‘Anonymous’, the saviour of idiocy?

Fight the good fight, just don't go kicking own goals in the process.

If you haven't already heard, there was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Australian government servers recently. The intent was to bring attention to the message "no one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason." The culprits go by the name 'Anonymous', and appear to have a strong opinion against Senator Conroy's decision to censor Australian Internet. It's fair to assume that these attacks were to prove how powerful this group is, and that messing with their rights to free speech and access on the Internet will not be taken lightly. A protest, of sorts. But was this attack a demonstration against an Internet clean feed, or another chip on the anti-censorship sholder?

It's no secret that Senator Conroy is oblivious to the impact his proposed ISP level Internet filter will have on Australians. It's a product designed to block websites in accordance to a secret blacklist, the performance hit is significant, and the technology can be easily bypassed via readily available means. Essentially, it's useless. It'll cost tax payers millions of dollars, and protect no one. It will, however, be quite successful in terms of an unavoidable performance hit. For a country which is behind in terms of Internet speed and quota, that's just unacceptable.

The action Anonymous has taken against the government's servers is nothing short of malicious. Similar to how protesters deliberately cause nuisance to draw attention to their cause, Anonymous has blocked access to certain government websites via a swamp of server requests. In addition to this, they took the opportunity to send recently restricted porn to government offices, particularly the Communications department.

Concerns have been raised over the appropriateness of such an attack. Conservative politicians thrive on taking otherwise clear-cut situations, and adding irrelevant or incorrect analysis to push their agenda. This is quite clear by how they promoted their Enex ISP filter test results as successful. Of course, their idea of a working ISP filter had the following conditions:

• Performance impact is considered negligible if it is less than +/‐10 percent;
• Performance impact is considered minimal if between 10 and 20 percent;
• Performance impact is considered noticeable if more than +/‐20 percent.

If it's only "noticeable" once you've lost 20% "performance", then there's a problem. A serious problem. Sadly, the report was riddled with such silly assumptions and uninspiring data. This brings us back to the point that politicians will happily dictate what we "want" to hear, provided they're able to push their agenda. In this case, they sugar coated the impact of the filter on Internet speed; and that's before they ran the tests! So when you have a vigilante group attacking their servers, you can only imagine the spin they'll produce to paint the informed userbase as "hackers". To the general public, this sounds like a matter of 'hackers' vs 'child safety', rather than 'informed citizens' vs 'dodgy filter'.

Apart from the blatant opportunity for Conroy and his minions to cast naysayers as 'the bad guys', the message that Anonymous attached to their cause is also misrepresentative of what people are fighting for. "The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn." Sorry, but that's not the message you want to be putting out there. Religious citizens vote too; the last thing you want to do is tarnish the cause with your own agenda. Although it's arguable that a large fraction of the community share the same feelings, it's of my opinion that focusing on the censorship aspect is of much more importance, and encompasses the blocking of porn anyway.

It quickly became clear that many anti-filter groups were also disgusted at the actions of Anonymous. Comments on articles such as the one at AtomicMPC showed a general objection to their attacks. The fact that no mainstream activist organisations such as No Clean Feed have approved or acknowledged the attacks shows how little respect these people have attained. No one is willing to tarnish their reputation as a fair opposition to the filter. The Australian Sex Party was quick to deny responsibity or association with Anonymous.

As much as it pains people to think that we could be censored similar to the likes of China, it's also irresponsible to launch attacks against the opposition. One can only imagine the thoughts running through peoples minds as they read the news in their daily paper.

What do you think? Were Anonymous' actions justified? Reply in the comments section below!