Late last week, an online video featuring a masked person behind a desk called out Donald Trump on behalf of the hacktivist group Anonymous:
“Donald Trump, it has come to our attention that you want to ban all Muslims to enter the United States,” the unidentified speaker with a scrambled voice states. The video is a warning to Trump to “think twice” before he speaks. Soon after the video was posted, an apparent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack temporarily took the website for Trump Towers off-line.
Earlier this fall, Anonymous declared war on the Ku Klux Klan. After the terrorist attacks in Paris, the group declared war on ISIS.
Each announcement was intensely observed and widely written about. The operations attracted praise from those who loved the idea of a vigilante crew of hackers taking down deserving targets, and criticism and concern from those who worried that Anonymous might not be able to follow through on its promise to use its powers for good.
For several years now, Anonymous has taken up plenty of operations, and made plenty of enemies. There was the time Anonymous went after Gamergate. There was Anonymous’ role in exposing details of the Steubenville rape case. And then there is the group’s lengthy history of going after Scientology.
But it’s misleading to imply that the entire collective put its weight behind each of these operations, acting as one. Anonymous’ operations are run by different groups, and sometimes those groups disagree strongly with each other. There isn’t a single official “Anonymous” Twitter account, or YouTube channel, or anything else. There are multiple accounts that have designated themselves as mouthpieces for the group.
Anonymous isn’t a monolith or a hive mind. In the cases of the recent headlines about the Anonymous “wars” on various enemies, there are also members of the collective who believe that the splashy campaigns designed to draw attention to Anonymous operations are hurting the group’s reputation way more than they’re helping.
“#OpTrump: another media hype non events to give #Anonymous more cancer. Anti free speech ops? Failed DoS? Yup,” one tweeted Friday.
An identity crisis within a loose collective of hack- tivists shouldn’t be surprising, given that the group’s identity and missions have shifted a lot since its founding nearly a decade ago. But because of Anonymous’ recent run of headline-friendly campaigns, the current disagreements are playing out very publicly.
Jeremy Hammond, an Anonymous activist who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for hacking Stratfor, issued a strongly worded condemnation of #OPISIS last week. “As someone who hacked with Anonymous and marched against the war in Iraq,” the statement posted to Free Jeremy reads, “I completely oppose #OpISIS and any attempts to co-opt our movement into supporting the government’s militaristic agenda.”
