The smiling face of a Guy Fawkes mask has appeared on the doors and windows of vacant commercial properties around Prince Rupert's downtown core.
The vexing vaudevillian visage on the poster is a symbol adopted from V for Vendetta, a graphic novel by Alan Moore, by the Internet activism group Anonymous. The poster shows a URL for a planning-website for “Operation Onslaught;” apparently the next mission being planned for the end of the month.
The “Operation Onslaught” that the posters are promoting is more of a awareness campaign when compared to the other of the groups' operations. The hacktivist group is calling Onslaught its “first ever large-scale community event.”
According to the website from the poster, people are being encouraged to print off their own posters, stencils or stickers and plaster them all over major centres in their home cities on the night of July 30. The goal is to remind people “that freedom is alive in all of us and Anonymous is here to make sure people are heard. Let everyone know that change is on the way.”
While that may sound like idle talk to some, Anonymous has been extremely successful into turning ideas of this kind into action with an collective of leaderless, nameless, young, internet-savvy volunteers from all over the world. Their use of hacking and other Internet tricks to promote their ideals caused the coining of the word “hacktivist,” to describe them and similar groups.
Anonymous has been around for several years but until last year was not known outside of Internet enthusiasts and the governments, companies and organizations that the group has targeted for its “operations. “
That all changed when Anonymous put motion “Operation Payback,” which targeted Master Card and Visa with denial of service attacks late last year after the credit card companies decided to stop processing donations to Wikileaks during the controversy over the diplomatic documents that Wikileaks published for all the world to see. Anonymous members bombarded the companys' websites en masse with requests eating up the sites bandwidth and causing them to either crash or slow down to a crawl.
Operation Onslaught may be a response to the pressure being put on Anonymous by authorities since it proved itself to be a more legitimate threat to companies and governments than just a bunch of idealistic kids with computers. Earlier this week 14 people in the US were arrested in suspicion of being involved in Operation Payback, people have also been arrested in Spain, Holland, Australia and the UK. US senator John McCain also called this week for congressional hearings on Anonymous and other hactivist groups like Luls Sec.
The signs indicate that at least one person in Prince Rupert is already trying to recruit others into participating in Operation Onslaught, but will a campaign on the Internet spill out onto the walls of Prince Rupert? We'll have to wait for the morning of July 31 to see.