Anonymous and the Sadism of Social Engineering

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Hang on a minute. If I read this correctly, this girl publicly threatened to kill someone? That in itself is a serious crime (at least it is where I live). Why did the police take no action against her at that point?

She publicly threatened to kill an anonymous person(s) who she did not know - which does not justify it to me - but maybe the reason no authority got involved.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Ekaros

So you can mark whole group by actions of one of their members?

When the group doesn't bother to make its members accountable for their actions, yes.

As a whole there is lot of not perfect in Anonymous. Still it doesn't stop one from supporting certain actions they have taken. It's not a movement which one must to take as a whole.

The problem is you just can't look at them in traditional way. They aren't one coherent large group, but individuals behind a mask or anonymity. Black and white thinking doesn't work in real world.

I can acknowledge the good they've accomplished, and even acknowledge that there was no other way to accomplish those goals, without believing they're "a force for good." They support a lot of random petty cruelty alongside the lofty goals of free speech and government accountability.

I hope we can move into an era where anonymous pushes itself out of existence--where people of all stations and roles are held accountable for their actions, so that governments don't use "national security" to excuse torture and corporations don't use lawsuits as clubs to fight their competition or to bully their customers. Where computer hardware & software manufacturers work to make machines virus-proof rather than "you MUST allow our updates, even if that leaves you open to attacks;" where end users are allowed to manage their own security instead of being required to leave it to the OS manufacturer. Where criminals get the same kinds of penalties for the same kinds of crimes, regardless of race, age, sex, or wealth.

In the meantime... we have anonymous. They're not going away unless we have a *drastic* change in political and social norms.

Anonymous is a symptom. There's no point in trying to attack or cure the symptom; if we want anonymous to go away, we need to tackle the root cause: status as a shield from accountability.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Hang on a minute. If I read this correctly, this girl publicly threatened to kill someone? That in itself is a serious crime (at least it is where I live). Why did the police take no action against her at that point?

Ah, but to kill who? If you're Anonymous, you don't exist. So where's the crime?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Hang on a minute. If I read this correctly, this girl publicly threatened to kill someone? That in itself is a serious crime (at least it is where I live). Why did the police take no action against her at that point?

Perhaps because she was 11 years old, and the police were pretty sure that her threats were entirely hyperbolic?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Perhaps because she was 11 years old, and the police were pretty sure that her threats were entirely hyperbolic?

Children do seem to commit mass murder with some regularity in the United States, if our news reports are to be believed. Can such threats simply be ignored?

Obviously that is not a justification for cyberbullying - that's a cowardly act that can never be excused.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Children do seem to commit mass murder with some regularity in the United States, if our news reports are to be believed. Can such threats simply be ignored?

Not categorically, but it's possible that either the police were never called in, because nobody seeing the threats took them seriously (indeed, we don't have any evidence, even now, that she had any intent or means to kill people), or the police investigated, and identified the situation as "pre-teen kid mouthing off" rather than actual threat.

I'd think that "ignoring" a threat means not considering it at all; I assume that, in this case, the threat was evaluated and the risk deemed to be low, and therefore not worthy of official sanction.

Obviously that is not a justification for cyberbullying - that's a cowardly act that can never be excused.

I can think of excuses for it, but this definitely isn't one. There are situations where a person or organization's status and resources has put them outside of any normal censure--I don't have a problem with anonymous tackling the Church of Scientology--but that doesn't make it reasonable to harass and threaten a child. Even a very bratty, vicious child who needs to learn some restraint and manners.

Where the line is would need to be evaluated separately in each situation; there's not going to be a hard-and-fast rule about when it's ethical to bypass normal social conventions to show one's disapproval of someone else's actions.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by MrsJoseph

She publicly threatened to kill an anonymous person(s) who she did not know - which does not justify it to me - but maybe the reason no authority got involved.

She threatened to kill the haters and just as her identity was found out the same could have happened to whoever she threatened. Apparently people insulted her when she posted nudes of herself so the natural reaction was to threaten to kill them and wish them "get AIDS and die". And this was before Anonymous got involved.

[HarryT]

What a delightful little girl.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Mr TubeMonkey, are you in favor of an end to anonymity on the network?

Sorry, I missed this.

I'm definitely not in favor of ending anonymity on the net.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What a delightful little girl.

If you haven't seen the video, here it is:

*** WARNING - STRONG LANGUAGE ***

Spoiler:

[Prestidigitweeze]

And of course all of the action hits this thread on the night when I get slammed at work.

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

You are from the US so you may not realize this, but according to Wikipedia there are 17 countries with a population of less than 15000 people. How many is a bunch?

You might not realize this Sil, darling, light o' my life, but Americans -- even former Canadians like myself, who now live in the States -- are aware of it when someone like yourself decides to be inversely jingoistic: pimping their own country or region by heaping insult on another.

In attributing cultural myopia to all Americans, you're not striking a blow against Americanism, you're reducing your own status to that of another gassy patriot.

Yes, it really is possible for an individual from any country to be aware of vast geographic and demographic differences. In attributing this lack of awareness to every American you encounter, you reveal your own potentially crippling lack of scope.

Secondly, your question "how many is a bunch" is as pointless as it is irrelevant. Let's review but a few of the reasons:

1. You've failed to recognize my metonymic of the use of the word country to denote places of undue power and importance. It is not ignoring the existence of every country to speak of the need to influence the most negatively influential. The worst effects of the most negatively powerful comprise the point.

2. You're setting up ridiculously literal controls for a rhetorical parallel between the population/political machinery of a corrupt country and the comparatively smaller numbers in a political group within it. You might as well be responding to the phrase, "The grass is always greener" by saying, "No, it isn't. It's always the same color."

My point is obvious to the meanest intelligence: Those who lack the numbers and influence to change the course of a national election can still effect change through the smaller groups they join and support. Anonymous looks like one of those groups, but it doesn't deserve our support. In its absence, more responsible groups would grow to replace it. Hacking as an act of strategic resistance to fascism would regain credibility instead of becoming an argument for tighter government controls even among the sympathetic. I don't think Mr. S. L. Jordan is wrong to predict that particular outcome.

So it's in the world's best interest to stay fascinated with them.

Again, you're choosing a literal and rhetorically tone-deaf mode of attack (which I hope is deliberate on your part). To invest my rhetorical statement -- Anonymous is only appearing to be constructive because people are watching -- with the least likely inference -- that, therefore, people should keep watching them so that their actions remain partially constructive -- is to ignore the actual meaning and context of what I said.

Again, the point was clearly this:

That we should ignore the facile good deeds of Anonymous and renounce the bad ones because the smaller the numbers of and power behind the group that represents our interests, the more selective we can be about which groups deserve that privilege.

If we're not dependent on bad politicians, as most Marxists and optimists I know would assert; if even the most pernicious regimes could be ousted overnight if citizens united in significant numbers despite the pressure of ulterior powers; then it's certainly within our means to support some groups and not others. It's certainly possible to support hackers who instill a sense of chaos in corrupt systems without showing themselves to be sadistic and corrupt.

We live in an age of hyperbole and hypocritical finger-pointing, an age in which people rant about the evil corruption of Obama while supporting Cameron, Newt Gingrich or even the CEOs of Goldman Sachs. It isn't constructive to fail to make moral distinctions when our judgment could actually affect other people's lives.

To earn people's support, Anonymous didn't have to be pure or never do anything wrong. They had simply to stay focused on speaking truth to power rather than slaking a thirst to abuse momentary power. They could have used sabotage and exploits, but only to effect social change. It isn't supportable for them to steal people's identities and ruin their credit at all, less so for personal gain or, even worse, "the lulz."

Anonymous claims to back Occupy Wall Street, which is about ordinary people standing up to those who bully and steal from them. But how can their support have any weight if they themselves steal from and ruin ordinary citizens on a smaller scale? They don't simply humiliate and ruin ordinary people's lives for fun. They also ruin the credit and lives of people whose only crime is being vulnerable.

To be credible supporters of OWS, their aim would have to be not to exploit or ruin anyone with a history of being economically or socially victimized by corporations and governments. That's what OWS is about, but Anonymous isn't about that at all. The popular imagination isn't going to make that distinction and we know that: The worst thing you can do on the internet is to take yourself to seriously and -- hey, look -- the cool guys who comprise Anonymous don't do that.

But guess what: The con man who considers himself the only worthy human and his marks cattle epitomizes self-importance at its worst. Grand-scale thievery in the guise of subversiveness can look like street art, but the mindset behind it is as trite and narcissistic as that of a Twilight blog by a schizophrenic who believes the main characters are speaking to him personally about his godlike status among the ants.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

She threatened to kill the haters and just as her identity was found out the same could have happened to whoever she threatened. Apparently people insulted her when she posted nudes of herself so the natural reaction was to threaten to kill them and wish them "get AIDS and die". And this was before Anonymous got involved.

And of course a little girl "posting nudes" of her eleven-year-old self and "threatening" people in me-and-my-dad-will-kill-you mode justifies mailbombing her with orchestrated, carefully thought-out acts of malice and sabotage.

Originally Posted by HarryT

What a delightful little girl.

It sounds as if you've either missed the bulk of the story or are actually construing the empty threats of one child as sufficient justification for her deliberate malicious persecution by an organized group, which wrote up a concise and specific list of actions posted on a board for the malicious to follow.

An 11-year-old responds to accusations of her sleeping with the adult male singer of a local electronic group and of course the onus is on her when she becomes angry and rants that they're just friends. No doubt all little are all quite restrained when being accused of sleeping with people. Yes, that action certainly means she should be mailbombed every hour of every day with the suggestion that she kill herself. She'll certainly learn restraint from that. Besides, the responsibility for her life is her own, apparently, and society should shoulder no blame whatsoever. She'd have behaved just as stupidly if no one decided to torture her over it, right?

Perhaps the way to socialize a little girl is not to berate her for being a whore and then to mailbomb her with the message "kill yourself" when she tries to respond to accusations of being a slut with pathetic and empty threats. As tempting as it might be to have fun destroying her life and watching her crumple in anger and shame, perhaps she should have been shown a bit of empathy and tolerance.

It isn't even as if Anonymous were guilty of this one act of malice. It isn't as if the girl deserved any of it any more than a loud dog deserves to be beaten, nor is Anonymous's reaction even as mature as the 11-year-old's. They LOL'd and congratulated one another when they learned her father punched her and again when she was reported to be institutionalized.

What's interesting is that Scientology, the empire of arrogance which Anonymous is supposedly poised to fight, is most criticized for doing that exact same thing. Google "Scientology" and "Operation Freakout" and you'll learn there's no difference on a tactical level between the methods of Scientology and those of Gregg Housh.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

She threatened to kill the haters and just as her identity was found out the same could have happened to whoever she threatened. Apparently people insulted her when she posted nudes of herself so the natural reaction was to threaten to kill them and wish them "get AIDS and die". And this was before Anonymous got involved.

So you found the actions of Anon to be perfectly ok then? We - as members of the human race - should feel no need to hold back when dealing with kids...vicious things that they are.


/sarcasm

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

It sounds as if you've either missed the bulk of the story or are actually construing the empty threats of one child as sufficient justification for her deliberate malicious persecution by an organized group, which wrote up a concise and specific list of actions posted on a board for the malicious to follow.

Certainly not. As I stated very clearly above, I consider cyberbullying to be a cowardly and despicable act, which can never be justified. That's still true even if the victim is an obnoxious brat.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

1. You've failed to recognize my metonymic of the use of the word country to denote places of undue power and importance. It is not ignoring the existence of every country to speak of the need to influence the most negatively influential. The worst effects of the most negatively powerful comprise the point.

2. You're setting up ridiculously literal controls for a rhetorical parallel between the population/political machinery of a corrupt country and the comparatively smaller numbers in a political group within it. You might as well be responding to the phrase, "The grass is always greener" by saying, "No, it isn't. It's always the same color."

What you said was:

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Nations are immense behemoths erected by vast consensus and brutal manipulation. Anonymous are simply a bunch of people like us.

You were replying to my post where I said "some governments". I wasn't talking about large countries in particular and I didn't see why you would be unless you don't consider smaller countries to be nations. Governments are even smaller than the people that they represent and can possibly be smaller than Anonymous (if they are a few hundreds in most countries the numbers of the group would be in the order of thousands).

If I wasn't clear: I wasn't limiting torture practices only to large and/or powerful countries so there wasn't any reason for me to assume that you were using the word "nations" to denote that particular group. You might as well be responding to the phrase "No, it isn't. It's always the same color." by saying "Well, you should have understood from my use of the word <greener> that I was talking about that patch of grass by the tree."

Originally Posted by MrsJoseph

So you found the actions of Anon to be perfectly ok then? We - as members of the human race - should feel no need to hold back when dealing with kids...vicious things that they are.

No, but considering the stories about the age of those that joined the group, it is possible that the actions were taken by kids of the same age as the girl since they were behaving like she did. So you could say that I am criticizing them as much as I'm criticizing her.