This week's arrest of 16 suspected members of the hacking group Anonymous may drive more people to the group's cause.
Floor64's Mike Masnick wrote
The arrests were apparently a response to Anonymous' attack on eBay Inc.'s PayPal after the payment company stopped allowing donations to WikiLeaks, Masnick wrote. Anonymous attempted to disrupt PayPal's service through a denial of service attack, which is a way of blocking access to a website by overwhelming it with traffic.
Anonymous is not an organized criminal group, Masnick wrote. "The focus is not criminal, but ideological. Arresting people just drives home their general fear of a world in which certain entities have too much power, leading more people to fight back."
People who say the arrests will serve as a deterrent "are greatly underestimating how people who feel disenfranchised by the world, but sense power through their Internet connection, react in such situations," Masnick wrote.
The sort of people who would join Anonymous also "dramatically underestimate the likelihood of getting tracked down and caught," he wrote.
