Nieroshai said:
Members of Anon are saying other Anon members were responsible. No matter how much you pad and justify, you cannot deny that the organization that claims to have no official structure says that a great deal of their members took part in this without group concensus. This was an Anon attack, it just wasn't an official one by all of them.
This is true, but neither can you justify that it was an attack by all of them. This is the nature of Anonymous.
Not to get of theological and theoretical of your backside here, but it is like the God debate. There isn't enough evidence to proof God exists, or that God doesn't exist, yet for many instead of taking the reasoned logical answer that there isn't enough proof on which to make a logically reasoned answer, they jump instead to their own judgements based on their own beliefs - and call this logic. It is not logic. It is rationalising your own belief.
In this very same way, given the nature of Anonymous, you have to make a judgement call about what exactly counts as an Anonymous operation. If anybody counts as Anonymous, then yes, this was an Anonymous operation, but it also follows that anyone could have done it because Anonymous = anybody. If you consider there to be a certain degree of Anonymous leadership, a certain identity to Anonymous that means they aren't just anybody, then Anonymous didn't do this operation. Either way, it comes down to what you want to believe about Anonymous.
Take this by Carl Sagan, from when he was discussing why he didn't believe in God: "God may exist, in a certain form, in the rules of the universe. However, praying to the Laws of Gravity makes for a very emotionally unsatisfying God."
In much the same way, people want Anonymous to be "emotionally satisfying" - the idea and belief that Anonymous represents everyone, and therefore is in fact no-one is emotionally unsatisfying. Everything else is just as case of subjectively mixing your logic - defining Anonymous as everyone and then giving Anonymous an identity is illogical, because of how identities work. If Anonymous is anyone, they are everyone, which means that we are ALL responsible - we are all Anonymous. The moment someone steps up and says "I'm not Anonymous", the idea that Anonymous is anyone breaks down to nothing.
The logic breaks down, leaving Anonymous as the modern-day bogeyman that we all want to dehumanise because it's easier to hate them that way than to think that another human being, just like us, broke into the PSN and stole all that personal data for personal gain. The key point there is "just like us."
This is the crux of the debate - Anon exists primarily under the idea that Anonymous can be anyone, and therefore everyone, and therefore every member of Anonymous is "just like us." They may wear masks to hide their identities, but they are no less human. The Anonymous ideal is that identity should not matter (plus it makes individuals harder to target).
Yet every attack against Anonymous is designed to shake this ideal, even while it is based upon it. Every attack against Anonymous is designed to show how they are NOT "just like us." This may be true, to a certain extent, because Anonymous clearly has an identity, a brand - something which would be very difficult to sustain if they were "just like us," since this would be like identifying as human - we are all human (however delusional some of the species may seem about this fact) rendering the identity meaningless.
But let's put this in another context shall we, one which isn't plagued by the ethereal nature of Anonymous. You have a group of people with the same identity, with official channels. There's lots of these groups around: Companies, governments, and so forth. Let's take one at not-quite-so random, say... Sony. Now you have someone who supports Sony's policies do something for Sony without their knowledge. Would you say that Sony was responsible for the other person's actions? This would be unreasonable - but there would be speculation unless there was proof that Sony did or didn't have knowledge, and normally that proof comes in the form of a licensing agreement. Generally, someone who operates without a license is deemed to have no affiliation with the parent group - licenses are about being able to do things while claiming affiliation.
Yet, despite being unreasonable to claim that outside groups without license are acting on behalf of organizations like Sony, this is exactly the claim that you are making against Anonymous.
You say it yourself - it's an Anon attack, just not an official one by all of them. You do realise that it's the very act of being an official Anonymous operation that makes it an Anonymous operation. If it's not official, it's not an Anonymous attack. It is an attack done by anyone who may or may not have been affiliated with Anonymous at some point.
Let me repeat that bit for you, in case you missed it:
IF IT IS NOT OFFICIAL, IT IS NOT AN ANONYMOUS ATTACK.
There's a bunch of people pointing the finger at Anonymous, but as of yet nobody in Anonymous has said this was an Anonymous attack. All it takes is for a single person in Anonymous to say this was an Anonymous attack. If they did this, they would have said this was an Anonymous attack by now. They haven't.
For the TL; DR generation: IF IT IS NOT OFFICIAL, IT IS NOT AN ANONYMOUS ATTACK.
