Anonymous One Year Later - a Twinkle of What It Used to Be

One year ago, on Feb. 10, 2008, Anonymous members appeared out of nowhere to protest Scientology around the world. The numbers were spectacular. In March, following the prediction of Anonymous that the protests will occur in increasing numbers every month, the amount of protesters were even greater, estimated to around 9,000.

After March, though, and contrary to the Anonymous announcement above, the numbers have been decreasing every month. Nowadays 1,000 would already be a lot.

In this respect, it was interesting to see what would be the numbers for the one year anniversary of Anonymous. For sure, at least some of those who did not protest in subsequent months would come out for this special occasion.

It is not possible to easily follow these numbers anymore. After their stats crashed, Anonymous stopped posting them systematically. Today, to know what the numbers are, one would have the burden of wading through all the posts in the WhyWeBWAA forum, trying to extirpate them from hundreds of infantilic comments, and even so one may not find them reported. I am therefore only taking the reports posted in ARS as a basis for comparison. To date, there are only three:

Manchester:
Feb. 2008: 130
Mar. 2008: 200
Feb. 2009: Manchester, England Feb 7th 2009 - alt.religion.scientology | Google Groups: "about 40 of us"


Phoenix:
Feb. 2008: 50
Mar. 2008: 70
Feb. 2009: protest in Phoenix 2/6/09 - alt.religion.scientology | Google Groups: "9 protesters"


London:
Feb. 2008: 400
Mar. 2008: 725
Feb. 2009: Picket Report - London (UK) - alt.religion.scientology | Google Groups:
"about 25 Anons turned up outside Queen Victoria Street. [...] Then on to Tottenham Court Road, where our numbers went up to about 30.


Total for these 3 locations:
Feb. 2008: 580
Mar. 2008: 995
Feb. 2009: 79 - which is roughly 80-90% down...