Politics & Government

Mystery Group Recruits in OC for Global 'Revolution'

Posters promoting a website purportedly set up by anti-Establishment group Anonymous appear along Del Mar over the weekend.

Xeroxed posters advertising a website purportedly set up by global online activist group Anonymous appeared on trees and light poles up and down Avenida Del Mar in San Clemente over the weekend weekend.

The posters have appeared throughout downtown San Clemente and at locations on Avenida Pico, as well as other cities in Orange County.

The campaign is apparently worldwide: Members of Anonymous have been spamming top-rated YouTube videos as well as posting signs.

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The posters send people to whatis-theplan.org, which has information and videos about a vague three-phase plan called Operation Onslaught. The “plan” apparently involves acts of protest against what organizers consider the corruption of corporations and government regimes worldwide.

“Corporate bigwigs live the highlife as they rape the land we all share,” says an unidentified figure—cloaked and wearing a mask—in a video on the site. “We grow up being told who to be … We have been consumed.”

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The video goes on to cite statistics about military spending and poverty and abuse of power by police.

The site encourages people to sign up to participate in a system of discussion forums.

The Anonymous group is linked to the “hacktivist” shutdown of PayPal and major banking websites after those sites refused to funnel money to Wikileaks, which had posted classified documents over the winter.

Federal authorities arrested 14 alleged members of the group on suspicion of perpetrating the “denial of service” attacks—a method of shutting down a website by flooding it with requests for service.

Whatis-theplan.org says the group's newest “plan” is legal and peaceful, and does not involve hacking activities.

“This community does not support/condone/encourage acts of violence or illegal activity,” the site reads. “THIS IS NOT A HACKER COMMUNITY. While some members here may personally choose to take part in such activity, we do not discuss hacking, hate-speech, violence or criminal methods within this community. These are not things The Plan supports or stands for.”

The San Clemente posters and the website use imagery of a Guy Fawkes mask, appropriated from the classic graphic novel “V for Vendetta,” which was made into a film featuring Natalie Portman in 2006.

The novel and film depict a fascist, dystopian England of the near future in which an anonymous hero cloaked in Fawkes mask and garb fights the oppressive regime.

Fawkes was an actual historical figure, born to a minor English noble family in the 16th century. He is notable as a revolutionary in the Gunpowder Plot, a plan to blow up Parliament in protest of England’s shift from Catholicism to the newly founded Church of England.

Fawkes was tortured into confessing his co-conspirators' names and subsequently executed for treason in 1606.

Anonymous has been around since 2003, according to Wikipedia, as a loosely affiliated anarchic group dedicated to forming a sort of mass digital brain and conducting acts of protest and civil disobedience. The “hive mind” concept perhaps explains the bee imagery on the whatis-theplan site.

The group achieved a degree of fame for its support of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and its self-described role of hacking into and publishing secret files from the Church of Scientology.

-- contributed to this report.


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