Why More Anarchists Should Get Involved With Anonymous: Announcing Anonymous Anarchist Action

Via Infoshop News

Of course I can only ever give my personal opinion about this subject, a subject which is changing all the time. I’ll try not to abstract too much and speak from my personal experience and observations of anonymous… It’s like this. I didn’t find the Anonymous IRC (internet relay chat) server until after “participants” in Operation Payback had taken down websites like Mastercard, Paypal and others. I had known about known about Anonymous before that but seeking them out had never really appealed to me until I saw them in the news for “defending wikileaks”. It took a while before I was able to navigate to their IRC, but once I was able to, I started looking around and realized a bunch of things…

What  I thought I knew about Anonymous was fairly wrong:

The more I hung around the more I learned about what was actually going on. For the most part Anonymous really is non-hiearchical. At least, as horizontal as the anarchist movement ever is. Also while it may have this reputation, it is not a group of “hackers”alone. Sure there are hackers involved but there are also “everyday internet citizens”, writers, graphic designers, translators, and people with many other skills. Sure there’s the 14 year olds the news talks about but theres also some 60 some year olds if you believe them… My point being that any attempt to generalize about Anonymous is a failure, because whatever can carry that name is so diverse that it really defies stereotyping a lot of the time…

Press Freedom Under Threat in Age of Wikileaks

Via IPS News

By Andrea Lunt

NEW YORK, Jan 26, 2011 (IPS) – Freedom of the press could be seriously impacted across the world in the wake of the ongoing political revelations brought about by whistle-blowing websites such as Wikileaks, one of foremost constitutional law experts in the U.S. said Tuesday.

Speaking at a Personal Democracy Forum event, “Wikileaks and Internet Freedom II”, at New York University, veteran First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams warned governments could use the controversy surrounding the recent release of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables as an excuse to crack down on journalists and publishers.

Abrams told IPS some countries could move to change constitutional laws in an effort to “protect their sovereignty”.

“To the extent that diplomatic cables or military secrets – as the governments view them – are publicised they will take whatever steps they find they are able to take,” the New York-based attorney said.

“My point was that in democratic countries they may not be able to take steps of a meaningful nature; that they may change their laws or their attitude towards freedom of expression in an effort to stop what they view as the harmful revelation of secret information,” Abrams noted. “The consequence of that would be to harm, not Wikileaks, which would continue, but others.”

Abrams has himself been embroiled in controversy over the right to government secrecy, having argued for the New York Times and Judith Miller in the CIA leak grand jury investigation in 2003.

However, he has been a critic of Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, calling for the organisation to take greater discretion in the release of government documents.

The Internet Wants to be Free, for Real This Time

Via Infoshop News

Death + Taxes blog

With net neutrality compromised, the persecution of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange ongoing and the new tech bubble expanding, should we consider a newer and freer internet?

Douglas Rushkoff thinks so, although he’s not the first. Jaron Lanier, self-styled tech guru and dreadlocked visionary, has been passionately taking a similar position (read his 2010 book “You Are Not A Gadget”).

Both Rushkoff and Lanier believe something happened as the Internet—itself a creation of anti-authoritarians and free information advocates—shifted its model from a tool of personal expression into one large information aggregator. Facebook and Google writ large. The internet became corporate, co-opted by the suits who never believed in the creation in the first place until they saw a profit could be made through ISP’s, amassing data to sell to other corporations and governments and a means by which they could create tech bubbles like that of the 90s.

Capital’s War against WikiLeaks

Via Infoshop News

Can the leak phenonomen sustain the continued assault by the corporate sector to prevail in the first ever cyber-war?

by Mark Levine
Al-Jazeera-English
Wednesday, December 29, 2010

When your Swiss banker throws you overboard, you know you’ve made some very powerful enemies.

Long famed for hiding money for everyone from Nazis and drug lords to spies and dictators, the Swiss government’s banking arm has decided that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are just too hot even for it to handle.

And so the PostFinance, which runs the country’s banks, declared in early December that it had “ended its business relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Paul Assange” after accusing Mr. Assange of – gasp! – providing false information about his place of residence.

This move followed similar moves by credit card companies MasterCard and Visa, as well as PayPal and Amazon.com, to no longer process WikiLeaks payments and, in Amazon.com’s case, to cease hosting its data.

As I write this, Bank of America has joined the crescendo of corporations taking aim at WikiLeaks, refusing to process payments for it any longer because of “our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.”

The Anonymous WikiLeaks protests are a mass demo against control

Via Infoshop News

The actions against MasterCard and Amazon are not ‘hacking’. People are just finding a way to protest in a digital space

Richard Stallman
guardian.co.uk
Friday 17 December 2010

The Anonymous web protests over WikiLeaks are the internet equivalent of a mass demonstration. It’s a mistake to call them hacking (playful cleverness) or cracking (security breaking). The LOIC program that is being used by the group is prepackaged so no cleverness is needed to run it, and it does not break any computer’s security. The protesters have not tried to take control of Amazon’s website, or extract any data from MasterCard. They enter through the site’s front door, and it just can’t cope with the volume.

Calling these protests DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks is misleading, too. A DDoS attack is done with thousands of “zombie” computers. Typically, somebody breaks the security of those computers (often with a virus) and takes remote control of them, then rigs them up as a “botnet” to do in unison whatever he directs (in this case, to overload a server). The Anonymous protesters’ computers are not zombies; presumably they are being individually operated.