Internet headline darlings Anonymous (that's a singular proper noun) stole the show on November 2nd 2011 by following up on an earlier effort to shut down prominent child porn networks operating via an anonymous web browsing service TOR. In October Anonymous took down
Lolita City, a community dedicated to the anonymous (lower case adjectival) sharing and browsing of child pornography. The week of November 2nd they released a number of IP addresses of users they say attempted to access child pornography.
Anonymous Releases Child Porn Data
Claiming to be unsatisfied with state and Federal efforts in the prosecution and discovery of child pornography groups, Anonymous used some insider information, basic psychology and insider information to snag a number of IP's.
It goes like this: The TOR service
allows you to hide your tracks online. It's something designed initially to protect political dissidents from being tracked and encourage free speech and protect individuals from invasive government tracking. Of course, TOR was used nefariously by those seeking to view and distribute child pornography to hide their tracks. Anonymous sat in on some online chats frequented by TOR developers and heard that a new update to TOR would be available soon.
TOR users are often very eager to have the latest version of the software, as updates usually close security gaps and strengthen their anonymity. Banking that TOR users were far more paranoid than prudent, Anonymous coded up a fake TOR update and released it before TOR's own update.
Typically a TOR user's activity is bounced around various internet nodes to obscure their browsing habits. In this case, the fake update ran all user activity through a node controlled by Anonymous, allowing Anonymous to track and record the IP's of users. After gathering this data they released 190 IP's of users who accessed child pornography.
But Isn't 4Chan Full of Child Porn?
But it might be too soon to call Anonymous white knights. The campaign to separate Anonymous from 4Chan has been poorly engineered and anyone who has been on the Internet long enough knows that this new Anonymous, while a unique group of savvy programmers, is as rooted in 4Chan as Bronies and memebase.com (incidentally MEMEBASE, what was with the
Motherless.com reference the other day?).
If Anonymous truly were White Knights who know nothing about /b/ it would not be opposed to turning its attention to /b/ and hacking Moot's servers. 4Chan and /b/ are of course communities which boast browsing Anonymity (a falsehood, considering
Moot's testimony regarding the
Palin hacking scandal) and churns out thousands of “CP” and “Jailbait” threads a year. Note: CP means Child Pornography, not Captain Picard, and Jailbait is a term also referring to underage pornography.
Anonymous Is Just On A PR Campaign
So if Anonymous, who just took down a child porn ring, is rooted in 4Chan, a child porn resource, are they simply displaying heroic cognitive dissonance? No. This is a public relations campaign in reaction to the serious attention they are getting from the federal government and nothing more.
What Reaction?
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/koch-industries-ddos-attack-875410 and
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/paypal-hack-arrests/ for starters. There have also been discussions of a full congressional investigation.
They may think they are vigilantes, doing what must be done. They may think hiding behind their cape and cowl of Anonymity makes them Batman. And they may be Batman. But in this case its like being Batman when Bruce Wayne is the Joker.
