“Members of the Anonymous hacktivist movement are claiming responsibility for taking down more than 40 secret child-pornography websites and leaking the names of more than 1,500 members of one of the illegal sites” (Source). We’ve all heard of Anonymous hacking government organizations and other groups, which usually gets a wide variety of reactions, but I think most people would not disagree with their campaign against sexual predators. In this post I’ll explore the Anonymous group’s attack against these servers and pose some questions for the reader to ponder.

The targeted websites are all hosted through the anonymous TOR network, which is primarily intended to avoid government censorship. TOR has been useful for many of the rebel groups during political unrest in the middle east, allowing users to communicate safely with the outside world and with one another when normally these activities would bring government officials knocking at their doors. However, as with any useful service online there are going to be people that find ways to abuse it.

Since pretty much everything related to child pornography is illegal in the US and many other countries, it is difficult to host and to find. However, due to the anonymous nature of the TOR network and the guarantees it must provide to keep political activists safe under suppression, the TOR network also provides a perfect cover to these criminals.

Due to the secure and anonymous nature of the TOR network, there is no way to take down these websites hosting illegal content. The only plausible action is to break into the server to disable it, destroy the content, and/or discover its identity from within. This is what Anonymous did. I now pose my first question to the reader: do you condone the idea of digitally “breaking an entering” in order to combat groups that promote abusing children?

After determining (guessing?) the host, they sent their demands: remove the illegal websites or face the consequences. I tend to see most of the Anonymous group’s tactics as bully tactics, and that is the case here. “Do what we want, or else” is not how civilized adults usually act and communicate. Lashing out like this will (in my opinion) likely have no lasting effect since the hosting company will see this as a childish attack from a group of immature hackers. I then pose my second question for the reader: do you feel that the tactics Anonymous uses are acceptable given the situation, or do you think they should have taken a different course of action?

What are your ideas? If you agree with their “take down those websites or else” strategy, what should they do if the hosting company refuses (or simply doesn’t acknowledge)? If you do not agree, what would you suggest instead? Do even want people policing the anonymous TOR network? Does that defeat its purpose?

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.