On Tuesday, a Latin American arm of Interpol, an organization that coordinates police operations across borders, reportedly arrested 25 members of Anonymous, the loosely organized hacker movement, in Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, as well as Spain. Some of those arrested were teenagers.
In retaliation, Anonymous responded in classic fashion, taking down Interpol’s website. The site is still down at this time, and the original press release on the arrests is offline.
Members of Anonymous are taunting the police agency on Twitter and other social networks. Retweets of the messages appear to be unusually high. That could indicate a coordinated plan to boost the reach of the message or genuine widespread support for Anonymous. Or, perhaps, a lot of people winding down the work day by reading Twitter.
So far there’s been no Twitter response from Interpol—neither the international police organization nor the band, which has the handier @interpol address and has been the target of some misdirected ire.
On the bright side, given the principle that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, this can only be good for digital music sales.
Photo by ari
