Tag: anonymous

Thoughts on Leaked Steubenville Video

steubenville videoIn response to the tragedy in Newtown, CT the idea was raised by news commentators and in the blogosphere that the names of people who commit heinous crimes should be de-publicized in order to deny them even a posthumous fame we believe to be a constituent of their twisted motives. It is hard to imagine, though, that even if we could instantaneously erase the names of these sociopaths, that this would really serve as a deterrent to crimes born in psyches we cannot understand in the first place.

I find myself thinking about the subjects of infamy, depravity, and justice since watching the video released last week in which teenage boys jokingly boast about an alleged multiple rape of a sixteen year-old girl in Steubenville, OH.  The video was accessed and released to the public by a group or individual identified on Twitter as KnightSec, who claims alliance with the hacktivist group Anonymous. KnightSec exposed the video on the grounds that officials in Steubenville have been papering over the case because the accused assailants are members of the very popular football team in this small, working-class community.  This is a familiar and easy-to-grasp narrative, one that might even be true; and although I believe KnightSec is acting in a good-faith effort to see justice done, the case in general, including the release of the video, raises some disturbing and challenging questions unique to our digital times.

According to CNN, one of the difficulties in the case, even if we give local law enforcement and prosecutors the benefit of every doubt, is that much of the evidence so far amounts to teenagers referring to criminal behavior via digital and social media. Reports indicate that even the victim herself was unconscious during the alleged assaults and cannot serve as a witness to her own abuse.  There is even a report that the victim text messaged the accused saying, “I know you didn’t rape me.”  Rape cases are often hard enough to prosecute, and this one appears to be complexly warped by the bizarre world of communications in which we now live — one where depraved speech is so common among certain users of social media, that it is very hard to tell who is merely presenting himself as a pig and who is referring to actual events in real life.  Certainly, this would not be the first time a bunch of jocks assaulted a defenseless girl; and it would not be the first time teenagers used social media to brag about their own hideous behavior; but it also wouldn’t be the first time teenagers produced comments, photos, and videos that exaggerate or distort actual events for no other reason than that’s how some people behave in cyberspace.

Even the kid featured in the video released by KnightSec is not one of those presently accused in the alleged assault; and while I would like to see him and his friends marched out to the woodshed for their lack of humanity, it’s hard to get past the fact that in the video, he’s behaving exactly like an Internet troll. In fact, his similes are frankly so childishly dorky that what we’re watching could be the blabbering of an accomplice, a witness, or pathetically enough, a wannabe.  If you think the idea of a wannabe rapist is farfetched, let’s go back to October for a moment . . .

Before Gawker outed super-troll Michael Brutsch (aka Violentacrez), the senior staff at Reddit saw no problem with the enormous volume of this man’s posts glorifying sexual assault of teenage girls. To the contrary, Brutsch was rewarded with what the Internet troll wants most — attention.  And because Violentacrez yielded literally tens of thousands of followers, Reddit even rewarded Brutsch with a statuette for his popularity. Is there a connection between Brutsch and the kid in the Steubenville video?  I think there is, and it comes back to the notion of infamy.

In the age of social media, attention is currency; and negative attention is not necessarily of lesser value than positive attention. Hence, this raises just one of the questions as to the value of the kind of net vigilantism, however well intentioned, conducted by KnighSec in this case. In order for there to be a video to expose, the video had to be shot in the first place and then loaded onto a storage device somewhere that could be hacked.  Hence the choice by these boys to memorialize and save a record of this offensive and imbecilic monologue suggests at least an instinctive desire for attention. In this context, then, does releasing the video to the public potentially satisfy a dysfunctional wish for infamy among these kids? If we would contemplate erasing the name of the already-dead Newtown shooter, what about giving fifteen minutes of fame to this morally-bankrupt teenager, who may face no consequences of any kind in this matter? More broadly, as we shake our heads and think, “How can these kids behave like this?”  are we missing subtleties in the design of our technologies that reward cruelty through mob acceptance?  I don’t know the answer, but I do know that this video is not an anomaly among teenagers, and I know that misogynistic themes are very common in shadowy regions of social media that many parents may not know exist.

Of course, there is another way to look at incidents like Steubenville.  Perhaps this kind of case is no more common than it was twenty years ago; and thanks to social media, we are able as a whole society to confront these incidents more frankly and to demand both justice and solutions. It is hard not to feel, though, that human depravity is lately on the rise.  Perhaps this perception is an illusion itself, one borne of the constancy of our communications technology and, hence, the universal competition for attention.

We hope, of course, that officials in Ohio are able to parse the gibberish from the evidence, that the facts of this case will see justice served, and that above all, the girl in question receive whatever support, comfort, and help she needs.  But whether the dumb kid in the leaked video is implicating himself in an attack or just shooting his mouth off, the confusion I believe should serve as instructive in this utopian, free-speech bonanza of the digital age — that words have a tendency to correspond to actions, if not by the speaker, then by somebody who’s listening.

It’s Guy Fawkes Day and Anonymous thinks that means something.

Forget that tomorrow is Election Day in the U.S. or that many of our fellow Americans are still digging out of the damage done by Hurricane Sandy. It’s Guy Fawkes Day, and the hacktivist group Anonymous wants to you focus on, well, them. At the risk of being targeted myself, I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge the fact that, in honor of Guy Fawkes Day, Anonymous has already begun a series of what it claims will be massive hacking and Wikileaks-style data dumps as a global protest against the forces of censorship, corporate and government control, and the usual litany of conspiracy theorizing that is frankly too tedious to repeat. Having apparently begun activities in Australia with attacks on PayPal, Symantec, and the Australian government, the loosely knit group of hackers claims that this is the beginning of a campaign leading up to a December event they call Project Mayhem 2012. Promising to pick up where Wikileaks failed to deliver, Project Mayhem aims to effect a massive leak of secrets and whatever other data Anonymous deems worthy of exposure to rid the world of oppressive government and corporate-controlled forces. If this all sounds like self-aggrandizing, pseudo-revolutionary bluster from a bunch of basement-dwelling super trolls, it could well be; but the group’s hacking skills should not be underestimated, and neither should the message they send to a world gone more than a little conspiracy-crazy in the last decade. In fact, this CNN article about the level of paranoia is aptly timed.

Maybe it’s because I began grade school in the wake of Dr. King’s murder and can still remember the atmosphere of that time, but I find it impossible not to think of a modern-day activist railing against generalized, corporate oppression, hiding behind a mask, and lurking in the shadows of Web code as anything but a coward and a hypocrite. Sure there’s corruption in the world that ought to be exposed, and it frequently is exposed by individuals willing to sign their names to the work they do, whether it’s journalism, a protest song, a poem, a play, a movie, or any other form of speaking truth to power. But what are we to make of a group that will anonymously invade privacy and seek to silence speech in order to protect privacy and speech? The journalist or the artist who speaks out not only puts himself or herself out there for the record, but also gives the reader, listener, or viewer a choice to consider what’s being presented and to come to his own conclusions. But the hacker (like the terrorist or anarchist) presumes to make the moral decision for us, choosing the target he considers an enemy, taking justice into his own hands.

Anonymous may pose as cousins of the Black Panthers providing services to their communities and speaking out against very real threats to civil liberties, but they are more reminiscent of the spoiled white kids in the Weather Underground vainly making bombs in a Manhattan apartment. The truth is, of course, that Anonymous could as easily be a corporate-funded operation as anything else. How do we know, for instance, that they’re not a small team of programmers working for Google or some other Silicon Valley firm? Is this possibility any more farfetched than the conspiracies they themselves promote? Last I checked, Silicon Valley is full of money, mega-corporations, computer programmers, and anti-establishment libertarians. We see Anonymous attack media companies but have yet to see them assail the Web or consumer electronics industries for the millions they spend on lobbying or other forms of political influence. Why do those special interests get the Anonymous seal of approval? Most likely, Anonymous is not corporate-backed, but as we’re dabbling in conspiracy theory, it’s as reasonable an explanation as any other. No?

I may well be inviting a cyberattack on myself here; but if so, that would only prove the point that any private citizen should abhor this juvenile approach to political dissent. Among the promises of the digital age is that we ordinary folks can more easily speak up, lend our voices, our names, our creativity, and yes even our real faces to the cause of social justice worldwide. In short, the Web is already ours, and we don’t need Anonymous or anyone else to plant their flag in it and hand it to us. But of course, we live in volatile and difficult times as the CNN article points out — a trust-vacuum if you will, and where vacuums form extremists find purchase and seek to fill the void. Wherever there is disillusionment, distrust, and disappointment that wants progressive dialogue among sane people, some clown in one theatrical mask or another invariably shows up to set things on fire. In this context, Anonymous is lobbing digital molotov cocktails.