video seed
https://seed305.bitchute.com/Pw2fb6nJlvrZ/ahY7j7Lhlzoo.mp4
At the end of may, as protests against the police killing of George Floyd got under way, reports started to circulate that the shadowy hacker group Anonymous was back.
The rumors began with a video depicting a black-clad figure in the group’s signature Guy Fawkes mask. “Greetings, citizens of the United States,” the figure said in a creepy, distorted voice. “This is a message from Anonymous to the Minneapolis Police Department.” The masked announcer addressed Floyd’s killing and the larger pattern of police misconduct, concluding, “We will be exposing your many crimes to the world. We are legion. Expect us.”
The clip generated a wave of renewed enthusiasm for Anonymous, particularly among young people. Twitter accounts associated with the group saw a surge of new followers, a couple of them by the millions.
At the height of its popularity, in 2012, Anonymous had been a network of thousands of activists, a minority of them hackers, devoted to leftist-libertarian ideals of personal freedom and opposed to the consolidation of corporate and government power. But after a spate of arrests, it had largely faded from view.
Now a new generation was eager to join. “How does one apply to be a part of Anonymous? I just wanna help out, I’ll even make the hackers coffee or suttin” an activist in the United Kingdom joked on Twitter, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets.
Anonymous “stan” (super fan) accounts remixed the video on TikTok to give the shadowy figure glamorous nails and jewelry. Others used the chat service Discord to create virtual spaces where thousands of new devotees could celebrate the hackers with memes and fan fiction. One of the largest Anonymous accounts on Twitter begged people to “stop sending us nudes.”
A series of hacks followed the release of the video. News outlets speculated that it was Anonymous who had hijacked Chicago police scanners on May 30 and 31 to play N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” and Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain,” a 2007 song that served as an unofficial anthem for the group. Likewise, when the Minneapolis Police Department website went offline from an apparent DDoS attack—a hack that overwhelms a target site with traffic—social media credited Anonymous.
Three weeks later, on Juneteenth, a person identifying as Anonymous leaked hundreds of gigabytes of internal police files from more than 200 agencies across the U.S. The hack, labeled #BlueLeaks, contained little information about police misconduct. However, it did reveal that local and federal law-enforcement groups spread poorly researched and exaggerated misinformation to Minnesota police officers during the unrest in May and June, and made efforts to monitor protesters’ social-media activity.
I had recently published a book that detailed the tangled origins of Anonymous, and until last month, I’d thought the group had faded away. I was surprised by its reemergence, and wanted to understand how and why it seemed to be coming back, starting with who had made the new video. It didn’t take me long to find out.
The video was watermarked, which is uncharacteristic for Anonymous. The mark is blurred out in copies, but appears in the original post in white font: “anonews.co.” That URL led me to a news-aggregation site, which brought me to the site’s Facebook page, where the first iteration of the video had been posted on May 28. A British company called Midialab Ltd. controlled the page. I wrote to the email listed on the page, and the company’s owner replied the same day. This person requested anonymity but was willing to put me in touch with the creator of the video.
I suspected I was chasing the tail of some Russian troll farm whose business it was to promote radical division of all stripes. The first place to report on the video, on May 29, had been RT, the state-owned Russian media outlet. And the millions of new followers flocking to Anonymous Twitter accounts? As the accounts themselves pointed out, many were bots.
Within an hour of receiving the email, I got a call from a suburb in Harford County, Maryland, just north of where I live. The man on the line told me his name was John Vibes. “Hey, man,” he said. “Surprised I’m local? I made the video.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/hacker-group-anonymous-returns/615058/
