Ethics Assignment #2 (Assignment #1 Revise)

Anonymous got its roots from 4chan which is an image board website, but anonymous as we know it today is a collective of like-minded people standing up for their beliefs. Anonymous is able to disrupt their targets by Ddos, Hacking, and protest. They have had many famous operations over the years but the operation that caught my eye the most in the documentary was Operation Payback. Julian Assange, a hacker, programmer and Journalist started WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks was created to expose secret and classified information. PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and Amazon removed their services from WikiLeaks so that it would not receive donations from supporters, Even the Swiss bank froze certain funds and this infuriated Anonymous to its core. Anonymous found out that Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal all still allowed their services to the KKK and other hate groups, and that just fueled the fire even more. Anonymous swiftly moved into action and started Ddos (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on Visa, PayPal, MasterCard. and Swiss Bank Post finance. Soon thereafter Tunisia blocked WikiLeaks and Anonymous ddosed Tunisian sites. As a result of the massive attacks 13 participants of Operation Payback were raided and arrested. In the words of many anons "information wants to be free".

I think what they did was right. At first I was definitely conflicted with the good and bad of this operation. I sat and thought about it for a while and I feel like the anons beliefs and intentions were in the right place. The government isn't very transparent with its citizens so it can make people uneasy and uncomfortable; WikiLeaks is a repercussion of that isolation. when government atrocities or wrong doings are brought to light people tend to either get angry or want change and anonymous beliefs lean towards change. The government needs to more explicit, WikiLeaks in my opinion is merely a necessity in modern day society. people have a right to know what’s going on. and when Anonymous saw that threatened they took action. I believe Ddos can be problematic for companies/websites but in reality there is no physical damage done. It is about awareness and cyber protest, they can potentially run up their bandwidth fees and leave them with a large bill because of all the extra traffic they have sent, but I feel like that is different than physical damage such as throwing bricks through windows and or other acts of violence. In some people’s minds WikiLeaks is an awful thing because of government exposure and the potential security risks that go along with it. Ignorance truly must be bliss to those individuals’. During the Afghanistan and Iraq war, we bombed village’s and hundreds of innocent adults and children were killed; we should ignore that? or when Saudi Arabian leaders told us to attack Iran, or when the Australian government tried to censor the internet and stop people from going to certain sites I.E. WikiLeaks, certain YouTube videos, religious sites, and pornography. those are just a few of the 1 million plus documents that reside on the WikiLeaks servers. I commend anonymous for their actions.