June 7, 2016 ▸ People, Technology

Episode 98: Anonymous: Hackers or Heroes?

Subscribe: TuneIn | RSS

This episode explores the notorious hacktivist group known as Anonymous. They started as an outgrowth from the website 4Chan back in 2003 and have expanded ever since. Anonymous is often said to be an internet gathering of a hackers, protesters, and mouthpieces speaking for freedom of speech and the end to oppression. They have a mysterious and decentralized command structure that is hard to track down, and they famously engage in activities that oppose big government, homophobia, ISIS, child pornography, and corporate greed. In other words, our kinds of people!

They famously wear the Guy Fawkes mask made famous in the V: For Vendetta film, and they typically post videos declaring a war on a particular group or individual and call for other “Anons” to join the cause and change things. They use Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks to shut down websites, Google Bombs, Black Faxes, and often post very private information and even nude pictures of people in their cross hairs. In this episode, we discuss their war on Scientology (Operation Chanology), their war on child porn (Operation Darknet), and their attack on movie studios who tried to shut down torrent sites (Operation Payback).

Did they really cause the Sony PlayStation network to shut down for an entire Month? What was their beef with the San Francisco BART transit system? Did they declare war on Donald Trump? Most importantly, who did they Rick Roll in the real world? Listen and find out!