Writing this post specifically, because I am normally a vocal supporter of Anonymous and their efforts in freeing the internet. This is one action I do not support.
A few days ago, I retweeted a link to a leak of police data by Anonymous. I should have checked the file first. Contrary to my expectation that there would be important information of interest to the public, it turned out to be a general catalog of complaints made to the police, and while there are enough allegations about all kinds of things, there are unsubstantiated personal views of people filing complaints, and the kind of stuff you would expect to be passing through any police station.
Today, after reading a news story on the leak, I checked the files again, and am convinced that Anonymous made a mistake. This leak does not serve any purpose of fighting government wrongs against citizens, and puts the private information of a lot of people at risk, since while numbers and emails were redacted, names, addresses and so on were not. In my imagination, this was a part of the fight Anonymous was supporting – to protect privacy, but it clearly seems to have gone awry somewhere.
In the article, Anonymous do mention that they are capable of learning from mistakes and it is my suggestion that they make all efforts they can to delete these files off the internet, communicate whatever vulnerability they used to gain access to the database to the police so that it can be fixed and avoid leaks of personal information in the future.
Crossing boundaries of privacy is not useful in a movement that fights censorship and spying on personal information.