Anonymous and Operation Sea Arrrgh

Espen alerted me to a recent phenomenon that's ravaging them intarwebs these days: Anonymous, an underground culture whose slogan is "We are Anonymous. We do not forgive. We do not forget. We are legion." It's a self-organising, emerging, hacktivist culture that employs flash mobbing to great effect.

Their goal is to focus on the dubious practices of the Church of Scientology ^TM®© (CSI) by arranging protests all over the world every month. Many of the videos from these protests are available online on vimeo. Most of them are even more hiliarious than the originals, including the one starring Tom Cruise.

This weekend, their protest was called Operation Sea Arrrgh, and focused on the CSI navy. More information about CSI in general is available at xenu.net, xenutv.com and Wikipedia (excerpt):

Xenu (also Xemu), pronounced /?zi?nu?//?zi?mu?, according to Scientology founder (and speculative fiction writer) L. Ron Hubbard, was the dictator of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions[1] of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs. Scientology holds that their essences remained, and that they form around people in modern times, causing them spiritual harm.[2][3] Members of the Church of Scientology widely deny or try to hide the Xenu story.

What's especially entertaining about Anonymous is their repertoire of great memes, like the longcat, a relative of the lolcat (how long is Longcat? looooong!), the V for Vendetta mask, and their great logo: