Anonymous’s “war” on Isis is leading to innocent people being wrongly reported as members of the militant group.
Did anyone ever expect anything else? Anonymous are a bunch of script-kiddies with delusions of competence. They are a pompous, self-righteous bunch of cretins. Of course they were going to catch innocents in their net. This is no different to the News of the World’s peado-vigilante campaign that saw innocent people accused as a consequence. Anonymous are not crusaders fighting the good fight, they are a bunch of wankers jumping onto a bandwagon.
Anonymous has previously appeared to have problems with its verification processes, including in a recent high-profile operation against the Ku Klux Klan. Activists affiliated with Anonymous leaked a supposed list of members of the group, but many of the identities on there appeared not to be genuine.
Twats.
I’m impressed that The Independent chooses to label a bodged attempt to ruin people’s lives as simply “problems with its verification processes”.
Would they be as generous if the targets weren’t so trendy?
My view: Kill them all and let Jahweh/Allah sort it out his end. After all, he created the mess in the first place.
Unity pointed out yesterday that they may well have queered the pitch on any number of GCHQ-monitored accounts with this action, too. Idiots.
Twitter is a US company. If the US wished to shut down the IS Twitter campaigns, would it not be sensible for the CIA or NSA to go and meet with the executives of Twitter, and point out that in the interests of the national security of the USA they, the executives of Twitter, would be proactively shutting down accounts of Twitter users who seemed to be IS supporters.
If the executives of Twitter did not wish to do this, then the NSA/CIA would be forced to investigate the situation. The investigation would involve seizing all the servers and infrastructure of Twitter as evidence in this investigation, to facilitate a prompt and effective resolution of the matter. Twitter would have no choice but to cooperate in the matter; anyone who disagreed would be arrested as a suspected terrorist.
The spooks would then invite the Twitter executives to think the matter over, taking as long as they needed to make a decision…
The fact that Twitter’s HQ is in the US is irrelevant: the right to Freedom of Speech is explicitly aimed at *governments and their institutions*. It does not apply to private individuals or businesses, so nobody can claim they have a “right” to say what they please on Twitter.
If the NSA/CIA/TLA inform Twitter that an account is clearly that of a terrorist and is violating US law, Twitter would be required under *existing* US laws to take suitable action. They don’t get to say, “No!”
What Twitter *cannot* be required to do is to police their own service for such accounts: policing is the government-run TLA’s job.
At least they’re trying – for which I give them credit even if they aren’t very good at it1
I don’t. They will do more harm than good. I don’t suppose it occurred to them that the security services might just want to monitor those accounts and therefore they are more use up and running?
And then, of course, there are the innocents caught up in their vigilantism.