ANON OPS: A Press Relse

Who is Anonymous?In their most recent public statement, Wikis is the only group of people to identify Anonymouscorrectly. Anonymous is not a group, but rather an Internet gathering.Both Anonymous and the media that is covering it are aware of the percieved dissent betweenindividuals in the gathering. This does not, however, mn that the command structure ofAnonymous is failing for a simple rson: Anonymous has a very loose and decentralized commandstructure that operates on ids rather than directives.We do not believe that a similar movement exists in the world today and as such we have to lrnby trial and error. We are now in the process of better communiing some core values to theindividual atoms that comprise Anonymous - we also want to take this opportunity to communi message to the media, so that the average Internet Citizen can get to know who we are and whatwe represent.Anonymous is not a group of s. We are average Interent Citizens ourselves and ourmotivation is a collective sense of being fed up with all the minor and major injustices we witnessevery day.We do not want to stl your personal information or credit card s. We also do not seek toattack critical infrastructure of companies such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal or Amazon. Our currentgoal is to raise awareness about Wikis and the underhanded methods employed by the abovecompanies to impair Wikis' ability to function.
What is Operation: PaybackAs stated above, the point of Operation: Payback was never to target critical infrastructure of any ofthe companies or organizations affected. Rather than doing that, we focused on their corporatewebsites, which is to say, their online "public face". It is a symbolic action - as blogger andacademic Evy Morozov put it, a legitimate expression of dissent.The background to the attacks on PayPal and the calls to attack Amazon.comAmazon, which was until recently Wikis' DNS provider, was one of the first companies to dropsupport for Wikis. On December 9th, BusinessInsider.com reported that Amazon.co.uk werehosting the recently diplomatic cables in e-book form. (Amazon.co.uk has since csedselling the bundle of the diplomatic cables.)After this piece of news circulated, parts of Anonymous on Twitter asked for Amazon.com to betargetted. The attack never occured.
While it is indeed possible that Anonymous may not have been able to take Amazon.com down in aDDoS attack, this is not the only rson the attack never occured. After the attack was so advertisedin the media, we felt that it would affect people such as consumers in a negative way and makethem feel thrtened by Anonymous. Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people arebuying presents for their loved ones, would be in bad taste.The continuing attacks on PayPal are alrdy tested and preferable: while not damaging their abilityto process payments, they are successful in slowing their network down just enough for people tonotice and thus, we achieve our goal of raising awareness.
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