"Hacktivist" group Anonymous appears to have backed off its threat in the above video to expose personal information about members of "Los Zetas," a leading drug cartel, perhaps because (a wild guess) the cartel has been successful in killing people who have done so in the past. Jack McDonald thinks the episode says something important about modern warfare:
What’s playing in my head is the idea of "identity wars". A persistent online conflict in which the "game" is to identify other people and knock them out before they identify you. States are used to playing this with hackers: they try to identify them, arrest them and imprison them. Hackers play this game against each other/civilians (doxing, whereby they dump a person’s identifiable information on the internet), and recently, right back at the state. All these people are not, however, likely to kill each other directly …
This analysis also explains why Anonymous couldn't win:
[F]or hackers, getting identified might get you arrested, but that’s only when they’re going up against companies, states and organisations that play nice. Capture/kill raids and predator strikes are what states do to people when they’re not "playing nice", and I doubt that criminal networks are liable to play nice to anyone that might out them, or their assets. Maybe when the first OpCartel chap winds up gruesomely executed with a note pinned to their chest, Anonymous etc might realise that there are worse people out there than Visa and Paypal.
Sam Biddle calls Anonymous a "shell of its former self."
The Dish 