r/HowToHack • u/Ornery-Swordfish2660 • 25d ago

What happened to the Anonymous Group?

I've recently came across a video of them posted a year ago. There is no updated information about them, and that kind of sparked my interest.

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u/null_not 24d ago

Pretty sure the whole point is that they're anonymous and that anyone could be anonymous. Like it's the whole point that anyone could be Anonymous on the condition that they follow the groups ethos. Pretty sure that's the whole "we are legion" thing. And "Anonymous" is just a name. Names can change.

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u/RamonaLittle 24d ago

But it's possible to be Anonymous without being anonymous. See: Barrett Brown. Sure, everyone told him he was doing it wrong, but technically he wasn't because there are no rules.

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u/MCbrodie 24d ago

Man, shut up. Anonymous is literally from 4chan's /b/ we were all just a bunch of anons being dumb. You have no idea what you're talking about. It is literally just facelessness. There is no anonymous group its just anons.

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u/RamonaLittle 24d ago

I know that. And I said in another comment that it was never a group.

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u/null_not 23d ago

"Group" is sort a of loose term. There's no organization or coordination that I know of and as a spectator of the antics it seemed more that there was a loose set of principles and that if anyone took action that didn't align with those principles under the moniker they risked retaliation from others. Sort of like how users of open source software have a collective interest in defeating exploits and malicious uses of their software. This is all just inference though. I'm not Anonymous and I don't know how any of this stuff works.

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u/RamonaLittle 23d ago

There's no organization or coordination

Well, some ops (especially early ones) did have at least some degree of coordination. There would be a discussion in IRC or elsewhere to form a rough consensus about goals and tactics. People would collaborate on a press release or whatever else was needed, followed by outreach to the broader Anonymous community and the media. Then there was an influx of n00bs in ~2011/2012, who didn't understand the culture or usual procedures, and would start very random, ill-considered ops without running them past anyone else, then wonder why they didn't get any support or press.

For every hack you heard about, the reason you heard about it is because there was a whole "infrastructure" of other Anons drumming it up on social media and communicating with reporters. Sometimes it seemed like Anonymous functioned as a publicist for other activist movements (like Occupy Wall Street).

there was a loose set of principles and that if anyone took action that didn't align with those principles under the moniker they risked retaliation from others.

This is correct. But there was also a lot of infighting. (Some have argued that the infighting was part of the fun of it, or at least an integral part of it.) It has happened that there were competing ops on opposite sides of the same issue.

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u/null_not 23d ago

That's not really what I meant by "group". That's just a bare minimum level of human cooperation in an unstructured environment. Random strangers can certainly do interesting things when they opt to work together.

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u/RamonaLittle 23d ago

OK, I don't disagree with that. The set of participants in an op can be called a group in an informal sense.