14 DAY TRIAL // “I don't know if I'm the 1st or only, but I make no secret that I support the idea that is Anonymous,” reads one of the tweets posted by Rhode Island State Rep. Dan Gordon Tuesday evening, making him one of the first political figures to admit that Anonymous is not something entirely bad.
While part of the Anonymous community treated his statement with disbelief, most activists and hacktivists started enjoying the idea that someone from the other side may share some of their views.
In an interview with The Tech Herald, Gordon said he respected the Anonymous movement even if he didn’t agree with all their actions.
He believes that just because some Anons cross the line by defacing websites, leaking data or launching distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, people shouldn’t discredit the entire idea.
A few days ago, a hacker called Jester attracted media attention with claims that he distributed a link via QR codes which allowed him to successfully exploit vulnerabilities on smartphones to spy on Al-Qaeda, Anonymous members, and others, among which, Dan Gordon.
Security experts dismantled the hacker's claims, saying that the exploit mentioned by The Jester cannot work in practice.
But, since this story is about Dan Gordon, a politician who has the nerve to state in public that he supports the Anonymous idea, let’s take a look at what he had to say regarding the hacker’s claims and how he made him think twice about his actions.
“Soooo, Teh Jouster and his cheerleaders celebrated this ‘victory’ with numerous tweets and hit counts to his factually inaccurate blog post, while I played up the fact that it is a CRIME to hack devices that don’t belong to you, and especially that of a duly elected official,” he wrote in response to The Jester’s claims.
“I didn’t make the rules…it is what it is. So while I taunted him with threats of Eff Bee Eye chasing his ass down for his drives, he continued to try to play it off that he didn’t hack me, contradicting his earlier claim,” he explained.
Gordon joins Jon Blanchard, technology and Internet contributor at Globe and Mail, and a reputable consulting web engineer, who recently came forward to say that he stopped worrying about Anonymous and started supporting the movement.
“Sometimes ‘Anonymous’ is just a single person with a cellphone camera or a YouTube account making sure evil does not go unwitnessed,” Blanchard wrote.