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Spanish police said Friday they had nabbed three hackers from vigilante group Anonymous for online attacks on Sony PlayStation and the governments of Egypt, Libya and Iran among others.

"We do not wish to threaten anybody's way of life. We do not wish to dictate anything to anybody. We do not wish to terrorize any nation.

We merely wish to remove power from vested interests and return it to the people - who, in a democracy, it should never have been taken from in the first place.

The government makes the law. This does not give them the right to break it. If the government was doing nothing underhand or illegal, there would be nothing 'embarassing' [sic] about Wikileaks revelations, nor would there have been any scandal emanating from HBGary. The resulting scandals were not a result of Anonymous' or Wikileaks' revelations, they were the result of the CONTENT of those revelations. And responsibility for that content can be laid solely at the doorstep of policymakers who, like any corrupt entity, naively believed that they were above the law and that they would not be caught.

A lot of government and corporate comment has been dedicated to 'how we can avoid a similar leak in the future'. Such advice ranges from better security, to lower levels of clearance, from harsher penalties for whistleblowers, to censorship of the press.

Our message is simple: Do not lie to the people and you won't have to worry about your lies being exposed. Do not make corrupt deals and you won't have to worry about your corruption being laid bare. Do not break the rules and you won't have to worry about getting in trouble for it."

...

"do not make the mistake of challenging Anonymous. Do not make the mistake of believing you can behead a headless snake. If you slice off one head of Hydra, ten more heads will grow in its place. If you cut down one Anon, ten more will join us purely out of anger at your trampling of dissent."

"do not make the mistake of challenging Anonymous. Do not make the mistake of believing you can behead a headless snake. If you slice off one head of Hydra, ten more heads will grow in its place. If you cut down one Anon, ten more will join us purely out of anger at your trampling of dissent."

TPRJones wrote:There is no PR Department. It's just whoever decided to type that and send it to someone.

Anonymous is not an organization in any sense of the word. It's a mob, very literally. It is composed of whomever decides to call themselves that at a given moment. Just like any mob, there are some in it that are focused on a goal or more active than others, and some that can convince other parts of the mob to do something in particular. But that's about it.

It's very democratic that way.

Yesterday, Lulzsec engaged in a spree of hack attacks against gaming and gamers: They downed The Escapist magazine because some commenters said mean stuff about them, then took the games Eve Online, Minecraft and League of Legends—all 4chan favorites—offline. Lulzsec has demonstrated a strange fixation on hacking video game companies, hacking Sony repeatedly. And when they hit the game studio Bethesda, they gave it top billing over their "bonus" hacking of the U.S. Senate's website.