Without commenting on the politics of the thing, I'd suggest the proper lens to look at this situation with is one of an insurgency.
When you look at insurgencies you start asking, it feels horrible to say this, what a life is worth to a cause. If the insurgents take out a couple of soldiers but lose a bomb-maker then they've done poorly on the exchange, if they take out a general or political figure but lose a few dozen suicide bombers they've done well.
Some lives are more valuable to a cause than others.
Here someone relatively smart, a high value target so to speak - though apparently not overly skilled in opsec, has been taken out of the game. That's a win for the powers that be, and perhaps helps to explain the punitive nature of his sentence. Anonymous has a lot of people who turn up in crowds, but we don't hear about them having a lot of high-quality hackers.
There are people that it makes more sense for them to sacrifice. To have the attacks that these people do executed by someone other than the people capable of making the tools in the first place.
They could do everything through encrypted channels, that could be made largely immune to traffic analysis, with the sort of really fluid cell structures that would facilitate. Just the first idea that springs to mind: uploading an encrypted steg'd message as part of a lolcats image on reddit that thousands of people are going to download - the noise to signal ratio would be enormous.
But then, insurgencies - in general - do a lot of things that don't make sense when taken purely from the perspective of their cause. I wonder how that sort of approach would interact with the social dynamics of A, how they'd find people who were up for it. Whether that's more what we're going to be looking at if A gets to mature as an organisation or whether their largely ephemeral nature excludes that sort of distribution of risk.
When you look at insurgencies you start asking, it feels horrible to say this, what a life is worth to a cause. If the insurgents take out a couple of soldiers but lose a bomb-maker then they've done poorly on the exchange, if they take out a general or political figure but lose a few dozen suicide bombers they've done well.
Some lives are more valuable to a cause than others.
Here someone relatively smart, a high value target so to speak - though apparently not overly skilled in opsec, has been taken out of the game. That's a win for the powers that be, and perhaps helps to explain the punitive nature of his sentence. Anonymous has a lot of people who turn up in crowds, but we don't hear about them having a lot of high-quality hackers.
There are people that it makes more sense for them to sacrifice. To have the attacks that these people do executed by someone other than the people capable of making the tools in the first place.
They could do everything through encrypted channels, that could be made largely immune to traffic analysis, with the sort of really fluid cell structures that would facilitate. Just the first idea that springs to mind: uploading an encrypted steg'd message as part of a lolcats image on reddit that thousands of people are going to download - the noise to signal ratio would be enormous.
But then, insurgencies - in general - do a lot of things that don't make sense when taken purely from the perspective of their cause. I wonder how that sort of approach would interact with the social dynamics of A, how they'd find people who were up for it. Whether that's more what we're going to be looking at if A gets to mature as an organisation or whether their largely ephemeral nature excludes that sort of distribution of risk.