[srl]

Anonymous's strategy for "defeating" the FBI etc. is to publicly humiliate them and expose them to be harmful and largely worthless[1] - that goal is better served by showing off the FBI's incompetence than by guarding their own rear ends.

[1] That's not to be interpreted as a claim on my part that they are. This sentence, however, may freely be interpreted as such.

(Firefox's spellcheck isn't working for me atm (nightly, so no surprise) - please accept my apologies for any embarrassing typos above.)

[toyg]

That will be their eventual downfall, unfortunately. Life is not a comic book; FBI and friends can withstand humiliation after humiliation, they'll still have their guns, dogs and PATRIOT acts to come after you.

Strategically speaking, it would have been much better to just keep listening. Now involved parties will do their best to lock down, and it will be harder for Anons to eavesdrop... but hey, we got some LULz, right?

[srl]

I disagree.

The FBI, DHS, TSA and so on /can/ be defeated through humiliation - you just have to keep at it until enough voters get the message for a few politicians to use "regulate XYZ" and "abolish the ABC" as mechanisms for political gain.

[zipdog]

I wouldn't expect so much. There is ample evidence for the ineffectualness of, say, the CIA. As a simple example, at the time of the fall of the USSR (pretty much their major goal) they had admitted they had no effective agents in Russia