The Ku Klux Klan was founded after the Civil War by former Confederate soldiers to fight against the reforms imposed by the North during Reconstruction.
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Anonymous, a loose and decentralized coalition of hackers, plans to release the identities of at least 1,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan on Thursday, organizers said.
The accountant who helped to answer the firm’s phone calls the day following the leak told The Post that the office received at least 70 calls in 24 hours that were clearly in response to their number’s presence on that list in addition to an uncounted number of voicemail messages. “I’m having trouble seeing the unmasking of people who have a public profile who wouldn’t have been already tied to this world”. The hacktivist collective also confirmed that it would be releasing the names of KKK members on Thursday, November 5, as planned.
In a statement released in October Anonymous said: “We are not attacking you because of what you believe in as we fight for freedom of speech”.
“It’s important to know whom you’re working with”, @Anon6k continued.
Back on-topic, this year there was even more chaos in the mix, as a lone hacker, Amped Attacks, released his own list of KKK members, independent of Anonymous and specifically refuting any link.
“After closely observing so many of you for so very long, we feel confident that applying transparency to your organizational cells is the right, just, appropriate and only course of action”, reads the release. “We would rather have a smaller, accurate list that we are comfortable with”.
The vast majority of names are simply paired with a Facebook account or Google+ page. This is a broad array of information and sources that are generally available to the public. The list is the culmination of what’s known as #OpKKK, an operation to expose members of the white supremacist group. “We hope this body of work speaks for itself.”, the document states in an introduction to the list. “Hard for me to wrap my head around this one”.
Among the questions circulating are: How would you define race? Ku Klux Klan members and affiliates with the public.
No prominent names, such as those of elected officials, are included in the list.
We did not release this list that circulated social media [November 1] and we do not vouch for the content of any work we did not complete ourselves.
The Orange Order claims it shows members wearing white Ku Klux Klan (KKK) clothing in a “deliberate demonisation” of its cultural heritage.
The names on the list have not been verified.
Senator Dan Coates of Indiana took to Twitter, calling the list “baseless Internet garbage of the worst kind”.
A few days after sending out the tweets, Anonymous put out a press release to explain its reasoning for unhooding more KKK members.
Ancona said that he thought many members who held sensitive jobs – he gave the example of police officers – would “make a fake account” to interact with other Klan members online.
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“They’d have to come in here and download it directly at the computer on a floppy disk-or, a drive-and it would be absurd for them to say that”, he said.
