Where Anonymous actions come from

from BoingBoing:

Quinn Norton reports in depth on Wired with a careful, important account of where Anonymous's actions come from -- how coordinated activity (political, lulzy, legal and illegal) can emerge from noise, randomness, bombast and joking. This is the best description of how decision-making works in decentralized movements, and has important implications for the future of activism, governance, politics, crime and security:

But it’s a mistake to identify Anonymous entirely with these arrestees, some of whom were blackhats and others who were guilty of just using the LOIC. The hacks draw their power from the support of the wider collective, not the other way around. The majority of Anonymous operations are conceived and planned in a chaotic and open fashion. At any given time, a few thousand people are congregating on the Anonymous IRC channels, figuring out for themselves what it means to be an anon. And together they embody whatever Anonymous is going to be that day.

Most of the time, in most of the channels, there’s little more than conversation; sometimes a whole channel will consist of lurkers, with no one contributing a thing. But when some offense to the net is detected, anons will converge on one or more of these “chans,” with hundreds or thousands arriving within hours—many of them new to Anonymous and yet all primed and eager to respond. What looks in one moment like a sad, empty chat room can quickly become the staging ground for a major multipronged assault.

Consider OpBART, which flared up in August 2011 and dealt with an unlikely issue for Anonymous: the messy offline world of race relations and police violence. Ever since 2009, when a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant, protests against abuse of authority by transit police had grown. On August 11, anti-BART activists were planning a rally at several of San Francisco’s underground transit stops to protest another shooting by a BART officer, this one of a homeless man named Charles Hill. It was an unremarkable story by the standards of the national media, but the response from BART to the planned protest did catch the interest of the local press: To thwart protesters from coordinating via mobile devices, BART cut cell service at its downtown stations.

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

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND DOCUMENTARY FROM 1976

from DangerousMinds

Directed by Emile de Antonio, Haskell Wexler and Mary Lampson, Underground (1976) tells the story of radical activists the Weathermen via interviews and news footage of the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s and 70s.

De Antonio reports that he had little difficulty contacting the radicals-in-hiding. Along with cameraman Haskell Wexler and editor Mary Lampson, he filmed the interview in a California safe house, avoiding his subjects’ faces by filming them through sheets and from behind. One camera angle used by De Antonio became a hot topic of discussion among film students. The Weathermen and women are filmed through a mirror. We see De Antonio, Lampson and Wexler with his camera staring right at us, but only the backs of the subjects’ heads. The angle states exactly how the film was made and acknowledges the presence of a camera at all times. What’s more, it suggests that the filmmakers are an active part of the testimony, and not separate from it. To some the shot suggests solidarity with the Weathermen. Others see it as a challenge to the F.B.I.: we’re exercising our First Amendment rights and we’re not hiding from anybody.”

De Antonio, Wexler and Lampson were subpoenaed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an effort to locate the Weathermen. The film was pulled from circulation.

The three, all prominent within the Hollywood community, hired the best lawyers that they could find, and with the support of other filmmakers and actors, including Elia Kazan, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, were able to get the subpoenas repealed . The three were able to use their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, as well as the rights of journalistic integrity which allow for confidentiality of sources.

The Weather Underground were a divisive force within the anti-war movement. Their violent approach to protest, which included bombing symbols of the corporate war machine, was reviled by pacifists who felt their tactics were just a mirror image of the forces the peace movement was railing against. But despite their lack of support, The Weather Underground managed to shake up the system without anyone getting killed but themselves. Three Weathermen died when a nailbomb blew up in a townhouse on 11th street in Manhattan in 1970.