Editor’s Note: As you may know, the protests on Wall Street in New York City are gathering energy. This article was posted as a diary to Daily Kos, a political site to which Planet Waves also contributes (this is not my writing — it’s from Ollie Garkey’s diary). The term MSM means mainstream media. The article addresses the collective Anonymous, which you may have heard about from the Julian Assange days. Link to the full-length original diary on Daily Kos.
The MSM just doesn’t know what to do with a leaderless movement. If there aren’t celebs, if there isn’t an official spokesperson, if there isn’t an easy narrative, they just don’t want to pay attention. That’s because doing actual in depth reporting is hard and boring, and no one wants to stand out in a square with a bunch of ragged revolutionaries when they could be sitting up in the towers interviewing wall streeters while sipping single malt and enjoying free cocaine. Can you blame them? So I’m going to talk a bit about who Anonymous is and how they’re helping.
Anonymous has promised us they’re on our side, they’re telling us to stand strong in the square, and they still scare the hell out of me.
Not only have they released Anthony Bologna’s home address online, as well as the addresses and phone numbers of his entire family, children included, they’re doing the same for the family of a Wall Street CEO every day that our demands aren’t met. All of them.
That’s a pretty hefty list right now. But that’s who Anonymous is. They’re not something new. They’re the great terror of the French Revolution. It’s just that they have computers instead of Guillotines, and in the modern day, they’re nonviolent. You can’t stop them, but they won’t kill you. Even if you could arrest them all, there isn’t the jail space on earth to hold them, and most of them live in countries where you can’t just hold on to people forever (I hope). They know how to cover their tracks. If you do manage to find and arrest one of them acting in a leadership capacity, another one with the same skills steps up to the plate within five minutes.
Aaron Barr of HB Gary, the last guy who tried to attack them (at the behest of Bank of America and the US government) was accused by Colbert of essentially sticking his penis into a hornets nest. Anonymous shut down his company’s website and hacked his personal and business email, releasing it online. They then took the information that HB Gary was planning on selling to the FBI and e-mailed it TO the FBI. They would rather go to prison then let someone make money attacking them. They crashed his company’s server and deleted it’s backup files, and even went so far as to remotely log into his iPad and wipe it. This was a computer security company whose entire business model was designed around securing companies from hackers. And just to add insult to injury, they posted the Barr’s home address and social security number online.