"Public support is not gained by stealing credit card info and personal identities," the statement reads. "We are trying to fight criminal activities by corporations and governments, not steal credit cards." The statement showed confidence in Anonymous's lack of involvement: "If a legitimate and honest investigation into the credit card is conducted, Anonymous will not be found liable. While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our 'leadership' does not condone credit card theft." Of course, the "intrusion" could still have been the work of someone who self-identifies as an Anonymous member; that very "distributed and decentralized" structure makes it difficult to identify officially sanctioned actions by those claiming affiliation.
Last month, during intermittent PSN outages, Anonymous issued a release saying that it would not attempt to take PSN down, because it did not want to "severely impact Sony customers."
