If you scanned the public service announcements in your subway car this morning—and happened to be adequately caffeinated—you might have noticed something slightly off. There's Melissa C., of small-time "See Something, Say Something" fame, with her gold hoops and salmon-pink hoodie. She's smiling next to the familiar MTA logo, but her message isn't just about reporting a suspicious bag on the platform and feeling heroic.
Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is a loosely associated hacktivist group. It originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain.
Come across a poster like the two above on your commute recently? Laid out in classic MTA style, but adorned with Orwellian imagery and an appropriately ambiguous hashtag, they warn of two possible hazards to your health: an upcoming “airborne non-toxic test” in which the NYPD will disperse “harmless, colorless gas” around the five boroughs, and an at-risk nuclear reactor that’s just 28 miles from NYC.
The notorious, wanted, and merciless leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico,"Jouquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was captured by Mexican Marines last month. This marked a small victory for Mexico's fight to rid the country of its corrupted drug trade. How did this happen? Through intelligence of course, but let us remember Anonymous in Mexico.
Between the late 1960s and 1970s numerous alternative printshops were set up across the UK, with the founding objective of producing, providing or facilitating the cheap and safe printing of radical materials. They were started by libertarians, aligned and non-aligned Marxists, anarchists and feminists, and as such were constitutive of the fractured and fractious politics of the post-1968 left.
From ReutersBy Vladimir SoldatkinHackers temporarily blocked President Vladimir Putin's web site on
Wednesday, carrying out a promise to disrupt government information
portals two days after his swearing-in for another six-year term that
has drawn street protests. The hacker activist
group Anonymous used the "Op_Russia" twitter account to publicize the
There’s a fine line between offensive and hilarious, and Arizona lawmakers aim to make that boundary legally protected. If House Bill 2549 passes, online harassment could become a criminal offense – but some hacktivists are there to help you rejoice.