It was called freedom of speech. It was called the Internet.
His name is Robert Paulson.
But this isn’t Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” or Project Mayhem. It’s Anonymous.
It’s a shame that our intelligence of the Internet doesn’t mirror our obvious dependence on it, because we’ve found ourselves in the crosshairs of a group who has that intelligence and knows precisely how to use it for their cause.
The line between terrorism and activism — or the new term “hacktivism” — is a fine one, so I’ll put it plainly: Activism is protesting outside of an abortion clinic. Terrorism is setting the clinic aflame.
In even simpler terms, terrorism is violence with a cause.
Unfortunately for our safety, no one seems to treat online goods as seriously as material goods, despite the fact that we pay for them, we work to produce them and we inundate our lives with them.
So when a man fires a bullet at the White House, headlines across the nation scrawl the attack in outrage.
But when word gets out that Anonymous has hacked the CIA or the FBI, the public is apathetic.
The same goes for the hacking of PlayStation Network, when hackers gained access to the personal information of up to 70 million users, including credit card numbers, names, birthdates, e-mail addresses and more.
Anonymous claims to be on the side of security and transparency, but burning a building down is not how you prove its structural flaws, just like killing a man is not how you prove his weakness by example.
In “Fight Club,” the most frightening aspect of Project Mayhem came with the realization that it consisted of everyday people — “We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep.”
Then Tyler Durden provides the appropriate conclusion: “Do not f— with us.”
And so Anonymous is aptly named. They can hack food transportation lines, they can hack waste management, they can hack any and all online communication and they can hack medical information. They can hack your security while you sleep.
Their credo logically mirrors Durden’s: “We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”
No one deserves this power. Should one possess it, using it as leverage for a cause is as evil as coercion under the sights of a gun or an atom bomb.
It is said their cause is transparency (and I use “they” loosely, as the group is cleverly decentralized), but transparency in this case is akin to anarchy.
Destruction does not bring liberation, just like exposing the personal information of millions won’t teach them to better protect their data.
And even if it did, do you know how to encrypt your hard drive? A better question: If you did, could Anonymous still hack it?
Yes, they can.
The logical conclusion is Anonymous as an Internet watchdog: When Anonymous sees online actions they disapprove of, they hack and expose it. And they’ve got all the guns and every means of watching us.
Freedom? It’s totalitarianism by the books. They can watch you, learn about you and exploit you for the simplest of actions, and they’ve proven that they are more than willing.
Yet they have no obligation to own up to their actions because anyone and anything can be Anonymous.
The mentality is aimless and evil, and with the potential to hack anything from our bank accounts to our energy grids, it threatens not only our freedom but our lives.
I should not fear for the data on my hard drive with the publication of this column, yet I do.
The FBI should not fear online retribution for arresting a man who invaded the privacy of another, yet it must.
When Interpol arrested 25 upper-level Anonymous members Tuesday, its website crashed in the wake.
This is the face of modern terrorism: a question mark and a taste for agenda-driven destruction.
Clayton Crockett is a 20-year-old international studies sophomore. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_ccrockett.
 
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Contact Clayton Crockett at [email protected]