Because of the Internet…

Published in

Wonk Bridge

6 min readSep 8, 2016

Why Anonymity on the Internet can create Revolutions

The Internet. It began as a military project with only a handful of harmless computer connections. It is now an immense infrastructural conglomerate of networks with 46 percent of the world’s population as its users.[i] It is also the centre stage for political activism. The internet has become a medium for anonymous individuals and networks to further their political agenda. Whistle-blowers and Hacktivist groups take advantage of anonymity, quick information diffusion, and the world as an audience to expose immoral actions of individuals or organisations. Have it be corruption, manipulation, murder or terrorism. Never before has the opportunity shown itself. That a single individual, with such limited resources, could reach out to such a wide audience. The internet has therefore evolved into something more than a simple symposium. It has become a voice for a global morality code. A code, even though entrenched in cyberspace, creates very real world turmoil.

The curious incident of the Panama Papers

**Source: (**https://panamapapers.icij.org)

The Panama Papers provides a holy grail of information that implicates politicians, oligarchs and corporations of corruption. The repercussions it was able to have on key individuals and entities was only possible through the collective mobilisation of people online and off. They rallied under the single idea of a liberal democratic interpretation of justice.

Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm, had 2.6 terabytes of data released to the public.[ii] These 11.5 million documents implicate 140 world leaders, from more than 50 companies to secret offshore accounts in 21 different tax havens.[iii] The documents are bigger than the Snowden leak in 2013 and Wikileaks in 2010 combined.[iv]

**Source:** (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-panama-papers)

The documents were exposed by a lone individual. Someone inside the company whose idea of right and wrong was not on par to the company’s ethics.[v] Now having an offshore company is legal, but hiding it from taxes is not.[vi] To the whistle-blower, these people of power defied the concept of righteousness and surpassed the threshold of legality. The most popular example of this was the resignation of the Icelandic prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.[vii] Gunnlaugsson, accused of hiding money in an offshore company, was pressured to resign after 22,000 Icelanders (~10% of Iceland’s population) protested outside parliament.[viii] Interestingly enough Gunnlaugsson broke no legal boundaries. He sold his shares in the offshore company in 2009, 4 years before becoming PM.[ix] There is no evidence to show he committed the oligarchical sin of tax avoidance, evasion or any other dishonest financial gain while in office. However, the global moral code of this situation was impervious to the facts. After the 2008 financial crisis people felt cheated from bankers and politicians. The PM had to resign.

Binary Suppression

**Source: (**https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/panama-papers-money-hidden-offshore)

China and Russia, whose leaders were implicated in the papers, censored the leak.[x] The internet in these countries are no longer an open source platform for discussion. Instead it is a tool for the country to promote their own, government favoured, narrative. On this premise the politically charged actions online have no effect whatsoever in these countries.

The Panama Papers shows some $2 billion in transactions by associates of President Putin.[xi] These transactions having been secretly shuffled through banks and shadow companies.[xii] President Putin’s close friend and construction billionaire Arkady Rotenberg and the godfather of Putin’s eldest daughter Sergei Roldugin contained assets worth billions of dollars. Quoting Dmitry Peskov, Russian Presidential Press secretary, Western reporting of the Panama Papers is ‘Putinophobia’ and in fact a conspiracy against Russia orchestrated by the CIA.[xiii]

China has taken a subtler approach to this open source quagmire. The former Premier daughter, former Communist party general secretary son and the brother-in-law of the current general secretary Xi Jinping all have shell companies in the British Virgin Islands.[xiv] Instead of overt anti-west conspiracy theories the government suppressed the Panama Papers on social media and search engine results. They have forced all websites to delete content about the Papers and censor its content on social media. The government also sent directives to news sites and newspapers waning them against coverage.[xv] Authorities have considered the material a foreign media attack.

The Anonymous Crusade

**Source: (**http://www.glitch.news/2015-11-20-hacker-group-anonymous-declares-war-on-isis-by-taking-down-thousands-of-terrorist-twitter-accounts.html)

Is there truly an inherent global understanding of what is right and wrong on the internet? Look no further than the crusade of Anonymous. Anonymous, an elusive group of hackers, embodies the moral warriors of righteousness in the information age.[xvi] Anonymous is a network of hacktivists who promote their political agenda of free speech, human rights and freedom of information.[xvii] These activists, with the subversive use of computer networks, undergo cyber-attacks on individuals or entities they perceive to fall under the category of the ‘un-righteous’.

They targeted the Church of Scientology in 2008[xviii], supported the liberal democratic movement of the Arab Spring[xix], underwent cyber protests against police in response to the unlawful shooting of Michael Brown in 2014[xx], revealed the identity of over 1,000 KKK members[xxi] and retaliated against ISIS after the November 15 Paris attack[xxii]. An army of cyber-activist, with an un-limited arsenal of cyberattacks. Now many of their attacks have been poorly co-ordinate and plagued with inaccuracy. Take the case of the wrongfully accused police officer for the killing of Michael Brown. After the shooting of Michael Brown, the group posted a profile of a police officer on twitter. The group makes use of social media sites to publically shame individuals, which evidently gains public traction. The (inaccurately) accused had to go under law enforcement protection after receiving death threats on social media.[xxiii]

On the other hand, the group excels at cyber-attacks. Their main choice of weapon against servers is Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. That is when a host server becomes overloaded and its services become interrupted or suspended due to a flood of superfluous requests. A tool they used most notably in their attack on the Church of Scientology.[xxiv]

These operations, harnessing the power of open source and taking advantage of anonymity, provide a direct implementation of the new found moral code. The actions of those that are deemed ‘unrighteous’ or against liberal democratic thought are targeted. They are the jury, judge and executioner (and occasionally fail at correctly doing all three). In the time of an internet crusade, anonymous are the Templars of cyberspace.

You can’t bully the internet

The anonymity provided by the internet will continue to fuel political activism. As long as a large of mass is mobilized, online and off, there will continue to be whistle-blowers divulging sensitive information. As long as there are ‘immoral’ actions being undertaken there will continue to be hacktivists fighting to curb these actions. The virtual world of cyber has very real world consequences. However, these consequences can be proven even more dangerous, if built on inaccurate claims.

Nicolas Seidman is a second year War Studies undergraduate.