Anonymous Explains CIA Takedown

It took a few days, but a representative of Anonymous (as far as there is such a thing) has given Gizmodo a manifesto of sorts, explaining Friday’s DDoS attack against the CIA.

Their statement, unabridged, below:

Citizens of the World,

We are Anonymous.

We are people. Just like you. We are not robots, we are not inhuman.

We are human. We are everyone.

That being said, We also have the capacity for the same errors of judgement and mistakes that everyone does. We are committed to improving the lives of everyone on this planet by whatever means we deem necessary, because we feel that if we have to take action to righta wrong, its gone on entirely too long.

If that is indeed the case, it has probably been ignored by the people who should’ve delt with it. Those people have much higher budgets and significantly larger resource pools, than what we have available. All we have is each other.

For good or bad. Some use the Anonymous name to try to “Profit!” off of it, some use it for nefarious reasons, and we’ve even seen some use it to try to get laid. Regardless of the reason its used, we are united under common goals, for the common good.

There are projects we are working on that cannot be discussed, as to do so would impact them negatively, and significantly. However, even those of us working for good, sometimes make very bad, rash and ill-thought out decisions. Such is the case of one individual who shall remain anonymous. We will leave it at this.

To the CIA: We are sorry your website is down. It was not the intended purpose of our actions, however, in doing so we have created a way more significant amount of attention to a situation that goes unnoticed far too often. Six compromised servers containing child pornography are activly DDOSing your webserver.

We cannot stop this, we have no access to them, due to the fact that the network link is entirely saturated and we cannot log back in. It will stop 41.6 days after the time it began. Your only choice is to act, and have them taken offline, which should have already happened.

We are Anonymous.

We are legion,

We do not forgive,

We do not forget.

You should have expected us…

That last paragraph is the most interesting, and provides both a motive and explanation for the strike. The anti-pedophile rationale jibes with the statement we were given while CIA.gov was down — and now we have more technical information, confirming that child pornography servers are (or were) indeed being used to DDoS the CIA.

Their site is up at the moment, so the attacks have either ceased or been blocked by the agency. Either way, if the statement is accurate, we can only hope that the porn servers involved have been handed over to the proper authorities. Not exactly the CIA’s purview.

We’ll have to wait and see if anything further happens within that purported 41-day window, or if the show’s already over.


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