But they all operate in the physical world, either blowing it up or trying to heal it in some way that they see needs healing. The US military sees the hacker cloud called Anonymous as a new threat:
Over the past year, the U.S. government has begun to think of Anonymous, the online network phenomenon, as a threat to national security. According to The Wall Street Journal, Keith Alexander, the general in charge of the U.S. Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, warned earlier this year that “the hacking group Anonymous could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage through a cyberattack.”
The article cited says it is too simplistic to say the group is a threat to us. True enough, I suppose. And other news might bolster that nonchalance about the movement:
China was struggling Thursday to restore several government Web sites that international hacking group Anonymous says it attacked in an apparent protest against Chinese Internet restrictions.
On a Twitter account established in late March, Anonymous China listed the Web sites it says it hacked over the last several days. They include government bureaus in several Chinese cities, including in Chengdu, a provincial capital in southwest China.
Yet the Foreign Affairs article conclusion is just bizarre:
Anonymous demonstrates one of the new core aspects of power in a networked, democratic society: Individuals are vastly more effective and less susceptible to manipulation, control, and suppression by traditional sources of power than they were even a decade ago. At their worst, Anonymous’ practices range from unpleasant pranksterism to nasty hooliganism; they are not part of a vast criminal or cyberterrorist conspiracy. Instead, Anonymous plays the role of the audacious provocateur, straddling the boundaries between destructive, disruptive, and instructive. Any government or company that fails to recognize this will inevitably find itself at odds with some of the most energetic and wired segments of society. Any society that commits itself to eliminating what makes Anonymous possible and powerful risks losing the openness and uncertainty that have made the Internet home to so much innovation, expression, and creativity.
The fact is, Anonymous is an independent actor on the world stage. No, it isn't a vast criminal or cyber-terrorist organization--although it surely as elements of that within it. And no, it can threaten people we don't mind being threatened. And no, we don't want to cripple the Internet to halt threats that originate there anymore than we'd nuke Afghanistan into a glass sheet to keep it from being a physical world-based threat to us.
But Anonymous is a cloud of broadly like-minded people and groups. Whether or not it is a threat to us or someone else will change over time, it is an independent actor that is both non-state and non-physical, operating in the cyber-world. Most obviously, alliances of convenience by elements of Anonymous with traditional states or other non-state actors could affect our national security. States might infiltrate the group (inasmuch as you can "infiltrate" a cloud, but you know what I mean) and use the group for state purposes. Like any newly independent nation, Anonymous isn't automatically friend or foe. But it is an actor that has the capacity to threaten us (and the fact that it can threaten others doesn't erase that), and we must take them into account.
And ultimately, don't assume that Anonymous will remain a cyber-based organization. We all still live and work in the physical world, after all, and the cloud group could well grow to the point that it isn't content with being online pranksters, hooligans, or audacious provocateurs.
Get used to private actors on the world scene and in military affairs (which is the subject of my first e-booklet on Amazon). Especially as states find funding for state military capabilities too tight to actually defend themselves with their own resources.
