An Anonymous letter to those who feel they wield the Power of the People FROM ANONYMOUS, Since you have come into power, you have singled out Anonymous as a threat to government and the people. You have also alleged that secrecy is a necessary evil and that transparency is not always the right way forward. Anonymous would like to remind you that the government and the people are, contrary to the supposed foundations of democracy, distinct entities with often conflicting goals and desires. It is Anonymous position that when there is a conflict of interest between the government and the people, it is the peoples will which must take priority. The only threat transparency poses to government is to threaten governments ability to act in a manner which the people would disagree with, without having to face democratic consequences and accountability for such behaviour. Your own report cites a perfect example of this, the Anonymous attack on HBGary. Whether HBGary were acting in the cause of security or military gain is irrelevant - their actions were illegal and morally reprehensible. Anonymous does not accept that the government and/or the military has the right to be above the law and to use the phoney cliche of national security to justify illegal and deceptive activities. If the government must break the rules, they must also be willing to accept the democratic consequences of this at the ballot box.We do not accept the current status quo whereby a government can tell one story to the people and another in private. Dishonesty and secrecy totally undermine the concept of self rule. How can the people judge for whom to vote unless they are fully aware of what policies said politicians are actually pursuing? When a government is elected, it is said to represent the nation it governs. This essentially means that the actions of a government are not the actions of the people in government, but are actions taken on behalf of every citizen in that country. It is unacceptable to have a situation in which the people are, in many cases, totally and utterly unaware of what is being said and done on their behalf - behind closed doors. Anonymous and WikiLeaks are distinct entities. The actions of Anonymous were not aided or even requested by WikiLeaks. However, Anonymous and WikiLeaks do share one common attribute: They are no threat to any organization - unless that organization is doing something wrong and attempting to get away with it. Anonymous does not, on the other hand, condone the release of classified information for any reason. That being said, it DOES happen, and you must understand that almost nothing can be kept secret forever, especially when those secrets are in direct oppositon to our Constitution, our way of life, and the ideals our Founding Fathers so carefully crafted those many years ago. We do not wish to threaten anybodys 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 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 wont have to worry about your lies being exposed. Do not make corrupt deals and you wont have to worry about your corruption being laid bare. Do not break the rules and you wont have to worry about getting in trouble for it. Do not attempt to repair your two faces by concealing one of them. Instead, try having only one face - an honest, open and democratic one. You know you do not fear us because we are a threat to society. You fear us because we are a threat to the established hierarchy. Anonymous has proven over the last several years that a hierarchy is not necessary in order to achieve great progress - perhaps what you truly fear in us, is the realization of your own irrelevance in an age which has outgrown its reliance on you. Your true terror is not in a collective of activists, but in the fact that you and everything you stand for have, by the changing tides and the advancement of technology, are now surplus to requirements. Finally, 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. Your only chance of defeating the movement which binds all of us is to accept it. This is not YOUR country. It is our country - OF THE PEOPLE We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us...
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 06:11:54 +0000