Anonymous & Lulz Security Statement to the FBI

http://twitter.com/#!/atopiary

EDIT: apparently sabu has been joining in as well. Pretty amusing.

Bad-taste jokes and troublemaking.

Badly written manifestos.

But I think there are some in the groups who have their heart in the right place and want to do the right thing. And, illegal or not, I've yet to see any other form of western activism that is as disruptive as leaking/hacking.

Let's see, "Make impassioned speech then go break into the neighbor's house and scatter his secret documents all over the lawn"

That makes a lot of sense now, doesn't it? Perhaps if you're seven. And drunk.

Aside from the validity of the charges, this manner of social justice never ever works for the people who try it. Good grief, did we learn nothing from Ghandi or MLK Jr.? There's a perfectly legitimate and effective way to denounce injustice. I think either you understand the problems with what they are doing from looking at history or you become so enamored with their cause you allow yourself to become feeble-minded.

I hate the security state that we're living in. But I hate even more people taking it on themselves to administer justice in this fashion. If you make me pick, I'm going with broken security state over anarchists every time -- and there are hundreds of millions of folks just like me. And the the thing I hate worst? Somebody taking _my_ legitimate cause and crapping all over it by doing things like this. It's an attack on freedom-loving people everywhere.

If the local prosecutor lets a murderer go free? I don't go burn the prosecutor's house down. If the local sheriff is corrupt? I don't break into his house and publish his papers in the newspaper. If the guy next door is crooked and in cahoots with the mob? I don't get to break in his house and hand out his property to the poor. In short, the minute I start deciding on my own when to break the law and disrespect other people's property rights because of a cause -- even a legitimate cause -- I become an enemy of everybody. You don't get to wave your hands around angrily pointing out how worthy your cause is and get a free pass. At least not from me.

I dunno, the Pentagon Papers had fairly significant political effects, I think. Stealing government documents and having them published overseas to embarrass/expose the state's actions was also one of the more effective tools used by opposition groups in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Do you really think stealing a state's documents is an attack on "freedom-loving people everywhere"? Is this always true? The Eastern-block dissents hated freedom, and damaged the cause of freedom by stealing/leaking Stasi documents?

I could certainly agree that the Stasi is much worse than the UK government, so maybe you could draw a line between a certain level of viciousness of the security state, past which document-theft becomes justified. But I don't see how you could make a blanket statement that it's never justified.

I would also make a distinction between breaking into a person's house and breaking into a government's office. Breaking into someone's home has a certain personal-threat aspect to it, and I'd consider homes to have a bit of a sacrosanct element that I wouldn't extend to state offices. So, probably not in favor of combatting a corrupt police force by breaking into the sheriff's home. But, combatting a corrupt police force by breaking into a police station and grabbing their files, as happened recently in Egypt, seems a bit different.