[ISN] Anonymous Member Speaks About Divide in the Collective¢s Mission

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/13/anonymous-member-speaks-about-divide-in-the-collective-s-mission.html

By Parmy Olson
The Daily Beast
June 13, 2012

The sound of a milk steamer roars in the background in a coffee shop, 
where William is sitting at a table and drinking idly from a cup. He is 
a young man, early 20s, dressed in a checkered red shirt and low-slung 
jeans, who wouldn’t look out of place wandering around his local 
shopping mall or riffing with friends over a beer. William has a few 
secrets, though, and one of his biggest is that he aligns himself with 
Anonymous. This is the online community of hacktivists and Internet 
trolls that’s been running riot across the Web for the past few years.

William (not his real name) is somewhat hardcore. He insists that he is 
part of the original Anonymous—like a Roman Catholic who sees himself as 
being part of the “one true church.� He says this part of Anonymous 
started it all, laying the foundations for the current nebulous 
community and injecting it with all the necessary elements of 
subculture: the memes and the lingo, the profound social acceptance and 
the disdain for authority, the intent to harass people for fun or 
“lulz.� Things that made it attractive and fun.

The “hacktivist� Anons who attacked Stratfor last year, and PayPal and 
MasterCard the year before, the ones who wear the Guy Fawkes masks and 
protest against acronyms like CISPA and ACTA: they’re a “joke,� William 
grumbles. A pair of elderly ladies at the table next door look in his 
direction over their cups of tea, and he lowers his voice a little. The 
real, true Anonymous lives on 4chan, William says, a website visited by 
millions of people each month. So-called trolls who are the Joker to the 
hacktivists’ Batman. Young men who, like William, are happy to watch the 
world burn. In essence, it’s his home.

William first found 4chan when he was in his early teens, around the 
same time he and his friends were “pedo-bating� on MSN chat and other 
websites. They would come online with a nickname like “sexy_baby_girl� 
and pretend to be an underage teen who wanted to see an older man 
masturbate on a Web cam. Once a man showed up on video, they’d suddenly 
type out a fake IP address, say it was his and that they were from child 
protection services. As the men suddenly fumbled for the mouse to turn 
it off, they’d fall about laughing. William always wanted to take the 
joke further, to get the man more excited. When it was over, he’d go 
home and carry out the pranks on his own.

[...]

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