There have been at least 40 alleged members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous arrested during the past year. In an interview with the National Post, one of the group's last remaining leaders tips us off to the group's next planned action.
Christopher Doyon, aka "Commander X," whose name is public because he's been indicted for hacking a California county government website after government officials forcibly removed a homeless encampment from courthouse steps. Doyon faces 15 years in prison for that action. For the interview, he met with a reporter and photographer from the Post in Canada where he is a now a fugitive from the FBI.
At the end of the interview, Doyon makes a whopper of a claim, make of it what you will:
Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.
Every classified database is a bit of a stretch for me to wrap my brain around. I can't even begin to imagine how many such databases our nation uses. But remember that Bradley Manning released a few hundred thousand emails from just one such database.
The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.
Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.
Now this claim, that the Anons next action could be the result of an inside job is quite plausible, and again, recall Bradley Manning. As we saw with Manning's Cablegate, just that one database created quite the stir for the U.S. government. Even with the "keys" to but a few of these databases would make Anonymous quite the force to be reckoned with, despite their diminished membership.