From: InfoSec News (alertsinfosecnews.org)
Date: Thu Jun 14 2012 - 06:56:00 CDT

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/13/anonymous-member-speaks-about-divide-in-the-collective-s-mission.html

By Parmy Olson
The Daily Beast
June 13, 2012

The sound of a milk steamer roars in the background in a coffee shop,
where William is sitting at a table and drinking idly from a cup. He is
a young man, early 20s, dressed in a checkered red shirt and low-slung
jeans, who wouldn’t look out of place wandering around his local
shopping mall or riffing with friends over a beer. William has a few
secrets, though, and one of his biggest is that he aligns himself with
Anonymous. This is the online community of hacktivists and Internet
trolls that’s been running riot across the Web for the past few years.

William (not his real name) is somewhat hardcore. He insists that he is
part of the original Anonymous—like a Roman Catholic who sees himself as
being part of the “one true church.� He says this part of Anonymous
started it all, laying the foundations for the current nebulous
community and injecting it with all the necessary elements of
subculture: the memes and the lingo, the profound social acceptance and
the disdain for authority, the intent to harass people for fun or
“lulz.� Things that made it attractive and fun.

The “hacktivist� Anons who attacked Stratfor last year, and PayPal and
MasterCard the year before, the ones who wear the Guy Fawkes masks and
protest against acronyms like CISPA and ACTA: they’re a “joke,� William
grumbles. A pair of elderly ladies at the table next door look in his
direction over their cups of tea, and he lowers his voice a little. The
real, true Anonymous lives on 4chan, William says, a website visited by
millions of people each month. So-called trolls who are the Joker to the
hacktivists’ Batman. Young men who, like William, are happy to watch the
world burn. In essence, it’s his home.

William first found 4chan when he was in his early teens, around the
same time he and his friends were “pedo-bating� on MSN chat and other
websites. They would come online with a nickname like “sexy_baby_girl�
and pretend to be an underage teen who wanted to see an older man
masturbate on a Web cam. Once a man showed up on video, they’d suddenly
type out a fake IP address, say it was his and that they were from child
protection services. As the men suddenly fumbled for the mouse to turn
it off, they’d fall about laughing. William always wanted to take the
joke further, to get the man more excited. When it was over, he’d go
home and carry out the pranks on his own.

[...]

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