This post is in regards to the loosely knit group that calls themselves "Anonymous" taking part in a modest number of vigilante cyber attacks in recent history.
Problem (as they see it): "They" seek a forum and venue in which to collectively exercise their claims and to attract attention to themselves for a variety of real or actual wrongs against people other than themselves.
Claim: They assert a claim of being political activists, and claim that what they do is a form of protest, not merely against various governments, but also against a wide spectrum of institutions, organization, and even against specific individuals.
Reason: Their reasons are usually very poorly thought out or justified beyond that of a group mentality at the level of that of a high school student. They appear to first start an action, and then to find poorly established rationale for the attack, or there is an attack by a person not associated with the group (who remains in the background), which the group them incorrectly takes credit for, with the group threatening additional attacks "unless their demands are met".
Principle: Thier principle of operation, is that a large number of unknown people can perform minor acts, or acts of cyber vandalism, and if these are associated with some semi-anonymous group, the individual gains social power within their group. The perceive that a widely distributed criminal act taints the individual only slightly, but that the greater taint on that of the target, and by this means they justify their random attacks. It is akin to a group of high school students going out to find someone to beat up, and then attacking the person with each of the assailants only punching or kicking the victim only once, and then rummaging through the victim's pockets to somehow "prove" they were a threat the society, when the threat to society is the pack mentality of the attacking group.
For example, the attack on the cloud used to store Sony digital files of their movies, in advance of rentals over cable, and screening copies of unreleased movies from a cloud hosting company in New Mexico and Arizona was incorrectly credited to a hack by Anonymous, and of course Anonymous took credit for the hack. The only problem is that the "hack" was actually merely an employee of the company who have trusted physical access to the server farm on the sites was merely swapping out hard drive in a RAID array so that when a new hard drive showed up in the array the files present on one drive were automatically copied to a second (new) drive. The drive bay that was occupied with the old drive, were a new drive was installed permitted the old drive (filled with data) to be smuggled out of the data center, and this process went on for a number of months, with the data being sold to a data herder in California, who in turn sold images of the drives to the North Korean government, and to the government of Taiwan. (Note: a "data herder" collects drive images from a wide array of sources, and then finds buyers for the images, usually these are entire images of drives to include unallocated space, not merely files). In an effort to injure Sony, the government of NK set up a series of TOR servers in order to disseminate information and intellectual files that injured Sony Pictures, and NK was more than happy to allow Anonymous to take credit for something that Anonymous had nto actually been involved in.
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