Anonymous, the activist hacker collective, released on Thursday what it claims is a list of 1,000 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members in an attempt to expose and fight racism, but experts said the information was "not exactly exciting."
"This is low-hanging fruit, basically public source information," Mark Pitcavage, director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, said of the list,
according to Vice News.
Pitcavage pointed out that one name on the list, David Duke, is infamous for his past membership in the KKK. Other names are connected to social media profiles that feature Confederate flags, white supremacist imagery, KKK symbols, etc.
"For most of these people it's not a secret that they've been in the Klan," he said.
One Twitter user who claimed to be the founder of the AnonOps #OpKKK channel that coordinated the project, said that the information was gained after the group "hacked into a trusted KKK member's account and got many names through social engineering."
David Cunningham, author of the book "Klansville, USA: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Era Ku Klux Klan," said much the same as Pitcavage.
"My sense is that the majority of the things I'm seeing here are known people. You can just hit Google and find a lot of them," he said. "I'm having trouble seeing the unmasking of people who have a public profile who wouldn't have been already tied to this world. I've had trouble wrapping my head around the Anonymous promise because, while I agree the Klan can be dangerous, I don't see that they're infiltrating society. A good chunk of those people are willing to publicly admit their roles."
The list appeared to have some errors. In many cases, the people included on the list were known white supremacists, but had no connection to any KKK group. Elsewhere, anti-government cartoonist Ben Garrison was included, however he is not a KKK member. Years ago, someone altered one of his drawings, "March of Tyranny," to include an anti-Semitic drawing, and he's become falsely associated with it.
Earlier in the week, other lists and videos released by Anonymous that alleged to contain the names of KKK members were deemed by several news outlets to be inaccurate. One such list contained the names of several U.S. Senators, prompting Sen. Dan Coats to disavow on Twitter any connection with the Klan, past or present.
According to The Washington Post, experts estimate the size of the KKK is 6,000-8,000 members across the U.S. It had roughly 40,000 members in the 1960s.
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