Anonymous Tries to Found a Legit News Organization, It Goes Badly

[Myna]

A little over a year ago, some members of the Anonymous hacktivist collective decided they'd try to found their own news organization. So they did what young people who have a dream do as a matter of course these days: they set up an Indiegogo campiagn. They raised over $50,000. And now more than $30,000 of that is gone.

This sad song, which to be utterly fair has been sung many times by people not quite as explicitly dedicated to anarchy and chaos as most Anonymous members are, was memorialized in a long pastebin post over the weekend. It was (apparently unironically) titled "Truth and reconciliation," a phrase associated primarily with post-apartheid inquiry commission in South Africa.

The report reveals that the culprit is one "JackalAnon," the alias for a Denver man named Christopher Banks. He was the force behind the original fundraising campaign, which sought to capitalize on the popularity of the @YourAnonNews twitter account to create a news organization which would reflect the not-terribly-coherent values of the hacktivist collective as a whole. (Less "celebrity and political gossip" seems to have been key to the plan.)

Banks personally collected the just-under-$55,000 that resulted from the campaign, and he does seem to have arranged for the manufacture of the various tchotchkes promised to the campaign's 1,300-or-so donors. But after that, what he did with the money gets pretty murky.

Alarms were raised when the merchandise was never mailed out, and at that point other Anonymous collective members stepped in to save the project. Per the pastebin report:

Wanting to protect and preserve this invaluable resource for the benefit of Anonymous and the wider activist community who support us and rely on us as to amplify their voices, a rescue plan was put in place by a collective that came together from various corners of our hive. We approached Jackal, who was under considerable duress, and offered to solve the mailout – and by extension credibility issue – on condition that he would relinquish control of the Twitter feed to a suitable protected entity. The password was subsequently passed on to DellCam and Emmi, after which Dell changed the password and had the only access.

The vague language here raises some alarms. What does "under considerable duress" mean? Legal duress? Financial duress? The report is silent on that point. Instead, it goes on to record efforts to turn YourAnonNews into a proper non-profit. And then the acts of mutiny and betrayal which naturally followed hard upon that effort.

Getting Banks to relinquish control of the Twitter account and forming a proper institution sadly did not bring an end to YourAnonNews's woes. For one thing, Banks didn't return the money, or even, it seems, tell anyone what he'd done with it. Banks also apparently did not like the way he was shoved aside in favor of creating a proper institution to handle the YourAnonNews twitter account and associated affairs. So last week, he tried to get Twitter to give him sole custody (so to speak) of the YourAnonNews Twitter handle again.

Read more @ http://gawker.com/anonymous-tries-to-found-a-legit-news-organization-it-1575025129

[Ballistic Gelatin]

When it comes to legitimacy, Anonymous might have a **small** corporate branding and image problem.