I mean it's really kind of stupid to think it's them as a group. Do you know what hackers from Anonymous do when they hack a company? They make a really nice internet post ridiculing and absolutely annihilating the company. It happened with everything from the security firms they scewed to the entire Gawker network (that post was absolutely hilarious actually).

Now answer me this question, has there been a release that ocmpletely mocks Sony and its security? That is basically the answer to this poll.

Lets imagine we take a fairly standard democracy, the Australian one for example. I assume you believe that has structure?

Now, lets imagine that a PM, interested in the public's opinion, opens a website where people can propose laws. The PM then raises the popular ones before parliament and they vote as normal. That is still structured, surely?

Now lets say the PM and parliament formalise and automate this - they simply say, "We shall pass any law that gets popular support, and we shall not pass our own, nor any unpopular decisions. Is this structured still?

Now, finally, the PM and all the members of parliament get bored due to lack of work and all go base jumping, and get themselves killed. However, because they automated the system previously, no-one notices their absense, laws are proposed by thosee who can be bothered proposing them, and voted on by those who can be bothered voting. Is that structured?

Now, the structure I described above is how Anon works. There is structure. There is even leadership - there is an established meritocracy where people are more inclined to listen to those they know are sensible. There is a system of police, with powers to ban users from the various chat channels. I don't know exactly the process by which one becomes a mod, I've lurked a time or two out of curiousity but haven't actually spent much time there.

As for the statement that because of the apparent lack of structure and leadership, they cannot determine if their people are actually behind it. The same is true of a country, the leaders of those countries from which the attackers come from are completely unable to determine if their countrymen are responsible, and if so, which of them it is. Criticising the entire on Anon for the alleged actions of what a handful of them have done is just like criticising an entire country for the actions of a handful.

Yeah, they'd be drumming up the victory song instead of watching quietly in a corner.

yes, that is very likely what happens if a country threatens attacks. 

I wonder if they are beating themselves up for not doing this first. Honestly, the best news that can come out of this is that Anon really did do this, because they don't give a shit about the actual data and don't usually use it for nefarious actions, therefore the personal information would be "safe." The worst they do is mock the users, and if someone really pisses them off then pull pranks on them. When Gawker got screwed there weren't any accounts of people's accounts being accessed until Anon made the information public. The fact that it is not Anon really raises the bar on the pant-shitting scale.

Yeah. They developed a GUI interface using Visual Basic to hack it.

Think about it. With all the backslash of the gaming communitiy that anonymous has experienced, wouldn't that just increase 10 fold if they admitted to being the ones doing it ?

If they really did it, the intelligent solution would be keeping quiet, that way, people will be more likely to blame sony as there isn't anything else to blame other than "hackers" in general.. Which is vague.

I don't know if they did it or didn't do it... But if they did, saying they did might not be the best of ideas.

they have no concensus so you cant generalise the whole group but i believe the extremeist among them did it.

More to the point you wouldn't be having this discussion if it wasn't for Sony's security holes so does it even matter who did it?

They're also criminals, and criminals are not honest people.

They're mostly just creating mischief at the expense of Sony; and have always had a very weak argument for it. They're justification is the lack of linux - something Sony is being sued over, and also about information that Sony acquired through legal channels.