Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011, shortly after Anonymous leaked HBGary Federal’s emails in February 2011, and its present-tense account reflects that moment. ETA is described as still active; it announced the end of its armed campaign in October 2011 and dissolved in 2018.
We have all heard of this hacker “organization” that calls itself Anonymous, capable of carrying out attacks on the big servers of internet companies. I imagine that for governments, Anonymous is the villain, the cyberterrorist.
And yet, almost without realizing it, we are coming to need the internet more and more. Every company and every person has to be present online, and above all on social networks, so it doesn’t take much thought to see that someone has, wants or needs to control it.
We already talked in a previous article about what lies behind the Facebook network. That article is based on several real investigations and on facts that are, for the most part, fully verified. Even so, to the average internet user it may sound like a conspiracy theory.
Today Anonymous is giving us another warning, this time about software designed to manipulate the internet, involving HBGary, IBM and the US Air Force. Most people will see the news but won’t give it much importance.
Facebook sells our information for an experiment in the mass manipulation of human beings, while IBM and HBGary, in collaboration with the US government, are developing software to influence, infiltrate and change the course of certain uprisings or revolutions organized over the internet. All this is happening while users keep uploading their photos and freely using social networks and their connections, believing they are completely anonymous online. Nothing could be further from the truth.
One day they will manage to manipulate us through the internet and social networks. It will probably be a kind of consented “dictatorship”, even an oppression 2.0. And as in any oppressive regime, a resistance will be needed. Right now that resistance is Anonymous, able to see, uncover and expose what ordinary users cannot perceive.
So far, apart from the odd prank, Anonymous has looked after the interests of internet users and has attacked those who tried to impose any kind of censorship, so for now they are not the villains.
That said, every war needs a resistance fighting for certain interests (and make no mistake, a war for control of the internet is being fought right now), although at times that resistance can stop fighting for its ideals.
In its early days the IRA, let’s say, were not the bad guys in Ireland, until they began taking the lives of women and children. ETA originally emerged to bring down the Franco regime, and today nobody knows what they are fighting for, and certainly nobody understands why they kill innocent people.
As long as Anonymous doesn’t lose those ideals, I’m sure that in a future closer than you might imagine we will need them, and let’s hope they are there. What is happening on the internet today is as plain as day.
Featured image: Tony Webster, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
