Yet overarching insights into the decentralized collective are hard to find.
Information activist Asher Wolf provides a unique perspective in an interview with a prominent American Anon, who has more than 290,000 Twitter followers via @AnonyOps and is living in exile by choice.
The hacker left the country out of a fear of being harshly prosecuted by the government for radical advocacy of movements such as WikiLeaks and Occupy.
“I think the idea was planted when I saw others leaving,” @AnonyOps told Wolf. ” Glen Greenwald left … There’s a brain drain of political dissidents – America’s punishment for screwing with civil liberties.
“With the NSA building massive domestic spying programs, I can’t blame anyone for wanting to leave: America – land of the surveilled, home of the logged.”
The coder — who sees his Twitter success as ” hacking public dialog” — left his home, family, and friends because he began to think the government would “fake my involvement in something or try to entrap me, or hit me with a bull— conspiracy charge.”
He likened his situation to Internet hero Aaron Swartz, the RSS co-developer and Reddit cofounder who committed suicide amid an ambitious prosecution after he downloaded millions of academic papers from the nonprofit online database J-STOR.
“I left for some of the same reasons Aaron Swartz ‘left,'” @AnonyOps told Wolf. “But exile was my choice of escape instead. I don’t have suicide in me and I didn’t want to end up in a jail cell.”
Swartz’s girlfriend believes that the death of the 26-year-old — who was facing a maximum of $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison — “was caused by exhaustion, by fear, and by uncertainty … by a persecution and a prosecution that had already wound on for 2 years … and had already drained all of his financial resources.”
Barret Brown, the journalist and Anon arrested for threatening an FBI officer and sharing a link to stolen credit card information taken from Stratfor, faces up to 100 years in prison.
“From my perspective, it’s time to either leave or hide,” @AnonyOps said.
( via businessinsider.com )