The Collective

Anonymous: The New Digital Threat

Everyone always said that hackers were the biggest threat to the digital community, and the information age. Anonymous, not righteously a hacker community, but a network of teenagers, in the angst stage of life, following almost mindlessly, invisible digital leadership. The digital leadership poses the question, "Are these digital terrorist?" Yes and no. In actuality the collective body of anonymous speculatively consists of individuals between the age groups of 15-28, the prime young-adult age group, also the age group in which mental development is more dictated by environment and peers, in this case the internet. Now only by speculation to I point out that they have leadership. Facts and observations that reinforce this theory are the multitude of webpages that give out instructions, rather than collaboration as a collective whole. If viewed really closely by any observer the collective body of Anonymous follows the same patterns as gang culture. Like the Crips and Bloods, Anonymous has no "true leadership" only a few elite that give out information and instructions for the disciples to follow. In gang culture most of us know that they operate in the form of cells. Anonymous functions in the same fashion, which gives good rise to believe there is some decentralized leadership in the group. This phenomena results in a collective group of individuals lead through an aristocratic decentralized group of individuals, that cannot be neither seen, or heard. They communicate their plans and ideas through the digital battleground, the same way World War II propaganda was distributed through posters, radio, and other forms of advertisements and media during the war effort. The collective whole (even Captain America and the Avengers), were anti-Nazism, or anti-Hitler, they called for change in favor of the government but the collective followed the propaganda.
Once recruited the orders the anonymous members receive trickle down from the top. They are posted by various leaders and individuals from forum to forum until it reaches the members, in a trickle down affect the mafia has been using for years. (The "Don" or "Godfather" expressed his orders to his consiglieres who would then give the orders to individuals below them, until the order was given to it's intended recipient who would execute this order). This creates what some have referred to as, the social botnet. A group of individuals who take orders or commands from a higher power that they never see, hear from, or witness in anyway except for some text on a computer monitor. This is very much the same way a botnet receives configuration updates, additions to autonomy, commands to spam, etc. The scary fact of the matter is the intended individuals who are receiving these orders generally follow them without question or regards to the law, ethics, or morality; as the anonymous quotes state: "We are merciless" and "None of us is as cruel as all of us". The social botnet is a real problem because like the Storm botnet or the Srizbi botnet, they are only used for the intent of the owners. The botmasters of Anonymous have enemies. They infiltrate a multitude of infrastructures in the world, and are able to act as a fully autonomous "malicious system" without constraints due to "hardware or software". One instance of this was in the case of Anonymous vs Goddessmine. There was a "collective" expression of discord towards Goddessmine. An all out internet war broke out between the two. Goddessmine being a young Art college student, was no chance against the collective whole of Anonymous who's technologically informed leadership, had the ability to not only ruin this girl digitally, but were able to obtain highly sensitive and personal documents. One member stated "/b/I live in [the town where this girl lives], what would you wish me to do?" which is similar to the Storm bot responding to the next computer with "query?" to receive commands from the botmaster. This model is dangerous, truly dangerous, anonymous as a group can destroy any individual in the same manner the Srizbi botnet can take down nearly any computer network in the world. Anonymous reminds me personally of Agent Smith, a virus almost. They spread rapidly and swarm their targets until they are destroyed. This is a very scary thought because anyone out there could be a target if they were to piss off Anonymous. As a researcher I find this disturbing because from the historic stand point, the only difference though is when Anonymous, these kids, do something really bad, a lot of people are going to prison.