A Eulogy for #Occupy

Wired’s Occupy Wall Street correspondent reflects on her year of covering the movement:

“Standing next to an older officer after one eviction, telling him what I’d seen and listening to him worry about how he was going to send his kids to college, I overheard the police talk to each other. Of the protestors they kept saying the same thing, the same three words to each other and walked away: ‘They’ll be back.’ Some said it with scorn, lips curled. Some said it with fear, some excited for the action. Some said it with the watery voices of drowning hope: ‘They’ll be back.’

“Please, let something matter again, let something change.

“The policing of protest in America makes it clear that protest has become mere ritual, a farce, and that, by definition, it becomes illegal if it threatens to change anything or inconvenience anyone. In time, all the police announcements came to say the same thing to me. ‘You may go through your constitutional ritual,’ they intoned, ‘but it must stop before anything of consequence happens.’ We must, above all, preserve everything as it is.”

Source: Wired
Published: Dec 12, 2012
Length: 29 minutes (7,476 words)

How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down

A look at the rise of the hactivist group Anonymous, and why they’ve targeted certain organizations:

“On February 5, 2011, the Financial Times quoted Aaron Barr, CEO of a security company called HBGary Federal, as saying that he had uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He claimed the group had around 30 active members, including 10 senior hackers who made all the decisions, and he purportedly had linked their IRC handles to real names using social-network analysis. He was planning to announce all this, he said, during a presentation at an upcoming security conference.

“Anonymous responded with inhuman severity and swiftness. Within 48 hours, all the data on the email servers of HBGary Federal and its former parent company, HBGary, had been stolen and then released in full on the Pirate Bay. Anons further humiliated Barr by seizing his Twitter account and (they allege, though this has never been confirmed) even erasing his iPad remotely. Barr’s Anonymous presentation was posted on the net and laughed at for its supposed inaccuracies. The notice on HBGary Federal’s site read, ‘This domain has been seized by Anonymous under section #14 of the rules of the Internet.’ (Rule 14 is a real thing, from a ‘Rules of the Internet’ list that often made the rounds on /b/. It reads as follows: ‘Do not argue with trolls—it means that they win.’)”

Source: Wired
Published: Jun 22, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,056 words)