Anonymous netizens offer a July 1 manifesto, posters

Summary: An anonymous manifesto making the rounds of the Internet promises a "worldwide" attack on China's censorship system, via Oiwan Lam. The document, issued in Chinese, and translated via Google Docs here, informs the Chinese government that the power they seek to consolidate is irrelevant to netizens:We are the Anonymous Netizens.

An anonymous manifesto making the rounds of the Internet promises a "worldwide" attack on China's censorship system, via Oiwan Lam. The document, issued in Chinese, and translated via Google Docs here, informs the Chinese government that the power they seek to consolidate is irrelevant to netizens:

We are the Anonymous Netizens. We are the sum of the world's entire online population. We are coordinated. We are dominant. We are innumerable. For every one of us that falls, another ten joins. We are omnipresent. We are omnipotent. We are unstoppable. We have no weaknesses. We utilize every weakness. We are the humanity under every mask. We are the mirrors of conscience. We are created equal. We are born free. We are an army. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

And there are posters (one of which is above). Here's the manifesto in its entirety.

We are the Anonymous Netizens. We have seen your moves on the Internet. You have deprived your netizens of the freedom of speech. You have come to see technology as your mortal enemy. You have clouded and distorted the truth in collaboration with Party mouthpieces. You have hired commentators to create the “public opinion” you wanted to see. All these are etched into our collective memory. More recently, you forced the installation of Green Dam on the entire population and smothered Google with vicious slander. It is now clear as day: what you want is the complete control and censorship of the Internet. We hereby declare that we, the Anonymous Netizens, are going to launch our attack worldwide on your censorship system starting on July 1st, 2009. For the freedom of the Internet, for the advancement of Internetization, and for our rights, we are going to acquaint your censorship machine with systematic sabotage and show you just how weak the claws of your censorship really are. We are going to mark you as the First Enemy of the Internet. This is not a single battle; it is but the beginning of a war. Play with your artificial public opinion to your heart's content, for you will soon be submerged in the sea of warring netizens. Your archaic means of propaganda, your epithets borrowed straight from the Cultural Revolution era, your utter ignorance of the Internet itself - these are the tolls of your death bell. You cannot evade us, for we are everywhere. Violence of the state cannot save you - for every one of us that falls, another ten rises. We are familiar with your intrigues. You label some of us as the “vicious few” and dismiss the rest of us as unknowing accomplices; that way you can divide and rule. Go ahead and do that. In fact, we encourage you to do that; the more accustomed you are to viewing your netizens this way, the deeper your self-deception. You are trying in vain to halt the wheels of history. Even with your technocratic reinforcements, you will not understand the Internet in the foreseeable future. We congratulate you on your adherence to your Cultural-Revolution style conspiracy theories in your dealings with dissent; for we too get nostalgic at times. We toast to your attempts to erect a Great Wall among your netizens, for such epic folly adds spice to any historical narrative. Still, there's something we feel obliged to tell you. NOBODY wants to topple your regime. We take no interest whatsoever in your archaic view of state power and your stale ideological teachings. You do not understand how your grand narrative dissipated in the face of Internetization. You do not understand why appealing to statism and nationalism no longer works. You cannot break free from your own ignorance of the Internet. Your regime is not our enemy. We are not affiliated in any way with any country or organization, and we are not waging this war on any country or organization, not even on you. YOU are waging this war on yourself. YOU are digging your own grave through corruption and antagonization. We are not interested in you, destined for the sewage of history. You cannot stop the Internetization of the human race. In fact, we won't bat an eyelid even if you decide to sever the transpacific information cables in order to obtain the total control you wanted. The harder you try to roll back history, the more you strain the already taut strings, and the more destructive their final release. You are accelerating your own fall. The sun of tomorrow does not shine on those who are fearing tomorrow itself. We are the Anonymous Netizens. We are the sum of the world's entire online population. We are coordinated. We are dominant. We are innumerable. For every one of us that falls, another ten joins. We are omnipresent. We are omnipotent. We are unstoppable. We have no weaknesses. We utilize every weakness. We are the humanity under every mask. We are the mirrors of conscience. We are created equal. We are born free. We are an army. We do not forgive. We do not forget. LIBERTY LEADS THE INTERNET. WE'RE COMING.

Topics: Censorship, Google

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4 comments
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  • yeahhhhh baaaaby

    Im a developer and hate those managers and companies who Ive worked overtime(for free) all these years(yeah i know its crazy to work overtime but I did, many, many hours overtime) And I resent them using my work to make lots of money and making the company LOTS of money without one Iota of credit for me. Corrupt corporations like the RIAA and countries like China, Iran, North Korea use computers and programs written by millions of programmers to make money and gain power. It is the programmers fault for putting the power in the hands of these groups and governments. We, our children and grand children should be taught the jedi technical ways so that we can technically attack corrupt groups like (for example) the Chinese government in any and every way possible to bring them down. Seriously. If you want to use our programs and technical work to take away the freedom of other people, the technical people responsible for this should try to bring down those groups. Either that or simple: turn off your computers, delete your software, or just throw away all technology that people like myself have created, designed and tested. We dont want groups or people like you - ie The Chinese government - to use our good work to allow you to gain power and push your own ideology in the comfort of your plush office chairs.

    Wait a minute. Here's an even better solution. Here's a word out to all those chinese programmers who have designed, coded things for the chinese government. Because you are responsible for writing stable systems, programs and setting up stable firewalls that the government group have used to oppress your people, you should get back by writing viruses in all the chinese government computers. Its you who are partly responsible for handing the power to them on a silver platter. The technical chinese people should take revenge for the tiannamen square massacre, but not only for that...but all this time the great firewall of china has blocked all information on this, so now you have fresh students coming out from the universities have NO CLUE as to what actually happened there, because the Chinese government has so successfully prevented that information from reaching the chinese people. Its time for every citizen in china who is technical to STOP giving the Chinese government this power. Attack them, write a virus, do something to flood the Chinese servers. The people of the world has to show these non-technical evil business/politicians that they should STOP using technology to gain power and control other people. People all over the world should stand up to each group affecting them who is evil, by doing something technical to POP OPEN these regimes so that they are weakened to the point where openness will creep in. Once openness starts and a little bit of freedom is let in...only then will those evil self fulfulling nontechnical businessmen/politicians lose their power and the power will move to the people. But it doesnt stop there, once the power is gone it takes work to stop bad groups from rising again. So I say, its a responsibility of the chinese technical people to fight this. The rest of the world can only watch and see if they have the balls to do it. We've fought on our side....lets see you fight on yours.
    onepersonsopinion@...
    • re: yeahhhhh baaaaby

      Welllll, not too much I can argue about there! It's a good rhetoric and appears to have been thought thru as opposed to knee-jerky, and if I were capable of that kind of prose, I'd wish I said it<g>!

      It might be an interewsting July 4 holiday this year! I know I plan to keep track of the goings on and I wish them all a bunch of luck in those endeavors.
      twaynesdomain-22354355019875063839220739305988
  • RE: Anonymous netizens offer a July 1 manifesto, posters

    FASCINATING! I have my doubts about the "we" but I certainly wish them luck. I hope this has some meat to it because otherwise I wish the entier free world would just ignore them, block them off from the world and forget them.
    It might be pretty intersetng to watch; I wish them luck!

    Twayne
    twaynesdomain-22354355019875063839220739305988
  • Given communistic ideology and paranoia

    I'm betting that manifesto gets taken seriously. Talk about a force multiplier... :)

    In all seriousness that manifesto is spooky as hell, and there's just enough truth in it to scare the Chinese leadership silly, no matter what they may say publically.

    Of course, what's the typical response of the Chinese government when they get frightened?

    Right. Hope the writer of that particularly chilling manifesto is willing to watch people die because panicky+guns+ruthless is not a good combination...

    This may get very nasty very quickly. Especially considering the Green Dam developers stole most of the code. Then created a security nightmare cobbling together the stolen bits into something that could run.

    Here's another bad combo: prideful leaders+buggy software+inability to backdown+botnet takeover...

    (shaking head)

    Good luck. We're going to need it.
    wolf_z