Leaders of the Hacktivists

Anonymous is a group who has become well known of the past few tears for their incredible, and almost scary ability to hack into anything they want. They have done everything from vandalize personal websites that they don’t agree with, to hacking into top secret government databases and websites.

There are members all around the world, many who have never even spoken to another Anonymous member, which is why it has been so hard to track everything that they have done over the years. There have been some arrested, most of which have been young people, but have ranged from the ages of 15-52. They have the signature Guy Fawkes mask, which is used to distinguish them, and use for their icon. Unfortunately, Anonymous has different sectors to them, so not all of what they have done has been good. The group has no higher ups or leaders. There is one man who investigators thought was a leader, codenamed commander X,  who is the founder of one of anonymous’ many subgroups, but when interviewed he just claimed to be a peon in the bigger picture of things. If you want to be a part of anonymous, all you really have to do is show your legions to them, and contribute something to them.

Despite their obvious kinks, anonymous  is a good thing to have in the world. They have many goals which they want to achieve over time, and one of them is to improve the internets’ security and peoples awareness of the security issue.

They have been working to help spread the awareness of these issues, and part of it has even been recruited by the government to help make their systems safer(and probably some other reasons they are not telling the public).

The group believes as a whole that the internet should be a free place for people to do what they want, and should not be constricted by the government in any way. Ever since the creation of the internet, governments have been trying to censor it out in any way they can, and America decided to follow this trend with the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and the PIPA( a very similar bill), which anonymous did not agree with.

The most notable of their works is when the government took down the popular information sharing website called megaupload. They believed that the people should have the right to share what they want to share, so they took down many government websites in retaliation, including whitehouse.gov, FBI.gov, copyright.gov, BMI.gov, and WGM.gov. They were severe in this because they claimed that the government should have no control in taking down websites on the internet without the SOPA act even being passed yet.

In all,  Anonymous’ biggest goal is to protect these rights that we have to be creative and spread information to all. Most of those who have have this view on life are young people, most not even old enough to vote yet, and an the differences between the new generation and the last one have become so great due to new technologies and interests that it has become increasingly hard to give everybody what they want. When the rights of this new generation are at stake , though, the scale is usually tipped toward the belief of the older one, and this is why anonymous does what it does. They want to give a bigger the new generation a bigger voice, and fight for what is right.