Anonymous Seizes the KKK's Twitter, Why Should You Care?

The hacker collective Anonymous is widely known for it's anti-political-correctness and extremely bold strategies for fighting it's battles. These battles include taking down internet pedophiles on the DarkNet, restoring internet and full coverage of the Egyptian revolution to the outside world, and now fighting for the protesters of Ferguson.

There has been a lot of heavy scrutiny toward the Ferguson protesters and their cause. The protests started after the late Michael Brown was shot by Ferguson police. However, the controversy became more and more nationally debated once Ferguson police rolled out for the protests in military-grade police vehicles, holding assault rifles, while wearing combat military armor.

This kind of police militarization is, quite notoriously, one of the largest dangers to the American public's freedom to protest, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and freedom of information.

So, most large groups and social influenced formed their own opinions on the matter, and were very public about the conflict. Whether or not they agreed on the original Mike Brown controversy, the mass of people's opinions went against the militarization of the police departments.

However, one group in particular has voiced it's own exceptionally strong opinion about the protests and the following debates. The Ku Klux Klan, about 75 miles south of Ferguson, started handing flyers around threatening to use "lethal force" against the protesters. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the actual sect that started the threats (Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan) is listed as an active hate group.

Anonymous, following the threats, launched it's own operation against the Ku Klux Klan, seizing two of the groups twitter accounts, d0xing the group's head members, and attacking the group's servers through multiple strings of Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

The Anonymous collective released this statement (in video, but I'll just leave the text here).

"KKK it has came to our unfortunate attention that you have been interfering with Anonymous. 

We are not attacking you because of what you believe in as we fight for freedom of speech… 

We are attacking you because of what you did to our brothers and sisters at the Ferguson protest on the 12th of November. 

Due to your actions we have started Operation KKK. 

The aim of our operation is nothing more than Cyber Warfare. 

Anything you upload will be taken down, anything you use to promote the KKK will be shut down. 

DDos attacks have already been sent and have infiltrated your servers over the past 2 days… d0x's have also been launched on leaders of the KKK. All information retrieved will be given to the public. 

You messed with our family and now we will mess with yours…
Let the cyber war begin.
We are legion.
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Ku Klux Klan you should have expected us."

This is one of the hacked accounts:

And this is the picture that was posted shown in the screenshot:

Who will come out on top, who will win the PR battle, and who will get arrested I cannot say. All I can say, is that my opinions fall on the side of Anonymous. The fact is, that protests are a crucial part of America societal progression. Without it, we are no different than any dictatorship out there.

The Ku Klux Klan is doing their own protesting but purely in the name of anti-protesting, and invoking a violent outreach in the meantime. That's volatile at best, and is the kind of close minded belief that leads to the destruction of Americans' freedom, which I will not stand for at any point.

If you put safety over freedom, then I'm sorry, but that's not what this country was founded on. You can the argument that any government ideology belongs in a state that calls itself free, and I will agree with you. However, moving toward a government where the people don't have that freedom, for the sake of safety, is unacceptable.

We must accept that this is not a place for overwhelming safety at the cost of freedom. America is not a country of hand-outs and will never be. If you want opportunity, and freedom, it will not be handed to you. For whatever reason (because we've never had to fight for it), this generation feels entitled to the freedom they have and in turn all they have to do is cheer on Veteran's Day.

That's not the case. We will spend our entire lives fighting, and we must accept that. That's the only way we will keep what we were given, and improve on it.

That's all I have for today, but I'll be back tomorrow with another entry.

"The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but not what to see." -Alexandra K. Tenfor