This Thursday, as thousands of Anonymous activists continued their two-week campaign of assistance to the successful revolution in Tunisia and the nascent pro-democracy uprisings in Egypt and Algeria, the governments of the US and UK scored a victory of their own, with the arrest of three teenagers and two young adults who are accused of participating in distributed denial of service attacks, or DDoS, against the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal.

Those attacks, conducted by some large but unknown number of participants associated with the Anonymous movement, briefly took down all three sites in retaliation for those corporations having given in to state pressure to deny their customers the ability to donate to WikiLeaks – the entity that helped to topple the autocratic government of Tunisia by releasing documents proving that now-ex President Ben-Ali and his associates were even more horrid than had previously been known to anyone outside of western diplomatic circles (which, in turn, have been revealed to be quite horrid in their own right).

Those of us who are keen on liberty – particularly those of us who choose to work with Anonymous rather than the various western governments that have shown themselves to be comfortably complicit with tyranny – are the first to acknowledge that every private entity should be free to deny services to anyone they choose, and for whatever reason. But none of the DDoS "victims" are truly private entities. Each involve itself in the governance of the world's states in general and that of the US in particular, by way of "donations" to those politicians who regulate the financial industry with occasional success, as well as through such things as the MasterCard International Employees Political Action Committee.

Meanwhile, the US itself exerts force on those same companies through antitrust suits. One may retort that all of these things are carried out in accordance with the rule of law. But I would love to debate any politician in any western state on the question of whether the rule of law ought to be respected in a world where even the most "respectable" governments establish intelligence agencies that routinely violate those laws at taxpayer expense and at no real penalty to anyone involved.

Of course, our detractors may note that, regardless of which laws they break, governments operate with different ends and obtain differing results than do those involved in Anonymous who engage in DDoS attacks and the like. This is absolutely true. For instance, the several agencies involved in today's arrests spent perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrest five people out of thousands. These individuals will now, it must expected, be tried and punished at some further expense to those taxpayers whose funds have been acquired by force. Whereas, in a shorter period, Anonymous has managed to provide what the more attentive media outlets now acknowledge to have been of considerable assistance in toppling a dictatorship, and following through with technical and organisational assistance to the population concerned, while also preparing to do likewise elsewhere. And this has been accomplished at the cost of a few servers, paid for by donations.

Meanwhile, the Anonymous movement is not diminished, but rather encouraged, by the sacrifices made by the five Britons in question. Which is to say that your money has been spent even less wisely than usual from the standpoint of those who seek to end our movement.

Like those who engaged in sit-ins throughout the 20th century in the cause of justice, which the law always lags behind, Anonymous hacktivists will continue to bring down the hypocrisy and tyranny of those who prefer state to citizen and the status quo to true liberty. All are invited to join us, and those who wish to do so can find us easily enough. The Tunisian people certainly did.

• Author's note: this article was created in association with Anonymous