Written by Henry Hill | 15 January 2012
Posted in Comment - Politics

 Photography: Jacob Davis

To some, the amorphous collection of e-libertines, hackers and cyber-terrorists that present themselves to the world as the ‘Anonymous’ are modern-day heroes.

You can see why they, and their more publicity-minded fellows at Wikileaks, might be attractive to a certain species of anti-authority leftist or libertarian. In a world where the people still elect Conservative  governments and buy the products of multinational corporations, it must be tempting to view the Anonymous as a sort of Robin Hood collective, bypassing the usual channels to stick it straight to ‘the man’.

These people hit the headlines again recently when they attacked the geopolitical analysis site Stratfor. The main thrust of this attack was to hack into and steal the emails of many of Stratfor’s subscribers. At the same time, they launched attacks of opportunity to steal credit card information and try to permanently destroy data on Statfor’s servers.

The justification for this attack is remarkably similar to the one used to justify the various Wikileaks revelations: that there is a powerful and super-secret conspiracy being perpetrated by an ill-defined group of powerful people and organisations, and thus a band of plucky e-guerrillas must do whatever it takes to uncover it, regardless of the law.

A non-disprovable conspiracy theory may justify these crimes in the eyes of the hackers themselves, but it does not – cannot – stand up to independent scrutiny.

In Stratfor’s case it seems to be that the hackers have fundamentally misunderstood what the company does. It consists of a team of experts who analyse world affairs and produce intelligence reports which subscribers can read.

The hackers, instead of referring to ‘subscribers’, refer to ‘clients’. As Strafor’s president has pointed out, client implies a two-way working relationship wherein the customer commissions specialist, bespoke work. There is no such relationship in Stratfor’s case.

More broadly, both this attack and Wikileaks are predicated on suspicion of government and authority taken to delusional levels of paranoia. The hackers and leakers are justified in their attacks, and morally absolved from the consequences of their actions, because of the supposed horror of the plutocratic conspiracy of the powerful.

Yet there is no convincing evidence of any such conspiracy, and if there is no plot then these attacks cease being heroic acts of resistance and become simply criminal acts of cyber-espionage. In the case of Wikileaks, they jeopardised all manner of western diplomatic initiatives and may have placed the lives of western agents and allies in peril.

But at least those were directed against a government. Unless any evidence of a grand conspiracy emerges from the stolen emails then the attack on Stratfor is simply a criminal attack on a perfectly legal organisation.

The implications of this should horrify anybody, on the left or the right, who values democracy and the rule of law. As Stratfor’s George Friedman wrote: “We are now in a world in which anonymous judges, jurors and executioners can silence whom they want.” The brutal doctrine of ‘might makes right’, which all our constitutions, laws and societal structures have been built to guard the citizen against, has emerged on the internet.

This must be dealt with as a matter of urgency. While a certain species of guardianista might revel at the sight of a company brought low by plucky hackers, the Anonymous are nowhere close to being a credible manifestation of the popular will.

Instead, they are the nucleus of a new and amorphous species of dictatorship in which a small number of people with technical skill can bypass all civil and legal protections and impose their will without mandate or accountability. There are few concepts more totalitarian than a world in which nobody can have secrets – yet this is the very world offered to us by the information-libertarians who justify these attacks.

A lone individual, possessing nothing but a degree of computing prowess, has no mandate to pass judgement on any business or individual. They have no right to bypass legal procedure and launch attacks on people they don’t like.

At best, these people are vigilantes. At worst, they could be terrorists. It is about time that all sections of the media recognised this ‘movement’ – if it can be termed such – for what it is, and stopped indulging its spokesmen and glorifying its crimes.

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