A few different times they popped up in the news over the years I went there to get a feel for why people were joining in any certain cause, (yes, mostly for the fun of it), and often to find out exactly what they were doing.
Probably the best example is around Christmas 2010. People were pissed that credit card companies were not processing payments towards Wikileaks. There were tons of posts about taking down their websites (and arguments for Amazon). Of course, it did eventually happen, and while I was at work. It's not some major earth shattering story for a local newscast, but, it's easy to get.
Yes, a lot of the actual goings on of some of the operations are smaller clandestine groups on IRC and the likes, and I'd love to work my way into one or two of those. But a lot of them do rely on populist support, be it from actual outrage or potential for schadenfreude. A lot of wire copy is just "secret hacker group!"
It's not like I browsed it nightly lying in wait or anything. But it was in my history, and I when asked I told my boss that yes, I'd visited it. As I started to go into why, he stops me and tells me the company can't have people visiting these kinds of sites, etc... Had I been smarter, I could've made a better defense, like asking to be shown the offending material.
At first I was angry, depressed, and all kinds of other things. Now, I genuinely think it was just a case of wanting to get rid of someone, and look for a way to fire someone without paying them. I don't take it as personally. I don't think he thought I was trying to do anything untoward at work. (I mean, it's not like I didn't have a bigger monitor and privacy(!) at home... And if I was, why wouldn't I use Privacy Mode, or at least erase the history and cache?) I don't know. Just a bad situation.
A few different times they popped up in the news over the years I went there to get a feel for why people were joining in any certain cause, (yes, mostly for the fun of it), and often to find out exactly what they were doing.
Probably the best example is around Christmas 2010. People were pissed that credit card companies were not processing payments towards Wikileaks. There were tons of posts about taking down their websites (and arguments for Amazon). Of course, it did eventually happen, and while I was at work. It's not some major earth shattering story for a local newscast, but, it's easy to get.
Yes, a lot of the actual goings on of some of the operations are smaller clandestine groups on IRC and the likes, and I'd love to work my way into one or two of those. But a lot of them do rely on populist support, be it from actual outrage or potential for schadenfreude. A lot of wire copy is just "secret hacker group!"
It's not like I browsed it nightly lying in wait or anything. But it was in my history, and I when asked I told my boss that yes, I'd visited it. As I started to go into why, he stops me and tells me the company can't have people visiting these kinds of sites, etc... Had I been smarter, I could've made a better defense, like asking to be shown the offending material.
At first I was angry, depressed, and all kinds of other things. Now, I genuinely think it was just a case of wanting to get rid of someone, and look for a way to fire someone without paying them. I don't take it as personally. I don't think he thought I was trying to do anything untoward at work. (I mean, it's not like I didn't have a bigger monitor and privacy(!) at home... And if I was, why wouldn't I use Privacy Mode, or at least erase the history and cache?) I don't know. Just a bad situation.