Traditionally their commitment to not destroy or alter sites they attacked made them more of a nuisance than a threat. In 2006 they attacked Hal Turner's white supremacist site, after that the Church of Scientology, they attacked Tunisian, Egyptian and other government websites during the Arab Spring. They were watched but not considered that dangerous even after an attack on Sony that got attention.
That all changed February of 2011 when Anonymous raided HBGary Federal a security contractor for Bank of America who claimed to have infiltrated Anonymous. In retaliation Anonymous invaded Federal, dumping 68,000 emails, taking out their phones and defacing their webpage. They posted a PowerPoint presentation they found in the raid created by Federal to present to Bank of America titled "The Wikileaks Threat."
The presentation describes a proposed plan of attack on Wikileaks including misinformation, cyber attacks and identifying big donors was posted around the internet. In March Anonymous posted documents from the Bank of America emails about improper foreclosures it said are examples of fraud. The direct action weapon of publishing secret information that corporations and governments want to hide had become a threat to the secret world of corporate wrongdoing ignored by mainstream media.
Anarchism the response to Globalization
Anonymous is just one example of the new anarchists rising across the planet to challenge globalization, destruction of the environment, loss of economic and political rights and increased control and surveillance by both business and government. It has happened before; Anonymous follows a long, but many times hidden and or distorted history of Anarchists in this country.
Once upon a time there was a strong movement of anarchists in this country; they were workers in the bowels of the mines, and early factories that built America, the were sharecroppers who fed the masses while their own children hungered, they were the immigrant laborers who worked until they dropped on the canals and railroads only to be replaced by the even more desperate.
They labored from the age of ten on, for 14 -- 16 hours a day in horrible work conditions that led to debilitation and early death, many times to be more in debt to the company at the end of the week then at the beginning. Death in a company mine would mean eviction for the widow and children from company housing the next week. That was the America of the corporation in the Gilded Age from the end of the Civil War until the great depression crashed the system in 1929.
Albert Parsons a former Texas journalist and confederate soldier who became the anarchist leader of the International Working People's Association explained that the War Between the States was a war of two labor systems. Parsons explained in a letter to his wife Lucy why it cost less to hire immigrant labor than keep slaves. After all immigrants required no capital investment or protection of that investment, they were expendable and replaceable.
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