The owners of Restaurant Vejlegaarden in Vejle in Denmark have received support from an unlikely quarter as hackers from across the world have organised to attack the restaurant's opponents in a union conflict. Anonymous have issued a statement distancing themselves from the hack (see comments below).
3F, a Danish trade union confederation have been in conflict with the restaurant since the restaurant decided to cancel their agreement with 3F late last year. Instead the restaurant have made an agreement with Krifa (Christian Trade Union), a so called yellow union, that has lower membership dues, but refuses to take part in industrial action. This means that wages for workers organised in Krifa are lower than those for workers organised in 3F.
In response, 3F have mounted pickets outside the restaurant and stopped deliveries to the restaurant from the restaurant's normal suppliers. Support from other unions has meant that the restaurant will not receive any post while the conflict is ongoing and only rubbish can be collected from the restaurant.
The struggle has received large-scale coverage in the press and a series of rightwing politicians have made a point of eating at the restaurant to mark their support for the management.
However, it was 3F's recent threat to launch a sympathy strike in the printing house of a local newspaper which carries the restaurant's adverts which caused Anonymous to get involved.
A video posted on YouTube on 20th July by AnonDK declared war on 3F for attacking the restaurant's right to freedom of speech and declared the union's "carbon based class struggle" to be old fashioned and irrelevant.
Over the weekend, supporters of the action participated in Distributed Denial of Service attacks which caused the union's website and IT systems to be taken offline for several days. This has had serious consequences for 30,000 union members who needed to use the system to receive their unemployment insurance. Because of the attacks, these payments will be delayed by several days at least. The attacks have since spread to the websites of the national trade union confederation, LO, the Social Democratic party and their youth wing underscoring the political nature of the actions.
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Your carbon-based class struggle is outdated and irrelevant.
Anonymous
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Anonymous has always been shit. I'd like to see the workers Doritos and Mountain Dew factories cut off production just to smite these fucks.
Has Anonymous in Denmark always been stupid and right wing?
actually, I withdraw this question. And perhaps the article could do with editing?
Basically, now a group calling themselves Anonymous Denmark have put out this video criticising these hackers, saying they are not really Anonymous and having a go at them for supporting capitalist interests (or so I gather not understanding any Danish):
I suppose that is the problem of having an anonymous group, if anyone can call themselves it!
If temporarily shutting down a newspaper is an attack on free speech, then surely so is shutting down a website?
I have no idea how online class struggle would work. Anyone understand what that would include?
I can't wait till the Nazis start calling themselves FAI-IRF!
There are a fair amount of right libertarians involved in anonymous. They may have their own caucus type thing within it. However, this ddos sounds a bit suspiciously massive.
The AnonDK youtube channel was apparently only created on Jul 20, 2012 (only a few days ago), another suspicious indicator.
Who knows if this is even genuine. It is completely possible that the restaurant management paid organised crime for the use of an illegal botnet. (This is more possible than a state orchestrated attack). This has been done in Russia by IT bosses against the site "antijob.net". In this case the management may not want it known they have paid for this, due to the massive bad press it would generate for the restaurant (not to mention illegality), and paid an additional amount to a hacking criminal syndicate to pretend it is a political entity doing it.
Of course, it could also be a couple of high level hobby/political hackers that own botnets and use them for fun. Maybe a non-anon hacking group that wanted to both attack unions and discredit anonymous.
I'm not defending anonymous, just thinking this is unusual and an anomaly compared to their usual targets (which in typical washy liberal fashion try to avoid taking either side in the class struggle)
Is it possible to cange the title of this thread now we have the statement from the real anonymous DK? I'm not saying anonymous are some super-miraculous perfect thing, but that's not the sort of thing that would actually be done by anonymous, not like that, not in such a high-profile way as that.
i have clicked spam on your post to draw the attention of an admin, as it is a good point.
I think that's a bit misleading, at least as presented. Talking about the "real" anonymous kinda misses the point; anonymous is made up of a host of tendencies and activities, including anything from deliberately triggering epileptic fits and flooding hip hop boards with racist imagery on the one hand, to leaking info on fascists or DDOSing the Knesset website on the other. The main underlying themes seem to be a focus on hacktivism usually combined with a fairly liberal concern with free speech, plus some anon groups linking themselves to particular social movements like occupy, anti-fascism, etc. And the Guy Fawkes masks of course.
The only way I could see a reference to the "real" anonymous making sense would be if, as Harrison suggested, this is a case of the bosses paying off hackers to do it on their behalf, both to crash the sites and to drive a wedge between anon and others.
That said, it would make sense to add in the video from some Danish anons criticising the action and maybe going into a bit more detail if such details are known. The headline as it stands is also somewhat misleading, though not sure what would be better.
I'm surprised you're assigning a political outlook to Anonymous and that you're talking about the fenomena as an organisation. I guess it's changed a lot but it's still a name up for grabs to anyone. Claiming to be the true Anonymous sounds totally at odds to the earlier ideas.
To be honest the latter pro labour video is more surprising to me. I mean classic left politics is not something I would expect from Anonymous.
Fractions, rivalries and subgroups are what Anonymous was always about? Sorta the ultraleft reality turned into the defining feature and goal
Perhaps they can avoid the Peoples front of Anonymous split by this clever trick of internalising it, this particular incident shows that perhaps even this strategy is to weak though.
people often talk about anonymous as an organisation, but i think its just any identity,
to be honest, both sides are claiming to be the real anonymous, so we can't know which is which.
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thanks steven, didn't know that.
i guess it kind of is, but thats if you read and believe their we are legion blah blah. in reality it each operation functions with an informal leadership of the most high profile hackers who take the lead, some of whom own botnets and therefore control a vast amount of its ddos'ing power. an operation being started basically means nothing until it has a few powerful hackers behind it (who can actually do useful stuff like rooting servers to gain internal access to sites, or have massive botnets) and 90% of anons are pretty rubbish when it comes to hacking and just use things like LOIC (which is like being 1 part of a botnet). successful operations are ones with at least few powerful hackers
its the equivalent of a consensus based anarchy group where the very few members that actually do useful stuff meet in the pub separately from the rest of the membership to decide stuff.
i know this even just from hanging around anonymous for a while, whilst never actually taking part in stuff because i realised unless i had mad hacking skills, i was basically a drone and had no clout within it. plus if you just blindly install LOIC (without paying for a dedicated VPN) and allow it to fire away you'll get in really bad trouble with your ISP and governments very quickly.
this massive exaggerates how organised anonymous are
its an analogy, its not perfect.
You could say both sides ARE Anonymous, however that being said if we want we can try and root for the better side which seems to denounce the other one, I presume.