Florida Cop Arrested For Wearing ‘Anonymous’ Mask Warns ‘There’s A War Coming’

[MADem]

116. More history, here....

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/design/2011/12/guy_fawkes_mask_how_anonymous_hacker_group_created_a_powerful_visual_brand.html

Six or eight people, Housh reckons, hashed out a press release. It read like the script to a movie trailer, so somebody proposed turning it into a video, combing Archive.org to dig up images of rolling clouds and ominous background music available under a Creative Commons license. They kept fiddling with the ending of the script, using Anonymous-associated phrases already in circulation. Another contributor proposed a conclusion: “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive, we do not forget.” Pause. “Expect us.”


“Everyone in the channel erupts,” Housh recalls. “Like ‘Oh my god. You’ve done it. You have done it! We win this game.’ ” The script was fed into AT&T text-to-speech software, and became the video’s creepy voice-over. Next the group created a Web site. For a logo, they considered imagery that had been floating around 4Chan and elsewhere, including the headless suit-man. Someone—Housh says the person wishes to remain anonymous—suggested imposing that image over a U.N.-style globe logo. Then a question mark was added where the figure’s head should be. In what seems like a missed opportunity, the Anonymous logo did not appear anywhere in the video. “We weren’t branding experts or anything,” Housh explains.

Fair enough, but the video really is a fine bit of propaganda—with 4.6 million YouTube views—mixing the snotty but intimidating “hacker gang” vibe with rhetoric that not only transcended the nihilistic, but sounded rather righteous. Excited by their surprisingly large audience, participants in Anonymous’ anti-Scientology efforts decided to organize in-person protests—a challenge, since they were already being accused of various illegal activities. (The Church of Scientology eventually outed Housh, and pressed a variety of criminal charges against him; those were ultimately settled pretrial, but today he describes himself as “an internet activist who observes Anonymous”—not a member.)

The need to remain anonymous at live protests led the group to adopt its now-familiar mask depicting a highly stylized visage of Guy Fawkes, an early-17th-Century British figure who was executed following a foiled plot to assassinate King James I. Though Brits have long used effigies of Fawkes in their Guy Fawkes Night celebrations, this particular, cartoonish representation comes from the 1980s comic-book series, V for Vendetta: A vigilante character wore such a mask while overthrowing a totalitarian British government in an imagined dystopian future. In 2006, the series became a film. Also in 2006, the mask began to appear in a popular 4Chan meme called Epic Fail Guy. According to Housh, the suggestion to use the Fawkes mask as protest gear was almost immediate. But some Anons weren’t convinced that the Fawkes mask was right, so they made a short list of alternatives: a Batman mask, classic masquerade masks, a few others. “Then we called comics and costume shops, all over the world,” Housh says, checking availability and price, and the V mask won out: “It’s available, it’s cheap, and it’s in every city.” (The actual Fawkes had “nothing to do with it, for us,” Housh says.)

An unexpected windfall for Warner Brothers, Incorporated!