Anonymous is a meme that I think has been wielded by different groups at different times. There is no "official" anonymous and all it takes to join is to think to yourself "I am anonymous". If some of the reports of hacks coming out of the war zone and surrounding areas are true (such as tweet claiming Belarussian rail had been disrupted) then I suspect that Western state actors are using the meme right now.
> But is it actually possible that it is really a decentralized collective?<p>Always has been. Wikipedia is pretty thorough[0]. Anonymous arose from 4chan, and while subgroups have certainly organized (of which Lulzsec is probably most notable), the "Anonymous" moniker is used by the folks who frequent(ed) 4chan, Something Awful, YTMND -- it was never a stable group, never had a leader. It's just whoever was around at the time and felt like joining in (... often, for the lulz).<p>A majority of "participants" were script kiddies - downloading tools someone else wrote, naive DDoS attacks, and things of that nature. But there were also some who really knew their shit.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group)</a>
They were coopted for political interests over a decade ago, and so any organic interest moved on. Now they are used as boogyman, as a honey pot or as a cover for cyberwarfare by the "good guys".
Someone that calls them self Anonymous.<p>" I am anonymous"<p>look I am part of it.<p>Mainly this started on the 4Chan image board because you could do anonymous posting of content. Then it moved forward doing various other hacking / social culture jamming or mainly just trolling people.
There was a hacker group several years ago that had some major hacks in their day.<p>But then they kind of fizzled out after the arrests of their leaders, with dozens of people arrested for involvement. With many of the big names in the group arrested, the rest broke away and disappeared, doing whatever they do now.<p>However, the name still had impact and popularity, so grifters set up Twitter news channels, claimed to members, blah blah blah. It's like "Dread Pirate Roberts" now.
In theory, <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Stand%20alone%20complex" rel="nofollow">https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Stand%20alon...</a><p>In practice, it may be some controlled operation.
[personal opinion]<p>I was asking myself the same question recently.<p>I think some of PR/decision making personas are probably "in charge" there, to define next goals for the collective, but then hackers itself are just volunteers who wants to spend their time & use their knowledge for such ideas that might make the world a better place.
Speculation as to what the entities claiming to be Anonymous now are should be informed by the history of Anonymous.<p>I recommend the book "It Came From Something Awful". Along the way you'll be told the history of counterculture and why you feel despair.
In a completely hypothetical, imaginary, (not our) world,<p>Anynomous was just a bunch of wanna be hackers who could only use scripts and such. They had some talent that could write scripts but mostly for denial of service etc.<p>As luck would have it, some highly skilled band of people decided to use the Anonymous philosophical movement to push their own agenda forward. Thus lulzsec [0] was born and from within the anonymous ranks performed a series of hacks that got anonymous more attention then it knew what to do with.<p>Lulzsec were also claiming[1] to be forwarding the philosophy of anti-sec[3]. But in this hypothetical world, anti-sec was anti attention. They believed getting media attention, white hat hacking, publishing etc all lead to reduced exploits for them to use and more unwanted attention they wanted to avoid. This might have gotten them more attention than from just law enforcement. Rumor had is that it was Teamp0isoN [3] that leaked some information about lulzsec to law enforcement. At least some supposed members of that group were claiming such (on random irc) before the bust of lulzsec was announced.<p>But in honestly, there were dozens of different irc servers at some point that all claimed to be Anonymous. Because it was supposed to be some type of hivemind, there wasn't any one place that could claim authority. Before their lulzsec stuff, the appear in zines for various groups like h0n0, zfo, el8 where they get mentioned as `scriptkiddies` and exploits of their servers getting owned is presented as entertainment for anyone reading it [4].<p>Hopefully this is at least entertaining if completely fictional. Some things are very hard to know/verify as an outsider looking in.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeaMp0isoN" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeaMp0isoN</a><p>[4] <a href="https://bgr.com/general/lulzsec-hacked-exposed-by-rival-hackers/" rel="nofollow">https://bgr.com/general/lulzsec-hacked-exposed-by-rival-hack...</a>
Don't trust anyone on Twitter who claims to be Anonymous. The original Anonymous got coopted by the rival group Pseudonymous who just use their name and fame for publicity.