The hacktivist collective Anonymous is to launch dedicated website for its crowdsourced news platform, Your Anon News, following a successful Indiegogo campaign that saw it raise exactly $54,798.

The Your Anon News title is already used by several of the collective’s social media accounts, for example its popular Twitter and Tumblr accounts, but the success of this project means that it can finally set up the first ‘official’ website for its independent reports.

A video uploaded onto the campaign page explains how the Your Anon News outlet will become a platform for reports that stay hidden from the mass public, independent of “the political and celebrity gossip that inundates the mainstream”.

Your Anon News will be open to citizen reporters, independent of mainstream news organizations, to livestream events as they happen.

According to the campaign page:

“We haven’t had a space to to provide a proper forum for our many contributors and talented supporters. We love the livestreamers that provide Your Anon News with first-hand reporting and the independent journalists whose voices often unheard, but we aren’t supporting them the way we should. We’re here to change that.”

And the new website is the result of that change, allowing the Anonymous collective to post the best blogs and news sources from independent reporters. The campaign page continues:

“We’ll provide feeds for citizen journalists who livestream events as they are taking place, instead of the 10-second sound bites provided by the corporate media. Likewise, we know it would be beneficial to our followers to exist as a community beyond simple social media interactions. Many people have asked us to establish a site that accomplishes all of this and we’ve decided it’s time we build it.”

The not-insignificant sum of money collected by the Indiegogo fundraiser will be used to finance essential startup costs like web hosting and development of the site. The amount raised far exceeded the original campaign goal set at just $2,000, but this was expected because Your Anon News will be an ongoing project, and the bigger it gets the more funding will be needed.

Using these funds and its expertise, Anonymous should be able to put together an extremely robust site and cultivate a strong following as it attempts to pursue its wide-ranging goals of delivering justice to the world and bringing down oppressive governments. One things clear, it’s certainly be an interesting site to follow and we’ll be sure to follow its evolution here on SiliconANGLE.

#OpFreeKorea Plays The Birthday Party Pooper

Anonymous’s fundraising efforts haven’t distracted it from the usual havoc it loves to create around the Web in recent days. The last couple of weeks has seen it score several notable ‘victories’, most notably its high profile hacking of a number of official North Korean websites. The first attacks on Kim Jong-Un’s regime took place last week, and it followed this up with further antics on Monday, posting mocking caricatures of the young leader on the anniversary of DPRK founder Kim-Il Sung’s birthday.

One of the collective’s official Twitter accounts is promising to step up this campaign, known as #OpFreeKorea, if Kim Jong-Un refuses to meet their demands and resign his position. This will be followed up by another campaign, #OpKoreanWar, on June 25, although just what the collective is planning to do next remains a mystery.