Thursday 17 March 2011

Yo! Anonymous! How about #OpProchoice?



The War on Women (also title of a book on the Canadian version by Brian Vallée) is fought on many fronts.

General violence against women More specific assaults like female genital mutilation and war rape (yes, that's a term). And so on and depressingly so on.

But never in my life have I witnessed such an absolute orgy of assault on women's reproductive rights as is going on right now in the Excited States. Unbelievably cruel, petty new laws are being enacted all over the place by Tea Party Hatriots. And then, of course, there's the MASSIVE effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood.

It occurred to me that women could use some help here. And then I started thinking about an excellent article by our pal Antonia Zerbisias a couple of weeks ago about Anonymous.

And then I started thinking that I know quite a few female geeks. And many male geeks even have female partners (kidding!).

From AZ's article:
Want a revolution? There is an op for that. Op as in operation. #OpEgypt #OpAlgeria #OpTunisia. #OpPayback. These are the Twitter “hashtags’’ that disseminate dissent.

I'm thinking #OpProchoice -- or something cleverer -- sounds very good.

Here's AZ's primer on Anonymous's past and present actions.
Project Chanology (2008): This was the attack on the Church of Scientology that brought the first mainstream attention to Anonymous. When a YouTube of a manic Tom Cruise raving about the benefits of Scientology was posted, the Church threatened legal action. As a result, Scientology.Org was taken out.

Anonymous Iran (2009): During the uprising after the contested Iranian election, Anonymous and other hacktivists set up an opposition Green Party support site with news and resources for protestors.

Operation Titstorm (2010): An attack against the Australian government, which had tried to pass a law that would censor online photos of small-breasted women because they could be seen as child porn.

Operations Payback/Avenge Assange (2010): This was where Anonymous sealed its reputation as champion of WikiLeaks and free speech. Among other actions, Anonymous brought down MasterCard and Visa’s websites because they would not accept or froze donations to founder Julian Assange.

Operations Tunisia/Egypt (2011): Anonymous helped protestors by knocking out government websites and providing resources for getting around the denial of Internet access.

The Attack on HBGary Federal (2011): This is the humiliating attack on a major U.S. security firm, which claimed to have identified Anonymous leaders and was planning to out them to the FBI. The corporate website was hacked, 60,000 emails leaked, and even its phone system was disconnected. Last week, the CEO resigned.

Westboro Baptist Church (2011): Last month, on live radio, while a representative from the notoriously homophobic church was debating with an Anonymous participant, a WBC website was hacked.

Operation Koch Block (2011): Last week, the growing ranks of Anonymous went after the multi-billionaire Koch Brothers because they were working “to undermine” the political process and workers in Wisconsin. They temporarily disabled the website of the Koch-funded group, Americans for Prosperity.

Avenge Bradley Manning (2011): On Thursday, #opbradley was launched, aimed at supporting U.S. Pvt. 1st Class Bradley E. Manning, the soldier charged with “aiding the enemy’’ by providing classified government documents to WikiLeaks.

Anti-choicers are all over the InterToobz, spewing hate, lies, and shame. Some enable anti-abortion terrorists. And, of course, they use those sites to raise more dough to continue and escalate their war on women.

And now I'm thinking, nice sites they got there, be a shame if. . .

1 comment:

JJ said...

Yep, be a shame. A laughing, err, crying shame.

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