AngryMongoose said:
"Playing a game of Whac-A-Mole."
It's more like punching smoke. Poisonous smoke. Poisonous smoke that hates you can gets more poisonous the more you punch it.
Why do people insist on this absurd notion that Anon can't possibly be taken down because its ideals transcend physical boundaries? Anon is an organization which stands for certain ideals, it itself is NOT an ideal, and organizations CAN be shut down or at least scared into dormancy if enough of its members are caught.
It's simple psychology, really. Suppose you hear about a massive raid in which multiple members of a popular group are arrested on charges of terrorism. You may notice that the number of people jumping up to say "I'm with them too! Please arrest me!" tends to decrease. That's because most people generally don't like being arrested and having criminal marks on their records for the rest of their lives. Ideals are metaphysical and can't be "arrested", but people most certainly can.
It's what happened to LulzSec. The hacker community united to start attacking LulzSec and intended to give their information to the FBI and CIA to aid in prosecution. The result was that members of their group started to back out, unwilling to take the heat, and eventually they folded back into Anon in the hopes of being protected. LulzSec collapsed under the threat of being exposed, and if the FBI keeps this up, Anon will, too.