I like the symbolism that Anon has become. Simply put Anon is the anger and frustration of millions (acted on by the few hundred) and is having real effects.
If Anon is taking down Mastercard and Visa, then perhaps our governments will start obeying their own laws instead of trying to manipulate companies into compliance. Or at the very least, our companies might actually question whether obeying the government is in their best interests.
> Simply put Anon is the anger and frustration of millions...
And the idiocy of millions, considering that one of their "bank" targets (PostFinance) isn't a bank. It is a money transfer service operated by the Swiss post office for Swiss residents only. Assange is not a Swiss resident, so they closed his account, and are returning his money to him.
> If Anon is taking down Mastercard and Visa, then perhaps our governments will start obeying their own laws instead of trying to manipulate companies into compliance. Or at the very least, our companies might actually question whether obeying the government is in their best interests.
Let's see--obey an anonymous group of DDOSers, who at most can cause you a short term outage until you add more capacity, or obey the government which has the full power of the state behind it and can actually stop your business and seize your assets...this one is a no brainer.
Yes, because the US government only managed to get 63% voter turnout would dare to seize the assets of credit card companies when it would be pissing off 80% of its voters. Given that the US has over 5 credit cards per capita, it's relatively safe to assume that the 80% of households with a credit card literally translates into 80% of voters have a credit card as in it would be an insta-lose at the next election to be "the party that knocked out credit cards for a month+"
Furthermore there are [3 (65% visa, 30% MC)] billion credit cards used outside of the US. If MC/Visa's assets were seized, the US would be under global shit for fucking up the global economy that it wouldn't even have to reach consumers in other countries before all hell broke loose.
What do you think the global repercussions of half the western world being unable to buy anything with credit for even a day?
Sorry, but it's a no brainer not to obey the government when they're making rice paper thin threats and to not even consult your legal department on the matter. Now they're dealing with genuine losses from their online payments being down for trying to brown nose the US government.
Yes, but instead of seizing MC/Visa's assets, the government can treat the companies unfairly in arbitrary antitrust lawsuits, not protect the companies from unjust foreign action, and pass regulations that limit the abilities of the companies to earn a profit. None of these would piss off 80% of voters, but could be significantly damaging to Mastercard and Visa.
His account was opened legally when he was in the country, but closed because he wasn't at that time a resident. This strikes me as a rather absurd policy on how to hold an account given that you'll have to be closing down temporary residents accounts and reopening them whenever they exit or enter the country.
A significant portion of Swiss residents spend only half of the year in Switzerland: they don't clear their postal accounts every month. ;) They close it when they realize you don't really live in Switzerland, even half-time.
The Post Office is actually a Government-owned company.
I keep saying that Swiss is a socialist country (the main assets are government-controlled, health and welfare are compulsive, minimum wage is astronomic) but no one believes me… and I'm the only Swiss around.
However, I don't think there was any US interference: Switzerland is a fiercely autonomous country (with a whiff of xeno…-scepticism). There most likely were sincere about discovering that he wasn't seriously considering to stay and discontinued service only for that: banking in Switzerland is like cooking in France — don't try to make sense of it, do as you are told, and admire in silence.
Wtf? Switzerland is more free market than the US. The people still hold most of the power, there aren't many mega corps that own everything. There are lots of "mom and pop" businesses around.
Switzerland is a wonderful coctail of free market capitalism and social responsibility toward it's citizens. Would you think it were more "capitalist" if there were a Walmart every thousand meters and all small businesses were dead?
You are confusing two distinct things: socialism is a type of capital accumulation (capitalism, therefore) that considers that essential assets of productions should be government owned, or controlled. Anti-trust is a classic, albeit minimal socialist law; it is also coherent with populism. Anti-trust is necessary as the last control in a free capitalist market, but is rather contradictory with private property being absolute. Other notable economic system around property include Saint-Marc doctrine (a man can steal to feed his family if its his last resort, that has been extended to land expropriation after peasant revolts), financial capitalism, or Rhine capitalism, where the means of production are family-owned, but social ties between owners offer a conventional control and can be used to enforce standards (like paternalism).
The last one is the system described in Karl Marx's The Capital It's also slightly incoherent with free market, because properties can't be exchanged freely: the community of owners have a say, albeit implicit. The best current example of that is Silicon Valley, where Arrington can sell TechCrunch to AOL, but still has to pull up a couple of stunts to prove his editorial independence; or where the value of your start-up is dependent on PG's impression of you being a nice guy. It's usually a very efficient system, especially with innovation, but it is quite “unfair”: winners are not always the absolute best (well, they tend to) but generally make orders of magnitude more money. It's acceptable in SV because most people have enough money to eat, and those who own redistribute it, but it wasn't so acceptable when the children of Rothshild's workers starved.
Free market, vs. planned economy are system that consider production. You can have a planed economy with private ownership (France in the 70s) or free market with very strong control over workers benefits, like Switzerland. Because large corporation have far more responsibility (thanks to heavy State controls on the job market) Switzerland indeed has a lot of SMEs.
I have no idea why you asked you last question: it goes well beyond the usual straw-man.
Those are not the same type of accounts: usually, tinpot dictators have “anonymous” accounts, where the local regulation is that you are not supposed to notice who owns it (but yet, you still recognize him as the owner).
A mob is just a group of people. If we are ever going to have a free, just, and rational society then by definition the mob is going to have to support freedom, justice, and rationality.
In the same way that the Encyclopedia Britannica gained fame by endorsing the cause of rationality, and in the same way that Wikipedia gained fame by endorsing the cause of free information, so too can anonymous gain fame as a mob that supports social justice. Anonymous has a lot of the characteristics of other populist uprisings, so I wouldn't be surprised if their (mostly) harmless civil disobedience today morphed into something more interesting in ten or twenty years. I'm not saying I support them, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
Totally independent of any issues regarding Wikileaks and DDoS attacks, I was reacting to Alex3917's statement:
A mob is just a group of people. If we are ever going to have a free, just, and rational society then by definition the mob is going to have to support freedom, justice, and rationality.
That's not true. 'Mobs', specifically, are unruly assemblages and more often irrational, unjust, and freedom-destroying. A mob doesn't have to be brought around to righteous thinking for society to function; it has to be dissolved, and stop acting like a mob. Ideally this is when its smartest members wake from an angry emotional trance and choose to become other kinds of 'groups of people' that work better for rational and just aims. But sometimes it's when adults say, enough is enough, and apply hard force against the mob.
Actual mobs sweep tyrants into power, either populist tyrants, or reactionary tyrants. The framers of the US Constitution understood this, at least.
Let's not fetishize the idea of mobs as any mass action in the name of some murky form of 'social justice'.
This is getting close to being a No True Scotsman type of situation. I'm reasonably sure that mobs were present during the French revolution, for instance.
Indeed it is approaching 'No True Scotsman' hair-splitting, and that's unfortunate, but shared definitions are important for discussion. My objection is to the watering-down of 'mob' to mean any 'group of people', including those who have the noblest aims. A 'mob' is not a 'movement', nor is it a 'rebellion' or 'revolution'.
It's angry people breaking rules and doing unfocused damage with the exercise of raw bulk power. That we can cherry-pick a few examples where similar action caused (or more likely, just correlated with) beneficial change shouldn't make 'mob' a positive-connotation term for the 'group of people' that via its 'support' determines whether society is 'free, just, and rational'.
We should prefer to rely on free speech, elections, courts, legislatures, voluntary assemblies, armies and even 'well-organized militias' over angry anonymous 'mobs'.
Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa chose to, in effect, attack Wikileaks by suddenly suspending their accounts. If they want to collaborate on an economic attack against an entity that hasn't broken any laws it's isn't surprising that they find themselves also attacked.
So let me get this right: if you're not with us you're against us, if you're not supporting them you're attacking them, "collaborators" the bunch of them.
Where have we heard all of these before?
Empty, vacuous rhetoric, that's all this situation has come down to. I'm tired of hearing about WikiLeaks because it's polarized and made everyone rhetoric-spewing, logic-hating extremists. Everyone involved, and sadly to say, particularly the pro-WikiLeaks crowd, has been making grandiose, pompous speeches as if it's their last day on Earth and they're the President from the movie Independence Day.
Stop. Just stop. Julian Assange is not the messiah and you are not delivering the the gospel truth of life, the universe, and everything. There is zero need for the amount of hyperbole, rhetoric, self-aggrandization, and more weasel words than I can shake a stick at.
Is this an important issue? No doubt, but polarizing speeches like yours aren't helping anyone. When you start using loaded words like "attack" and "collaborator" you've lost any semblance of credibility with moderates, and just come off as an extremist instead.
That's a lot of words and generalizations, but doesn't seem to explain why a corporation that chooses to aid in an unlawful attack should be pitied when they fall prey to an unlawful attack in retribution.
You seem to be of the opinion that suddenly suspending the account of an organization that hasn't broken the law is a neutral, harmless action.
Au contraire, moderates are far more valuable to an extremist than extremists. As an extremist, your job is to convince the moderates. You will not do this if you appear to extreme.
We're talking about 80% of the population here at least. It's pretty diverse. Perhaps some "moderates" may be folks who simply haven't heard the right argument. Yet we saturate the airwaves and internets with arguments every day, so while historically such people may have been more significant in number, I suspect their numbers have been steadily decreasing for some time. Most moderates are moderate for basically the same reason, that being that unless you are literally burning down their homes and starving their friends and families, they don't want to get involved. They might vote if they remember that day, although you can't count on them to figure out for whom, and they certainly have opinions, but they have better things to do than reason about them or articulate them to more than a superficial degree. They may occasionally get passionate about something but then they lose interest. In short, they have to be given a concrete, not an abstract, reason to care about anything.
Most people don't fly, so they don't care about the TSA.
Most people aren't Iraqis, so they don't care about Iraqi war dead.
Most people aren't Paypal, so they don't care about Anonymous.
Most people don't have much to say, so they don't care about the First Amendment. And they don't expect that anyone wants to search their home, so they don't pay too much attention to the Fourth, either.
And they're not rich, so they don't see how tax cuts for the rich are any of their concern.
I mean, we supposedly had this great national progressive moment in America not two years ago. Well, what happened? Would you say that the so-called leader of that progressive movement, Barack Obama, has spent too much time appeasing his base, and not enough time convincing moderates? (I'm not even sure what his base is anymore but let's pretend it's the left for the sake of argument.) His entire Presidency so far has been about trying to hog the center, while the Republicans spent the last two years nurturing the fears and hatreds of their most extreme and vocal supporters, while ceding as little ground as possible to the victors of 2008. So, who won?
So no, au contraire, I don't agree that the job of the extremist is to convince the moderates. His job is to basically leave them the hell alone, and outflank his opposition so as to relieve them of their hold on the status quo. Then, replace it with one of his own. The moderates will go along because they don't give a shit either way. In this case a good start would have been to get the Fairness Doctrine reinstated in the FCC by revoking the executive order of 1987, and hit the Right where it hurts. But now we're talking tactics.
Actually, I think a lot of people take a moderate view on things because they recognise that the world is rarely black or white, but rather a full spectrum of shades of grey.
Of course, in saying this, I have to acknowledge that some people hold moderate views out of laziness (it's not black and white). Of course, there is probably an equal proportion of lazy extremists.
Perhaps not, but it is certainly interesting to study. Its a mob where all the members are anonymous, that has no leaders and yet manages to coordinate fairly sophisticated digital attacks. I'd love to grab a sociologist or two and throw in the vague direction of 4chan.
Just out of curiosity, can you name a time when a Government has responded positively to this kind of attack? Where a protest has defied the law and the Government has reacted by giving the protesters what they want?
Because I can't. In every example I can think of the Government has doubled down on its crack down effort. I suspect we're only months away from a bunch of these people getting arrested for cyber-terrorism.
I suppose this sort of thing can be effective if the government crack down becomes so oppressive that the general public turns on them (See the Kent State Shooting). But that's a pretty destructive way to make your point.
I think you make a good point--the reaction to an attack is generally a stronger counterattack, not reconciliation--but there are certainly counterexamples.
Just wanted to point out that the reasons for the fall of the Berlin wall were TREMENDOUSLY more complicated than just protestors complaining about it. Comparing the fall of the Berlin wall to a DDoS attack on MasterCard feels like a slap in the face to history.
Most things are complicated. All I took from his reply was to say that protests have led to success in the past, and that the DDoS attacks are a form of protest (debatable).
I didn't see anything trying to belittle the fall of the Berlin wall. Drawing extreme conclusions like this reminds me of "Unamerican" arguments from a few years ago.
You make valid points but I don't think they support your conclusion. I'll go down the list.
Cape Town Peace March, The Berlin Wall & Salt Satyagraha: In these cases the Government felt it didn't have a choice but to capitulate lest it be overthrown completely. The Cape Town article makes that point and in the case of the Berlin Wall the Government of East Germany did dissolve. But I'll happily add the caveat "where the government believes it is capable of doubling down on its efforts without being overthrown". Still doesn't change the point though (unless you seriously think Anon is capable of overthrowing the U.S. Government)
The same was true of the Indian independence movement. In the end the British Government didn't so much capitulate as it withdrew (which goes back to my first point of Governments doubling down until they can't anymore)
Rosa Parks : In my post I said it would work if you are willing to let the Government take a pound of flesh and that's exactly what happened in the case of Rosa Parks. Parks was arrested and convicted. People who protested in her name were beaten as well as being arrested and convicted. The very section you point to says that MLK's house was bombed and churches were burnt down.
I think Anonymous want to force third parties to oppose the rule of law to government's “suggestions” — no political overthrow per se, but trying to force a judge to stand to the precedent of NYTimes vs. USA on Pentagon papers.
“Victory” here would be to have some press (done — if a coverage worthy of Olympic games is satisfying) and a stable URL (done), or better: the 1st link on Google search and an active Facebook page where they can safely link to articles about Nobel prize, Obama's hypocrisy and PayPal reversal (done, done and done).
Interesting magazine to be writing about Anonymous. I sometimes feel that the magazine itself is a LOIC for the global banking system. It's possibly one of many publications (nodes) that publishes (DDOS) anonymous writings that seem to usually endorse the position that the world needs more debt.
Very interesting. I’m glad that you pointed out that the Economist is “anonymous”. (If you haven’t noticed, almost all Economist articles are published without a byline). It’s a quirk I’ve never been convinced that they adequately justify. One of my favorite gags is to claim that I write for the Economist? Don’t believe me? I challenge you to prove that I don’t.
It has little to do with anonymity (although it's close to ‘Anonymous‘ approach): they do it to force journalists of the “factual” part of the magazine to accept that they are part of a redaction; see:
http://www.economist.com/about/about_economist.cfm
That “lack of by-line” allows them to have a tone and yet, not be the Opinion pages; it seems to work.
A friend of mine works there (or interns, not sure); she post on Facebook and twitter the papers that she wrote, or the video that she shot, but she also includes other papers that she really liked. I'm assuming the official policy is stricter, but what she does is rather implicit, that only a handful of people notice (and presumably mostly other journalists that help with her ‘beat‘). So far, she has defended, sincerely, every paper that I criticized (I go after The Economist a lot) — most of them quite far from her beat (I'm closer to the Economist's line when it comes to the topics that she covers).
I went to a talk by a part time science writer for the Economist. She is a Scientist and this shows because the science pieces in the Economist are as good as the fluffy stuff in the front of Nature.
I think the anonymity allows people, who are experts in their field, to be candid but protect their reputation.
How is publishing in any way analogous to a denial of service? If I purchase a copy of the Economist, it does not impair anyone else's economic activity or ability to do business with me. Your suggestion that they promote indebtedness doesn't seem very consistent with the content either.
I agree with you that the parallels were… creative —— but I've been one the wrong end of publication once, and it can be close to a DDoS. You can't respond, whatever the journalist misunderstood is the Word of God, and if he wake up on the wrong foot, it feels very much like a mob —— the paper actually triggered a crowd of 15 to beat me.
Really? They seemed to print hand-wringing articles about how developed countries are too far in dept semi-regularly until the recent financial crisis. Example:
http://www.economist.com/node/275183
I'm surprised. I thought they organize mostly on 4chan, and then go down to IRC channels spontaneously and temporarily, and keep their identities only temporarily. Am I to understand that there are actually people who have a persistent identity? Who are "in charge"?
There was an article on New York Times online today as well. It's pretty funny to read how mainstream reporters try to explain Anonymous to their readers whose experience of the Internet begins and ends with email and Facebook. There was no mention of 4chan anywhere in the NYT article (probably for the best).
If Anon is taking down Mastercard and Visa, then perhaps our governments will start obeying their own laws instead of trying to manipulate companies into compliance. Or at the very least, our companies might actually question whether obeying the government is in their best interests.