We are legion.

The last post we talked about Wikileaks and how the website is being used by the US Government as an excuse to attack freedom of the press. This time I want to talk a little about a very interesting, and I think foreshadowing, side-effect that the attacks on Wikileaks have spawned.

I'm talking about the pseudo group calling themselves Anonymous and I think they have started down a path of political activism that has the potential to be very exiting and hopeful and very scary.

First off I will attempt to give the best description of Anonymous that I can. Basically, they are a very loose knit group of computer hackers and non technical activists that carry out campaigns, through media and distributed Denial Of Service(DDOS) attacks to bring down the web servers of organizations who they feel are acting against their best wishes. They have no leader and no official members, anyone who wants to take part in the movement can. They started out attacking The Church Of Scientology after their lawyers began sending out DMCA take down notices to prevent videos that showed its members in a poor light from being place on video hosting sites such as YouTube. A piece of software was developed that allows anyone who chooses to give their computers to the cause of taking down websites in the name of furthering the motives of the group. To put it plainly, it is a random group of people who meet up in a chat room and form a rough consensus about what they want to attack and why and then people give their computers to send tons of server requests to a website, crippling it. That's it.

Recently they have come out in defense of Wikileaks by targeting organization that are denying the website of services such as hosting and credit card processing of donations. PayPal, MasterCard and Amazon have all been attacked.

An argument could be made that they are terrorists but also one could be made that they are social activists. I don't know yet which it is, I'll leave that up to you. I do, however, think it raises a few interesting possibilities for having both positive and negative change.

First, we've seen the internet having an influence in some elections, namely the presidential, but it hasn't reached the point that it is necessary for every politician to carry a huge web presence to win. We haven't seen any pointed attacks on politicians in the way they have gone after the people trying to shut down Wikileaks. I could easily see this sort of technology having an impact on elections. It's even conceivable that it could be carried out by people who can't even take part in the election.

Also, these attacks rely greatly on people donating their computer to the cause to run the software. As the barrier to entry lowers then the participation goes up. The issue is that at some point it's easier to take part in this sort of disruption than it is to take part in the real political process. So you can envision this being a huge driver even in elections with low turnouts. This could affect both sides of the aisle. If the response to this is making it easier to vote then more people turn out to vote which generally is bad for Republicans. On the flip side of the coin if it doesn't get easier to vote you could see people choosing this sort of activism over voting and thus fewer people vote with usually hurt Democrats.

I think it will be interesting to see how this will affect upcoming elections, if at all, and whether the outcome is generally good or bad.

We shall see.