Anonymous are no strangers to lifting the lid on online troublemakers, including Lizard Squad which was targeted for attacking the Tor network. More recently, the group has waged an online war against Daesh (an alternate reference to ISIS) by taking down one of its websites and replacing it with a Viagra ad.
However, Anonymous does not limit itself purely to online matters.
On New Year's Day, a 20 year old man handed himself into police after police released CCTV video of a coward punch assault in Canberra's central business district. The man was later charged with recklessly inflicting grievous bodily harm.
Since then, Anonymous Australia has published the alleged offender's name on social media along with claims that it had obtained the home address and phone number of the individual. According to the group, their post containing the name of the alleged attacker was shared over ten thousand times and received over 1.2 million likes.
Unfortunately, the legal implications for disclosing the personal information of the accused could be quite serious. In an interview with ABC news, criminal lawyer Adrian McKenna said that the actions of Anonymous Australia "may lead the offender's lawyers to make an application for the matter to be heard by trial by judge alone and take the matter out of the hands of 12 members of a jury who would in effect represent the community for these proceedings."
Furthermore, should personal information be released, there would a real risk that all court proceedings could take place under suppression or non-publication orders in a "judge-alone" trial. This would prohibit any material relevant to the proceedings from being published, including the ultimate outcome, effectively wiping the rest of the case from public scrutiny.
Despite calls to release the information in the post's comments, Anonymous Australia have said:
We have also obtained his address and phone number, which we will refrain from releasing at this point in time. We'll see how the court case pans out before resorting to anything further.
We want to see justice, not his family terrorised.
It is somewhat ironic that Anonymous does not want to see the alleged offender's family terrorized while failing to rule out the disclosure of personal information at a later time. However, vigilante justice should not prevail nor should not come at the expense of due legal process or a fair trial for all involved.
Source: ABC News Australia
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