Anonymous is Terrifying (Notes from Wall Street)

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.

Anonymous essentially destroyed an anti-hacker private security company hired by the US Government and the US Chamber of Commerce. That’s what they can do. But more than all of that, anons are standing in the square with us. They’re incredibly well organized, and they know what they’re doing.

And they’re with us.

Last night, they released addresses for James Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, and several of his family members and colleagues, which included things like political contributions.

What Anonymous does, releasing someone’s personal information, isn’t illegal. Each and every one of us has a long trail of information we’ve left behind online. Mistakes have been made by people handling our information. When you have hundreds and thousands of research experts crawling the internet looking for information on one person, they can compile a dossier full of information very quickly, all of it legally obtained. Sometimes, that includes social security numbers accidentally posted online by banks, charitable organizations, or the users themselves. Compiling information posted freely online and releasing it in a single document is not illegal. It’s just very, very mean, and quite frightening.

We don’t live in a world where people can hide behind a badge or a desk anymore, feeling the security of rank, feeling as if they can act with impunity. Anonymous and people like them refuse to tolerate petty tyrants. Anyone unprepared to deal with that world, anyone like the CEOs of Wall Street or thugs with badges like Anthony Bologna, is in for a very nasty surprise. The world has changed. The release of a Police Deputy Inspector’s personal information is a new event in the history of nonviolent resistance.

The world has changed, and it will keep changing. If we get out and fight for it, we can make sure that it’s a change for the better.

I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do, but Anonymous is giving the abusers something to fear. Abusers who, too often, have treated barbaric acts by their fellow officers with laughter. For example, the following comments are being posted on the “Law Enforcement Forum” at Officer.com. The comments posted there by people claiming to be police officers are disgusting. Since writing this last night, the thread in question has been taken down. I’ll post a few choice quotes, though:

Crass Cop, who posted a thread titled “Dirty stinky hippies in NY dont like how theyre treated when they azz up..” identifies himself as a Patrolman in the Kansas City Police Department, posted

Theres a few videos on the link. man I LOVE how OC works wonders at clearing a sidewalk!!![Link to HuffPo]

Yeah…I love how the chick just falls to her knees and starts screaming!

Many of the officers making similar comments self identify as NYPD. They call the protesters dirty commies among other things, and say they want to break out the fire hoses so they can give the dirty hippies a bath. Not one single comment respected the fact that this was an illegal attack. Then, they made fun of gay people for a few minutes.

Now I know this isn’t reflective of the entire NYPD. Most officers, the vast majority of them, are good people who are trying to do their job. The ones who don’t outright support us are at least respectful of the fact that the people in Liberty Plaza are exercising their constitutional rights. There are a handful of officers, however, who want to raise hell. Lawrence was right. Within the police departments of the US, there is a “look the other way” boys club.

I have no idea what Anonymous is going to do to these guys, but the website is already swarming with new users. Whatever it is, it’ll be as fun as taking a hornets nest and… you know.

Street police, meet internet police.

In any case, those posts prove Lawrence O’Donnell right. Anthony Bologna shouldn’t be investigated by Internal Affairs, especially when he is a former member of Internal Affairs. This should be investigated by someone outside the police department. If I commit a crime, I don’t get to ask my closest friends to investigate it. The same standard should apply to police. Currently, it doesn’t. Lawrence himself explained that investigations like we’re about to see are always a sham designed to protect the police.

That being the case, what else are we supposed to do? This system is completely broken.

I don’t know that what Anonymous did was right. They scare me. But I do know that without their work compiling video and photographs to identify Bologna, we wouldn’t have his name, we wouldn’t have his badge number, and we’d be looking at a bunch of blurry video, not knowing who to investigate.

Thanks to them, we know who did this. Thanks to them, there will be an investigation, even if it is a sham of an investigation. They’re already hard at work trying to identify several other officers involved in brutality. This isn’t over yet, not by a long shot.

The world has turned upside down. Instead of the government and corporations telling the people “If you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear,” the people are now saying to the same to their government.