One Tory politician insulted the lower class, but hacker group Anonymous is making the whole party pay for it.
It started with “Plebgate,” England’s current political scandal. Andrew Mitchell, one of the Prime Minister’s senior ministers and Party Whip, called the police entrusted with guarding his life “[expletive-deleted] plebs.” That’s short for “plebians,” a term meant to deride the lower class.
The Tories are notoriously uptight. Stuffy. Boring. But overnight, one of their websites has become downright playful. The list of board members of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom’s money-raising arm, the Conservative Foundation, has undergone a subtle makeover:
“Lord Feldman. Baroness Bottomley. Lord Saatchi. David Ord. Mark Bamford. Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover. Lord Fink. < script > alert (“test”) < / script >. Anonymous.”
Needless to say, those last two are not the names of actual board members.
If this doesn’t answer for sure the question of whether Anonymous is far left or far right, it at least resolves the question of who hacked the Conservative Foundation’s website early Thursday, after the Tory national conference drew to an anticlimactic close.
Twitter user Patrick Torsney managed to Twitpic the main hack and defacement, which didn’t last long. “Looks like V’s in town,” he tweeted.
“Your government has failed you,” it wrote. “The resistance is here. Greetings Tories. We are Anonymous. You are arse holes. With all your fuckery you should have expected the shit out of us.”
The defacement states this action is part of Operation Vendetta, a sub-project of Project Mayhem, announced last year. It’s a project in which Anonymous more or less declared war on all established governments it decided were corrupt.
Operation Vendetta is to culminate Nov. 5 in London in a live reenactment of the final scene in V for Vendetta (though, presumably, without the movie’s climactic explosions).
That same date is supposed to mark the release of TYLER, an Anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing system that claims to be completely extra-governmental and without restrictions of any kind. Both the name “Project Mayhem” and “TYLER” were taken from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, which gives a hint of the spirit of the thing.
The Conservative Foundation’s sysadmins have so far either not noticed or not been able to counter Anonymous’ addition to the list of Directors. When clicked, instead of a bio of worthy, Conservative accomplishments, the familiar mask and taunting message appear.
And as for this “script” guy, he looks entirely untrustworthy. Probably a pleb from Java.
With the recent changes to immigration laws, Tories should have expected him.
Images via Patrick Torsney, Twitpic, and The Conservative Foundation
