For nearly a year, a war has been unfolding in strange corners of the Internet. But can a bunch of hackers really take on the world’s deadliest jihadi group?

Anonymous vs. the Islamic State, by E.T. Brooking, Foreign Policy

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This is something new. Anonymous arose from the primordial, and often profane, underground web forums to cause mischief, not to take sides in real wars. The group gained notoriety for its random, militantly apolitical, increasingly organized hacking attacks during the mid-2000s. Its first “political” operation was an Internet crusade against the Church of Scientology following its suppression of a really embarrassing Tom Cruise video.

In time, however, Anonymous operations became less about laughs and more about causes, fighting the establishment and guaranteeing a free and open Internet. In 2010, the group launched #OpPayback, retaliating against PayPal for, among other things, suspending payments to WikiLeaks following the publication of a trove of classified U.S. documents. This was followed by a cascade of increasingly political operations: in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring protests; against the CIA and Interpol; against Muslim discrimination in Myanmar; and on behalf of democratic activists in Hong Kong. Most recently, Anonymous launched a muddled campaign against purported members of the Ku Klux Klan. As Paul Williams, a hacktivist writer and occasional documentarian, writes in a colorful history of the group, “Anonymous had come to the conclusion that they were no longer abstractly playing with scatology and paedo bears.”