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who are anonymous?"Hello World. We are Anonymous. What you do or do not know about us is irrelevant. We have decided to write to you, the media, and all citizens of the free world at large to inform you of the message, our intentions, potential targets, and our ongoing peaceful campaign for freedom."

So begins a recent manifesto sent to various blogs and news sources by Anonymous, talking about their support for Wikileaks. Who are these people?

Who Are Anonymous?

A loosely-organized collective of people currently seeking to assist the spread of Wikileaks' information by harassing the websites of those who refuse to cooperate with them, like Paypal, Visa and Amazon, and by spreading the Wikileaks documents themselves.

They are loosely affiliated with 4chan and other smaller "chan" boards (like 7chan, 2chan and 711chan) due to these sites' anonymous posting feature, which allows them to plan attacks without revelealing any identifying information. Chris Poole, who founded and runs 4chan, has not publicly endorsed Anonymous per se, but he seems to encourage them. Anon does not take orders from him.

They are not a group with defined leaders. Being "Anonymous" is much more a quality or a self-definition than a membership. Each project under the Anonymous banner may have a whole different set of instigators. Leadership, when it exists, is informal and carried out in chat channels, forums, IM and public calls to action online. No one's meeting in a board room.


Why are Anonymous all over the news right now?

The activities of Anonymous used to be limited to 4chan, which deletes everything posted to its boards every few hours. Then came Encyclopedia Dramatica, a NSFW wiki site that recorded a lot of the memes, language and activity that happen on 4chan and thus crystallized them. They provided destination pages for people wondering what Project Chanology was all about, for instance.

The more mainstream-friendly Know Your Meme joined in, using fewer in-jokes and more balanced language to describe 4chan and Anon, and this year we've covered Anonymous plenty at Urlesque.

Then, Reddit, especially its 4chan subforum began to spread these ideas beyond 4chan. Bloggers and mainstream news sites often pick up information once it gets posted to Reddit. For example, this Reddit thread is how I found out about Anonymous's raid on Hot Topic. Reddit users are able to spread these memes so much more widely because working journalists can know easily browse Reddit for the latest developments on 4chan rather than slogging through threads of nonsense and garbage on 4chan itself.

This is why you see tons of news stories about Anonymous now, whereas a few years ago only a few niche blogs covered the site. Senior editor Nick Douglas was one of the first journalists to discuss Anonymous when he wrote about their Scientology raids for Gawker back in early 2008.


Whom have Anonymous targeted in the past?

Habbo Hotel
4chan users banded together under the moniker in order to harass the users of Habbo Hotel, a cartoonish social network. As early as 2006, Anonymous would "raid" Habbo, spewing racism and blocking its usual users from moving around. Then when all their black cartoon avatars got banned, they'd call Habbo racist. This was all done "for the lulz," or just for fun. At this point, Anonymous's actions had not taken on a political bent. Some members of Anon would argue it was better that way.

Hal Turner
Anonymous targeted this white supremacist with a talk radio show in December 2006. They overloaded his website, bringing it down. Some Anons seem to have a distaste for actual racism, though they express it frequently in jest. But of course you can never tell if it's the same people. "Anon is legion," they like to say.

Chris Forcand
Anonymous helped catch an internet child predator by reporting information to the police in 2007. By this time, Anonymous began to see themselves as a group of internet vigilantes fighting for assorted noble causes, rather than a band of merry pranksters.

The Church of Scientology
With these raids, Anonymous exploded into popular culture. They took to the streets, protesting outside of Scientologist churches wearing "V-masks," the disguise used by Alan Moore's vigilante comic book hero, V, originally inspired by would-be British terrorist and folk hero Guy Fawkes. When the Church tried to get embarrassing footage of Scientologist celeb Tom Cruise taken down from YouTube, Anonymous formed a splinter group called Project Chanology that dedicated itself to stopping censorship and harassing the exploitative church.


More Assorted Trolling
Anonymous has since trolled the Epilepsy Foundation of America, uploading seizure-inducing content to its forums. They also targeted the kid who started The No-Cussing Club, for obvious reasons. They regularly flood YouTube with pornography on designated raids. These sorts of things harken back to the pre-Project Chanology days of Anonymous when it was all about pissing people off for the lulz.

But Anonymous has steadily grown more politically charged. They fought against internet censorship in Australia early this year, and more recently they launched Operation Payback, an effort to punish companies and individuals attempting to fight internet piracy. The current attacks related to Wikileaks are performed under the same banner.



What do Anonymous want now?

This is a tough question to answer because Anonymous is such a varied group. Because they aren't identifiable, any joker with an internet connection can claim to be leading the charge against something in the name of Anonymous. I can't stress this enough. Anonymous is not an elite band of hacker ninjas and they're barely organized. There's a ton of infighting and a lot of misinformation about the group floating around forums. Most of them (but definitely not all of them) are likely bored teenagers who feel like they're dispensing vigilante justice.

Ultimately most members of Anonymous seek to fight internet censorship. They generally can't do much other than harass, but their ability to spread awareness through word of mouth as well as press coverage is much more powerful than their occasional DDoS attacks.

From their manifesto:
The Internet is the last bastion of freedom in this evolving technical world. The Internet is capable of connecting us all. When we are connected we are strong. When we are strong we have power. When we have power we are able to do the impossible.

What are Anonymous's tools?

Word of Mouth
Anonymous spreads its message through a bunch of 1-page Photoshopped posters like this one attacking Tumblr and this one attacking Know Your Meme, as well as chatting and posting in forums.

Misinformation
When Anonymous attacked Hot Topic for stealing their memes, they promoted a fake racist version of a popular meme in a failed attempt to convince them to pull the shirt off shelves. One poster for Operation Payback encourages people to lie about Anon's takedown of Mastercard.com, pretending customer data was compromised, so scared technophobic "normals" will close their accounts and thus punish Mastercard. These tactics aren't universal among Anon, but they could spread whether or not the "leadership" wants them to.

LOIC
The Low Orbit Ion Canon, as it is affectionately called, was described this week in an excellent Gizmodo post:
LOIC basically turns your computer's network connection into a firehose of garbage requests, directed towards a target web server. On its own, one computer rarely generates enough TCP, UDP, or HTTP requests at once to overwhelm a web server-garbage requests can easily ignored while legit requests for web pages are responded to as normal.

But when thousands of users run LOIC at once, the wave of requests become overwhelming, often shutting a web server (or one of its connected machines, like a database server) down completely, or preventing legitimate requests from being answered.


Can Anonymous accomplish anything?

I'm personally doubtful. They've brought down some very small targets in the past, but going up against a huge company like PayPal, or even Visa? They might be able to annoy them with a few hours of downtime, but little more.

Still, they play an important role in the global discussion of internet censorship. The recent press coverage they've managed to garner will help spread awareness about censorship concerns, but that's about it. [I disagree! They'll get more sophisticated as they grow. Wanna bet? – Ed.]