Anonymous deserves an incredible amount of appreciation

Corvus Maximus wrote: »

Monitoring hasn't done much, considering the Paris ring leaders travelled around with not a care or worry in the world.

Channel 4 infiltrated one of their 'cells' in London, it's in a documentary on right now; loose women in a book club banging on about hating x y & Jews lol clever monitoring!

custard gannet wrote: »

You think that Isis leaves details of future attack plans hanging around on their email and twitter sent items? Good grief.

The 9/11 finalization were communicated by a mix of intricate codewords between men posing online as boyfriend and girlfriend and face to face meetings- one of the WTC pilots traveled the whole way from Florida to Spain to receive his final orders. If anyone believes that they left lists of times and dates lying around their accounts you must have been born yesterday. Even all of the hijackers bar the pilots were likely unaware of the date and the targets until the eve of the attacks, to minimise the damage to the entire plot if one of them were to be taken into custody before the attack.

Which means Anonymous is just doing a pointless Publicity stunt really, with no value at all barring pissing off loads of ISIS sympathisers, not some noble act as some who are brain washed in these things think.

beks101 wrote: »

They're already known by the authorities. Every global intelligence agency you can think of is already monitoring IS social media chatter like a hawk and making movements, POAs, raids, arrests and deployments accordingly. They're employing high tech companies to help them with it (I know because I work for one of them.)

And yet they're doing absolutely f*ck all about it, while this cancer continues to spread across the world.

All vigilantism is essentially the same - it is the natural result of a perceived failure of those charged with upholding the law to do so. Nobody would be getting involved in this, or cheerleading it, if people had any faith in the Western authorities to do their jobs.

Western governments, through their unimaginable and astounding stupidity and incompetence, have nurtured the threat of extremism and allowed it to flourish. "Let the grownups handle it", says Phoebas - but to the vigilantes it's as clear as day that the grownups have royally f*cked it up.

I'm not saying I approve of vigilantism - I never go that far - but just like when that pedo in Dublin had the sh!te kicked out of him after he was caught staking out a school playground, it wouldn't have happened if he had been in jail where be belonged.

By all means let the authorities take care of it - but if they want the people's trust and faith in their abilities, they're going to actually have to make some headway at some stage. Otherwise it's natural that people will say "f*ck this, they're going to sit and fiddle while our world burns, let's try to do something ourselves".

Case in point, this whole concept of "let them spread their propaganda if the result is that we can track them" didn't work in Paris, but allowing the propaganda to spread may well have been how those terrorists were radicalised in the first place. Appeasement is neither a realistic strategy, nor something that the general public will tolerate - especially when they have seen tangible evidence that it has failed.

Fleawuss wrote: »

I'm curious about Anonymous. Given what we know about the capacity of the NSA do Anon bring any extra capacity to the table? If you have a govt agency capable of corrupting update channels to install their own versions of software the scratching around of anonymous isn't going to do much. As for anonymity I thought the Israelis got p*ssed off with some of them and hacked their webcams and posted their photos.

Perhaps because the reality is that 'morons posting on facebook' is in fact the best source of information intelligence agencies have to identify possible threats.
It's actually amazing the number of plots there have been that were thwarted by facebook generation terrorists and their decreeced notional concept of privacy coupled with their need to brag to the world about their jihad on social media that has lead to their ultimate failure. Ironically, shutting down these sites could possibly lead to an surge in successfull attacks.