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A secretive Internet group known simply as “Anonymous” that gained notoriety in recent years by toppling government and credit card websites has turned its sights on Wisconsin. The controversial group, alternately derided as cyber-terrorists and praised as 21st Century “hacktivists,” has launched attacks on the websites of national conservative groups that support Gov. Scott Walker, whose push to limit public employee union bargaining rights is fanning a national firestorm.

Anonymous is an informal collective of Internet activists and hackers who first gained international fame in a 2008 tussle with the Church of Scientology, which had irked the group by filing a copyright claim with YouTube over a leaked Scientology video. Anonymous temporarily disabled several Scientology websites with brute-force “denial of service” attacks. A favorite among the group’s tactics, such assaults work by overwhelming Internet servers with requests.

“It’s kind of like sending junk mail,” says Eric Durant, director of the computer engineering program at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. “They’re overwhelming (the servers) with hundreds or thousands of times (more traffic) than they would normally be getting during a busy period.” Durant says specially written software can be used to carry out the attacks. Website can take precautions to protect against them, but hackers adjust. “It’s kind of an arms race,” he says.

Anonymous has no central leadership, and its motives are often unclear. According to a statement it released in 2008, “Anonymous is a spontaneous collective of people who share the common goal of protecting the free flow of information on the Internet,” an objective it pursued vigorously in December in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Anonymous attacks crippled websites for the Swedish Prosecution Authority, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal (all pegged as enemies of Assange by the group).

Other attacks (part of the group’s “Operation Payback”) have brought down websites for the Motion Picture Association of American, the Recording Industry Association of America and the U.S. Copyright Office in recent years. More recently, however, Anonymous attacks have grown political, taking down websites in Egypt and Tunisia amidst protests in the countries. And two of the group’s newest campaigns, Operation Wisconsin and Operation Koch Block, grew out of the fervor in Madison.

In a press release announcing both, Anonymous declared, “It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch, the billionaire owners of Koch Industries, have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today, we fight back.”

scott walker

Koch Industries was a major contributor to Walker’s campaign, and the brothers are major tea party group funders, including the national umbrella group, Americans for Prosperity. In late February, Anonymous temporarily disabled it with “denial of service” campaigns and carried out other attacks on two other national conservative groups: Citizens United and the Club for Growth.

AFP President Tim Phillips called the attacks “an attempt to silence our voice and to stifle that debate through an illegal attack.” He said his group “will not be intimidated and will not be deterred from our effort to support responsible economic policies.”

On Thursday, a brief outage of the Madison-based MacIver Institute’s website stirred speculation that it had been a victim of an Anonymous attack. The conservative think tank tweeted that it was “determining if (the outage) is traffic-related or something more malicious.” MacIver told NewsBuzz on Thursday it was still looking into the cause of the malfunction. Such an attack might constitute a violation of Anonymous protocol: The group normally frowns on attacking media organizations; MacIver’s website hosts the MacIver News Service, which runs stories with a conservative bent.

Although Anonymous is secretive, it lives by its own code: Chat channels used to plan activities are widely accessible. The channel for Operation Wisconsin said on Thursday that no “denial of service” attacks were being planned, although other, less damaging tactics were under consideration. One participant asked if “wiki vandalizing the 18 senators and Governor Koch” was “out of line,” presumably referring to making unflattering alterations to the Wikipedia pages for Republican state senators or Walker. (Wikipedia has actually imposed special protections on Walker’s Wikipedia page intended to prevent such editing.)

A running list of suggested protest activities includes boycotting businesses that support Walker, encouraging student walkouts and strikes, engaging in Project Moon Walker by mooning the State Capitol and sending mysterious “black faxes” bearing the Anonymous logo to the offices of Walker or Republican state senators.

One Operation Wisconsin skirmish that flopped was the “Toilet Wars” attack: Anonymous tried to bring down the Angel Soft toilet paper website (owned by Georgia-Pacific, which is owned by Koch Industries) but couldn’t field enough volunteers to disrupt the server.

Still, Anonymous denies that it’s gone political. “Anonymous is not interested in political parties. We are not Democrats, Republicans or Tea Partiers. We are all and none of these,” says another statement from the group. “We believe that government should be of the people, by the people, for the people. We are against corporate oligarchies, dictatorships and evil in the world, no matter where it is.”

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