At the March 15 protest, an anon in his 30s who says he works in homeland security, compares Anonymous to the War on Terror--you can fight terrorists, but you can't fight an idea. Anonymous, he says, is an idea.

"Oh Fuck, The Internet is here."

Anonymous existed before it was called Anonymous.

The Cairo News Company, which provided satellite services and equipment for Al Jazeera, the BBC and CNN, was raided by police after it transmitted footage of the food riots.

But new media applications were changing the rules. This was demonstrated by the arrest of a journalism student from Berkeley named James Karl Buck, who was detained along with his Egyptian interpreter as he photographed a street protest. Buck used the Twitter application on his cell phone to send a snapshot of himself and the text message “arrested” to a list serve of his contacts. His friends used the message to prompt intervention from Berkeley and the U.S. consulate. Buck was soon able to Twitter the word “free,” and mounted an online campaign to release his interpreter.

police finally located him and tortured him for his Facebook password and names of the other group members (the vast majority of which he didn’t know).