"I am Anonymous, I am informed, young, and emboldened"
11.12.2010
08:15
Protothema.gr interviews one of the "Anonymous" hackers who took part in the DDoS attacks in support of WikiLeaks
The young Briton accepted an invitation to comment with a message, presenting his opinion on the electronic attacks on websites belonging to MasterCard, Visa and PayPal.
I am Anonymous, I am informed, young, and emboldened.*
I am aware of, and have experienced other cultures than my own. I consider myself a global citizen, because my generation has never known anything except an ever-emergent global culture forged within the heat of the internet, a melting pot of information and ideas*
Furthermore, he presented the overall feeling of his generation, who grew up using the Internet, and presents the reasons behind his unwavering support for freedom of speech.
Since childhood, I have taken for granted the ability to communicate with my fellow humans concerning any topic I desire without any fear of censorship or control. Like much of my generation, I am proudly addicted to the wild thrill of unfettered freedom of expression, the sharing of ideas, and the global interconnectedness that is enabled by the internet. Through the advent of social networks, our very lives are lived out on the web; recorded, uploaded, and shared for others to see, comment upon, and interact with. *
*It is a novel form of human interaction that to many people, especially to much of the preceding generation, is strange and abstruse. To us, it is nothing more than a natural evolution of technology - one whose pace of change shows no sign of abating. Constant and rapid change is a concept with which our generation, having witnessed the advent of the information age, is familiar and comfortable.*
I am Anonymous, I am informed, young, and emboldened.*
I am aware of, and have experienced other cultures than my own. I consider myself a global citizen, because my generation has never known anything except an ever-emergent global culture forged within the heat of the internet, a melting pot of information and ideas*
Furthermore, he presented the overall feeling of his generation, who grew up using the Internet, and presents the reasons behind his unwavering support for freedom of speech.
Since childhood, I have taken for granted the ability to communicate with my fellow humans concerning any topic I desire without any fear of censorship or control. Like much of my generation, I am proudly addicted to the wild thrill of unfettered freedom of expression, the sharing of ideas, and the global interconnectedness that is enabled by the internet. Through the advent of social networks, our very lives are lived out on the web; recorded, uploaded, and shared for others to see, comment upon, and interact with. *
*It is a novel form of human interaction that to many people, especially to much of the preceding generation, is strange and abstruse. To us, it is nothing more than a natural evolution of technology - one whose pace of change shows no sign of abating. Constant and rapid change is a concept with which our generation, having witnessed the advent of the information age, is familiar and comfortable.*
Judging governments and organizations who maliciously tried to withdraw their support and silence the flow of information, Anonymous continued to underline the caution required on what concerns the matter of the increasing bouts of censorship on the Internet.
However, to governments and tradition-bound institutions, change is more often than not a threat., especially when that change is external and inevitably beyond their control.*
Thus the symbolic meaning of the Cablegate/Wikileaks drama as viewed through the prism of the Internet Generation is a desperate attempt by an "ancien regime" to stop change, or at best attempt to control it. Wikileaks is just one battle, but it is important because it represents a war that has been building since the inception of the web: the struggle between states and corporations, against organisations and individuals, to control and manage the content of the web.*
In other words, to censor it.*
Wikileak's release of the diplomatic cables is a powerful act of transparency in a world that sees much lauding of the term but precious little practice. The attempts to silence Wikileaks are an equally worrying act of censorship. What is clear is that our Western governments, in spite of the liberal democratic values and norms enshrined in their many constitutions, are ever more eager to push for a system of restrictive internet governance that threatens this final frontier of free expression and association *
The principles of liberty that this represents, the attack on the internet, which is so dear to my generation, that this represents; these are the reasons why I have supported and perhaps even participated in anonymous attacks on the corporations and government institutions which have conspired to silence Wikileaks. These are the same principles that have driven countless individuals, known and anonymous, before us to take part in the same type of protest and action. Our support for the DDOS attacks online today is the same as the support for the sit-ins of yesteryear.*
Anonymous presented the electronic sabotage as a form of protest, similar to protests and marches of the past, and raised the alarm as to the dangers to privacy lurking alongside the emergence of the WikiLeaks scandal.
This is a watershed moment in the history of free speech on the internet; a cyberspace equivalent of the May 1968 student protests in Paris, or the 1969 Vietnam marches in the United States. We are not agitating for something new, we are not revolutionaries. We are resisting the destruction of something old: the free internet which has characterized our lives and our experiences up to this point.*
What the outcome will be, remains to be seen.*
I am Anonymous, and like thousands of other men and woman, mothers and husbands sat at computers in homes and offices around the world, I am adding my one small voice to many voices, so that we might be heard:*
The Internet belongs to us, and we want it to stay that way.*
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