The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous — And for All of Us
And for All of Us — The latest Snowden-related revelation is that Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) proactively targeted the communications infrastructure used by the online activist collective known as Anonymous.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Snowden archive has moved from bulk collection to named targets. NBC's reporting the same day, based on the documents, describes a secret British unit mounting cyberattacks against Anonymous and LulzSec — meaning GCHQ did not merely monitor the collective but acted against the infrastructure its members relied on to communicate.
That lands on a group already squeezed from both sides: the FBI had warned in November 2013 about a year-long Anonymous-linked campaign breaching U.S. government computers (per Reuters), while thirteen members pleaded guilty the next month over the 2010 PayPal attack. The Wired piece adds a second casualty — shared anonymity tools. Weeks earlier, Businessweek documented NSA efforts against Tor, and together these disclosures suggest intelligence agencies treat the plumbing of online anonymity itself as an adversary.
First-order effects
- Anonymous loses operational ground: GCHQ attacking its communications infrastructure means coordination channels the collective assumed were private were actively degraded, not passively watched.
- Ordinary users of the same tools are exposed alongside the target — the Wired framing is that infrastructure-level attacks sweep up everyone who shares that infrastructure, not just hacktivists.
Second-order effects
- Developers and operators of anonymizing systems face a two-front problem: state adversaries working to defeat the technology (as the January 2014 Tor reporting showed) at the moment public trust in those tools becomes their most valuable asset.
- Other governments gain a template: once one signals-intelligence agency openly treats a decentralized activist network as a legitimate offensive target, peer agencies have precedent for doing the same against their own domestic collectives.
Third-order effects
- If offensive operations against shared internet infrastructure become standard practice, anonymity tools bifurcate into hardened niche products and mainstream services presumed compromised — reshaping who can plausibly organize outside state view.
- The Snowden disclosures keep escalating from surveillance policy questions toward offensive-cyber norms, feeding a legislative and diplomatic fight over whether states may attack civilian-used infrastructure in pursuit of non-state adversaries.
The trend: The Snowden-era revelations are shifting scrutiny from what intelligence agencies collect to whom they attack — with state cyber operations now aimed at decentralized activist networks and the shared anonymity infrastructure they depend on.