By Aaron Kesel
Anonymous has attacked several websites in the past few weeks as the collective returns to its glory days. This writer sat down to speak to the collective on a plethora of topics for one of the biggest exclusive interviews in a long time.
To start, no single individual represents the whole idea of Anonymous. However, there are security groups or secs within the collective which speak for the bigger idea; and if individual Anons agree, then they hop on the “train” for the agreed cause. As previously written, “there are no specific goals for the collective; there is, however, an overarching desire within shared by many to combat censorship, promote freedom of speech, and counter government control within the collective. Anti-oppression and supporting whistleblowers seems to be something most can also agree on.”
Anonymous actions have been taken against Sony, HB Gary, Aaron Barr, Operation Payback, and protests against organizations like Westboro Baptist, Church Of Scientology, and various governments worldwide including Iran, Egypt, Australia, and Ireland, as well as Occupy against police brutality to name a few of those targeted in early Ops.
The collective utilizes a number of techniques such as digital web sit-ins (DoS attacks) with LOIC (sending HTTP header requests to sites), “rudimentary exploits,” d0xing and sometimes the more extreme hacking of a database and leaking of its tables and contents for the Lulz.
Now, the Anonymous collective takes its aim once again at police brutality and corrupt police institutions that are abusing protesters. However, this time the police brutality isn’t just against protesters; it’ is also squeezed with a little flavor of systemic racial oppression. Anonymous recently defaced several websites in memory of George Floyd, a black man who was killed when white officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee down on his neck.
Since the murder of Floyd, others have been killed as well, like Rayshard Brooks and Carlos Carson, which has amplified protests across the U.S. and even the globe. We have even seen protests raging as far away as continents such as Africa. This is a true last stand for people against systemic racism and the issue that affects every person no matter the color of your skin: police brutality.
Anonymous seeks to help protesters and aid in the overall fight against the murder and harm of innocents by police. However, that’s not all, after sitting down to speak to Anonymous, this writer learned that hacktivists not only defaced sites with memories of George Floyd, but the hackers also embedded court documents of U.S. President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein — Epstein and Trump have been accused by numerous plaintiffs of rape when they were minors.
There was also a site owned by the Philippines government defaced with memes of Trump and the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte stating that both men are against journalists.
Anonymous also professed its support for recently imprisoned WikiLeaks journalist Julian Assange, who revealed war crimes, corruption, money laundering by elitists, and general criminal culpability by governments worldwide. Assange faces his extradition hearing in September, which will ultimately decide the fate of not just one man, but the future of freedom of the press.
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The collective also took a swing at Reddit’s mods in a high-traffic subreddit showing admin abuse, symbolic because one of the internet’s own boys, Aaron Swartz, created the popular website. Ever since Swartz’ death the once free speech haven where anyone could go viral has been ruined with censorship of opinions while racism runs rampant.
All deface links are below and can be viewed without worry archived on archive.org or a similar medium.
Anonymous is back, so to speak, but did the collective idea ever really leave? No, not really, you can’t kill an idea. However, the collective has returned in “full whack!”
You can read this author’s full exclusive interview with Anonymous below.
1. What were the motivations for the attacks?
Anonymous is coming back in full fucking whack! After the death George Floyd we want to do something about it like most of you so we took down Minneapolis Police Department’s website and mess with their radios. For that we also managed to hack and deface Brookhaven National Labs webpage.
We also took Atlanta PD site down too.
Anonymous hate sadistic authoritarian dictators and authoritarians such as Trump or Duterte therefore its natural for us to target them. For that, We took over Filipino Department of Interior webpage
2. Why did you include Jeffrey Epstein documents on the Philippines deface?
Anonymous want to show the world the real face of Donald Trump, a fucking pervert. We are incensed by the fact that this has not been noticed for so long. If this were to be leaked earlier the common folks of the United States won’t have to endure his horrible consequences including the mishandling of COVID 19 crisis.
3. What do the documents posted on the deface include?
Besides Epstein documents we include a lot of Reddit’s “mod abuse” cases on a high-traffic subreddit where the mod/mods in question improperly abuse the power given to him such as banning users for no reason as if he’s a god-damned Digong doing it out of fun and boredom.
One of them has been sued for online harassment in a court.
4. Can we expect more actions to follow?
Of course! Anonymous is everywhere and can be anyone.
5. Does this have anything to do with press freedom as some of the memes on the deface talk about journalism?
Yes. Anonymous want to protest Duterte’s censorship of media including the revocation of ABS-CBN’s license so we did this.
6. Why did you include a bunch of memes is that just for the trolling lulz?
Some of those memes are reused from Anon previous ops as does the page source code used in #OpPhilippines deface too. It’s fun by our standards.
7. Since your motivations seem to be to expose press freedoms what is your personal opinion on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange’s case?
Julian Assange did absolutely nothing wrong when he exposed US war crimes in Iraq!
8. Do you have any further message to the public? 269GB worth of US police agencies data are now live.
If you wanna protest power corruption in general then the scope doesn’t have to be limited to just governmental aspects only. Many orgs and companies such as Reddit, Facebook or even Wikipedia which most of us hold dear in terms of trust have engaged in shady practices behind our prying eyes.
If the instrument of law is perverted by totalitarians into a tool of abuse then people should no longer have the obligation to follow it.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. We are Anonymous, We are Legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget, Expect us!
**By [@An0nkn0wledge](https://hive.blog/@an0nkn0wledge)**
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post.
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An Interview With Anonymous — George Floyd Protests, Hacks, And Press Freedom