The best part about being anonymous is being able to change everything about your identity without having to justify it.
The same goes for the increasingly infamous online group Anonymous.
The group made headlines in Canada this past week after Dawson Creek RCMP shot and killed 48-year-old James McIntyre last Saturday outside of a public hearing regarding the Site C hydroelectric dam project. Anonymous issued a news release saying McIntyre was one of their members and that they would avenge the loss of their "fallen comrade" by posting the name and personal information of the officer who shot McIntyre.
Within 24 hours of the shooting, the RCMP's national website, the Dawson Creek RCMP website and several other B.C. RCMP websites crashed but police aren't saying if the sites were hacked.
Federal public safety minister Steven Blaney waded into the matter Tuesday, stating "we are constantly monitoring cyber security and cyberattacks."
Meanwhile, over in Britain, a different side of Anonymous was on display, earning praise. A BBC story this week explained how ISIS has been using Twitter extensively to spread Islamic State propaganda and attract members from Western nations. In response, Anonymous has published a list of Twitter accounts it says are connected to ISIS and flooded many of the accounts with female Japanese animated characters to trick search engine requests for ISIS contact information.
The rise of Anonymous has prompted the creation of a new word - hacktivist - to describe online provocateurs who use legal means, like social media shaming and DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, which overwhelm websites with traffic, causing them to crash, and illegal means, such as hacking into company and government websites to steal and publish sensitive data, to make their point.
In her book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, McGill University academic Gabriella Coleman stresses that the group has no formal organization or hierarchy. As a result, it is a loose affiliation of online activists interested in everything from police brutality to global terrorism, government surveillance to access to information, but held together with a prankster ethic. In other words, they want to change the world and have a laugh, preferably at the same time.
Although Anonymous is faceless online except for a logo of a suited man with a question mark where his head would belong, the group does have an increasingly well-known public persona that is itself a cartoon figure. At the time of his shooting in Dawson Creek, McIntyre was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.
In British history, Guy Fawkes was part of a group of conspirators that tried to blow up the British Parliament in 1605. The "gunpowder plot" was discovered, Fawkes and his cohorts were publicly executed and bonfires are still lit on the night of November 5 each year across the country to mark Guy Fawkes Day.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November.
Over time, Fawkes has become identified with government and police protest. That symbol was solidified in the 1980s when writer Alan Moore and artist David Lloyd published V for Vendetta, a graphic novel set in a post-apocalyptic England that has become a fascist surveillance state. A man only identified as V, wearing a homemade Guy Fawkes mask, surfaces to stir the population and overthrow the government.
Hollywood adapted the comic into an interesting but inadequate movie that simplified the complex, interlacing plots in favour of an "oppressive government is no match for one principled man" theme that spoke to American audiences. The Guy Fawkes masks from the movie live on in public protests, suggesting Anonymous involvement and support in the cause.
Moore's story was an update of 1984 and a protest against Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Unlike the movie, the V for Vendetta comic left readers struggling with whether anarchy, vigilantism and violence as an answer to fascism was a cure as bad or worse than the disease. According to Coleman's book, that is the constant internal battle within Anonymous - is causing online mayhem to challenge abuses of power itself an abuse of power? If so, when and how is that abuse still justified? The debate and the public actions of Anonymous in Canada and Britain this week show that this is an unpredictable group with many faces and opposing views but one to be taken seriously nonetheless.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
