Mashed Articles

Anonymity does strange things to strange people. It makes them behave incredibly badly because they believe they will never be caught. It makes them spout lies behind a veil of apparent truth. It makes them reveal their feelings without fear of recrimination. Protecting one’s privacy is one thing; being shady and underhand quite another.

LulzSec, Anonymous, TeamPoison, A-Team: let me first address you directly. I admire your dedication to security. I love that you have revealed, publicly and violently, the gaping holes in supposedly secure systems. Richard Cobbett has his say on the state of security, but let me give you the credit you deserve: I hope that system admins the world over are sitting up and taking note of your high-profile targets and the apparent ease with which you have obtained sensitive data from them.

Who doesn’t like seeing corporations like Sony taken down a peg or two? What Xbox owner who recalls the Sinclair/Commodore playground wars wouldn’t chuckle at his rival taking a hit?

But things started getting uncomfortable quickly. Basically, guys, it’s your attitude. Are you doing this to reveal security holes, or are you doing it ‘for the lulz’? Is there any need to be so cocky about it? The private enjoyment of small groups of pseudonymed hackers, doing it safely and sensibly for points in their own community, is actually pretty cool. The too-public guffawing combined with the blatant acquisition of highly sensitive materials? The hyperactive response to baiting on Twitter? The inter-team squabbling? Not so much.

And now, because you’re so keen to hide, we can’t tell fact from fiction. A recent declaration that data from the UK Census had been stolen was attributed to LulzSec, but the group denied any involvement.

Part of the blame here has to go to Pastebin. On one hand it’s a useful service for short term widespread sharing of anonymous (or just insensitive) text; on the other it’s a means for anyone to post anything they like, unsigned or even falsely attributed. It’s the latest tool of lazy journalists looking for a headline – there are no facts to check, no sources to follow up, just pure dirt.

How can I tell that the latest big hack came from a particular group? How can I tell that it even happened? I could – and I have actually considered this – rock up on Pastebin and craft my own ASCII-art proclamation of big-name company doom. Or maybe I’ll write some disparaging lies about a popular pre-teen reality show contestant, dragging him, his family, his management, and the high-profile star of his show through the mud for no good reason. Maybe I’ll claim the whole show was a fix.

That sounds like a true front-page plan, and indeed it was; the anonymous Pastebin screed against Britain’s Got Talent star Ronan Parke hit tabloid wide, causing Simon Cowell to grab a camera on live TV, stare menacingly down the lens, and let the author know that he or she had done very wrong. A subsequent apology popped up, which again may or may not have been from the individual in question.

The press have called this person a ‘blogger’, which does actual bloggers a disservice; at least bloggers have the gall to attach their posts to a single body of work, rather than spitting them into the ether. I do have sympathy for the author, who suffers from bipolar disorder and has received a warning from the police, but I don’t recall nearly as much shouting from the mainstream press about the falsified information as there was about the apparent truth behind it.

Anonymity isn’t always about pranking or malice, though. Sometimes it’s the last resort of a desperate person. A letter from a high-level RIM employee, complaining about the company’s direction and management, caught my eye not necessarily for its content – I probably could have made most of the suggestions contained within with no inside knowledge of the company – but for RIM’s response, an almost immediate swathe of PR-speak with the barest hint of what looked like “We’re going to find you, you rat.”

There was no admission of poor practice, no agreement with the suggestion that RIM was lagging behind its competitors, just the sort of controlled language that arises when you know you’re being looked at directly. Perhaps it would have been better, in this case, for an anonymous higher-up at RIM to step forward and admit that the company is in tatters, and that it is willing to make it right. The shareholders might not agree, but sometimes the veil of obscurity is just what you need to kick-start a revolution.