Qualification: By
social engeneering, I mean the hacker and con man's practice of
seducing people into allowing access to information, not the psychological and sociopolitical meanings of the term as originally coined and used.
Because of their success in raising the visibility of worthy causes (Occupy Wall Street) and fighting ones that promote censorship or exploitation (corporate censorship, scientology, retricted access to the internet in the name of intellectual property), some of us have been inclined to cut Anonymous and 4chan some slack. And even if they began ignobly, does that matter in the long run if they evolved into something more principled?
Unfortunately, the story arc isn't that clear. According to a recent article on Huffington Post (see below), Anonymous began with acts of sadism, theft and humiliation, and has never lost its interest in destroying people for fun, nor are its founders and key members above racketeering and identity theft for profit. Given its visibility and effectiveness in making a few worthy causes known, how comfortable are you with its amoral ambiguity?
Anonymous and the War over the Internet
I find it difficult to support
anything they do in the name of ethics now that I've seen their systematic cruelty and opportunistic acts of theft. Sequences of behavior like the one described in this quote (see below) seem nearly as sadistic as those of some hooded figure torturing a victim in their basement:
Quote:
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In 2010, an 11-year-old girl nicknamed Jessi Slaughter issued a YouTube threat against "haters" who had started an Internet rumor about her. . . . As a Gawker account put it, "Ha ha." Unfortunately, as Gawker went on to note, the response went beyond "ha ha." People found her real name, address and phone number. They passed the information around. A bomb squad showed up to her school after a suspicious package arrived in the mail. Encyclopaedia Dramatica . . . published an item on how to troll her. "Tell her dad that we are going to beat her up." "Tell her to kill herself." Jessi responded with another video. In this one, she was seen crying and whimpering while her father crouched in the background, screaming at the camera and shaking his fist. His awkward threats would become memes. A year later, he was arrested for punching Jessi in the mouth, and six months after that, she posted a video saying she'd been institutionalized and was living in foster care. Last summer, her mother wrote on Facebook that the father had died of a massive heart attack. Someone posted a screenshot of the message on FunnyJunk.com.
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Edit: Second link fixed.