Anonymous No More? Hacktivists Reportedly Fighting Among Themselves

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In-fighting. Bickering. Fracture. Those things happen to every fearsome social movement, whether it’s Civil War Confederates or Stalin-era Communists. Now, it’s supposedly happening in the invisible ranks of Anonymous, the hacker collective who may or may not be responsibe for the grand-mal crash of Sony’s Playstation Network.

As seen on Kotaku, Thinq.co.uk–or “thinq_” with post-underscore–gets members of Anonymous talking about the ideological differences that are allegedly splintering the group into factions. While they claim to be a leaderless collective, some people in Anonymous act like they’re in charge, says former Anon member “Ryan.” The media attention over various operations–including the shorter, GeoHot-centric PSN outage that preceded the current one–went to the heads of a “leadership cabal.”

“The media is part of the problem. It’s why AnonOps still exists,” they told thinq_.

According to Ryan and two other former supporters, ‘Garrett’ and ‘Chippy1337’, the publicity-hungry cabal behind AnonOps had begun engaging in operations simply to grab headlines. They accuse the group’s leaders of “using the PR machine that is AnonOps” to feed their own egos.

“Their power was wasted on stupid operations,” thinq_ was told.

So which operations, did the group think, had been a step too far?

“I was never a fan of OpSony, for instance,” replied Garrett.

The splinter group questioned the motives of Owen and other figures within this leadership, claiming: “They just like seeing things destroyed.”

Still, Ryan goes on to say that he doesn’t think that Anonymous was involved  in the external intrusion that led Sony to shutter its online gaming services. Nevertheless, the splintering of Anonymous could them easier to catch by the FBI and the other firms hunting them. We’ve all seen this movie: once the hotshots start shoving each other around, it’s only a matter of time until they’re paraded in front of cameras.