Anonymous

A less flattering side-story to the Wikileaks scandal concerns the hacktivst group anonymous. Shortly after several major companies and banks announced that they would no longer do business with Wikileaks, hackers around the world united to crash the corporate websites of those companies through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This has been widely written about, but less widely photographed as, well, you can't, really.

We have all seen pictures of 404 errros when websites are down, but much less so of the people who cause them. Seeing the live IRC chatrooms where hackers co-ordinate and group into 'hives' to carry out attacks was truly fascinating, but I was still lacking that photographic illustration. The media widely reported that the group calling itself 'Anonymous' was behind the attacks; my subjects claim that anonymous is such an amorphous body of people it would be nearly impossible to pin-point the mastermind behind it all. Apparently, there are several sub-groups, the most aggressive being Anon Ops which claimed responsibility for the majority of recent DDoS attacks.

Now before anybody jumps to conclusions - the two brave guys who allowed me to photograph them emphatically stated that they were part of Anonymous, but did NOT - I repeat NOT - participate in the DDoS attacks. Make of that what you will, I am grateful they had enough trust and courage to face my camera.