Anonymous€™ first major attempt at politicized group cyber-action came a couple years before Chanology. In 2006/7, a group on 4chan decided to change their tactics: instead of randomly trolling someone, they would do something a little more well intentioned. Anonymous went after Hal Turner, a white supremacist talk radio host. They called him thousands of times with idiotic questions, they DDoS bombed him (the cyber equivalent to getting hundreds of thousands of people to block the entrance to a park or a building) and before it was over they had cost him thousands of dollars in bandwidth fees. Not content with that, they hacked into his private servers and discovered he was an FBI informant. In the end, Turner's career was over and he found himself in financial ruin. This initial act against Hal Turner was the seed that grew into Operation Blitzkrieg in 2012. Understanding that their skills could be put to more ambitious ends, the group suddenly found itself on a global stage with a growing number of sympathetic citizens. Blitzkrieg was designed to disrupt the online presence of neo-Nazi and other hate groups. The Anonymous subgroup LulzFinancial took down the website of Stormfront.org, the largest white nationalist web-community in the world. Not only did they crash the site for several days, they obtained and published online the personal information of over 200,000 registered users. Hacking done right!
David Wagner is an author/musician who splits his time between Oakland, CA and Istanbul, Turkey.
David has published two novels, both available on his website, and as a fan of movies, comics, and genre television, he is happy to be working with WhatCulture as a regular contributor.
