Thursday, 8 December 2011

V for Anonymous

A while back, I came across the following article while browsing an internet forum:


Article

Essentially, the Zetas, a particularly violent Mexican drug cartel, kidnapped a member of Anonymous during a street protest. Anonymous is an international group of hackers. In this case, Anonymous was threatening to reveal the identities and addresses of the cartel's associates. With such information, competing gangs would completely rip apart the Zetas.

As you can see in the video linked in the article (as well as one of the quotes in the article), Anonymous is making clever use of "V for Vendetta", not only by using V's mask to cover the speaker's identity, but also when he says "If anything happens to him, you sons of (expletive) will always remember this upcoming November 5". The article was posted around October 28, which happens to be quite close to November 5th.

This article in itself is very interesting, but it is even more so in the context of this class. After this article was linked, a discussion about the article began. One person was trying to argue that he did not believe that Anonymous actually had this kind of information beforehand, and that the whole thing had been a bluff. Others argued against him, but his bottomline message was that he did not fully accept what the article was saying.

This goes back to what we had talked about in class, when saying that we should always be careful when consuming media, because we are never getting the full story, and the full context. This is especially true of this article, considering that we have no clue why it was that the Zetas decided to kidnap this person. Could it be that they somehow knew that he was a member of Anonymous? If so, then what business would the Zetas have with/against Anonymous in the first place? This also begs the question: how did Anonymous even know about the kidnapping?

The problem with this article is that it does not give us enough information about the context in which this occurred; it merely reports this particular event without giving us an understanding of why this happened in the first place.

After all, context is very important:




A few days later, someone had posted a follow-up article on the matter:

Follow-up article

In the article, it is mentioned that the Zetas released their hostage, who was relatively unharmed. The Zetas had made a counter-threat, saying that releasing information about them would lead to retaliation against the family of the hostage, as well as the murder of 10 people for every name revealed.

Though we may have reason to doubt that Anonymous even has this information, there is no reason to believe that the Zetas wouldn't follow through with their threats. This case is a great example of the repercussions that one's actions online can have in real life. A single blog post could have resulted in the loss of untold lives.

In his article, Goldsmith talks about the impact of media technologies on policing. This case stretches that notion further, by talking about the impacts of these technologies on intelligence gathering in general, and how these technologies can empower groups like Anonymous. Conversely, it can also endanger the lives of those using them, as pointed out by the second article: "A budding domestic effort among Mexican Internet users to expose the cartels was crushed this summer when the mutilated bodies of two bloggers were found hanging from a highway overpass, and a third was found decapitated in a park".

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