not able to continue his radio show. When they protested Master Card and Visa, they hacked into the system and took card numbers, because they were upset that they could no longer donate money to Wikileaks, but someone could still use Paypal to donate to the KKK.

This brings up the question if someone should actually be allowed to do something like this. Sure, they did target people that would be considered "bad" people. However, some of their means of protesting are sometimes not quite in good taste. Sure, they did shut down some organizations' websites, but in some cases they would send pizzas and hold up the company's hot line. Some of these people in Anonymous have been convicted in the United States for some of the protests they have made.

 I found this graphic to illustrate the potential that this group has. In almost every country in the world there are at least some people that have access to the Internet. Anonymous has really picked up some international ground and I personally believe that this group will continue to grow for the next few years. That is also concerning, because having such a big group of computer hackers may get out of hand really quickly and cause a lot of damage and change the way we look at Internet. Also, if you want some further reading on anonymous, check out the article below this graphic.

Graphic credit:http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/newsgraphics/2011/1206-world/1206-sci-WORLD-INTERNET.gif

Further reading:
http://www.salon.com/2011/02/25/westboro_baptist_church_anonymous_website/