Who is Anonymous?

You may have seen their iconic images, the suit with no head, the Guy Fawkes mask, or you may have even read their slogan before:

"We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."

If you watch or read the news you've probably heard of this mysterious collective, but exactly who is Anonymous and what are they about?

In the simplist of terms, they are a loose-knit collective of Internet activists. They have no leader, they have no headquarters, and yet they are one of the most effective groups of individuals on the Internet. Their hobbies are:

• Civil disobediance
• Punishing racism
• Exposing Internet predators/ child pornographers
• Defending freedom of speech
• Preventing Internet censorship
• Punishing abuses of power
• Sharing information
• Long walks on the beach

Okay, I have no idea if they like the beach or not, but they do also like to have fun while being Internet vigilantees. Their MO is usually DDoS attacks and defacing websites, but they've also been known to take down phone systems, send black-faxes and just about anything else they think will get their point across.

What they aren't:

• Anarchists
• "Script kiddies" (Young, inexperienced hackers)
• Terrorists

Just the other day, they were bringing down government websites in Greece alongside the riots happening in Athens while also helping to restore access to the Internet to people in Syria and Iran when their government shut it down. The day before that they shut down the CIA's website (not it's internal sites, just the sites available to the public), and the week before that they were attacking members of the Neo-nazi party. A month earlier they brought down over a dozen major websites (government and corporate) and kept them down for hours because the website MegaUpload was taken down and it's leaders arrested for piracy. Busy, aren't they?

It would take far too long for me to describe everything they've done, and there are a plethora of websites that have documented that already, but I just wanted to let everyone know exactly who/what they are and what they really do since major media outlets seem to switch between ignoring them, belittling them, and making them seem like terrorists. Several people have called them "bored teens", but after seeing what they do and why they do it I must ask: Does age really make someone's actions more valid than anothers? It would seem to me that this collective of people has been more effective at protecting the rights and liberties of people world-wide than all the politicians put together.