To be honest, I'm a bit surprised at the number of people who had a difficult time identifying who I mean. I'm actually a little-l libertarian and no great lover of government, so I understand the knee-jerk inclination, but why would I be stretching for the definition of a mob when there is another thing that can be called a "mob" in the story with no stretch at all?

Taxation on things is a normal thing that is allowed to all individual entities within their sphere of control. If you own some item, you can effectively set up any taxation system on the usage of that item that you want. The governmental entity is allowed taxation powers because the people under its authority utilize its public benefits, such as police work, court systems, legislative considerations, and so on.

Likewise control of commons exists on an individual level as well -- if you are near a certain amount of water, you are generally free to own and control it. To the extent that you don't secure and maintain your property, your ownership is a vain deed.

Rearing and teaching of young is a really easy one, commonly given to individuals. Do you think all children should be taken out of individual households and placed in government-run child-rearing centers? That's what this one sounds like, and that is horrifically scary and ridiculous.

I don't really disagree with you, but I'm not sure what you mean by glossed over. It sounds like you'd like the journalist here to be condemning the actors or tsk-tsk-ing about the whole episode. But the lack of that isn't Anon getting a free pass, it's just how most neutral reporting is done. When you read a feature on a violent gang, or organized crime, or a serial killer generally you'll see a lot of matter of fact type of reporting, with the editorializing left up to the reader. It's not different here just because it's a mob.

And surely they're not getting a pass on the actual legal repercussions. The FBI took dozens of doors over the earlier DDOS's - I'm sure that they are quite keen at rolling up this incident into what is likely a very well staffed task force.

See my replies here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2203359 . The gist is that people don't really endorse Anonymous's actions, but the actions are unsurprising and generally uninteresting. The interesting part is the psychology and behavior of HBG[F] and its executives, specifically Aaron Barr, so that's what everyone is talking about. The silence shouldn't be taken as an unspoken endorsement of script kiddies.

- An issue that you're not addressing well is that it's hard for a single person to DDOS, but it's a lot easier if you can get a group of people to run LOIC (i.e. the group's power draws from numbers).

- A group of people that decide to do something is not necessarily a mob.

- Anonymous is just a description for a set of people. The set of people most likely to participate in these raids. The entirety of Anonymous doesn't participate in each and every raid. Just the raids that they have the time, and motivation to do. If you can describe Anonymous as a mob, then you can also extrapolate that to the entire population of the planet. The entire planet of a group of people where sometimes some people decide to form a group and do things based on common interests.

From your moral high horse can you see what the correct action to take is? More useless voting between two parties who take near identical actions?

Anonymous did what their target did. It was no more legal or illegal. If you want to punish them fine, but make sure you punish both criminals equally.

As we see in Egypt, fighting within the laws (which are just a list of rules made up by people in control) doesn't always give you the option to win.