anonymous hactivism

BCM206 | Week 9

For my remediation this week I wanted to educate myself, and my audience on the Anonymous group.

In 2012, Anonymous was at the height of their popularity, a network of thousands of activists, a minority of them hackers, “devoted to leftist-libertarian ideals of personal freedom and opposed to the consolidation of corporate and government power“. Their symbol is a Guy Fawkes mask (made famous by Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta in which an anarchist revolutionary dons the mask to topple a corrupt fascist government) (Molloy, D & Tidy, J 2020)

Then of May this year and the dead of George Floyd and the trending of Black Lives Matter Anonymous posted a video to their Facebook page. They began their acts by taking the Minneapolis police department website temporarily offline over a weekend and then began circulating documents in a civil court case that was voluntarily dismissed by the accuser before it went to trial involving President Trump.

Despite there being no single unified approach among Anonymous’ members, the group has targeted groups over race relations in the past. In 2014, when the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted widespread protests, Anonymous threatened to target the city if protesters were harmed, they then disabled the city’s website and compromising communications at city hall.

References:
– Molloy, D & Tidy, J 2020, George Floyd: Anonymous hackers re-emerge amid US unrest, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52879000
– Beran, D 2020, The Return of Anonymous, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/hacker-group-anonymous-returns/615058/