Where did Anonymous come from?

The history of Scientology is pretty decently documented, provided you are willing to pull the research. But what of the history of Anonymous? Where did this online community come from? How was it formed? What the heck is Anonymous? These are all valid questions.

Anonymous was originally a Meme. A catchphrase. An inside online joke. On many an online form, people would make posts anonymously. A good number of these posts shared certain trends. They had a tendency to be annoying. A tendency to be inflammatory. A tendency to say certain things that were rediculous, hilarious, and somewhat true. An so a meme was born. Somewhere out there was a single individual, hunched over his computer screen, buzzing around the internet leaving random posts at random websites, saying outrageous things purely for the entertainment value.

Interestingly enough, the law enforcement and medical community have a similiar meme. Its the story of a man called "Sumdood". Sumdood hides drugs in peoples houses. Sumdood plants pot on your property in the middle of the night. Sumdood sells stolen goods to unsuspecting victims, spikes peoples drinks, and gets into random fistfights.

And so eventually, a group of hackers and computer users were born, taking the title of thier favorite meme. They started on relatively unkown message forums, that quickly splintered into multiple forums as members got mad at Forum admins and left to start thier own websites, or recruited new freinds on other sites. Anonymous quickly gained a reputation for online pranks, tricks, and jokes, separated into two basic classifications.

Lols, and Lulz. Lols (Laugh out loud) are considered harmless pranks and jokes. Purely for entertainment value. Lulz have a darker side. The purpose of a LULz is to specifically target a group or individual for pranking. To laugh at the suffering of others.

One of the most famous Lulz occured prior to the release of the last JK Rowling book from the Harry Potter series. Various hacking and online groups united to release plot spoilers prior to the books official release date all across the internet. When the lines started gathering to purchase the books at stores various individuals would run in and shout plot spoilers to the waiting crowds, telling them what characters would die on what pages, which two characters would wind up together by the end of the book. Many fans were irritated and infuriated at this, Anonymous gained a reputation as being particularly cruel due to the fact that the prank targeted mostly children and young fans.

For the most part, Anonymous was simply a very loose group of online pranksters and hackers.

But then something happened. An internal video from the Church of Scientology starring Tom Cruise was leaked online to the popular website Youtube. Various computer users ripped the video in order to make parodies and various mashup videos. Various other websites grabbed the video in order to post on thier websites largely for the same purpose. The Church of Scientology contacted Youtube and demanded that the video be pulled. Youtube complied, as is its standard policy regarding copyrighted material. The Church then began a widespread effort to contact the other websites that had grabbed the file and have it pulled from thier servers as well.

According to unofficial rumor, things got pretty nasty. COS was threatening copyright lawsuits. Users were angry when thier parody videos and the independent creations they had made utilizing the video were being pulled. COS pretty much hunted down each and every website holding the video, and threatened them with legal action if the video, and all videos using said video were not removed from circulation.

And so you wound up with a large population of rather irate site admins and users. The internet community at large has always had a flair for stretching if not ignoring standard copyright laws.The media industry, in particular the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) have a particularly bad reputation online. But the COS was considered even worse. COS is a religion where all of its sources and relics are copyrighted. Its symbols are copyrighted, its scriptures are copyrighted, all of its associated media is copyrighted. The MPAA and RIAA is mostly known for using passive means to try to prevent pirating, (DMRA software, advertising campaigns, etc). The RIAA has on occasion managed to sue and shut down a few large file sharing websites, it has largely left alone the individual users. There was one campaign to sue individual users, but it resulted in a public relations nightmare as elderly women with file sharing kids and people with pirated wireless routers were swept up in a mass and poorly organized dragnet.

And so an online call to arms was put forth. A single video was aired on youtube, an open declaration of war. The first waves were the original hacking groups. the COS websites were shutdown if not defaced, thier printers and faxes were bombarded with "Black fax" attacks. Attacks where your printer or copier prints endless reams of sheets that are nothing but big black boxes, until the printer runs out of ink. The forum groups were joined by individual hackers and computer users, from the highly skilled computer experts down to the average computer users, so called "Script kiddies".

COS rebutted with a public relations campaign claiming religious persecution, while hiring a well known computer security company to secure thier websites. Individual users began searching out data on COS and building Anti COS videos to be posted online in order to recruit still more people and in order to sway public opinion. Eventually the online war spilled offline in the form of protests outside of Scientology buildings and churches, the first mass protests occurring in February 2008.

Anonymous did indeed start out as loose organizations, but it has taken a path that is inverse of the usual popular movement. While most popular movements start out disorganized, and slowly coalesce into more organized forms and organizations, the opposite has, and continues to occur with Anonymous. It started out as a few loose groups composed of hackers. But the call to arms was put out to all individuals, and many members strive to take their anonymity seriously. Individual computer users feel compelled to take direct action in whatever way they see fit, rather then contact a central organization or fall in line with any form of command infrastructure.

Its a simple system, you call for individuals to take action, and the individuals decide how, why, when and what action they will take. There is no organization, no true command infrastructure. This is the fluid structure that is anonymous.

So now you know where Anonymous came from, Relatively speeking. But where is it going? What are its weaknesses, if any? How do these mass numbers of individuals effect (Either negatively or positively) the efficiency and effectiveness of the group collective? More to come later.