Group responsible for 2010 Wikileaks Denial of Service attacks against Amazon and Visa splits, reveals power elite, confirms main ideas of Virtual sociability book

The hacktivist group Anonymous, which was recently in the news for its strong-armed support of Wikileaks, is in the middle of a mini civil war. A group of secessionist members has revealed the online identities and other details (Ip addresses) of some of the “leaders” of this hacker organization. Anonymous is the group of hackers that has been responsible for a number of denial of service attacks against several corporate sites that refused to serve as fundraising and money conduits for Wikileaks.

The dissenter group claims that those that they “outed” act like a self-anointed elite.  The group was founded with the expectation that none of the members would have more power or be of higher status than others.

A self-styled Anonymous “splinter group” that has seized control of two sites used by the ‘hacktivist’ collective to organise Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other operations have revealed their intentions in an exclusive interview with thinq_.

‘Ryan’, a former member of network staff on AnonOps.net and AnonOps.ru, says that he and and a number of other disgruntled members seized control of the sites because they believed AnonOps had become too centralised.

They accuse a small elite within the organisation of “behind-the-scenes string-pulling”, abusing their power by setting themselves up in a leadership role.

The group condemns ‘Owen’, a key figure in this leadership cabal, as being “incredibly incompetent”, stating that had been “abusing the fact that people use his platform”.

Owen and others, the group said, had “crossed the barrier, involving themselves in a leadership role,” adding: “That’s not how things were set up.”

This development comes in the wake of a recent investigative reporting post by Gawker, which revealed that Anonymous has a definite hierarchy obsessed with a vainglorious search for power.

They show a collective of ecstatic and arrogant activists driven to a frenzy by a sense of their own power—they congratulated one another when Hosni Mubarak resigned, as though Anonymous was responsible—and contain bald admissions of criminal behavior that could serve as powerful evidence in criminal proceedings if the internet handles are ever linked to actual people.

The event is a wonderful illustration for the theme of a book I coedited with Brian Britt and I  launched only last week. Virtual Sociability: From Community to Communitas (which can be downloaded from Smashwords, or bought from Kindle, or as a paperback from Amazon.com) analyzes the recurrent theme of the intrinsic “democratic” and “equalizing” effect of online communities. The papers by a group of scholars and graduate students grouped around the Online Interaction Seminar at Purdue University, which I have been directing since 2003, reveal that online communities are quite well structured and hierarchically organized. In addition, the papers indicate that online groups are

also unstable and liable to change be definition. They are identified not as communities, but as “communitas”. This is a term introduced in sociology by Victor Turner and it designates a state of social aggregation that is meant to help individuals advance between the various layers of a social hierachy. The term is close semantically to an “initiation ritual.” The papers explore, with other means and in other ways, ideas I have proposed in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Virtual Community Discourse and the Dilemma of Modernity published in Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.

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• Anonymous denies role in Sony attacks (zdnet.com)
• Man arrested in crackdown on pro-WikiLeaks DDoS spree (go.theregister.com)
• New arrest over Anonymous’ pro-WikiLeaks attacks (telegraph.co.uk)
• Disgruntled Anonymous Faction Maliciously Attacks Anonymous (escapistmagazine.com)