Anonymous Brilliance
Claire Berlinski, Ed. ·
February 15, 2011 at 1:24am
I don't know who's behind this. It's way too much to hope it's us.
But man, would I take it back about Clapper if it was.
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Comments:
May '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
It has the marks of 4chan over it. They are a secret internet hacker society that does international practical jokes. They organized for the sole purpose of destroying the cult of Scientology. It is outrageous how powerful they can be when they put their mind to it. Be careful with them.
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
Tell me more, Robert, I'm trying to figure this out. They exist to take down Scientologists, but they do superb psy ops against the Iranian regime as a sideline? That would be kind of amazing, if true.
May '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
Alright Claire. They come from a website called 4chan (i'm breaking rule #1 by talking about it). There is a culture developed on this site that completely embraces anonymity. Everyone who posts is anonymous. You wouldn't even know my pen name Robert Bennett. They managed to organize massive protests and propaganda that mocks Scientologists. Thousands showed up wearing the V for Vendetta mask.
They do whatever bizarre thing strikes their fancy. One guy posted a video of him kicking a cat or something. So they analyzed the video, found the guy, and got him arrested.
This brought them more publicity and more members so it became harder for them to organize. I thought they were dead by now because "n00bs" ruined it all. This is probably a few small people who managed to keep this society together.
info more
The founder of that website had to testify at the Sarah Palin email hack trial. 4chan users were involved.
NOTE: That website would not meet the Ricochet code of conduct. They have had serious problems
May '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
Watch that youtube video at 4:45. Here.
I have no idea what they have to do with Iran. I just hear about these things.
May '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
It is a website of offensive EJ Hills. EJ has more class.
Jun '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
Well, uh, I don't even know what to think about all this. The videos related to Iran were strange and the youtube video that Robert Bennett provided about 4chan threw me off. Perhaps this is my first cruel step into losing my understanding of modern youth. I feel like I'm missing A LOT to this story.
May '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
Yeah, 4chan. Sigh. There's no doubting the technical prowess of that crowd, yet Uncle Ben's wisdom of "with great power comes great responsibility" absolutely does not apply. How else could someone justify the necessity of anonymity ergo privacy then post Sarah Palin's email to /b/?
Running Low Orbit Ion Cannon hardly indicates 31337 h4x0r 5k!11z. Those script kiddies got busted for causing DoS against Visa and Paypal as /b/ retribution towards those companies terminating donation processing for Wikileaks.
Protesting Scientology, in a country where freedom of religion is codified? Sure, freedom of assembly and speech and all that. I wonder how many times 4chan organized a protest against the Islamic Thinkers Society? Yeah.
Those videos indicate solidarity for Iranian self determination, and that's great. Anonymous very well may have a campaign to bang on the Republic's cloud-facing address pool in an effort to foul up data flow for VEVAK/MOIS or something. It's not helping, and it might actually hurt the ability of citizens to communicate out to the world the new tragedy that's unfolding there. Per Bruce Willis, "This isn't a command center, it's a basement!"
Nov '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
The idea of 4chan doing anything worthwhile is laughable.
Aug '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
You can safely write off anything that originates on 4chan as useless Internet ephemera.
Nov '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
Hogwash. 4chan is the most wretched hive of scum and villainy on the Internet. There are hives more scummy, and certainly more villainous, but none are more wretched than 4chan (well, except for the other *chans that split off from it).
As far as "secret society" goes, anybody can go there (not that I suggest that). It is the largest English-using imageboard out there. As such, you get all sorts - from the super-hackers (though I hear they are mostly from 72chan) to complete idiots - by far mostly the latter.
The whole Scientology thing was one of those rare occurances when you can get that many people to agree on something, are motivated to do it, and the stars align just right. Likely won't happen again, especially since that incident brought in a lot of new people, mostly edgy-type kids that talk big but don't do anything.
But they do like to pull pranks.
Nov '10
Re: Anonymous Brilliance
As far as these specific videos, I don't see anything from 4chan today, right now, that indicates any such activity, not even from the international board. Granted, I didn't check /b/, but if anything big was happening it would have spread to the other boards. Plus, it doesn't seem like something they would do - 4chan, and /b/ especially, is the place where everyone can come together to be a racist atheist.
If that last sentence didn't entirely make sense, well, that's just the kind of place 4chan is.
Now, just so you know, I go to 4chan every day. Yesterday I was there for some hours. I wouldn't suggest it to anyone, though. I do stay out of the explicitly 18+ boards, but their moderation is...lax, to put it mildly.
An aside: in the thread about the "vagueness" of language today, there was some mention of kids these days not being able to adopt different "dialects" to fit the appropriateness of different situations. This is something I have to do on a daily basis - how one would talk on 4chan, even intelligently, is quite different from the standard here.