Anonymous & Lulz Security Statement to the FBI

anonymousIRC and Lulzsec both tweeted it

Linked from Lulzsec's and AnonymousIRC's twitters which are held by respective members of the groups.

« When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties. »

Article 35 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793.

That's not what MLK is saying at all. You don't get to break any law simply because one of them is unjust. Instead, you have no moral obligation to abide by immoral laws.

If I feel like the speed limit is unjust, I should go about my business driving any speed I feel like. I do not, however, get to run over people while I'm doing it. If I feel like the law that protects my crooked neighbor's website is unjust, I have no obligation to support his privacy and private property.

I do not feel this way. I feel like my neighbor the person, corporation, or government entity uses their computer resources as an extension of their brain. As such, I frown severely on _anybody_ taking that property from them, whether through force of law or just trickery. To me you'd have a better case to have insiders physically take individual items that demonstrate and protest injustice and then publish them than this current tactic of scattering thousands of innocent user's passwords all over the web. I'm almost at the point where I consider the tactic of blanket attacks itself as being immoral. Not there yet, though.

This is an excellent reference, though. MLK disagreed with those who thought the system itself was unjust enough to declare war and make each other enemies. (I remind you of the phrase on the linked site "...These governments and corporations are our enemy....") During his life, he specifically and clearly separated himself from folks like the Black Panthers, who took this "enemy" position and look to me a lot like Anon's forefathers. MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail is probably one of 2 or 3 standard-setters in this arena. I encourage people to pursue this further.

I'm sorry I responded -- I know better. This is an emotional issue, and those of you who share my passion for freedom no doubt are going to try to beat what I've said to death. But I couldn't stand MLK's words being used in this fashion. He was making the exact opposite point. The laws he broke were unjust, not simply the ones that got in his way of creating social change.

EDIT: There is a simple unstated question that this thread brings out, though: are you an enemy of my country? (EDIT: I ask this because of the specific phraseology of the anon statement, the position of the Black Panthers, and some of the other comments, not as a means to heighten the tension.) It sounds like from reading many of the comments on the internet that some folks are -- or at least they'd like to think of themselves as such. They feel the system is so corrupt that they have made it their enemy. If that's the case, then we are enemies, and there's no more argument really needed. Kind of simplifies things up rather nicely. If not, then we should talk about practical and efficient ways to change things, because I share the view that things are off the rails and need changing.

I believe that some systems are bad but people are mostly good. That means that I respect those laws that deal with the privacy and dignity of the human being, including (for most folks) keeping their passwords and personal lives out of political battles. So email dumps and tactics like this are only going to piss me off further. Not sure if that was the intent, but that's what's they're doing.

Where are you drawing the line exactly? Both Ghandi and MLK broke laws, and in many cases did so by disrespecting other people's property rights (sit ins, for one, are exactly this and often were against corporate entities as well as govt. ones).

Furthermore there was a fairly large segment of the civil rights movement that disagreed with MLK and thought the strategies he promoted would not lead to acceptance of "black culture" but instead the acceptance of blacks into "white culture" (ie: ok fine if you act and dress like us then we wont hate you). It's painfully clear that there are still massive inequalities in terms of the way people of different races are treated in the US, and I would argue MLK's limited success in getting rid of racism was at the cost of the introduction of even heavier, subtler and harder to eradicate classism (yes Obama is president, but we all remember the "is he black enough" debates).

So while I don't entirely disagree with you, let's not make it seem like there is obviously a right or wrong here, and that by simply "looking at history" we can we can see that. Usually I like your posts but this one really lacks nuance...at least it is appropriately tagged "rant."