How Call of Duty Is Making Anonymous "the Enemy" - Gawker

Blink and you'll miss it. The Guy Fawkes mask flashes on the screen only for a brief instant, but it's there. Twice.

The iconic mug first entered pop culture in the graphic novel V for Vendetta, but has since been re-appropriated by hacker collective Anonymous as well as Occupy Wall Street protesters.

That iconic mask, however, is now shorthand for hacker—and the enemy.

Anonymous has gained attention in the past few years for its protests and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against big business and Scientology. For many, the group has tinges of political activism, using their computer skills and savvy for "good".

The way that Anonymous stands for causes seems to impressed V for Vendetta's creators. After the mask appeared at last year's Occupy Wall Street protest, V for Vendetta's writer Alan Moore said, "When you've got a sea of V masks, I suppose it makes the protesters appear to be almost a single organism—this "99%" we hear so much about. That in itself is formidable. I can see why the protesters have taken to it."

The irony of ironies is that the rights to the mask are actually owned by Warner Bros. So for every mask legally sold, Warner Bros. gets a kickback.

However, the mask is being recast in a different light in Call of Duty: Black Ops II's promotional campaign. A series of documentary style clips tackle different elements of technology and warfare; in two of them, the Guy Fawkes mask appears on screen.

In a clip titled "Synopsis", Oliver North talks about his nightmare scenario, and when he says, "The enemy could be anywhere, and it could be anyone," an individual wearing a Guy Fawkes appears on screen. I don't worry about the guy who wants to hijack a plane," North continues. "I worry about the guy who wants to hijack all the planes."

In another clip, titled "When the Enemy Steals the Keys," the Guy Fawkes mask pops up again. The footage is slightly different—it's tighter, more of a close-up.

"You know, if there are guys out there who are smart enough to hack into our banks and people's personal information, then certainly, eventually, there's gonna be someone who's smart enough to hack into our aircraft," drone pilot Major Hercules Christopher says in the clip. "If you can hack a bank, you can hack a drone."

The moment the pilot says "gonna be someone who's smart enough", the Guy Fawkes mask once again appears on screen, seeming to insinuate indirectly that Anonymous members are going to be smart enough to hack drones—or even want to. Once again, the Guy Fawkes mask is cast as the enemy.

With in the past few years, the Guy Fawkes mask has become inseparable from Anonymous, and, in turn, from hackers. Not all hackers are good. Not all are bad. And for a group like Anonymous, free flowing and ill defined, it's difficult to pin down who is a member and who isn't. Anonymous is more of a concept than a card-carrying group per se.

Yet, that group—that idea—is now being dragged through the mud via comments directly and indirectly aimed at the Guy Fawkes mask. Those who wear the mask are the enemy. Those who wear the mask are hackers.

Oliver North is right: the enemy could be anyone. It could be me. It could be you. It could even be the folks on TV, trying to sell you a video game.



http://kotaku.com/5906880/how-call-of-duty-is-making-anonymous-the-enemy

It's not necessarily bad : young player that may be influenced by seeing this, while playing, is the kind of people who'd like to use Anonymous as a 'personal army' or the boys liking 'anonymous' page on Fuckbook.
But it sucks their attempts to manipulate, implicitly, people.

The Guy Fawkes mask is just a symbol. It provides anonymity for the wearer while also recalling the message of V for Vendetta. But it in itself is not integral to the anonymous cause.

There's also the meme : http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/epic-fail-guy

I like how Oliver North is being invoked as an authority on 'Dangerous Terrorists' and their Personal Armies.

I can see how these two videos are going to need some re-editing....

Wasn't CoD 18+..?

I don't think it verifies age at runtime...

They can already sense whether Drake is pirated or not, so who knows...

Lol Oliver North, the guy who gave Reagan plausible deniability for the Iran-Contra scam. Last I remember hearing from him, think he was involved in selling crap to people panicking over Y2K.

Ain't that what he's doing now?
I mean, when you think of it...

Umm...yeah.

They were "bad guys" and we are too? Bahaaaaaa.

Is this the point where we start to question whether someone in our group is retarded enough to actually want to do that?

question?

Always November 11-13

In the movies Ghost-busters and Cannonball Run, the the bad guy was EPA guy both times.

Now Anonymous is the bad guy in a game. Are these advertorials or artistic decisions? Hmmm.

To take a look at Ghost-busters, we have this chronology:-

1982: Nuclear Waste Repository Act PL 97-425
1984: Hazardous and Solid Wastes Amendments Act PL 98-616
1984: Ghostbusters is made and the bad guy is telling the good guys that their hazardous waste containment is not good enough and he switches it off and all hell breaks loose. The good guys save the world from the the evil the EPA guys unleashed.

In the same vein, Cannonball Run came in the wake of amendments to the Clean air act which affected automobile emissions.

Anonymous being the bad guy comes in the wake of Wall Street and general tension between internet freedom and censorship over many years. I'll try to contain my surprise.

My guess is producers occasionally offer conservative politically motivated script changes to woo investors. I doubt it happens very often. Artists probably don't enjoy doing it.

Bruce Willis doesn't seem to mind political or product related advertorials. He was OK with hitting golf balls onto the deck of the Greenpeace boat from his oil rig in Armageddon. He was OK with pop tarts in Pulp Fiction. He was OK with The Last Boy Scout which was a 90 minute advertisement for Monday-night football. Then opening 2 minutes made my jaw drop. So fucking shameless.

So it turns out film producers, some actors and computer game producers are shameless whores. I'll try to hide my surprise.

Fucking Ollie North should have been stood against a wall and shot as a traitor.

Yeah well I think there were a lot of our guys involved in Iran-Contra.

We want soldiers and police to fight on our behalf. But we put them under constraints. "Don't shoot the enemy unless blah blah blah. Don't go looking for evidence unless blah." These constraints mean that the enemy sometimes wins. We are not good at accepting that. So our guys hire bad guys who don't bother with constraints to do the dirty work.

Making deals with the devil means short term wins but probably long term losses. A protected informant tends to get fat and nasty --e.g.,

Well, he certainly has a lot of personal experience selling weapons to dangerous terrorists and their armies.

Why nowt?
Wouldn't be the first time

Starts @ 0:30

Anonymous said: ↑

In a clip titled "Synopsis", Oliver North talks about his nightmare scenario, and when he says, "The enemy could be anywhere, and it could be anyone," an individual wearing a Guy Fawkes appears on screen. I don't worry about the guy who wants to hijack a plane," North continues. "I worry about the guy who wants to hijack all the planes."

Yeah, and I worry about the Coke-Dealing Colonel plying his wares and his paranoia.

Amen, bro.

"A lot of these will sound like things out of science-fiction; things like directed-energy, which is basically lasers made real." P.W. Singer.

As opposed to real lasers? Morons.

But Ollie?
Whore?

Say it ain't so!

The "up against the wall, and shot for treason" part, isn't because he made a skeevy deal with skanks.
You're right, that there were plenty of other guys involved in that.

What makes him a paragon of misvirtue is the elaborate web of deception he erected to hide that skeevy deal, the lying to congress part, the shredding part, the defense of his actions and lack of shame part, the antagonism and hostility toward Congress and the rest of the USA part.

The Bulger case was a series of personal and professional fuckups. I really wouldn't compare the two.

Party hard right?

I say most of what Ollie did would probably now be legal under various DHS/HSA provisions.

It's only illegal if you get caught: Government Employee Rule #1.

Infomercial, not article.
It's a promotional slick for a videogame.

He is being used as a source of propaganda, to generate controversy and sales. Liberals raeging about convicted commie North, are among the target audience the promoters hope to reach.


well played, sirs.

Maybe the "ironic" part is that Oliver North's style of providing cover, was straight out of the Nixon era.
Antiquated, old-fashioned, plumbing thoroughly disavowed today.

Current practice (since ~1990) is to deny by reframing, rebranding, crapflooding. Re-branding him as a courier for the new "message" would be the kind of rehabilitation that used to be unthinkable.

But whores will be whores.
And the Lieutenant Colonel never worked for Secret Service afaik.

Your high calipers are irrelevant.

That video would have been better if after "i want to show you what the war of the future is going to look like" they just had a bunch of kids on Xbox live screaming FAGGOT set over top of the rest of the video. I mean this is a call of duty ad right?

IT'S a FUCKING video game. Half the punks, err, FOLKS playing the game have no fucking idea who Ollie North is.

. . . But the irony is not lost on this old cat. Fffft. Douche bag.

MAYBE that's the FUCKING PROBLEM

Okay. True that. What now?