My Brief Experience with Anonymous and Why I Cringe when People Bring Them Up.

As a disclaimer, the title is slightly misleading; I do not cringe when anonymous is brought up but when people start to uphold ideals of anonymous by treating it as a independent and single entity. Basically I cringe when someone says something like the following: "Anonymous fights for our right to privacy." As well, if you already know what anonymous is then skip to the part bolded as "Chapter 1".

Definitions for the purposes of this post:
Doxing: (verb) the act of releasing private information about someone such as their name, where they live, or anything else the victim did not give them permission to release.
DDoSing: (verb) To deny communications of service through distributed means, AKA preventing a website communicate with its customer.
Defacing: (verb) to change the information given on a website without explicit permission.
Malware: (noun) A piece of code that gives the programmer certain remote privileges over the infected computer
Botnet: (noun) A group of computers infected with the same malware being used as a single entity by the programmer
IRC: (noun) Internet Relay Chat, basically a chat room
TOR: (noun) The Onion Router, a routing method developed by US government agencies to allow their combatants to route information anonymously, even through territories that would block certain destinations.
Skript Kiddie: (noun) someone with little to no experience with coding using either precompiled, or prewritten, exploits to gain access/privilege within a system (i.e. hacking).

So how to start this off, I mean, I am assuming you know what anonymous is. For those who don't know what anonymous is an ideology whereby the identities of those who uphold it are kept secure. They stand for a little more than that but otherwise they are essentially no more of a real thing then say a political party. So for a better explanation, people who support anonymous tend to do so by either raising awareness for their message, supplying information to the massive group, or by downloading their malware and allowing themselves to be a vector for illegal activities. To add to how anonymous works, they started out on 4chan making memes and trolling threads as "anonymous" which eventually lead to the creation of their identity.

Chapter 1
So now that anonymous is introduced to you, here is how I was introduced to them. During my teens and preteens I had gotten a used laptop with next to no life left in its battery and vista as its operating system. This was essentially the first computer I had ever gotten used to using and ever actually learned. At first what I did was played internet flash games, which were kind of lame. Then I started learning about how to use cheat engine to manipulate the games and even make modifications to the game (with a little coding required) which at this time (2009) started leading me deeper and deeper into the mystical land of the internet. Probably early 2010 I was introduced to the concept of IRC and at first I thought it was really cool. It was around the same time that I had started getting into Minecraft which basically lead to me getting more into programming than I already had been. Anyways I started getting extremely intrigued by IRC channels and how they worked so I would usually start joining more and more (and even built an IRC bot at one point) This kept me moving to some crazier IRC channels which ultimately lead to TOR and consequently TOR IRC. Now most of the IRC channels that go through TOR are filled with either some really fascinating conspiracy theories, though many false, or else people on some strange quest to find the red rooms (I didn't know what those were at that time) so I typically didn't do much about it. One of the IRC channels that I joined was different though. It, like the many others, was filled with conspiracy theories but it had more logic put behind it. That being said it also tended to being filled with insults and absolute garbage like the rest but it still had more going for it than most. This is when I had stumbled onto one of the [many] 'Anonymous' IRC channels. Now this IRC also stood out to the rest that used privacy routing methods in that it held active moderators and if things got too out of hand then people would get kicked, very similar to that of regular IRC channels. By this point in my life I had known what anonymous was, or I thought I had, but it never truly occurred to me that anonymous was mostly a mask, a umbrella, for people to hide under whenever they felt that the government was going to fight back against them. This showed me the true face to the mask that almost everyone knows.

What more occurred to me was that not everyone within this niche community actually held the public,or private, values of the group and as such there was almost always conflict. After a couple weeks (if that) of the IRC being up it had disappeared but me knowing where to look to find its predecessor I was able to find and view a new part of the community, the smart ones. Now me calling these guys the smart ones isn't calling the rest stupid, its just, these were the ones with the technical knowhow and the ones who have done probably the most illegal of things. Now at this point these members were attempting to convince people to download a 'support' package in order to show people support for that members cause. Funny enough, the botnet used was a custom derivation of the Zeus Botnet which just goes to show that they weren't much better than simple script kiddies. It was around this time that I got a new computer and during this process of moving t a new computer I decided to download their 'support package' and run it after disabling all wifi (including removing the internal wifi card) and what came to be was actually quite interesting. Since it was in a essentially controlled environment I was able to watch it work which lead me to realize the bot was actually recording all keystrokes in a file and attempting to send the data contained back through tor to a specific address. It also kept tabs on what I was doing, or attempting to do, on that computer and this lead to me having a even greater level of distrust for people who claim to be affiliated with the group. As time went on I started to pick and chose which ideals I would share with them (by sharing a video that they posted) before I finally cut any ties I had with the group. If I were to be able to rate the group on yelp I would give them a 3 out of 10. The 3 comes from the conflict located in the IRC is quite entertaining but is quite overshadowed by the fact that there is no unity, nor is there any sense of responsibility from people within the group. Statements by public figureheads of the anonymous group state that the goal of the group is to fight the government for our rights yet in doing so they have every person in their cross hairs and they take on complete moral ambiguity to the people that they bring harm to in their crossfire.

Now onto the second part of the title. Many people that I myself am affiliated with are not, nor have, any connection to anonymous but will talk about the ideals of the group as a whole and talk as if it were unified. As I stated in the disclaimer, the group is in many ways like a political party, it has a public figure head and the public views it to be doing/fighting for a specific goal but that doesn't mean every member of that political party agrees on those values, some even flat out disagree. For instance, do you think every single republican flat out agrees that a wall needs to be built on the American-Mexican border? I highly doubt it. Now this makes me cringe because the political party only works as long as you limit your scope to that of the public portion of the group anonymous, and even then it breaks down. Instead the group is more like a group of kindergarten children put into a entire school and told that there are no rules; sure some will be fine but how long will it take until someone opens up a thing of paint and decides to paint everything, or worse. The group has no internal support for its own directives and will quite often have member doxing another member and even getting them arrested by making an "anonymous" tip to the FBI. Now if you are going to argue against me stating that there is internal support or that members would never dox each other, just remember that when they share the IRC address they usually also share links to popular VPN's, proxies, and how to configure a VPN/Proxy to work with TOR. They also tend to warn, or at least did, people that joining such channels you put yourself at risk and should make the most security conscious choices you can. So why do I cringe, because people will argue that anonymous is good, or bad, and it is like justifying that all Christians, or atheists, or males, or white people, or trans people are good or bad. In other words you can't vaguely describe an entire group following an ideology with a single adjective or noun. The group has some people who should probably be in jail, it also has some really nice people. So if you are thinking of doing a march with Anonymous for something then go ahead and do it, just make sure you are marching for your reasons and not theirs.

Final Notes
I was really vague on how things actually happened for a couple of reasons, the first being simply that it happened 7+ years ago and the second being that most of what happened was trolling in the IRC channels and as such spending the time to write out a paragraph of the different ways people trolled each other would be interesting to read but completely useless for the topic at hand. So I do not dislike nor do I like anonymous and what it stands for (the umbrella of being able to hide under it) but the point of this is to not judge someone based upon their affiliation. Just because someone affiliates themselves with the group doesn't mean they are fighting for your freedom, nor does it mean that they know how to gain access to your computer if you were to hand it to them, it just means that they found some aspect of the group to be appealing and in doing so found a community that they can grow in.

Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Brodie