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Jamie Wilkinson
Evan Roth
James PowderlyWar on Scientology as effective as War on Drugs
Inspired by disgust, intolerance, or just plain old boredom, the cancer that is Anonymous has declared war on the Church of Scientology as of Jan 21st, 2008. What does this actually mean? A couple of servers temporarily denial-of-service’d, some unfunny prank calls, a few black faxes… and truckloads of famo. Peep this:
- Digg search results for “Anonymous” totals over 35,000 diggs on the first 10 stories, which only span the last 2 days
- heavy MSM coverage: News.com, NBC11/KNBC, Wired, Slashdot, Sky News, National Post, and Gawker (also at war with Scientology)
- YouTube declaration video has over 600k views, 8k comments, and is #2 top viewed this week
- follow along on the /i/nsurgency wiki
This is some exemplary net pranking. Little has actually been done and huge press achieved. Anonymous’ input/output ratio is through the roof.
There’s been some real-life raiding too, but if you take away the anonymity of the Internet, you take away a /b/tard’s balls: see 16 y/o boys handing out flyers, and some weak stenciling (go big or go home)
More interestingly: Alexa graph of scientology.org traffic. Is this from the DOS attacks, or legitimate increased interest in the Church’s website?
It’s entirely possible this attack will have the opposite effect from what Anonymous intended: Scientology is getting more attention than ever.
Scientology might get more attention, but it will certainly be negative attention. It seems to me that’s what Anonymous would really prefer. Not too many people really know what Scientology is aside from the Xenu story. But the documents Anonymous hacked from their servers show some pretty odd stuff. I think a lot of people will come to realize what a scam Scientology really is.
I don’t think Scientology is really getting as much attention as this growing fear of “Anonymous” It’s quickly turning into a corny movie were they are hunting a serial killer that doesn’t really exist. The media still doesn’t understand Anonymous isn’t an actual group of people, its anyone and everyone who wants to partake…personally I think this event is a precursor to what will start taking place on the net regularly, as we become more dependent on the net, attacks that Anonymous makes will be harder hitting and do more damage.