Anonymous Targets San Francisco BART
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This flyer was released by Anonymous for mass submission to executives at the San Francisco BART. Creative Commons.
Protest threats in San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations caused the transit agency to disable cell phone service on its station platforms Aug. 11. Though these protests, a response to the shooting of a passenger by a BART police officer July 11, never transpired, the decision to cut cell service captured the attention of well-established hactivist organization Anonymous.
“Cell phone service was was shut down in BART stations today to prevent protests. How would people call 911?” tweeted @YourAnonNews, the Twitter domain of hacker group Anonymous, around 6:00 a.m. PST on Aug. 12.
An hour later, the account posted the phone number for the BART Board of Directors. And in the following hour, it addressed BART directly: “. @SFBART #ExpectUs.”
The group called for a “Twitter riot” in the same hour using the topic #OpBART, then asked users to tweet pictures of their “muBARTek” fliers, which had already installed throughout San Francisco. By 9 a.m., Operation BART was “well underway.”
Identifying "Anonymous"
Anonymous began collectively and informally in 2003. On the imageboards of a notorious forum, 4chan, a decentralized contingent of users began coordinating their posts, usually just to entertain. Their game was “trolling,” or provoking strangers online and enjoying their “disrupted emotional equilibriums," described the New York Times.
The group grew as the Internet did, particularly among young computer-savvy users with plenty of free time. With what the Times called “a fluid morality,” these anonymous forum members permeated domains with provocative and occasionally harmful “lulz"--pheonetic reading of the popular online phrase, "laugh out loud (LOL)"--the term for actions that allow the perpetrator to laugh at another’s online frustration.
Their mission evolved as well: After five years of simply seeking "lulz," some members embraced vigilante hactivism. Their mission remains protecting free speech, Internet freedom and user sovereignty by pranking corporations that seem to corrupt those goals. Recent pranks are hardly the harmless “trolling” founded on 4chan with .gif files and funny captions, however.
Faceless Action
As a coherent but still faceless group by 2008, Anonymous challenged its first large-scale victim: the Church of Scientology. First, the Church asked YouTube to remove one of its copyrighted videos. YouTube complied, but Anonymous (also “Anon”) rebelled against this perceived act of censorship. The group posted a threatening YouTube rebuttal.
"With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed, for the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment," Anonymous proclaimed in a computerized voice over a quaint cloudscape.
Local chapter Church of Scientology websites were then hacked, defaced and disabled. Additionally–-in true hacktivist fashion–- Scientology call centers were imbued with false pizza orders and loud renditions of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” a longtime Internet meme. Within a month, 9,000 Anonymous supporters protested simultaneously at about 200 Scientology buildings worldwide, the group announced.
Anonymous has since challenged major anti-piracy firms in the name of free information. They hacked PayPal, MasterCard and Amazon after the companies cancelled the accounts of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, in 2010. They also interfered with the domains of Spain’s Ministry of Culture and major Sony websites to represent public dissatisfaction with business’ greed, reported Telecom.paper.
Is my content safe?
Anonymous practices “cyberterrorism,” defined by the Federal Bureau of Information as any "criminal act perpetrated by the use of computers.” The Harvard Law Review adds that, because there is “no unified legal regime” for the Internet, the prosecution and prevention of large-scale hacking is complex if not impossible.
Anonymous continues to grow as its notoriety increases. Currently, the group posts its threats on Twitter and Tumblr. Threats are generally directed at corporations or powerful individuals who allegedly interfere with free speech, an uncensored Internet or free information.
On Aug. 10, a YouTube video allegedly produced by Anonymous surfaced, threatening to “kill Facebook” for its notoriously complex privacy settings:
“Facebook is the opposite of the Antisec cause. You are not safe from them nor from any government. One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the internet, we are not harming you but saving you.”
The video and a corresponding press release set the attack for Nov. 5, the date on which Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1604 (Anonymous frequently adopts motifs from the film V for Vendetta (2004), which fictionalized Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot). Anonymous formally disowned “Op Facebook,” though they admitted that the idea was considered but scrapped by the group and is now facilitated by a few of its members working independently. Gawker reported that, while OpFacebook is not a coordinated effort, it’s not a diffused threat, either - a mass account deactivation may still be in development.
Not Only Virtual
The Anonymous Twitter account shares links to news articles and occasionally a song lyric, but frequently tosses in tweets like, “Here is the number of Manaf Tiass the best friend of Bastard (Bashar) Al Assad. Have a good time…” The contact information is consistently accurate, and people retweet such information to their successive networks.
On Aug. 13, OpBART formally began. An “Email and Fax Bomb” was posted at 9 a.m. PST, encouraging users to flood BART officials’ mailboxes with a concert of Anonymous flyers and questions about the new cell phone policy. The organization’s phone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses were, of course, provided.
On Monday, the group encourages San Francisco residents to engage in a peaceful but large-scale protest at BART’s Civic Center Station. Its press release implores participants to avoid violence, but does not attempt to veil its classical concluding threat:
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not Forgive.
We do not Forget.
Expect us.
