Nameless Vigilantes Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Apr 17 2003

Location: 

Online

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.

It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known. It strongly opposes Internet censorship and surveillance, and has hacked various government websites. It has also targeted major security corporations.It also opposes Scientology and government corruption. Its members can be distinguished in public by the wearing of stylised Guy Fawkes masks.

In its early form, the concept was adopted by a decentralized online community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner, usually toward a loosely self-agreed goal, and primarily focused on entertainment. Beginning with 2008, the Anonymous collective became increasingly associated with collaborative, international hacktivism. They undertook protests and other actions in retaliation against anti-digital piracy campaigns by motion picture and recording industry trade associations.Actions credited to "Anonymous" were undertaken by unidentified individuals who applied the Anonymous label to themselves as attribution. They have been called the freedom fighters of the Internet,[11] a digital Robin Hood,and "anarchic cyber-guerrillas."

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