Anonymous, that nebulous movement of people spearheading civil disobedience and anarchy on the web, has done some unpleasant stuff in the past: ripping apart a digital security company's servers, paralyzing the website of MasterCard and Visa, or reporting that Rupert Murdoch was dead. But are they the kind of folks that would threaten someone's kids?
In the early hours of this morning the British Conservative MP Louise Mensch said on Twitter that she had received an email "from Anonymous/LulzSec" threatening her children. Mensch has gained prominence in recent months after questioning Rupert Murdoch just before that infamous foam-pie-throwing incident in Parliament, and for a recent Twitter war with Piers Morgan. This morning she took a irreverent approach to whatever the ominous message said, tweeting:
- Had some morons from Anonymous /Lulzsec threaten my children via email. As I'm in the States, be good to have somebody from the UK police advise me where I should forward the email.
- To those who sent it; get stuffed, losers.
- Oh and I'm posting it on Twitter because they threatened me telling me to get off Twitter. Hi kids! ::waves::
- I've contacted the police via the House of Commons and the email is with them now. I don't bully easily, kids. Or in fact at all.
Judging by her tone Mensch doesn't seem too fussed by the threats, though she has rightly taken the precaution of contacting the authorities. But could this be a viable threat? It brings up a tricky point for Anonymous. Supporters are completely unknown to one another, there is no clear hierarchy, no official communication channels and no leaders or spokespeople, meaning anyone can get away with signing off a blood-curdling email with "Anonymous" or "Anon," and invoke fears of some sort of web attack or who knows what. Not even senior figures within Anonymous could really dispute it - hence why they struggled to convince the world that the recent Anonymous-linked threat to "kill Facebook" was also not to be taken seriously.
It's very possible Anonymous supporters don't like Mensch: last week she called for a blackout on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to prevent the kind of riots recently seen across London and the U.K. This would appall supporters of the cyber movement, which while vague in its aims holds general support for freedom of information (hence the protest for WikiLeaks last year).
At the same time, however, there a few reasons why the rabble-rousers of Anonymous probably aren't behind the threat to Mensch's family:
- It's highly unusual for hackers, web activists or internet trolls with Anonymous to threaten, with any serious, people's families or kids. As Graham Cluley at Naked Security points out, neither group has ever engaged in any sort of physical violence, "preferring to sit behind computer keyboards instead." One of Anonymous' most famous victims, Aaron Barr, told me in an interview soon after a devastating cyber attack on his company HBGary Federal last February, that he had received "personal threats" via Facebook, but nothing against his family, any of course none of them were ever carried out.
- It's also unconventional for Anonymous to send a message via email. More popular forms of communication are Twitter and the online text application Pastebin.
- LulzSec officially disbanded in late June, and while the small coterie of hackers (a splinter group from Anonymous) did align themselves with a cyber attack on The Sun newspaper a few weeks later, they've been quiet ever since.
- If it is people aligned with Anonymous, the threats are probably a form of "trolling," or provoking someone with enough threats and comments to upset them and get a kind of sick satisfaction.
As with most death threats to well-known individuals, whoever targeted Mensch is probably more interested in freaking her out than carrying out any sort of action. Hijacking the "Anonymous" name just makes dismissing them a little more complicated.
2 comments