http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/12/anonymous_vs_lulzsec_the_technology_snob_s_favorite_hacker_group.html
By Gabriella Coleman
Slate.com
Dec. 8 2014
This essay is adapted from Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many
Faces of Anonymous, by Gabriella Coleman, published by Verso. On the
evening of Thursday, Dec. 11, Coleman will be discussing her book with the
ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian at a free Future Tense happy hour event in
Washington, D.C. For more information and to RSVP, click here.
Here is a question without an easy answer: Who is Anonymous? I have spent
more than half a decade spending copious time with Anonymous on chat
rooms, during protests, and interviewing participants. Still this question
has no easy or at least straightforward answer. Various groups of hackers,
technologists, activists, geeks, and unknown parties use the name to
organize diverse genres of collective action. These have ranged from
humiliating hacks against security firms to technological support for
Occupiers or Arab revolutionaries. In some instances, a multitude
participates, as was the case with one of their most famous interventions:
Operation Payback from December 2010. Anonymous targeted the websites of
PayPal and MasterCard after they ceased accepting donations for WikiLeaks.
Anonymous has also involved smaller and more exclusive hacker groups such
as LulzSec and Antisec. LulzSec—a crew of renegade hackers who broke away
from Anonymous—engaged in a startling 50-day catalytic run that began in
early May 2011 and abruptly ended in mid-June, soon after one of their
own, Sabu, was apprehended and flipped in less than 24 hours by the FBI.
Among LulzSec’s targets were Sony Music Japan, Sony Pictures, Sony BMG
(Netherlands and Belgium), PBS, the Arizona Department of Public Safety,
the U.S. Senate, the U.K. Serious Organized Crime Agency, Bethesda
Softworks, AOL, and AT&T. Despite the avalanche of activity—and numerous
intrusions—LulzSec, when compared with Anonymous, was more manageable and
contained, at least from an organizational perspective. Its members also
hacked with impunity, finally making good on the 2007 Fox News claim that
Anonymous was comprised of “hackers on steroids.”
Even the haughtiest of security hackers—those technologists whose skills
are channeled toward fortifying computer security—who had earlier snubbed
Anonymous cheered on LulzSec. Old-school black hats lived vicariously
through LulzSec, in awe of its swagger, its fuck-you-anything-goes
attitude, and its bottomless appetite for exposing the pathetic state of
Internet security. One Anon Anon (as members of Anonymous call
themselves), also once active in the black-hat scene, put it this way in
an interview with me: “LulzSec seemed to have a sort of fully formed
mythos straight out of the gate while other hacker groups like Cult of the
Dead Cow took decades to achieve that.”
[...]
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