I like that phrase. It sounds epic, when in reality it’s nothing so epic. I especially have fun when newspapers and online magazines refer to anonymous as a “hacker group”, occasionally even adding “that gathers on the meme-generating portal 4chan”. Seriously, why do people write about matters they don’t have the slightest idea about? I mean, it’s one thing if i’m blabbering nonsense on my blog, and another if it’s a (inter)national online news portal’s editor who does that.

It’s hilarious though, how easily anon can take down websites. With less than 500 ion cannons in the hive, the website of the swedish whatever office who charged Assange was taken and kept down for hours. Same goes for the swiss bank who froze the WikiLeaks account. With not a whole 1500 in the hive, Mastercard’s main website was down and it announced that even secure transactions were facing connection problems. And when i went to sleep, the hive was closing 2000 and more and more people were demanding an attack on PayPal. (If you wanted to know the hive size or any of the details on the topic, checking /b/ would’ve sufficed, with every third thread being related to Operation Payback.)

But today i woke up and out of interest wanted to check AnonOps.net, where the whole thing was coordinated from—and i was (not?) surprised to see that it’s down. To be precise, the domain name is not working anymore, and i couldn’t find any new HQ for now. So what? Is this the grand power of anon? One domain down and the whole war is lost. You can sure try to coordinate people from twitter, but considering that just now there are at least three accounts that claim to be the “official” Operation Payback and there’s also someone who speaks on behalf of all anon to the media (some Coldblood or whatever), it’s hopeless.

Did it all calm down or what? Did CIA get tired with playing along the foolish little games of anon? Or were they the ones coordinating the hive to begin with? (Why didn’t the hive target any US government website? Not even once?) I wrote about this bad feeling about the whole scandal earlier, and when i read on maybe Guardian that an iranian security advisor (not sure about details, can’t find interview) expressed doubts about how WikiLeaks obtained the cables, and suggested it might be all a scheme by CIA to “paint the world black and white” and may have inserted fake data among the truth… Just what i was thinking. It’s strange by itself how a private could have clearance to download all of these more or less classified diplomatic cables…

Anyway, i’ll be interested to see what this whole thing will turn into. It’s nice to feel that there have been events in my life that probably will show up in history a hundred years later.