For those, like me, who were confused about the censorship that clearly didn't happen, here is a relevant piece of info from wikipedia.
"Title V of the 1996 Act is the Communications Decency Act, aimed at regulating Internet indecency and obscenity, but was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment. Portions of Title V remain, including the Good Samaritan Act, which protects ISPs from liability for third party content on their services, and legal definitions of the Internet."
The EFF of 2012 doesn't "declare independence" from society, or talk about "weary giants of flesh and steel". It puts its money where its mouth is, working within the system to fund research, legal aid, and advocacy.
Excellent, trenchant point, and also why RMS gradually needs to fade away from the EFF (only). You can't have a belligerent and extremist mouthpiece and be taken seriously in law.
I thought this was the coolest thing in '96. All these years later it just reads like self parody. The Internet is very much a part of the terrestrial world, and governments do possess methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. It sucks, but grandiose proclamations don't change that.
There was a tremendous amount of techno-utopianism in the early 90s. The internet & computers would bring peace, love, erase national borders, enable society to be utterly transformed into a global place without work, strife, etc.
Mondo 2000, early Wired, and Rushkoff were big proponents of that thought paradigm. I see Barlow's essay as an offshoot of that paradigm.
We're still very much at the beginning, and it's far too early to say anything like that. If at all, we've been slightly thrown back.
I still believe everything you dismissed as "techno-utopianism" to be possible one day. Social change rarely happens overnight. We have to work and fight for it.
Oh, there's a lot of possibility out there and some of it has been realized. But, unfortunately, there was a lot of ignoring human nature going on at the time. People are simply a lot grittier than the future of the time was portrayed.
Reads like an Anonymous PR piece, though more mature. If only Barrett Brown could write in a non-douchey way like this. It strikes me as odd that Anonymous doesn't seem to work with the EFF on critical issues... they have a lot of support and manpower that could be really useful in working to fight things like SOPA (instead of attacking websites, committing fraud, releasing personal information of random individuals and generally vandalizing systems & networks). Let's see where they are in 10 years.
You (and many others) fail to realize that Anonymous isn't an organization. It's an anarchistic collective with an extremely loosely defined set of common goals and values which anybody can consider themselves member of[1]. Anonymous doesn't have official positions, affiliations or representatives[2]. Each member acts on their own, and on many occasions they form groups and cooperate to start projects or operations, which sometimes become big (like Operation Payback for example).
In other words, I can assure you that members of Anonymous are working with or for the EFF. But Anonymous isn't something you can just declare to be supportive of the EFF. Nobody can.
[1] Member is actually a bad word for this, but I can't really think of a better term. There's no "membership" for Anonymous technically, there's just people considering themselves part of Anonymous.
[2] Neither are there some ominous "masterminds" behind Anonymous, as some people wrongfully assume.
Wouldn't an anarchistic collective imply that they all follow a specific political philosophy? I've never seen a wholly-accepted political agenda centered around anarchism that came from Anonymous. Do you have a source for this?
Anonymous is an autonomous or 'leaderless' collective. Yes, you're right that they have no 'official' positions, similar to the Occupy movement. But who organizes? Who makes press releases? Who builds network infrastructure? Who issues commands to the rest of the group? And who follows those plans, uses that network and executes the commands?
All you need is one strong personality that articulates the general urges of the group into a specific action they can all agree with and poof, you have yourself a leader and goals which can be worked toward. Every single 'operation' is essentially this. You can quibble over different factions or timing or independent values all you want but it's the same as how terrorist cells and abortion-clinic bombers work, though spread out over the internet and bombing websites instead. So don't tell me Anonymous can or can't declare or deny support (which it has many times in the past). This is the very fabric that Anonymous is built on: collective reasoning.
>Wouldn't an anarchistic collective imply that they all follow a specific political philosophy?
No, by no means. You confuse the organizational state of anarchy with the political philosophy of anarchism, which is basically the mistrust or disbelief into authority. Anonymous is the former, but its "members" are not necessarily the latter. There are all sorts of ideologies in Anonymous. If you want to name a single, shared point of belief in Anonymous, your best bet is probably "For the Lulz", and even that is debatable.
>All you need is one strong personality that articulates the general urges of the group into a specific action they can all agree with and poof, you have yourself a leader and goals which can be worked toward.
That's quite right (besides the "strong personality" bit, you really only need a person with a good idea and the ability to articulate it), but that still doesn't mean Anonymous has leaders. You completely fail to differentiate between the collective Anonymous and operations or projects which operate under the banner of Anonymous[1]. The relation between the two is one-sided - the latter affiliates with the former, not vice versa.
>but it's the same as how terrorist cells and abortion-clinic bombers work, though spread out over the internet and bombing websites instead.
Ho, are we falling back to guilt-by-association fallacies now? It is certainly true that operations affiliated with Anonymous have a tendency to operate very far inside the grey areas of legality and often even far beyond that. So are many grass-root or civil right movements. Declaring Anonymous as a whole equivalent to a terrorist cell because they break the law and use similar organizational methods as established enemy stereotypes is ignoring the aforementioned points. It's equally as low as declaring the Occupy movement as domestic terrorism because you disagree with them.
>So don't tell me Anonymous can or can't declare or deny support (which it has many times in the past).
No, it didn't. Persons, projects or operations affiliated with Anonymous did. Anonymous as a whole does not, nor will it ever have official support or opposition of anything, be it ideological positions, organizations or specific persons.
Besides, don't you tell me what Anonymous can or can't do - I've participated in or observed first hand a few projects and operations directly or indirectly affiliated with Anonymous myself over the last two years, and have been involved with the culture typically associated with them. I've seen live and in action what I am talking about. Do you?
[1] Which anything and everybody can, that's the whole point.
I'm a little too tired right now to comment on the rest but the comparison to abortion-clinic bombers is accurate. They basically pioneered the use of leaderless resistance in the United States (i'm not very familiar with historical use in the rest of the world). I wasn't making the suggestion that Anonymous hates abortion doctors if that's what you're inferring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaderless_resistance#Internet_...
The way you talk about 'Anonymous as a whole' is ridiculous. They don't do anything as a whole by definition. You have to consider their rhetoric in general and whether or not they accept actions taken by members of the group. If one guy says 'we hate Scientology' and the majority of people who identify with Anonymous agree with that guy in principle, guess what? The group has just made an implicit collective declaration. You can't identify as a member of a group and be an active participant in it and then claim no responsibility for the group's actions just because there's supposedly no leader or official stance on anything. You are an accomplice, or if you prefer, a willing participant by association. This wouldn't be the case if the entire idea of the group weren't that there is no central decision-making; you can distance yourself from a voice which no longer represents the majority, but you cannot distance yourself from that which cannot be identified unless you step outside of the ether entirely.
Which actions do you mean? The botnets, sqli sweeps, social engineering or meaningless skirmishes with the jester and other pseudo-blackhat douchebags? I never really paid attention to the early stuff due to a loathing for anything from 4chan. I'm no expert, but one doesn't need to be a scholar to watch kids at play.
"Title V of the 1996 Act is the Communications Decency Act, aimed at regulating Internet indecency and obscenity, but was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment. Portions of Title V remain, including the Good Samaritan Act, which protects ISPs from liability for third party content on their services, and legal definitions of the Internet."
And the wikipedia link in general for the act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
I believe this was the court case that resulted in the relevant portion of the act being struck down by all nine supreme court justices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._ACLU