September 12, 2011, 1:52 PM — According to a PDF containing what purports to be a leaked psychological assessment of the leaders of LulzSec and Anonymous by the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (which also profiles serial killers), Anonymous is not only not a collection of individuals, it's a coherent group that poses a threat to national security.
Neither the FBI nor Dept. of Homeland Security have commented on the "leak," which may be a fake according to the TechHerald, but seems to reflect accurately the thinking behind a series of DHS warning bulletins and crackdowns that have resulted in 75 raids and 16 arrests of Anonymous members just this year.
Anons themselves refer to the group as a rough, almost coincidental collective of individuals that occasionally cooperate on projects to protest specific things.
There are approximately eight vortices of special interest within the collective, according to interviews, postings and counter-arguments posted by various Anonymi in response to invective by those it attacked.
Attacks are the work of small groups of interested individuals who, on their own initiative and using public argument as their weapon, gather like-minded Anonymi to protest governmental outrages or attack injustice in whatever form they find it, according to de facto leaders in the non-existent but vocal #OPpublicrelations.
In March, for example, members of Anonymous and 4Chan debated, in the finest traditions of American Democracy and citizen activism, whether to attack and defeat the Internet scourge that is Rebecca Black – the annoying but harmless pop "singer" whose made herself famous with a mom-and-dad-funded music video on YouTube that repeated the same lyrics so often it became apparent those might be the only words she knows.
(Other, less world-shaking Anonymous projects resulted in significant attacks against the embattled governments of Egypt and Syria, the exposure of government atrocities in Bolivia, civil protest against censorship on the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, attacks on Visa, Mastercard and Paypal in support of whistleblower site WikiLeaks and a long-simmering, high-profile protest against unrestricted greed, corrosive dishonesty of Wall Street and the and economic destruction from which the rest of the country suffers while financiers continues to prosper.)
