The hoods are off! Renowned hacker group Anonymous is marking the November 24th anniversary of the Ferguson protests by revealing the names of 1,000 Klu Klux Klan members. First the Ashley Madison members leak and now a KKK reveal… it has NOT been a good year for people with shady hobbies.
Last year, when the Ferguson protests sprung up following the news of a grand jury not indicting police officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed black teen Mike Brown, a Missouri KKK chapter warned protesters that lethal force would be used against them. Not so fast you hooded baddies, Anonymous isn’t cool with that sort of threat and the group retaliated by taking control of the hate group’s Twitter account and said they would begin publishing information on some of the chapter’s members. They first did it last year by revealing credit card info of the KKK’s grand wizard, and now they’ve followed up by releasing their full list of alleged members.
The hacker group claimed to have evidence of the KKK chapter’s ties to local police, and spent 11 months gathering the data that has now been dumped onto the internet.
Anonymous released a statement saying that they weren’t going after the KKK simply because they disagreed with the group’s beliefs, but because of the groups harmful actions on other people.
The hacking group concluded the release, saying that the data dump is a “form of resistance against the violence and intimidation tactics leveraged against the public by various members of Ku Klux Klan groups throughout history.”
The group has been criticized in the past for disrupting lives with less than credible information, most notably by releasing incorrect information regarding the officer who shot Mike Brown last year. Time will tell what sort of ripple the release will create if local government structures prove it accurate, but stay tuned, because the aftermath that follows is surely going to be a spectacle.
