Aaron Barr, an employee at security firm HBGary Federal, made a bold claim a week ago in the Financial Times that he had uncovered the identities of the top leaders of the Anonymous movement and was going to meet the FBI.

Not long afterwards, the company’s website was brought down by DDOS, its email server was compromised and 4.7 GB of corporate correspondence, including business deals and NDAs, were leaked onto Pirate Bay. The company’s president went on IRC to beg for mercy and disavowed Barr’s actions.

Ars Technica has an excellent write-up on this latest dorama. They always have the best Anonymous coverage.

And the worst part is that Mr. Barr’s claims were exposed by the leaked emails to be of little actual substance. All he did was some guesswork attempting to link accounts from multiple social networks together to identify what he personally believed to be the “leaders” of Anonymous, and then selling the output as some kind of magical statistical tool to the feds in an attempt to boost the firm’s public image.

Anonymous was not amused. To quote their torrent release:

Greetings HBGary (a computer “security” company),

Your recent claims of “infiltrating” Anonymous amuse us, and so do your attempts at using Anonymous as a means to garner press attention for yourself. How’s this for attention?

You brought this upon yourself. You’ve tried to bite at the Anonymous hand, and now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face. You expected a counter-attack in the form of a verbal braul (as you so eloquently put it in one of your private emails), but now you’ve received the full fury of Anonymous. We award you no points.

What you seem to have failed to realize is that, just because you have the title and general appearence of a “security” company, you’re nothing compared to Anonymous. You have little to no security knowledge. Your business thrives off charging ridiclous prices for simple things like NMAPs, and you don’t deserve praise or even recognition as security experts. And now you turn to Anonymous for fame and attention? You’re a pathetic gathering of media-whoring money-grabbing sycophants who want to reel in business for your equally pathetic company.

The ensuing attack and trollage probably left a permanent black mark on HBGary’s IT security credentials.

Really the only thing stopping this from turning into a Ghost in the Shell-moment is that the Internet still doesn’t have enough direct influence over the physical world. They did remote-wipe the guy’s iPad though, so I suppose that’s a start.

Like the old glass-house saying, people working for security firms should learn to secure better. Or, as Anonymous puts in the description of the torrent file, “It would appear that security experts are not expertly secured.”

I can imagine some people out there are probably trembling at the thought of an army of hormonal teenagers with the power to wreck havoc on the Internet superhighway series of tubes. There have been some buzz over a purported Internet “kill switch” being considered by the US Congress and Egypt’s recent Internet shutdown has added fuel to the fire.

But Anonymous and the anarchy it represents is really the pure distilled essence of direct democracy, where no authority is sacred and all traditions can be questioned and discarded. It is a direct filterless channel of human nature, both the good and the bad. There can be no Anonymous without the Internet, but neither can there be an Internet where there is no Anonymous. Of course, Facebook is actively working to destroy that, but we’ll see.

As more aspects of society go online, supranational digital movements that do not respect traditional forms of authority will become more influential. It is simply part of the deal. The outcome can be scary or exhilarating depending on your perspective.

Personally, I enjoy the cyberpunk-comes-alive aspect of Anonymous. So when are we getting our cyberbrains?

Tomorrow, 6th of January 2010, is YouTube Porn Day. Yes, 4chan’s Anonymous has once again declared war on YouTube as a reaction against perceived injustice in YouTube’s ban policies. YouTube junkies can look forward to stumbling upon some titillating surprises tomorrow.

Just don’t do it at work.

At some levels, pranks are generally awesome and fun to watch from a safe distance. Deep down inside, even as we deride Anonymous for its immature mean streaks, we secretly want to be part of this public conspiracy. The complexities hidden in our reactions to Anonymous’ works are almost Freudian in their elusiveness, as intangible as the loose collective of “hackers on steroids” itself, and yet as real as the effects it engenders.

From Scientology to Dusty the cat, 4chan’s influence on the “real world” is undeniable even though it possesses neither structure nor organization. Driven by powerful ideas encapsulated in memes, Anonymous is the ultimate form of anarcho-libertarianism, free from all authority but the common consent of peers.

It is the epitome of al-Qaeda’s modern strategy to inspire unknown independent actors through commonality of ideology to effect change without the liabilities of a chain of command. It is mob justice without any concern for personal responsibility. It is the fifth estate as envisaged by the deepest believers of crowd wisdom. It is a conscious but anonymous act of rebellion against the system. It is a game for the thrill-seekers and an addictive sense of empowerment for the disenfranchised. It is also nothing one can describe in words because it has no authority to define its own existence.

The past few years brought us the rise of online social networks — a wealth of information that further empowered the collective’s capability to effect change upon the physical world. As the Internet extends its reach, who knows what tomorrow will bring? Anonymous’ power can only grow.

The actions Anonymous takes and the opinions it generates are not ones that can be conveniently shaped by paid consultants and media gurus. Its credibility lies exactly in the fact that it has none. As it grows, the anarchic influences it thrusts upon our orderly society will eventually become a force of nature, an untamed wild bull in a carefully-planned china shop, to be reckoned with by the old establishments.

Perhaps, they will eventually strike 4chan down, for one reason or another. But just as al-Qaeda survived the destruction of its physical networks, the powerful sense of identity behind the driving wheel of this invisible force is not something that can simply be outlawed.

Though grass-roots movements of similar nature grew and died in the past, they did so because they existed in the old world, where size and power eventually meant leadership and the vulnerable points of failure that it led to. But Anonymous has thus far proved itself capable of surviving this critical flaw of human societies that has over millennia dismantled empires, conglomerates and alliances. After all, how does one kill that which has no life?

Perhaps one day, someone clever and insane enough will learn to shape and direct this untameable power. After all, in the online world of loose circumstantial evidences, it is not impossible to tactically unleash the fury of anonymous mob justice upon one’s enemy with an expertly-crafted false flag.

I, for one, welcome our new anonymous overlords.