Whatever Happened To Anonymous?

CYBER

VICE

Tech News, News & Politics, Technology, News

4 • 645 Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At its height, the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous was the bane of Scientologists, the FBI, CIA, Mastercard, Paypal, Middle Eastern dictatorships, and in its latest effective iterations, even ISIS.

But in recent years, Anonymous has all but disappeared. It leaves a legacy: It single-handedly brought back the Guy Fawkes mask as a true symbol of civil disobedience, was the obvious inspiration for the hit TV show Mr. Robot, and is also associated with all sorts of more nefarious and negative aspects of trolling culture. In its wake, hacktivism hasn’t dried up altogether, either, with entities like Phineas Fisher still making headlines and taking up its mantle as an online vigilante force challenging the powerful.

This week on CYBER we have Biella Coleman, a professor of anthropology at McGill University in Montreal who wrote the comprehensive book on the group—Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous—to talk about what became of the infamous collective.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Tann, it's got the code it's going to launch.
0:10.7	It's a unit system.
0:13.1	I know this.
0:15.1	It's all the files of the whole park.
0:17.3	It tells her everything.
0:19.0	Sir, he's uploading the virus.
0:21.6	The Eagle One, the package is being delivered.
0:24.6	It became the hacker boogeyman of the ages.
0:27.6	The mysterious group Anonymous has struck again with a warning.
0:31.6	This is just the beginning.
0:32.6	Covert vigilantes making the powerful pay.
0:35.6	Hackers are rushing to defend WikiLeaks and its jailed founder Julian Assange.
0:41.8	So-called hacktivists operating under the label Operation Payback have claimed responsibility
0:47.9	for knocking MasterCard Visa and several other websites offline.
0:53.2	And the inspiration for hit TV show.
0:55.5	Greetings, brothers and sisters.
0:57.9	We are F Society.
1:00.0	It is anonymous and it was Legion.
1:02.8	But then, at least in the last few years,
1:05.3	the group of infamous hacktivists seem to disappear.
1:09.2	This week on cyber, we have Biela Coleman,
1:12.2	professor of anthropology at McGill University in Montreal,
	...

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