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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Thursday, October 13, 2011
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Is Anonymous still a "hacktivist" collective? Posted by Sean @ 17:40 GMT

Members of the Internet collective known as "Anonymous" are often described as hacktivists. But are they really?

Or are they really just activists (is that what they've become)?

We follow various Anonymous news accounts on Twitter and ever since the sub-collective, LulzSec, petered out, Anonymous has shifted away from talking about online attacks and hacks to real-world protests, e.g., Wall Street.

Back on August 15th, we mentioned Anonymous Ops Britain and BART. Operation BART was a rather successful event and is one of the precursors to Occupy Wall Street. Op Britain was scheduled for Saturday, October 15th. That's this Saturday.

We didn't really expect too much would develop from it.

But with the success of the Wall Street protests, Op Britain has expanded into Occupy The Planet.

Anonymous: Occupy The Planet

Hundreds of meetups around the world are planned — there's even one here in Helsinki, Finland.

Occupy Helsinki

By this time next year, instead of hacktivists, we may all well consider Anonymous to be a collective of "social media savvy" activists.