Last week, Riverside Police officer Julian Pollitt claimed to anonymous protestor Happy Smurf that he, and everyone with him, cannot protest Gold Base because Happy Smurf once met Keith Henson over 10 years ago in Clearwater, Florida.  Henson is a long-time critic who has a permanent injunction against him protesting at Gold Base as he once replied to a post online about “Tom Cruise Missiles” hitting Gold Base.  By being at a large protest in Clearwater in the mid-90s, this “proved” that Happy Smurf was working in concert with Keith Henson, and since everyone in the car was with Happy Smurf those people too were in effect working in concert with Keith Henson. (more…)

TechRepublic has a nice article on Anonymous.

Of course, the idea has grown beyond even necessarily having a single direction, and the flock of birds analogy is more organized than the composition of the “anonymous” illusory identity is likely to become as time goes on. The case of the person who acquired access to Sarah Palin’s email account is a perfect example of this, one person working alone. The culprit operating under the name “anonymous” was, in this case, apparently David Kernell — the son of a Tennessee state representative, and an Obama supporter.

It is a mistake for security experts to view any act of security cracking or online activism signed “anonymous” as part of some even loosely organized group effort. In time, it will surely become more evident that there is no single, central, organizing principle at work in directing the actions of people using the name “anonymous” in this manner. It is a meme, an emergent phenomenon of a social Internet, and a running gag, rather than a definable network of activists or criminals.

The best part isn’t so much the article but all the Scientologists leaving laughably obvious comments to get their stats up:

“Anything goes” is the message of Anonymous. So their adherents feel fine when they go and hack into Sarah Palin’s account to have something to brag about. Or when they drive emo(tional) girls into suicide. Or when they demand rape and mayhem to be done. It’s a game with no consequences for them, they think.

Sounds like Tommy Davis.  Fail handling is fail.

From Graham Berry, attorney for Angry Gay Pope:

These documents are the Angry Gay Pope’s moving papers on his Anti-SLAPP motion. These documents can be posted. I am half expecting the cult to try and seal the Berry Declaration. Apparently it has sent DM (and therefore OSA) ballistic.

The documents, which are public record, can be found here.  Feel free to download and mirror and repost and whatnot.

Enturb thread is here.

Number 17.

This is the best article on Anonymous I have ever read.  The best part about it is that it comes from a former douchebag who previously attacked Anonymous, but has taken the mantra of LURK MOAR to heart.

I’ve been researching this question, and I have come up with some very interesting answers. I even had the opportunity to exclusively interview some of the Anonymous members who will, of course, remain anonymous. For starters, Anonymous doesn’t appear to be a “what”. Rather, not a single “what”. The makeup is more a loose confederation than a group with a defined edge. The outline is fuzzy, as well as the purpose.

If you look through media reporting over the last year, you will no doubt come away with one of two definitions of Anonymous. Either you’ll think they are a left-wing protest group who engages in online activity, or you’ll think they are a fearsome group of hackers and cyber-bullies, who sometimes protest. Neither of these definitions is correct. In fact, in many ways, no definition is correct.

Read moar of Caleb Howe’s excellent article on AOL’s Political Machine here.

Tony Ortega has given us another enjoyable read into everyone’s favourite criminal cult.  This time, it focuses on its latest (apparent) convert, Will Smith.

Besides talking pure nonsense to a bewildered Smiley for several minutes, Smith used a very strange phrase about halfway through the clip. He talked about “feeling like you’re at effect,” which means…well, frankly, this Hubbard jargon means anything you want it to mean, so what the hell.

“I’ve been giving him the benefit of the doubt,” [Mark] Bunker says about Smith. “But how do you absorb ‘being at effect’ without taking courses? I suppose it’s possible he picked it up from his equally certain, equally high-strung pal Tom Cruise. But it’s not an ordinary buzzword out here in the wog [non-Scientology] world.” To Bunker, the clip is evidence that Smith has been taking Scientology courses for some time, and has absorbed the Hubbard way of thinking.

More from the Hamburg convention; this time, former Gold Base staffer Marc Headley gives his story.  A three-parter.

Actor and Former Scientologist Jason Beghe had his German speech covered in the Village Voice.

Two weeks ago, Beghe gave similar warnings about Scientology to some German government officials in Hamburg, and videotapes of his presentation have been posted to the Internet in various places.

German officials are sensitive to the rise of tyrannical movements, for obvious reasons, so the German government has long been suspicious of Scientology and its notorious methods of coercion, which have been exposed in so many U.S. court cases going back decades. And since Germany and other European countries don’t share with the U.S. a squeamishness about all things religious, Scientology hasn’t been able to shield itself, as it has here, by claiming to be a “church” whose beliefs are off-limits to government scrutiny.

Digg here.

Jason Beghe’s four-parter speech in Hamburg Germany.