Anonymous Responds to Sony's Theft Accusations With a Definitive 'Nuh-Uh!'

There is certainly no love lost between Sony and the theatrically-gifted hacker collective known as Anonymous. The group took aim at the publisher following their legal hassling of PS3 firmware-cracker George "GeoHot" Hotz, albeit largely through a series of proposed pranks and standard denial-of-service attacks that resulted in some supposed connectivity interruptions for the PlayStation Network service.

But even with all that chicanery going on, many an eyebrow was raised yesterday when a letter from Sony Computer Entertainment boss Kaz Hirai, directed at questions from the U.S. Congress over the mass theft of user information via PSN, directly called out Anonymous as likely perpetrators, citing files found on company hard drives titled "Anonymous," which contained a portion of the group's downright biblical slogan, "We are Anonymous. We are Legion."

Anonymous, troublemakers as they often are known to be, have never really seemed to be of the mind that stealing innocent people's personal information and credit card data was in any way okay, and today they reinforced that notion in an online statement denying any involvement in the theft.

Read part of the statement:

"If a legitimate and honest investigation into the credit card [theft] is conducted, Anonymous will not be found liable. While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our 'leadership' does not condone credit card theft. We are concerned with erosion of privacy and fair use, the spread of corporate feudalism, the abuse of power and the justifications of executives and leaders who believe themselves immune personally and financially for the actions they undertake in the name of corporations and public office."

Elsewhere in the statement, Anonymous was quick to point out that their corporate "adversaries" have, in the past, taken to erroneously blaming them for things they had nothing to do with, effectively insinuating that Sony may just be accusing them due to a lack of any other feasible target.

Granted, Anonymous is a multi-headed group with many different factions, and while the group's "leadership" might have had nothing to do with it, there's nothing to say a random, pissed off sect couldn't have gone rogue and done the deed themselves. Or, maybe no one at Anonymous was involved, and whoever did hack in and steal PSN user data just left those files as a smoke screen. Or maybe everyone is lying? Or telling the truth? Who knows? All we do know is that nobody is happy right now, and nobody will be until the dust settles on all of this and we truly know exactly what the ramifications of the whole event are. Anything else at this point just feels like a lot of noisy back-and-forth that distracts from the true issue at hand: Sony, its network security, and how things get made right for the affected consumers.