Via Ian Welsh, a must-read interview with Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X. If the Anonymous hacker group says it doesn’t have real leaders, then Doyon is one of the major leader’s they haven’t got. “There’s a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth” he says of Anonymous’ 50,000 strong collective, who Ian calls “the only enforcer class the left has”. Doyon refuses to accept the term “terrorist” applies.
Basically I decline the semantic argument. If you want to call me a terrorist, I have no problem with that. But I would ask you, ”œWho is it that’s terrified?” If it’s the bad guys who are terrified, I’m really super OK with that. If it’s the average person, the people out in the world we are trying to help who are scared of us, I’d ask them to educate themselves, to do some research on what it is we do and lose that fear. We’re fighting for the people, we are fighting, as Occupy likes to say, for the 99%. It’s the 1% people who are wrecking our planet who should be quite terrified. If to them we are terrorists, then they probably got that right.
”œInformation terrorist” ”“ what a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with information. But who’s terrorized? Is it the common people reading the newspaper and learning what their government is doing in their name? They’re not terrorized ”“ they’re perfectly satisfied with that situation. It’s the people trying to hide these secrets, who are trying to hide these crimes. The funny thing is every email database that I’ve ever been a part of stealing, from Pres. Assad to Stratfor security, every email database, every single one has had crimes in it. Not one time that I’ve broken into a corporation or a government, and found their emails and thought, ”œOh my God, these people are perfectly innocent people, I made a mistake.”
And if what Doyen says about the group’s reach is true, “most powerful group on earth” may be justified:
Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.
Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.
On the question of whether that’s true or not, ironically, all we are likely to hear from officials are rote denials and “that’s classified”.
From Chris Hedge’s recent article.
It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.