Anonymous & Lulz Security Statement to the FBI

More explicitly stated:

Robin Hood did not "rob from the rich and give to the poor". He attacked oppressors and protected the oppressed (only rarely giving them money). While the oppressors tended to be rich and the oppressed tended to be poor, there were exceptions. IIRC, there is even a tale where Robin protects a wealthy knight from peasants who are trying to rob him.

>Really? Make that one person, but there are surely more.

What liberties do you feel are at stake? Do you feel oppressed - that suddenly your rights may be taken away? Could you expand? I currently have no idea why you would feel this way.

>Who are a bunch of flawed humans to judge anything? Physics operates on a totally open system of merit. Economics as well. Doctors are directly responsible to reality. These are sciences. Government is not a science, and it is an intention of the system that the people should be able to evaluate it.

Flawed humans can judge the things which we have expertise over. Business is not a science either, but in many partnerships, one trusts the opinions of the other simply because they have more experience. You're right, that government is not a science. Yet, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of experts being better versed than the majority of people who have an opinion on the matter.

>Incidentally, we do not "leave medicine to the doctors" in any realistic sense -- there are numerous byzantine legal controls on the medical profession, such as, for example, the FDA. To "leave medicine to the doctors" would be to abolish the FDA

The FDA is a regulating body, kind of like the government. Now, what if they're also corrupt? Unlike government issues, we don't (I know some do, yes) apply as much pressure on the FDA because most people realize they don't understand how complex chemicals work. Yet, they think they understand complex social initiatives because it's more 'down to earth'.

> Ultimately, experience is not a guarantee of competence or even a strong indicator in most fields, be it physics or government.

Agreed, without objection. Yet, how do we know the replacement will be more competent? If we miss that mark, it'll just be someone of the same competency (with slight deviation), without the 20 years of mistakes to learn from. I remember working with an electrical engineer, who pointed out a large amount of issues that no degree of competence could have foreseen - because he had been in the field for so long.

> I realize it about you, specifically. Would you argue that because of their positions, the heads of the DEA and TSA are necessarily more competent than the vast number of medical, legal, and security experts who argue that their actions are often unnecessary and unjustified? There are people outside the government capable -- perhaps superbly so -- of analyzing the merit of government action.

Sure, but how do we identify who is right, out of the thousands of people who are wrong? I'm not arguing that the government is perfect. I'm simply saying it might be the most practical system.

>The problem with that line of thinking is that there is no universally accepted, objective standard of what defines a just and unjust law. Do we make those decisions based on Natural Law? How about on the teachings of Mohammed? Jesus? etc.

Everything every human does is solely their reaction to their perception. It is as possible to misperceive the law itself as it is to differ on ethical reality; this is irrelevant to the reasoning of any individual. The law is a fluid entity, created by humans, and it is obviously incomplete as evidenced by the fact that we keep modifying it. Furthermore, some notion of ethics has to exist in order to create any law at all.

There is a large body of work in the field of ethics, and it is not really unreasonable for most people to try to understand it. While many philosophers disagree on particulars or even the entire foundation, there are many common elements in the philosophy of people as different as Kant and Nietzsche.

So yes, you have to react to what you consider to be a just law, just as you have to react to what you consider to be the law -- how many people do you know who actually know the law? In practice, this does not usually lead to much difficulty, if all of the participants agree to use at least a little logic.

The best analogy I can come up with is language -- everyone speaks their own version of language (even when everyone is speaking the "same language), and if the rules are codified anywhere it is inevitably a tiny subset of the language that is actually used. Despite this, human communication has been quite successful over the past several millenia.

Robin Hood has stood for a lot of things depending on which poem one reads and which people in which century's opinion of him is being counted. One of the most popular traditions of Robin Hood is of him as monarchist supporting the true king, Richard, and opposing Richard's brother, John (the one defeated at Runnymeade. By the way, this is over 500 years old, not invented in the 19th century as some think.) You can think of Anonymous in the same way -- they are opposing an illegitimate regime and would happily stand down should the excesses of the FBI et al be ended by the government.

>What liberties do you feel are at stake? Do you feel oppressed - that suddenly your rights may be taken away?

Yes. Here, do you need examples?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/a-pound-of-f...

>Yet, they think they understand complex social initiatives because it's more 'down to earth'.

To what precisely do you refer? Most people defer to someone who makes coherent arguments for their positions, rather than using gunpowder. The former group usually consists of experts.

If I don't have the greatest grip on airport security, that doesn't mean I can't defer to Bruce Schneier because I find his argument more coherent than John Pistole.

>Sure, but how do we identify who is right, out of the thousands of people who are wrong? I'm not arguing that the government is perfect. I'm simply saying it might be the most practical system.

In the end, the same way we choose who gets into the government in the first place -- popular opinion. This is not to say that popular opinion is always right, and in fact it is quite often wrong, but people are generally swayed by logic, and it just so happens that things which are close to the truth tend to be more convincing that utter lies. The responsibility of the government to popular opinion is the foundation of any democracy.

(Of course, I, as an individual, make judgments using logic, not popular opinion -- this much is clear -- but I am not a particularly special individual)