Mayor Rob Ford wants to remove the Occupy Toronto tent city by next week. If that happens, Anonymous has threatened to similarly remove Toronto or the mayor (it is unclear which) “from the Internet,” according to a new video released on Nov. 11 under the hacktivist’s moniker.
“We all have freedom of speech, and opinions to express, and [the Occupiers] are doing it peacefully” says the Anonymous voice in the video. “There is no need for you to put an end to the occupation in Toronto. The brave citizens of Toronto are peaceful and well-mannered occupiers, and we will not let the city, or the mayor that uses vulgar language in public get involved.”
The Canadian Press and the Toronto Star quickly ran with the story, and it wasn’t long before the Huffington Post and even the London Free Press picked it up.
The phrase to remove Toronto “from the Internet” is ambiguous, and many media outlets have assumed this means Anonymous will attack government websites or that it was simply a warning to Mayor Ford.
There’s no mention of a Toronto attack on the AnonOps Twitter account, which has previously been used as the official Anonymous Twitter stream. That doesn’t rule out potential action, though.
An Anonymous source familiar with such matters told the Daily Dot via private IRC chat that AnonOps has become unreliable, “a festering hole of a bunch of kids and feds.”
If there is a attack on any government sites in Toronto, it will be carried out by “obviously dumbass DDoS kids,” the Anon wrote.
“A great deal of these videos are from individual Anons trying to start something and thinking that’s how it works,” the Anon said. “They are so easy to make. LOL.” (This idea was echoed by a Gawker article last week titled “How Your Bullshit Anonymous Hacking Threats Get Made.”)
Anonymous has made empty threats in the past. On Nov. 5, Anonymous said they’d attack the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, Facebook, and Fox News. Those attacks never materialized.
The Anon didn’t completely rule out the possibility of a cyber attack on Canadian government websites, however. “[T]here are other [Anonymous] groups who don’t make themselves as public,” he wrote.
Anonymous doesn’t have a centralized place where each faction or group communicates with each other. And, each group could be a handful of people or just one person. The video threat to attack government websites could be a form of “misdirection” or a “ruse” for something bigger, the Anon stated, and the government sites might have already been compromised.
The website of St Louis Mayor Francis Slay was hacked last week, after the mayor threatened to evict Occupiers.
Update: Since publication, the video has been removed from YouTube, and the uploader has closed their account. The Daily Dot is looking into the matter. The video embedded above is a copy uploaded yesterday, by a different user.
Image by Luciano Castillo