hActivists – Je suis Charlie!

I am sure it is no news to any of us that Anonymous the infamous hacktivists movement are taking up cyber arms against extreme militants following the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo

Love them or hate them they are here to stay and cannot be ignored.

In fact the more I read on this the more I imagesstart to speculate on the place of cyber activists in the future of our global digital verbose and connected world that we are all a part of today?

And you know you don’t even need to be a hacker to be a part of their attacks on institutions or/and people that restrict the human right of freedom of speech. All you need to do to be a part become a sympathiser and become a part of their movement is visit their chat rooms, see what is the latest target, click on the appropriate icon, and lo-behold you will be one of the millions of PCs to launch a DDOS attack. See how Geoffrey ‘Jake’ Commander a 66-year-old British rock guitarist who’s worked with George Harrison, Elton John and Electric Light Orchestra, who participated in the December 2010 Operation Payback, an Anonymous campaign that brought down many financial websites including VISA, MasterCard and PayPal by launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, the crowd movement enabled by todays connecting technologies is bringing a new energy to the people, and experienced world-wide power, bottom up with the Arab Spring. There have always been activists fighting for what is right, fighting against greed and corruption, what has changed now is that it has not only become a force in the digital world with cyber activism with hacktivists on the forefront, but the linkage with the empowering capabilities of social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Maps to bring people together to protest on the streets coordinated across the world.

Power to the People‘ is taking on a new guise, and this is for real!