The iconic mask of the Anonymous 4chan /b/tard and offshoots movement, fashionable for Yale law students to blog about now deciding they are "passionate people bringing about change"; even Forbes buys the line with a mild caveat.
The Alphaville Herald spent years covering the virtual worlds of the Sims Online (now-closed) and Second Life (still struggling ), among several others like Metaplace, now defunct. Bored with these conflict ridden and ultimately artificial societies, and having wrung just about every bit of faux-news to be extracted from the banal and repetitive antics of griefers and hackers in these worlds, the editors are now turning to "real life" hactivism -- as if this is any less virtual than the virtual worlds. Peter Ludlow, founder of the Herald (Urizenus Sklar), who leaves and returns periodically, is back trying to get the reluctant script-kiddies who make up most of the anonymous readers and commenters on the Herald to get interested in larger political issues. I suspect readers will continue to drop off.
Meanwhile, Uri and his alts and subordinates continue to ring the same ethics-free, maliciously-gleeful chimes they have rung for nearly a decade on the evergreen subterfuge, long-ago perfected as an art form by Eddie Haskell in "Leave it to Beaver," of claiming that an obvious wrong is legitimate when it isn't, and distracting from that illegality with smoke and mirrors.
Today we're treated to a long editorial that is the usual cheerleading for hacking of the RIAA and other founts of evil and treated to the spectacle of a typical 4chan harassment of a lawyer defending copyright.
Leaving the rights and wrongs of the RIAA, aside, asking 4chan to do your justice crusade for you is kinda like asking the mafia to keep your streets clean and your neighbourhood safe. Sure, they may do that, but along the way there will be shoot-outs in strange, darkly-curtained restaurants and bodies floating in the river and that monthly protection fee you have to pay to keep your shop opened. It's like that.
A popular immoral notion shared by ethics-free hackers and their more criminalized and radical channer friends is that if someone has left data available to be stolen or hacked or simply exposed (due to carelessness), then it's the fault of the owner/manager of the data, not the hactivists when it gets outed. This Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning is then replicated by the media and various electronic rights outfits, and becomes a meme of its own -- that the scorn we should feel when data is revealed is not for the hacker, but for the person unable to keep the data secret against assault by the hactivists. It's like being on the wrong side of the date-rape concept.
So it's as if a thief steals my TV, I'm to blame if I left my door open or didn't have a strong enough lock; furthermore, the thief gets to out my e-mail correspondence on the Internet, send fake pizza deliveries and SWAT teams to my home and pillory me on Encyclopedia Dramatica if I call the police and complain.
A group that is supposed to be "protecting our rights" itself undermines the rule of law by picking up this theme, quickly setting aside the problem of the criminality of the 4chan attack, absolving them of all sins and saying the real focus should be on copyright protectors:
While reports have concentrated on the “attack” by 4Chan users that brought their webserver down, the more important questions are:
(a) Why did ACS:Law host email files and sensitive information in a place that could easily be exposed to the public?
(b) Is it legal and permissible to collect and process such information from torrents without permission or knowledge? As we have reported, the EU Data protection authorities think the answer is probably ‘no’. Now the world can see why.
Of course, the obvious piece missing to this one-sided story is how the ACS firm could even come up with a list of targets for their warning letters: they were in the torrents, duh. Funny how the channers don't find anything wrong with the platform-providers or Pirate Bay itself in the first instance leaking people's IDs, but only come down on a copyright lawyer like a ton of bricks when he benefits from this fact to defend his clients. Rupert Murdoch is to blame , they say, for turning over lists of people using Sky who have illegally downloaded media. So, um, Pirate Bay's devs don't keep tracking of any IPs either, *cough*? So the answer is for all Internet uses to use proxies or circumventions as the default, even if they are commiting what *even 4chan* might concede is a crime, like puppy-killing?
So basically "Open Rights" (closed society) is telling us that no one dare ever collect information about you on the Internet, especially while you are committing a crime, or you will infringe EU data protection laws. Um, ok, so...why is it ok for 4chan to grab everybody's data and expose it then?! It wouldn't have been exposed if 4chan hadn't made its assault. Truly concerned and ethical activists could have first tried private correspondence or calling the authorities. Could we circle back to the *facts of the case* please?! Before Rebecca McKinnon comes along any minute to tell us that we need to seek "balance" in these matters...
In this case, the lawyer was sending warning letters to people like pensioners exchanging adult movies or married men downloading gay porn, and now their identities are exposed, causing them embarrassment or even worse things like job loss or divorse. That's unethical -- and yet these "victims of copyright aggression" are the people the Anonymous fucktards claim they are defending from evil RIAA. Look at how they treat them -- collateral damage in a war.
Like the hapless civilians of Afghanistan that Assaunge and Wikileaks were willing to expose, the cynical and arrogant 4chan gang shows its hand truly when they're just as willing to destroy the supposed beneficiaries of their struggle as their targets. It's like the Wrong Hands scandal in Second Life, where the b/tard offshoots in Woodbury University targeted by the JLU, a vigilante group that harassed them by scraping their data, and then wound up dumping a boat load of data collected by the JLU, mainly about their fellow griefers, for everyone to paw over.
It might well be that Andrew Crossley is unethical, I have no idea, because we can't learn the facts of the case certainly from the unethical channers, nor the lap-dog media or the griefer-cheer-leading blogs like Alphaville.
Gloats the anonymous "PaleFire" (a Nabokov reference which is probably a Uri alt)
One blogger cheerfully announces “In a massive triumph for freedom of the Internet a British law firm (ACS: Law) that specialises in anti-piracy cases has been exposed by Internet activists for what it is: a heartless, soulless, money-grubbing conglomeration of complete bastards, who have no respect for human rights, or even humans.”
and then concludes that justice was served and "all's well that ends well."
But wait. Wasn't it wrong to expose all those people in the course of this active measure?
That question seems to be trumped by the emphasis that it was wrong in the first place to threaten a lot of council-flat dwellers with 500 pound fines for downloading files illegally. We'll leave aside the claims that "innocents" were targeted, because we can't be sure if there were industrial-strength file-sharers. The lawyer did this likely because he couldn't get at the larger targets of the platforms that make them available in the first place. So it's a war of attrition. The real culprits are the platform owners like Google, owner of YouTube. Even so, I fail to see why we need countenance the criminality of Pirate Bay for a minute.
A key feature of the 4chan temporary successes in the world of hacking is to make people feel as if they are unstoppable, inevitable -- even normal, reasonable, etc. So to that extent, when somebody like Cross says they only put temporary dents in the copyright protection machine by slowing him down as long as he might wait in line for a latte, they'll be relentless.
So far, the b-tards have successfully hijacked the real point -- now Privacy International is indignantly launching a suit against ACS for privacy invasion -- although um, remember, it's the 4channers that exposed the data, not ACS. PI can't get at "anonymous" however; they will get at a richer and fatter target capable of paying the half a billion (!) pound fine.
Ultimately, however, they cannot go harassing this man and collaterally damaging his alleged victims without further crossing into crimes no one is going to be Haskelled about, and with so many of the little script kiddies all over, risking that one of their number will get exposed accidently through his own stupidity, or be blown in by another one of his disloyal buddies.
That's what happens all the time in these 4chan capers, and it's a pattern you can count on. So you have to keep documenting, exposing and going to the law yourself, and ultimately you will prevail.
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