| > I have nothing to fear from Anonymous. Do you? Thanks to whoever was calling themselves "Anonymous" one particular day, my full name, physical and email address, and credit card number was posted publically on the Internet, merely for being a customer of a company who some misguided "Anon" thought was working for The Man (not even close by the way). This means that anyone I have ever given my address to will now be able to find out my precise address and full name. For me it is an annoyance, but I have been exceedingly careful not to associate anything controversial online with my real-life identity. Someone who had enemies, or even expressed opinions online that were controversial--to ANY segment of the population--would have a lot of reason to fear for their lives thanks to that irresponsible act. "Anonymous" are criminals who directly target random civilians and use them as pawns to try to scare those who are in power. The people in power are sure that "Anonymous" will never tilt the balance of power away, but that doesn't stop them from trying, and leaving a devastating trail of identity theft in their wake. Furthermore, the fact that they are so antisocial they won't show themselves means there can be no accountability for them, so the true good idealists among them are operating in an opaque cloud of others who have proven to have no insight, no judgment, and no sense of ethics or fairness (a phenomenon that anonymity often leads to in humans). These bad seeds use the public perception of "Anonymous" as a force for "Good" and "Openness" in order to commit petty crime such as charging things on other people's credit card for purely selfish reasons. We will probably see the same people exploiting "Anonymous" to commit more and more serious crimes. Sorry for the novella. My point was just that the public has a great deal to fear from these people. EDIT: I agree with a lot of things ascribed to that group -- I've marched with OWS before. However, their apparent mission that no one, no country, no company should have any privacy or confidentiality ever, coming from a group that refuses to identify themselves, is just making them look like hypocrites. |