This week, Sony Corporation claimed to Congress that their investigation of the breach by which millions of customers had their credit card numbers compromised had turned up a document left on the server in question entitled "Anonymous" and containing the phrase "We are Legion," itself a fragment of our longtime slogan. Some have taken this as proof that Anonymous was responsible for the most significant online heist in memory. The online activist movement has recently been engaged in a battle with Sony over its treatment of two individuals who taught others how to alter the Playstation 3 in such a way as to install Linux OS on the gaming console, making it a natural suspect. But those observers who are most familiar with Anonymous - such as the dozens of journalists who have had the opportunity to speak with us and to watch us at work in the venues from which most of our operations have launched - tend to agree with us that the circumstances of this incident are highly suspicious, and that any investigation into the crime in question must take into account the natural question of who might benefit from such an act while also possessing the means by which to carry it out.
The perpetration of some unethical or even criminal act with the purpose of framing another party and thereby damaging its reputation has a long history. The FBI spent two decades operating a program called COINTELPRO by which agents would infiltrate such "dangerous" groups as the civil rights movement and then promote violence by its members in order to provide an excuse by which to crack down further. A Congressional committee that investigated later noted that "the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association."
Additionally, it was only a few months ago that Anonymous' counterinvestigation into a group of federal contractors including HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Belrico revealed that the three companies - collectively known then as "Team Themis" - had planned to destroy Wikileaks at the behest of their client Hunton & Williams (which in turn had been hired by Bank of America). This was to be achieved via disinformation, placement of fake documents, and "cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters." Of course, Anonymous itself engages in attacks of that latter sort, the planning of which is a crime in and of itself. On the other hand, Anonymous does so against dictatorships and corrupt institutions that engage in corruption alongside the state - and when we do, the FBI raids the homes of our alleged participants. Not being as respectable as our corporate counterparts, we are not permitted to commit crimes with impunity.
Now, having made enemies of the dozens of other firms whose wrongdoing we have exposed in the months since via Operation Metal Gear and other crowd-sourced investigations, Anonymous is accused of having committed a major crime entirely different from the campaigns of civil disobediance for which we are rightfully known. The evidence is a single document that helpfully names us as the perpetrators. And Sony has thus managed to shift attention away from its unprecedented negligence, while the same federal agencies that work hand in hand with those firms have yet another chance by which to pursue us, this time for a massive theft rather than popular acts of revolt. I cannot prove that this action was taken by any of the powerful and sophisticated enemies we have made in the world of intelligence contracting or law enforcement or both, just as they cannot prove that Anonymous was responsbile for this heist.
At any rate, an investigation is being conducted by the usual people. Congress is now on the job. Even more heartingly, Attorney General Eric Holder says that the Justice Department is taking this "very seriously." It is good to see those two entities back to work all of a sudden. When a few months ago Rep. Hank Johson called for Congress to look into the potential crimes committed by Team Themis in coordination with Hunton & Williams, Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, declined, saying that this was the role of the Justice Department. He did not seem to think it problematic that, as we discovered from the e-mails, it was the Justice Department itself that recommended Hunton & Williams to Bank of America for the purpose of conspiring against Wikileaks. Eric Holder having presumably been too busy to investigate his own department, Anonymous is of course flatterred to learn that we are more significant than the DoJ.