This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It is ironic that those who champion WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange for publicizing classified State Department documents that embarrass the United States and may harm its foreign policy and even individuals are — in the name of freedom of the Internet — doing it under a rigorous cloak of anonymity.
Among them is the prominent group of Internet conspirators known as Anonymous, which keeps secret the names of those shutting down websites of WikiLeaks' perceived enemies (known as "hacktivism"). They have made the names of those terrorists, well, classified.
In the name of openness they refuse to be open. The hacktivists demand openness from others but they refuse to be open themselves. That's not just irony, it's hypocrisy.
In Sunday's Washington Post, a hacktivist who wouldn't be named because he feared arrest compared the attacks on U.S. companies' websites to "the sit-ins during the 1960s when you had college students taking up space in restaurants." What?! The whole point of '60s civil disobedience was to publicly and nonviolently state your position with your body and willingly submit to arrest and the consequences of what you thought was an unjust law.
These hactivists aren't patriotic activists; they're secretive, terrorizing thugs.
Tim Vincent
Moab