Who is Anonymous?

by aestetix

In light of the recent BART subway protests in San Francisco, a lot of people have been asking this question.

We keep hearing phrases in the media such as "Anonymous hacks into large corporation," and I suspect people's natural reaction is to assume it means a bunch of angry teenagers trying to "smash the system."  But I think that reaction may change on deeper examination.

Traditionally, Western culture has lived in a philosophy of dualism: good and evil, attack and defense, with us or with the terrorists, etc.

This can extend into notions of threat models, where we have not only the type of action that is an attack, but the level of harm it causes, or how "at risk" we are to it.  For example, a web server that returns the server name and version in the HTTP headers may pose a low risk level, while a server using a faulty security certificate could create much higher risk.  Most security models I have seen are constructed this way.  I think those models are fundamentally flawed and have helped lead to a paranoia which completely misunderstands Anonymous.

These models are flawed because they assume meaning for an action or tool, and often lack additional context.

For example, let's say I push someone and make them fall over.  That seems like a pretty negative action until I add in the fact that they were in the street and I saved them from being hit by a car.  Now we've seen the same action from two different perspectives, operating on different information, leading to remarkably different conclusions about whether it was "good" or "bad."  The problem with having threat models is that they can fall into a paradigm where "good behaviors" are patterns reflecting what is typically seen inside the known social system, and "bad behavior" is the strange and unknown.  While there are genuine cases of "good guys" and "bad guys," I don't think Anonymous falls into this at all.

Anonymous is a concept which exists in memetics, or ideas which spread around.  It is a result of imagination, free speech, and creativity, and while it may assume structure in some forms (such as mobilizing groups for protests), it is more a set of ideas by which groups of people have agreed to abide.  In other words, someone effectively wrote down a list of guidelines that seemed to work, and others read them and acted based on them.  You could compare it, in a sense, to someone who picks up a copy of the U.S. Constitution and forms their own government based on their interpretation of the words of our Founding Fathers.

So here's where the problem comes: in a classic warfare, not only is there a clear enemy (the bad guy), but the way to knock out that enemy is to find the ringleader and remove them.  For social structures in the (((Ed Bernays))) sense, you have key social leaders and the people who follow them.  Just like how in the middle ages the king would give orders and his subjects would follow them, we have a structured society where there are set leaders, and we're supposed to follow them.  In many ways, this is useful.  If I were in court, I would rather have my case handled by experienced lawyers, and if I'm in the hospital, I want medical professionals to be around.  However, the more levels of hierarchy there are, the more difficult it is to actually do anything.

Two key things happen in a social structure with lots of visible hierarchy: people at the bottom often have no power because their actions are determined and guarded by people higher up than them and they very rarely have a say in how their group acts; and people at the top have no power, because every action is watched closely, and every word they say is assumed to reflect the needs and desires of the entire group.  While in theory, you could get a strong leader who can take the blame and keep doing things following either the mission of the group or the inferred desires of the people in it, most often you get layers of anger and grumbling by people who increasingly feel their needs are not being met.  And this leads to phenomena like Anonymous.

Anonymous, inherently, is non-hierarchical.  Rather than following a person, they follow an idea.

The idea becomes the top level of the hierarchy, and the people involved become the bottom level.  When an idea comes along that they like, people will join together and act on it.  Sometimes there are seemingly negative actions, such as DDoSing.  Sometimes there are seemingly positive actions, such as having peaceful protests that call attention to progressive change.  If a group can create both positive and negative actions, then how can the group as a whole be either positive or negative?  And that's where the dilemma of the dualism lies.

Because we have a culture where there are good guys and bad guys, we demand that those labels be used, and that people be lumped into either one or the other, preferably those who agree with us and those who don't.  The problem is that when we do that without understanding why it doesn't actually work that way, we unfairly prosecute people who were doing the "right" thing, and wind up having to deal with people who have been mislabeled.  This is utterly plaguing our political culture right now, and it will continue to do so until we realize you can't really destroy an idea unless you consider it.  The problem is, once you open your mind and consider it, you may no longer disagree with it.

And that is the bottom line which creates and perpetuates both the fear and the paranoia: a sense that we might just be wrong.

When you only ascribe as "good" things with which you agree, you leave no place for learning from your mistakes.  Thus, when we discover we have made mistakes, rather than being honest, meeting sympathetic eyes, and moving on, we must run and hide, begging forgiveness, or morph the mistakes into shell statements of what they actually were, devoid of any meaning, and shedding any potential lesson we could have learned.  With this pattern, we learn to brush the things we don't understand under the table, hoping they will go away and leave us alone.

This is the current state of our information security world, and security theater in general.  If more people stop to consider it, then perhaps we can make the world a better place.