In short, Anonymous targets and humiliates authoritarians and those who service them. This is at the core of my morality.
Their hacks illustrate the glaring weaknesses of our technology and that the incompetence in infosec so often spawns from negligence at the highest of levels in the industry. Despite this, powers that be (nation-states, militaries, and regional law enforcement) invest nearly nothing in securing their (public) assets. They demonstrate that organizations like Sony, the State Department, and the Pentagon can go months without even knowing of full-root breaches, only to wait yet more months to inform the public.
Luckily, Anonymous does all this for the sake of Teh Lulz (public humiliation), rather than corporate or state espionage.
> Luckily, Anonymous does all this for the sake of Teh Lulz (public humiliation), rather than corporate or state espionage.
Or so they say. There seems to be an awful lot of blind trust that Anonymous (or people claiming to be Anonymous) really do have the goals that they've stated. If Anonymous, or a splinter group, goes after some random company, ostensibly to humiliate them, what's to say they're not being paid by the company's rivals?
I tend to agree with you. They have been going up against publicly unpopular targets, so few have questioned them thus far, but there's no reason that can't be a ruse.
Part of the problem here is the fact that they really are anonymous, so if Anonymous goes after two different targets on two different days, there's no way to know that it's actually the same group both times. So even if you could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what their goals were for one particular attack, that would have zero bearing on the motivations and goals behind any subsequent attack.
I honestly thought that statement was so stupid that it didn't need "<SARCASM>" or the like.
Guess I was wrong. Not about how stupid a reference to getting someone on the record as "supporting anonymous" was, but about not needed to telegraph the joke here.
"Luckily" ?