From Anonymous To Shuttered Websites, the Evolution of Online Protest

silentbrad sends this excerpt from the CBC: "The days of screaming activists marching with signs in hand to voice their displeasure at a particular politician are changing rapidly – just ask Vic Toews. Canada's public safety minister was the latest in a string of public-policy lightning rods to feel the wrath of Anonymous, a loose coalition of web-based activists who went after Toews for his overly vociferous promoting of the government's online surveillance bill. ... Graeme Hirst, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Toronto, says that while Anonymous does share some properties of older protest movements, sometimes its motives can be called into question. 'It's a kind of civil disobedience, so we can immediately make analogies to the Civil Rights movement of the '60s,' Hirst said in an interview. 'On the other hand, it's not entirely clear that Anonymous is as altruistically motivated as those protests were.' ... Hirst viewed the January showdown as 'the first legitimate online protest' that was really only about the online world and suggested that the key to its success was that it was organized not by individuals but by organizations — and ones with clout. ... Another apparently successful online campaign was the Cost of Knowledge protest started by an international group of researchers in January, following a blog post by Cambridge University math professor Timothy Gowers."

Motivations

[Hatta]

Does it matter if Anonymous is less altruistic than the Civil Rights Movement? The important thing is that they're more altruisitic than our political, economic, and social leaders.

Re:little man vs. business

[poity]

Civil disobedience isn't just disruption. Civil disobedience entails the breaking of laws such that one's subsequent arrest/prosecution can reveal the injustice of those laws to the public, which then brings about a change in the social/political atmosphere, leading to progress. The intent of black students to sit in white only restaurants was not to punish those restaurant owners who may have supported segregation laws; their intent was to put a spotlight on the unequal treatment despite claims of "separate but equal." That's how you practice civil disobedience -- by targeting specifically unjust laws, breaking them, and exposing them to the public

Now compare with Anonymous, what laws did they break in an attempt to reveal their injustice? They only broke fraud and network intrusion laws. Does that mean they were against fraud and network intrusion laws out of the belief that those laws were unjust? There is no way one can logically compare Anonymous with historical examples of civil disobedience.