Anonymous still anonymous?

The "hacktivist" group Anonymous have themselves fallen foul of hacking!  Cited by Sony as responsible for the current PSN outage, at least in part, the group have had to issue a warning to their members (and I use the word in it's most pejorative sense) that two of their sites have been "compromised" and should not be used for fear of identity theft.

According to the Financial Times and GamesRadar, the sites have been vandalised with obscenities and the supposed details of 500 individuals who have taken part in Anonymous activities have been posted. As to who did this and why:

• Anonymous have said that an ex-member, who was know through IRC (Internet Realtime Chat) as "Ryan" was responsible.
• Someone calling themselves Ryan have posted on Thinq.co.uk that "he was acting because the old group had become too centralised and hungry for media attention".

However this should be taken with a pinch of salt as the internet is rife with spoofs.  Just like Anonymous claim to represent the general public in their illegal activities, this "Ryan" is likely to be another interested but uninvolved person wanting to contribute their opinions.

Speculation is that this situation could have been orchestrated by Anonymous themselves to deflect any blame for the theft of the personal details of millions of PSN users, but security professionals have been monitoring the common "watering holes" of Anonymous members and report that this indicates that Anonymous is returning to their usual fragmented, bickering state after a period of exceptional unity.  Some of these professionals have been passing the information they have found to the FBI to assist in the investigation into Anonymous as a result of the PSN attack.

My views are that this is in the least poetic justice enacted upon Anonymous.  In freely arming people with the weapons to commit crimes against organisations they take exception to they have fallen foul of exactly the same practices, perhaps by those they previously armed.  They want to be taken seriously and recognised as a legitimate threat to targeted organisations, well finally the authorities are giving them that recognition by launching a criminal investigation into their activities.  I hope the Anonymous leadership are found and the book well and truly thrown at them.

The only downside to this is that now the US government will react by creating legislation to give agencies such as the FBI even further access rights to ISP user traffic than given as a result of post-2001 anti-terrorism laws.  I don't have anything to hide and am all for curbing internet crime, but by attacking Sony (and by extension 70+ million innocent PSN/SOE users) they have kicked over a hornet's nest which may lead to even more abuses of the individual privacy and human rights for which they claim to be fighting.