Thunderous Cacophony said:
So, it appears people are not happy with this. Hooray!
I wouldn't mind if they went after their old targets of oppressive banks or people trying to regulate the internet (which is what they are supposed to be protecting) but this is just vandalism. Not worthy of the Anon name.
Anonymous is not, and never has been, a group of "Hacktivists" despite that being projected onto them. Anonymous has always presented itself as a force of unpredictable chaos. Before all of the so called "hacktivism" you should take a serious look at what they did, a lot of which was NOT nice and justified by the famous "for the lulz" explanation.
While Anonymous has thrown down for internet freedom related causes, which I always suspected because crackdowns could very well affect their own brand of chaos, it's done far more than that.
To be honest the eclectic collection of targets aimed at here is what you should expect from Anonymous, don't let the exceptions, as famous and popular as they might be, interfere with your understanding of the entity your dealing with.
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That said, in response to the article itself, my immediate guess is that like many large scale offensives this was conducted by differant individuals (and groups) who all picked their own targets without any real theme, other than the specific date. It was probably done to show Anonymous is out there and still pretty strong despite crackdowns. Their shotgun blast of random targets kind of shows that nothing from goverment sites, to those of private figures, and pop culture gurus are safe, nor are they aiming entirely at wrong doers.
I suppose some of the odder choices do make a degree of sense, some even from a hacktivism standpoint. Assaulting an Austrlian disabillity bureau is something you'd have to look at the policies of to see if it was random/chaos or a message based hack by those conducted it. Despite the popular, left-wing, perception, helping disabled people isn't all that these groups get up to, it rapidly becomes about power. Such organizations have been used as a blunt object to call people on "code violations" and the like, some politician doesn't like you and he can insist your back door has a handicap ramp costing thousands of dollars despite all common sense, it can be used to shut dowm an condemn buildings, and similar things that have nothing to do with legitimate uses of the granted power and how it was intended. Among other things. I can't say much about that organization. "Lady Gaga" likewise is pretty much pop culture, she creates the illusion of being subversive, doing so in a more or less socially accepted way, that might get attention but not so much that it represnets more than a trivial annoyance. It's hard for me to put into words, but I can see how true subversives might dislike her. ICP (Insane Clown Posse) was more over the top than she is, especially during their height, and actually seemed to be one of the favorite targets of Anonymous and other similar groups with or without ties to it like Encyclpedia Dramtica or Something Awful.
