Anonymous campaign against ISIS backfires
Anonymous should stick to what it is good at: its attempt at crowd-sourcing anti-ISIS investigators has quickly become a joke. As we reported earlier this week, the hacktivist group has declared war against ISIS, saying that it has exposed tens of thousands of ISIS propaganda sites on Twitter and elsewhere on the web. So far the campaign has probably hindered the security services more than ISIS; one Anonymous warning of a potential ISIS threat at a WWE wrestling event in Atlanta resulted in the FBI stating clearly that they did not even deem the information to be credible. 
 

For example, Ghost Security Group, which claims to help governments with intelligence reports, is not to be confused with the hackers of GhostSec.org. And not all participants in public Anonymous chats support the efforts. “Paris deserved everything it got,” one user wrote in a chat on Tuesday.

The real danger is that keyword search tactics will shut down people who are trying to monitor the Islamic State, warned Lawrence Husick, co-chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of Terrorism.

“This is likely to implicate people who follow ISIS but don’t support it,” Mr. Husick said. “They follow it for research and intelligence purposes. So it’s painting with too broad a brush.”

Mr. Husick said also that Anonymous had sometimes disseminated incorrect information.

“I’m never in favor of cybervigiliantism,” he said, “even when it serves what I think is a just purpose.”

And in any case, Mr. Husick added, “ISIS has demonstrated that it’s pretty adept at putting up new accounts quickly.”

But Mark Wallace, the chief executive of the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project, supports the reporting and blocking of accounts en masse.

“When the puppet pops back up, in the context of social media it’s not as strong a puppet,” Mr. Wallace said. “You’re weakening that person’s presence on Twitter with each time you take them down.”