Anonops #13: Stop CISPA

Its Over 9000!!! [Original Video and Audio]

LOLPRAH: OVER 9000 PENISES!

Tom Cruise Scientology Video - ( Original UNCUT )

Message to Scientology

Operation Payback #Anonymous Message RE: ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, Internet Censorship & Copyright

Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church Website During Live Confrontation

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http://www.thinq.co.uk/20(...)persecute-anonymous/
NATO leaders have been warned that WikiLeaks-loving 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous could pose a threat to member states' security, following recent attacks on the US Chamber of Commerce and defence contractor HBGary - and promise to 'persecute' its members.

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From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world

(Reuters) - It all started innocuously enough with a July 13 blog post urging people to #OccupyWallStreet, as though such a thing (Twitter hashtag and all) were possible.

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Gabriella Coleman Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. Her first book, "Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking" is forthcoming with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. She is the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Institute for Advanced Study.

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Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action

^{Gabriella Coleman, April 6 2011}

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Our Weirdness Is Free

The logic of Anonymous—online army, agent of chaos, and seeker of justice.

_{by Gabriella Coleman, [01.13.2012]}

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Anonymous And The War Over The Internet

This article is the first in a two-part series tracing the development of the amorphous online community known as Anonymous, pranksters who have become a force in global affairs.

^{The Huffington Post, Saki Knafo. Posted: 1/30/12 12:20 PM ET | Updated: 2/1/12 07:36 PM ET}

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Anonymous 'hactivist' goes public on cyber protests

Peter Fein is a self-described "hacktivist" and member of the international hacker group Anonymous.

This loose collection of hackers has gained notoriety by aiming DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on government and corporate websites since 2010. The targets have ranged from the US Department of Justice to Sony and Visa.

As befits the name Anonymous, most members have chosen to keep their identities secret - especially after dozens of alleged hackers were arrested in a series of government crackdowns in the US and Europe.

Mr Fein, however, has decided to go public about his involvement. He insists he is not involved in anything illegal, claiming that he simply helps bring together activists who want to battle government surveillance and attempts to police the internet.

The activist from Chicago is also involved with another hacker group called Telecomix - an international network of people providing internet access to pro-democracy protesters in countries such as Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Mr Fein says he is not a spokesman for either group and that Telecomix's achievements are the result of countless hours of work from hundreds of members.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC's Matt Danzico he explains what he believes Anonymous is trying to achieve - and why he decided to go public.

Anonymous: Project Mayhem 2012 Call to Hackzion! Code TYLER!

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Firefox security bug Tor Browser Bundle

A user has discovered a severe security bug in Firefox related to websockets bypassing the SOCKS proxy DNS configuration. This means when connecting to a websocket service, your Firefox will query your local DNS resolver, rather than only communicating through its proxy (Tor) as it is configured to do. This bug is present in current Tor Browser Bundles (2.2.35-9 on Windows; 2.2.35-10 on MacOS and Linux).
To fix this dns leak/security hole, follow these steps:

Type “about:config” (without the quotes) into the Firefox URL bar. Press Enter.
Type “websocket” (again, without the quotes) into the search bar that appears below "about:config".

Double-click on “network.websocket.enabled”. That line should now show “false” in the ‘Value’ column.

See Tor bug 5741 for more details. We are currently working on new bundles with a better fix.

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Neelie Kroes: ACTA gaat het niet halen

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"We hebben recent gezien dat duizenden mensen bereid zijn te protesteren tegen regels waarvan ze denken dat die de openheid en innovatie van het internet beperken. Dit is een sterkte nieuwe politieke stem. En die strijd voor openheid verwelkom ik, zelfs al ben ik het niet eens met alles wat er over dit onderwerp gezegd wordt. () Waarschijnlijk zal de wereld het nu zonder SOPA en ACTA doen. Nu moeten we oplossingen vinden om het internet tot een plek van vrijheid, openheid en innovatie te maken voor alle burgers, niet alleen voor de techno avant-garde."

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Review: Hot Docs — We Are Legion looks at Internet's first army Anonymous

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You've heard of those hacktivists wearing Guy Fawkes masks and taking down Scientology websites and going to cyber-war with PayPal. But with the documentary We Are Legion, you finally learn about the motives and missions at the heart of Anonymous.

In a compelling and insightful documentary, a profile of the powerful Anonymous hacking collective shows a different side of the global force known for battling the Church of Scientology and opponents of WikiLeaks. Some may see Anonymous members as skilled but criminal hackers living in their parents' basements, but We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists peels back the curtain to reveal a more human story: these are angry and passionate coders taking to their virtual street corner to protest for free speech and Internet freedom.

Brian Knappenberger's 90-minute film, debuting at Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival, traces the history of hacktivism and online forums, telling us in great detail how pulling pranks online has long been a steadfast tradition that eventually evolved into a more serious form of dissidence. Born out of the 4chan community, Anonymous members first started trying to silence Neo-Nazi radio hosts and Church of Scientology groups. The latter fight gave Anonymous worldwide attention, partially thanks to their real-life protests at almost every Scientology building across the world. This was the hacker getting into the sunlight to finally meet colleagues they've known online for years.

A parade of experts and insiders layer the doc with insight into what motivates Anonymous hackers to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Mastercard or the Australian government: they want to combat Net censorship. Getting Anonymous members to discuss why they do what they do was a real coup for the filmmakers, because these hackers don't often speak so freely to media.

We learn a lot about their core beliefs: They believe in the right to spread information freely (WikiLeaks) and they help other groups spread the word about their own protests (Occupy Wall Street). They oppose governments such as Egypt who bar citizens from accessing the Web. But their hacking work comes with a price, We Are Legion tells us: 14 Anonymous members have been arrested for their alleged crimes, which include lobbing massive DDoS attacks against websites for Scientology, PayPal, MasterCard and more.

The film leaves us with an important question: As more protests are being organized and carried out online, should governments grant these netizens the right to conduct virtual sit-ins? If Occupy protesters can legally block a city intersection, why can't Anonymous members do the same online, shutting down the traffic of their targeted sites?

Whatever you think about hackers fighting for their voices to heard, We Are Legion is a newsworthy film documenting the Internet's first army, who will continue to be relevant in our wired world.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/324105#ixzz1tv3o5RFE

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FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites - now


CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.


The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.

In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned.

The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

"If you create a service, product, or app that allows a user to communicate, you get the privilege of adding that extra coding," an industry representative who has reviewed the FBI's draft legislation told CNET. The requirements apply only if a threshold of a certain number of users is exceeded, according to a second industry representative briefed on it.

The FBI's proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers, not Web companies. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks.

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Hackers have breached top secret MoD systems, cyber-security chief admits

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Major General Jonathan Shaw says 'it was a surprise to people quite how vulnerable we are'

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Computer hackers have managed to breach some of the top secret systems within the Ministry of Defence, the military's head of cyber-security has revealed.

Major General Jonathan Shaw told the Guardian the number of successful attacks was hard to quantify but they had added urgency to efforts to beef up protection around the MoD's networks.

"The number of serious incidents is quite small, but it is there," he said. "And those are the ones we know about. The likelihood is there are problems in there we don't know about."

Government computer systems come under daily attack, but though Shaw would not say how or by whom, this is the first admission that the MoD's own systems have been breached.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency, took its website offline on Wednesday night after becoming the target of a cyber-attack. A spokesman said the attack did not pose a security risk to the organisation.

Shaw, a veteran of the Falklands and Iraq wars, also said the MoD had to be prepared to embrace unconventional and "wacky" ideas if the military wanted to catch up with, and then stay ahead of, rivals in the cybersphere. Getting "kids on the street" to help the military was vital, he said.

"My generation … we are far too old for this; it is not what we have grown up with. Our natural recourse is to reach for a pen and paper. And although we can set up structures, we really need to be on listening mode for this one."

He added: "If we want to work the response, if we want to know really what is happening, we really have to listen to the young kids out in the street. They are telling us what is happening out there.

"That will pose a real challenge to us. This thing is moving too fast. The only people who spot what is happening are people at the coal face and that is the young kids. We have to listen to them and they have to talk to us."

A former director of UK special forces, Shaw, 54, said he thought the military could learn a trick or two from firms such as Facebook.

The company has a "white hat" programme in which hackers are paid rewards for informing them when they have found a security vulnerability.

Nine people in the UK have been paid a total of $11,000 (£6,785) for working with Facebook. Shaw said this was the kind of "waacky idea we need to bring in".

Shaw has spent the last year reviewing the MoD's approach to cyber-security, and the kind of cyber-capability the military will need in the future.

He says next year's MoD budget is expected to include new money for cyber-defence – an acknowledgment that even during a time of redundancies and squeezed budgets, this is now a priority.

The general said the MoD wasn't "doing badly … but we could do a hell of a lot better. We will get there, but we will have to do it fast. I think it was a surprise to people this year quite how vulnerable we are, which is why the measures have survived so long in the [budget] because people have become aware of the vulnerabilities and are taking them seriously."

China and Russia have been accused of being behind most of the sophisticated cyber-attacks, with state-sponsored hackers targeting military secrets from western governments, or intellectual property from British and American defence firms.

Shaw refused to point the finger at any nation, but admitted the UK was "trying to engage the Chinese on rules of the road in cyberspace", pressing the argument that new international treaties are not necessary to stop this kind of theft and espionage.

Shaw said the number of attacks was "still on an upward curve … and the pace of change is unrelenting".

In his last interview before retiring, Shaw said the UK had to develop an array of its own cyber-weapons because it was impossible to create entirely secure computer systems.

"It is quite right to say that pure defence, building firewalls, will not keep the enemy out. They might be inside already … there is no such thing as total security. You have to learn to live with certain insecurities.

"One needs to engage in internal defence and be quite aggressive about it. And if you are going to manoeuvre in cyberspace, that is something that obviously involves action across the spectrum."

Shaw said he intended to "mainstream" cyber-capabilities across the MoD by 2015. This included ensuring military commanders had a range of cyber-options to use from a "golf bag" of weapons systems.

But he thought cyber-weapons would complement rather than replace more conventional weapons.

"As new capabilities come on the block, you reassess whether you need the old ones, whether they are complimentary or duplicatory.

"People have asked me whether cyber-weapons will make conventional weapons redundant. Absolutely not. A hard bomb is actually quite a good cyber-weapon because it can take out a broadcasting station, take out a server."

The military top brass, he said, had been the "hardest to convince" about the cyber-threat, because high-ranking officers tend to be set in their ways. "We are the wrong guys to deal with this."

Shaw said it still surprised him that the MoD's headquarters in Whitehall "is the only building, main defence security establishment, where you don't leave your mobile phones and Ipad in a box outside your office … people's personal behaviours are not good enough. When we look at cyber-security in the MoD, we are looking at preserving intellectual property and our networks and stopping people spying on us.

"The real challenge is how we secure our supply chains. We are dependent on industry for our technological edge … and preserving that intellectual property is absolutely vital."

He added: "Cyber implies something technical. To the average person in the street, cyber means it is someone else's problem. But it is everyone's problem. We can't just leave it to the techies."

An MoD spokesman said: "The MoD takes all possible precautions to defend our system from attack from both unsolicited, for example 'spam' email, and targeted sources. It would be both misleading and naïve to assume that any system is 100% secure against all possible threats which is why we take additional steps to detect suspicious activity within our own systems.

"We also ensure that our most sensitive networks are not connected to the internet and have additional physical and technical measures in place to defend them."

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Anonymous Hackers Target Activision CEO After 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2' Trailer Insult

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Members of the online hacktivist collective known as "Anonymous," are targeting Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg after the trailer for upcoming videogame "Call of Duty: Black Ops 2" implied that Anonymous hackers would be the game's enemy. Members of Anonymous have already found Hirshberg's personal information and published it online on text-sharing website AnonPaste.

The message begins by accusing Activision of opening itself up to attack from Anonymous: "So Activision Why you done goofed? We are not the enemy but, well you want it you got it. Eric Hirshberg DOX. #OpPirateAllActivision."

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A number of Anonymous members worried that the trailer and the upcoming game may be part of a larger smear campaign launched by the US government to portray Anonymous as a nefarious organization and a threat to the American people.

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Anonymous Hackers Target CIA, UK Supreme Court Over ‘Pirate Bay’ Censorship

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Hacktivist members of the online collective called "Anonymous" targeted the websites of the United Kingdom Supreme Court and the CIA on Friday, responding to efforts by both governments to stifle internet freedom. Anonymous has named its new campaign to fight online censorship "Operation The Pirate Bay" (TPR) and "Operation Trial At Home."

On Friday afternoon both websites were knocked offline and inaccessible to the public, most likely with a DDoS attack. The cyber-attack comes just days after the British high court ruled that Internet service providers must block all access to The Pirate Bay, a popular file sharing website. Since the ban, traffic to the Pirate Bay has in fact increased by 12 million, while the website has defied the UK ban and offered users tips on how to get around the block.

In a video released by Anonymous promoting Operation TPR, an electronically voiced narrator equates the UK government's attempts to block The Pirate Bay to the US government's attack on Megaupload.com and the file-sharing website's founder Kim Dotcom.

The minute-long video ends with a play on Anonymous' typical send-off: "We do not forgive censorship. We do not forget the corrupted ways of our government."

This online skirmish between Anonymous and the US and UK governments comes in the midst of a much larger battle over the fate of internet privacy, While the controversial CICSPA bill, which would allow the government to monitor everyone's internet, is making its way through congress.

Meanwhile, according to Al Jazeera, an equally controversial plan promoted by British Prime Minister David Cameron, would allow his government to monitor every single text message and phone call made in the country. Internet providers would also be forced to install software allowing law enforcement to access every internet user's IP address, email address books, when and to whom every email is sent in real time. The bill would also force social media sites and other online services to comply with any and all date requests.

Anonymous members coordinated their attacks on Friday through Twitter, using specific hastags to organize their posts.

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World War 3.0

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When the Internet was created, decades ago, one thing was inevitable: the war today over how (or whether) to control it, and who should have that power. Battle lines have been drawn between repressive regimes and Western democracies, corporations and customers, hackers and law enforcement. Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.

ANONYMOUS - STOP CISPA

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Inside Anontune - The Hacktivists' Answer To Spotify

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At long last, the great online music war – between record labels and copyright-holders on one side, and proponents of ‘free’ on the other – might just be hurtling towards some kind of endgame. This week, the High Court ordered internet service providers to block access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Grooveshark’s days of cheerful copyright infringement appear to be numbered. In America, the legal case against Megaupload gathers pace.

Can legislation ever stamp out music piracy completely? Of course not. But dont be fooled by open web evangelists like this guy who claim its pointless to even try to tackle file-sharing. Forget the ISPs. If it wanted to, Google could cut the flow of traffic to the most high-profile offenders in a shot. They do it with editorial sites all the time, tweaking the pagerank levers, dispensing punishment or reward. Such a measure wouldnt eliminate piracy. But it would reduce it dramatically.

Google spent $5m lobbying the US government in 2011. Its in their commercial interest to bang the drum for free, because they can sell ads next to all those millions of searches for pirated MP3s. Just dont expect them to channel any of those profits back into content creation. Ditto Apple. Ditto Spotify, whose CEO is now supposedly worth £190m. In the tech world, money flows into the pockets of investors and shareholders, not musicians.

Indeed its one of the great puzzles of the digital age that gigantic technology companies have generally been portrayed as the good guys, on the side of the consumer, while record companies are regarded as greedy and rapacious. Labels invest huge amounts in A&R, taking gambles on new acts, often at ruinous expense. iTunes drove almost £1bn in revenue last year. Will Apple ever sign a new artist? Dont hold your breath.

So the battle rages on. The latest entrant into the melee is Anontune, a new and mysterious music site, basically the anti-Spotify, in that it draws music from a number of different sources on the web. It is nominally associated with the Anonymous movement. Anonymous is a loose affiliation of hacktivists, best known for initiating Operation Payback, a string of cyber-attacks on organisations that have publicly condemned music piracy, from Universal Music to RIAA.

Billing itself as a new and open social music platform, at first glance Anontune would appear to be the ultimate expression of freetard logic. Its mission statement is full of Up yours, The Man!-type bluster, intoned in a spooky-wooky, bad-guy-from-Saw voice: It has come to our attention that the state of online music has been sabotaged by the fat hands of corporate involvement.

NME Blogs - NME Blogs - NME Blogs
Inside Anontune - The Hacktivists' Answer To Spotify
By Luke Lewis
Posted on 04/05/12 at 07:00:55 pm


At long last, the great online music war between record labels and copyright-holders on one side, and proponents of free on the other might just be hurtling towards some kind of endgame. This week, the High Court ordered internet service providers to block access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Groovesharks days of cheerful copyright infringement appear to be numbered. In America, the legal case against Megaupload gathers pace.


Can legislation ever stamp out music piracy completely? Of course not. But dont be fooled by open web evangelists like this guy who claim its pointless to even try to tackle file-sharing. Forget the ISPs. If it wanted to, Google could cut the flow of traffic to the most high-profile offenders in a shot. They do it with editorial sites all the time, tweaking the pagerank levers, dispensing punishment or reward. Such a measure wouldnt eliminate piracy. But it would reduce it dramatically.

Google spent $5m lobbying the US government in 2011. Its in their commercial interest to bang the drum for free, because they can sell ads next to all those millions of searches for pirated MP3s. Just dont expect them to channel any of those profits back into content creation. Ditto Apple. Ditto Spotify, whose CEO is now supposedly worth £190m. In the tech world, money flows into the pockets of investors and shareholders, not musicians.

Indeed its one of the great puzzles of the digital age that gigantic technology companies have generally been portrayed as the good guys, on the side of the consumer, while record companies are regarded as greedy and rapacious. Labels invest huge amounts in A&R, taking gambles on new acts, often at ruinous expense. iTunes drove almost £1bn in revenue last year. Will Apple ever sign a new artist? Dont hold your breath.

So the battle rages on. The latest entrant into the melee is Anontune, a new and mysterious music site, basically the anti-Spotify, in that it draws music from a number of different sources on the web. It is nominally associated with the Anonymous movement. Anonymous is a loose affiliation of hacktivists, best known for initiating Operation Payback, a string of cyber-attacks on organisations that have publicly condemned music piracy, from Universal Music to RIAA.

Billing itself as a new and open social music platform, at first glance Anontune would appear to be the ultimate expression of freetard logic. Its mission statement is full of Up yours, The Man!-type bluster, intoned in a spooky-wooky, bad-guy-from-Saw voice: It has come to our attention that the state of online music has been sabotaged by the fat hands of corporate involvement.

That kind of thing. I wanted to talk to the shadowy folk behind Anontune, to find out if they really thought the artistic world would be a better place without any copyright laws in place to ensure creative people get paid for their work. However, the answers I got surprised me. In this debate, reducing things to an emotionally charged dichotomy freetards in one corner, major label fatcats in the other helps nobody. And Anontunes aims are more reasoned and nuanced than you might think.

1st Kopimism church wedding @ Share Conference

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'Til Delete Do Us Part: First Couple Married Under Swedish File-Sharing Religion

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There were vows, a kiss, and a crowd full of supportive friends. But there was very little else normal about the first couple married as part of Sweden's information and file-sharing religion.

Believers of Kopimism, which became an officially-recognized religion in Sweden earlier this year, think information sharing is a vital part of human existence—regardless of law. With more than 6,000 followers and branches in 18 countries, including the United States, perhaps a Kopimist wedding was inevitable.

[Learn More About the Tenets of Kopimism]

The couple—a Romanian woman and an Italian man—were married late last month at Belgrade's SHARE conference, a three day festival celebrating new Internet and media developments.

The presiding priest, or Kopimistic "Op" wore a Guy Fawkes mask as a computer read vows and some of Kopimism's central beliefs aloud.

"We are here to announce a new pair of noble peers. Copying of information is simply right. Dissemination of information is ethically right. Copying and remixing information communicated by another person is seen as an act of respect," it said. "Do you want to share your love, your knowledge, and your feelings with [the bride] as long as that information exists?"

The couple kissed and it became official under the Kopimist religion. In a statement on its official website, Isak Gerson, the 20-year-old founder of Kopimism, wrote that a Kopimist wedding was "unavoidable."

"Hopefully, they will copy and remix some DNA-cells and create a new human being," he wrote. "That is the spirit of Kopimism. Feel the love and share that information. Copy all of its holiness."

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Eerste Kamer neemt Telecomwet aan: netneutraliteit gewaarborgd

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De Eerste Kamer heeft vandaag de nieuwe Telecomwet aangenomen. Daarin is ondermeer netneutraliteit geregeld: providers mogen websites of diensten niet meer blokkeren of belemmeren. Daarnaast steunt de Kamer een wet die betere bescherming tegen cookies biedt.

Dat bleek vanavond na een lang debat over de Telecomwet. Een meerderheid van VVD, PvdA, CDA en D66 stemde voor de wet. Vorig jaar stemde de Tweede Kamer al in meerderheid voor de wet, maar de Eerste Kamer moest zich er nog over buigen.

Netneutraliteit
De discussie over netneutraliteit draait om de vraag of providers specifieke vormen van internetverkeer met voorrang mogen behandelen, en andere mogen wegfilteren. De christelijke partijen vinden dat filtering op ideologische gronden bij uitzondering mogelijk zou moeten zijn. Minister Maxime Verhagen zegde toe een nieuw wetsvoorstel in te dienen waarin een dergelijke mogelijkheid is opgenomen.

Na Chili is Nederland nu het tweede land ter wereld dat netneutraliteit wettelijk heeft vastgelegd. In Nederland laaide de discussie over netneutraliteit vorig jaar op, nadat provider KPN had laten weten geld te willen gaan vragen voor het gebruik van WhatsApp, een internetdienst waarmee gebruikers gratis kunnen sms'en. Met de nieuwe Telecomwet kan KPN dat niet meer doen.

Cookies
In de nieuwe Telecomwet is ook vastgelegd dat de privacy van internetters beter beschermd moet worden als het gaat om cookies. Dat zijn bundeltjes van gegevens over de gebruiker - zoals bijvoorbeeld het surfgedrag - die zonder dat de gebruiker het merkt worden verstuurd. Ze kunnen worden gebruikt om bijvoorbeeld wachtwoorden te onthouden, maar ook om de gebruikers gerichte advertenties voor te schotelen.

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Op dinsdag 8 mei 2012 01:36 schreef PKRChamp het volgende:
Even een veer in Papierversnipperaar zijn kont steken, goed bezig pik!

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Pirate Bay Scolds Anonymous Hackers For Cyberattacks On Its Behalf

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Some hackers aim to free the flow of information, while others aim to stifle it. The Pirate Bay has taken a moment to remind the hacker group Anonymous of the difference.

Anonymous has been launching a series of distributed denial of service attacks that took down the website of Virgin Media Wednesday following a court order that British internet service providers like Virgin must block access to the PirateBay.org, one of the world’s most popular source of pirated downloads.

The Pirate Bay, unexpectedly, spoke out Wednesday afternoon against the Anonymous attacks on its behalf. “We’d like to be clear about our view on this: We do NOT encourage these actions,” the Pirate Bay’s administrators wrote on its Facebook page. “We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us. So don’t fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.”

Since the order to block the Pirate Bay was announced, the site has been organizing a campaign of proxy servers it called “The Hydra Bay,” linking on its home page to instructions of how to create a proxy for the site that circumvents the British carriers’ block.

The Pirate Bay’s advice to Anonymous suggested they join that proxy effort or try something else more proactive, like supporting the artists who now advertise with the Pirate Bay under its “Promo Bay” project. ”If you want to help; start a tracker, arrange a manifestation, join or start a pirate party, teach your friends the art of bittorrent, set up a proxy, write your political representatives, develop a new p2p protocol, print some pro piracy posters and decorate your town with, support our promo bay artists or just be a nice person and give your mom a call to tell her you love her.”

One sub-group of Anonymous known as the People’s Liberation Front also attacked the branch of Anonymous attacking British ISPs, writing on that “We strongly condemn the attack on Virgin and UK ISPs as it violates the 2nd principle of Anonymous to NEVER attack infrastructure.”

A Twitter feed called Anonymous UK, which has been touting the attacks against Virgin and others, responded “Anonymous… Principles? What?”

“Virgin Media aren’t ideal targets, I agree,” the same feed wrote earlier in the day. “But I’m not the leader of Anonymous. Cry more.”

The Pirate Bay’s stance against Anonymous contrasts with that of WikiLeaks early last year, when Anonymous launched a series of website takedowns against Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon and others for their payment embargo against WikiLeaks and other actions in opposition to the secret-spilling group. “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks,” spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson wrote at the time. “We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”

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Twitter Fighting Subpoena for Occupy Wall Street Tweets

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The battle over Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris's tweets is still going, but now he has Twitter on his side. Harris, who was arrested with hundreds of others on the Brooklyn Bridge last year, was told in April that he could not block a subpoena for his since-deleted messages, which prosecutors say show he was "well aware of the police instructions, and acted with the intent of obstructing traffic on the bridge," because they belong to the company. But Twitter is maintaining that Harris actually owns his content, so they should not be forced to turn it over. "Yesterday we filed a motion in NYC to defend a user's voice," Twitter's legal counsel tweeted yesterday. And so Big Brother must be trained to jump some hurdles, at least.

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Everything you know about Anonymous is wrong

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Whether viewed as heroes or villains, much of what is stated about Anonymous is exaggeration.

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_{Gabriella Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University.}

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While government officials and law enforcement are painting Anonymous as one of HL Mencken's "imaginary goblins" poised to menace the public, it's worth noting that national governments around the world have aspired to control the internet, and have been developing statutes that erode individual rights and privacies, long before this entity came to prominence. Anonymous is more a reaction to these trends than a cause. The brutal, depressing and dire fact of the matter is that an expansive surveillance state is not here to come but is already in our midst. The surveillance state is so well entrenched that if Anonymous were to vanish tomorrow, or never had happened in the first place, it is doubtful that the trajectory of the expansion of the surveillance state would be deterred. It seems misplaced, even disingenuous, at this juncture, to blame Anonymous' actions for increasing the rate at which governments and security companies seek to control the internet, private data, and online freedoms.

quote:

Even if spectacle alone is insufficient to engender political change, it is hard to overstate its importance for publicising issues and clarifying political stakes. With Anonymous, it is not simply that their DDoS tactics dramatise specific issues, such as with their campaign in the winter of this year against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It is that in their totality - as a masked entity bearing the name Anonymous - it relays an urgent message about anonymity to contemplate. Given the contemporary reality of a corporate and state controlled surveillance apparatus, Anonymous stands out, compels, and enchants for a very particular reason: it has provided a small but potent oasis of anonymity in the current expansive desert of surveillance, much like the one quite literally being built in the Utah desert right now by the NSA.

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DDoS-vidaniya: Anonymous takes Kremlin off-line

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The Russian branch of hacker group Anonymous is claiming credit for shutting down the websites of the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The websites were unavailable on May 9 due to DDoS attacks, according to news reports. In a tweet, the Russian branch of Anonymous proclaimed that the Kremlin’s website, kremlin.ru, was taken down.

Anonymous said in a Pastebin post that the attacks were to protest the inauguration of President Putin following allegations of vote tampering in the presidential elections.

According to RT.com, the Kremlin press service confirmed its websites were attacked by hackers: “We received threats from Anonymous several days ago but we can’t confirm it’s exactly this group that attacked the Kremlin.ru website. At the moment we can’t establish who’s behind the attack. Unfortunately we live at a time when technology security threats have mounted, but we have the means to resist them.”

Commenting on the attacks, Ash Patel, country manager for UK & Ireland for Stonesoft, said that “with a group such as Anonymous, one can never be certain as to who exactly is behind the cyberattack. For some time now, Anonymous has been attacking the sites of many government bodies and for that reason, there’s no denying that one motivation behind the attack on the Kremlin’s websites is political.”

quote:

The House That Fox Built: Anonymous, Spectacle and Cycles of Amplification

This article focuses on 4chan’s /b/ board, a—if not the—pillar of online trolling activity. In addition to chronicling the history of the site, as well as the emergence of the nebulous collective known as Anonymous, the article considers the ways in which early media representations of and subsequent reactions to trolling behaviors on /b/ helped create and sustain an increasingly influential subculture. Echoing Stanley Cohen’s analysis of moral panics, the article goes on to postulate that trolls and mainstream media outlets, specifically Fox News, are locked in a cybernetic feedback loop predicted upon spectacle; each camp amplifies and builds upon the other’s reactions, thus entering into an unintended but highly synergistic congress.

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Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most powerful organization on Earth’

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Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, sits atop a hillside in an undisclosed location in Canada, watching a reporter and photographer make their way along a narrow path to join him, away from the prying eyes of law enforcement.

It’s been a few weeks of encrypted emails back and forth, working out the security protocol to follow for interviewing Doyon, one of the brains behind Anonymous, now a fugitive from the FBI.

Doyon, who readily admits taking part in some of the highest-profile hacktivist attacks on websites last year — from Tunisia to Orlando, Sony to PayPal — was arrested in September for a comparatively minor assault on the county website of Santa Cruz, Calif., where he was living, in retaliation for the town forcibly removing a homeless encampment on the courthouse steps.

The “virtual sit-in” lasted half an hour. For that, Doyon is facing 15 years in jail.Or at least he was facing 15 years in jail, until he crossed the border into Canada in February to avoid prosecution, using what he calls the new “underground railroad” and a network of safe houses across the country.

Thanks to his indictment, Doyon is one of the few Anonymous members whose real name is now publicly known.

But as the leader of the People’s Liberation Front — a hacker group allied with Anonymous — and the second-most wanted information activist after WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, he prefers not to show his face, and instead dons the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask, to wear with his Sunday best: a sweatshirt with the Anonymous calling card, “We do not forgive … We do not forget.”

Terrorists to some, heroes to others, the jury is still out on Anonymous’s true nature. Known for its robust defence of Internet freedom – and the right to remain anonymous — Anonymous came in first place in Time Magazine’s 2012 online poll on the most influential person in the world.

Fox News, on the other hand, has branded the hackers “domestic terrorists,” a role Anonymous has been cast to play in the latest Call of Duty Black Ops II, in which Anonymous appears as the enemy who takes control of unmanned drones in the not-too-distant future. (That creative decision may have put Activision, the creator of the video-game series, at the top of the Anonymous hit list.) For its part, much of what Anonymous does and says about itself, in the far reaches of the Internet, cannot be verified. Nor do all Anons agree on who they are as a group, and where they are going.

quote:

Na Duits succes verwacht ook Nederlandse piratenpartij politieke doorbraak

De Piratenpartij heeft gisteren zeer goede zaken gedaan met de verkiezingen in Noord-Rijnland-Westfalen. Nu verwacht ook de Nederlandse Piratenpartij dit jaar door te breken in de politiek - wat in 2010 nog mislukte. 'We denken 2 tot 3 zetels te kunnen halen', zegt de woordvoerder van de Nederlandse piratenpartij Dirk Poot.

De piraten hebben het momentum. '2012 is internationaal het jaar dat veel mensen zich realiseren hoe belangrijk internetvrijheid is. Dat zag je met de Amerikaanse opstand tegen de strenge internetwetgeving onder de noemer SOPA en in Europa tegen ACTA. Als dit soort wetten nu niet worden tegengegaan, is het echt te laat en wordt internet een gesloten bastion.'

In Duitsland leefde dit sentiment en de Duitse piratenpartij bestormde de politiek. In Noord-Rijnland-Westfalen, de grootste deelstaat en de deelstaat met de meeste inwoners van Duitsland, won de partij 7 procent van de stemmen. Ook in andere landen, waaronder Oostenrijk, Tsjechië en Zweden hebben partijen van de piratenbeweging afgelopen tijd voet aan de grond gekregen in het politieke landschap.

De beweging van Piraten ontstond in Zweden, naar aanleiding van de sluiting van de downloadsite The Pirate Bay. Vijf jaar later is de kwestie nog steeds actueel: in Nederland oordeelde de rechter dat na Ziggo en XS4ALL ook UPC, KPN, T-Mobile en Tele2 de populaire maar omstreden downloadsite moeten blokkeren. Volgens de Piratenpartij schendt dit de internetvrijheid.

Kroegmeetings
De Piratenpartij gaat de komende maanden met kroegmeetings hun verkiezingsprogramma aan de man brengen. Een uitgebreid program is dit niet, en de versie voor 2012 is ook nog niet klaar, maar het komt erop neer dat de partij internetvrijheid wil garanderen en een verbod op downloaden tegen wil gaan. Ook wil de partij privacy op internet waarborgen. Volgens Poot zit er tevens een groot gat in de vorige week aangenomen netneutraliteitswet, die de partij, mits verkozen, zal proberen te dichten.

Twee jaar geleden was de kritiek nog dat de partij geen visie over andere problemen had. Dit jaar proberen ze hier naar Duits voorbeeld verandering in te brengen. Over hypotheekrenteaftrek en andere politieke kwesties zal de partij werken met een systeem van permanente ledeninspraak. Poot: 'Zo kunnen we ons partijprogramma aanpassen op de huidige situatie. Een in cement gegoten verkiezingsprogramma is vaak na een jaar alweer achterhaald.'

Of Nederland net als Duitsland klaar is voor een Piratenpartij, dat moeten de verkiezingen op 12 september uitwijzen.

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th3j35t3r "The Patriot Hacker" To Be Unmasked

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A hacker known for attacking jihadist websites, wikileaks, and feuding with various anonymous groups and individuals, appears to have had his real life identity compromised. There have been several previous attempts by numerous individuals, but it appears that one man does indeed know @th3j35t3r's identity.

@th3j35t3r, 'The Jester' in 'leet' hacker speak, was contacted on Twitter by another account named Smedley Manning (@cubespherical) who publicly tweeted that Jester should read the DM (direct message in Tweet speak) he sent or that he would live to regret it. Early this morning, a series of screenshots appeared to show the contents of the DMs that followed.

If this is genuine, the Jester knows he's been doxed as @cubespherical DMed Jester his real name (redacted in the screenshot), former Army assignment (partially redacted in the screenshot) which appears to be the 75th Ranger Regiment, and the type of vehicle Jester owned in 2003 (and, apparently, still owns - it a Chevy Silverado if you're curious). @cubespherical then told him that, as his name suggested, he was a Wikileaks supporter and that, some years ago, he knew Jester personally... and did not like him. They had had a previous run-in of some sort that had left a bad taste in @cubespherical's mouth. Jester, realizing he had been d0x'd (hacker speak for having your cover blown), asked what they could work out only to be informed that @cubespherical was going to post his real ID, resume, and other information, but not before raising a large donation for Wikileaks and himself. A recent tweet from @cubespherical reads "Jesters ( @th3j35t3r ) full creds as soon as BTC here:15JDgkwFVXvuxCt66eUQ434ty3jrvwPfGe hits 100K -". BTC refers to Bitcoin, an online currency in an amount equivalent to $100,000 (approx. 20,000 Bitcoin).

A source that has been in contact with @cubespherical states that he will donate 51% ($51,000) to Wikileaks and then disappear. This is deeply ironic as Jester has loudly criticized Wikileaks and claimed credit for a DDoS attack on Wikileak's site which drew the ire of some anons.

@cubespherical gave the source a small preview of who Jester is. Jester is, as he had himself previously claimed, former military. He was at Fort Benning in 2002 and, at some point in 2003, transferred to Fort Brag. He was known to disappear from time to to for 2 or 3 week periods. He left people guessing as to to where he'd been and what he'd done. He got a gig with SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and, according to Jester's own limited biography, he spent some time in Afghanistan. Currently, he works an a consultant in the information security industry. He has very recently deleted his real Facebook account. And he may be someone to take seriously. @cubespherical has indicated that he will use his 49% to "hide".

Jester has admitted to committing crimes but there's not yet any word on what charges could/would be brought against him. Jester has recently been a subject of controversy in the hacker scene as it has been alleged he has taken credit for attacks that never happened or for attacks that others have done. He also claimed to have launched an attack on a large numbers of iphones who snapped a photo of a new avatar he placed on his Twitter account. It was a QR Code that Jester claimed executed a multi layered attack. One of the people he targeted was a Rhode Island State Representative named Dan Gordon (R), a vocal supporter of the anonymous movement and Occupy Wall Street and a strong opponent of both SOPA and CIPSA. He ran afoul of Jester and, according to Jester, had his phone contacts, text messages, and emails sent to Jester's own server. He also engaged in a Twitter flamewar with Lulzsec that resulted in the CIA's website being crippled by a DDoS attack.

The @J35t3r account has been uncharacteristically quiet. His last tweet, dated May 10, reads "@cubespherical ummm dude. DM pls." I've been informed that there has been no further communication between the two since the last direct message shown here.

As for @cubespherical, he'll be tweeting updates on the donations total until the goal is reached and @th3j35t3r's true identity is revealed. There's been no word on how @cubespherical was able to idenitify Jester but he did have these final words, "I feel Wikileaks is advancing everyone to more open government, which ultimately cannnot be bad. Bradley needs to be released. #freebrad"

One of Jester's favorite phrases, when taunting anons that are being hunted by law enforcement, is "Tick Tock". But it appears that today, it's Jester who the clock is bearing down on.

UPDATES:

Update 1 05/14 9:30 a.m.: Jester is erasing posts on his blog: http://th3j35t3r.wordpress.com/

Update 2 05/14 3:12 p.m.: Jester has erased all Tweets from his Twitter account.

Update 2 05/14 3:24 p.m.: Jester has deleted his entire Twitter account.

Update 3 05/14 3:40 p.m.: @cubespherical has revealed to a source how he was able to uncover the Jester's identity.

Did he forget to remove exif (hidden datat embedded in a file) data from a photo he posted? Was he back-traced in an IRC chat? Was he tricked into downloading an exploit of some sort? These are the questions going through the minds of individuals familiar with the hacker scene.

According to @cubespherical, the explanation is, incredibly, low tech. Recently, @cubespherical bumped into a mutual acquaintance of @th3j35t3r's real life identity. When his name was brought up in conversation, the third party slipped up and linked this identity to Jester. Using this information, @cubespherical confronted Jester online with his real identity. This can be seen here.

There are many people in the hacker scene who feel that @cubespherical may himself be Jester and this may be an elaborate ruse to get his enemies to send him money (and will use a portion of the proceeds to donate to his charity of choice: The Wounded Warrior Project). Such conspiracy theories are common in the hacker game as elaborate ruses are common in Ops (operations - hacker planned and executed actions).

Others believe it to be genuine as, at this point, @th3j35ter has completely deleted his Twitter account which had tens of thousands of followers. Since @th3j35ter has revealed himself to have quite an ego, there are many who doubt he would go to these lengths for an operation with no goal other than raising money.

Update 4 05/14 3:56 p.m. A source has revealed that @cubespherical has stated he is a mercenary that works in PMAs (Personal Military Army). @cubespherical has indicated that the key for Jester to uncover HIS identity lays in his Twitter handle. He has also stated that, "I have the memory of an elephant." It seems one of those memories includes an incident, years prior, when Jester crossed @cubespherical. When asked if he wants Jester to know who he is he replied, "Payback wouldn't be the same without it."

Update 5 05/14 4:35 p.m. @cubespherical has revealed Jester's initials, R.D.C.

Update 6 05/15 1:46 a.m. A photo that was said to be from @th3j35t3r's true identity's Facebook has been found online. A reverse image lookup returns an image here shows the same photo. The used-car lot is 2.5 hours from Fort Brag, the place of the alleged incident that caused ill feelings. The photo was taken by the dealership in the dealer's lot. Some have have concluded this proves it's all a ruse led by @th3j35t3r and some compatriots. If it IS a ruse, what does @th3j35t3r plan to do with any money he raises? Conspiracies have been flying around the Twittersphere all day.

The website turned up another detail, the trucks VIN (vehicle identification number). The truck is listed as SOLD and a call to the dealership verified the fact. The manager declined to give further details as she said it would be illegal to do so. It is almost certain that an anon will gain access to DMV resources and run the VIN to pull up ownership records. As of yet, such documentation has not been released.

We are waiting on comment and further details from @cubespherical.

Author: @truelai

twitter:

Anon_Central twitterde op woensdag 16-05-2012 om 00:29:29 #Anonymous is hunting 4 black men for raping a 14 year old girl in the #Netherlands. http://t.co/qLsdeN69 | Primary suspects is @jay_baby_ reageer retweet

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Pirate Bay comes under denial-of-service attack

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The Pirate Bay came under a sustained attack on Tuesday and Wednesday, knocking the file-sharing service's website offline for around 24 hours.

Early theories had the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack emanating from Anonymous, but the hacker collective denied responsibility. The Pirate Bay (TPB) also said on its Facebook page that it knew Anonymous was not behind the attack.

"We're under a quite big DDoS attack. We don't know who's behind it but we have our suspicions," TPB said in a separate post.

In yet another Facebook post, TPB also noted that Wikileaks.org was being targeted. The file-sharing outfit suggested that this confirmed its prediction in January that 2012 would be "the year of the storm".

At the time of writing on Thursday morning, TPB's website was back up and running, but Wikileaks' site was still down.

Theories abound as to the source of the anti-TPB broadside. Corero Network Security, which sells DDoS protection, told the BBC that "it could be the record labels, or a government somewhere that has had enough of not being able to catch The Pirate Bay, [or] it could be just one person who had rented some cloud power from Amazon and is sitting in a cafe, and is able to launch an attack."

The website TorrentFreak, which regularly covers file-sharing issues, suggested that there may be a link to the escalating legal attacks on TPB, the most recent of which has been a UK court order forcing ISPs here to blockade the service.

"Whoever is attacking The Pirate Bay has achieved what no copyright or governmental authority anywhere in the world has — an almost complete disruption of the site’s operations on a global basis with no court order required," TorrentFreak noted.

quote:

Dear Citizens of the World

We at Anonymous fight for those who cannot speak for themselves. We fight for those whose voice has been stolen. We fight for the disenfranchised, and the left behind, the forgotten and the invisible.

Today we ask you to stand up for not just one lost forgotten child but hundreds like her around the world.

Many of you may have seen the hastag #oplithchild without really understanding what it means, let us explain.

Almost three years ago, a father found out his daughter was being sexually abused every time she visits her mother’s home on the weekends. As if that was not bad enough it turned out that this child was part of a larger conspiracy that no one could have predicted. Spanning countries and continents around the world; in recent months a custody battle was fought over the child, ending in her father’s death.

Drąsius Kedys died believing no one would stand up for his daughter. ABC News has reported that over thirty protesters were arrested trying to protect this child. Various videos can be seen floating around the internet showing the child being beaten by police as they try to rip her from the only safety net she has.

The Government has not intervened. Earlier this morning the child was taken from her grandparents’ home and thrown into the back of a van. There is fear the child may be murdered as she can name names and faces of government officials. We fight for her, we fight for Drasius Kedys, and we fight for your children.

We ask you to stand with us, hold the Lithuanian Government accountable for allowing this sexual abuse of our sister to continue. We ask you to help us protect her.

In a nutshell: A girl just three years old was pimped out by her own mother to three adult men; for 4,000 Euros per month. Those three men are high ranking members of the Lithuanian Government. Most of the key figures in this story are dead — murdered — with the exception of the mother, and the court is trying to force the child to live with her again — this child is the last breathing witness.

Freakoutnation.com

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gtnrvLemx0E

After Kedys failed to get a court order protecting his daughter, he allegedly killed a judge and the mother’s sister, both of whom he accused of being part of the pedophile ring. Kedys then disappeared, only to be found dead near a reservoir in mysterious circumstances two years ago. His funeral was attended by thousands of Lithuanians who had come to regard him as a martyr who dared fight a corrupt justice system.

abcnews.go.com

httpv://youtu.be/eOOA2pbpYq4

Lutianian justice has rejected all the requests of the plaintiff. Algimantas Valantinas, the General Prosecutor of Lithuania did not find it appropriate to ask that the judge Furmanavičius be interrogated, but he did find appropriate to criticise Drąsius Kedys for having published on Internet, the videos and 200 letters sent to European Parliament members and Lithuanian authorities, where face hidden, Diemantele tells what has happened to her. Drasiaus plea letter in English is available here: A father fighting for his daughter

Veritasll

We Are Anonymous

We Do Not Forgive

We Do Not Forget

We Are Legion

Expect Us

Peace and Love,

#ATeam

twitter:

AnonOpsSweden twitterde op donderdag 17-05-2012 om 19:22:32 Right now #OpLithChild goes #OccupyLithuania, people pitched tents outside president palace, cops wanted to demolish, people defended! ) reageer retweet

twitter:

Reckz0r twitterde op donderdag 17-05-2012 om 19:14:30 http://t.co/GKrESNrU - The Jester's True Identity (DoX) reageer retweet

quote:

Breaking News: The Pirate Bay DDOS Attacker Revealed

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We have some news just breaking right now. ZeroPaid has learned who was behind the attack of Swedish BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay. The attacker goes by the name Anonymous Nyre – a defector of the online collective Anonymous. A comment was left on PasteBin explaining the attack:

quote:

Anonymous Central takes down Supreme Court, Congress websites

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A day after the Indian government proposed a hyper watchdog to police the internet, the websites of the Supreme Court of India and the Congress mysteriously went offline on Thursday. This sparked off rumours that the hacker group Anonymous Central had taken down the two sites to protest the government's censorship plan.

The hacking was reportedly in response to the blocking of torrent site thepiratebay.com and vimeo.com.

While the Supreme Court of India website came back online after a little while, the Congress website was still offline at the time of filing of this report.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) website had also reportedly come under attack.

Earlier, tweeting about the government's plan, Anonymous Central had tweeted, "Namaste #India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a new one. Good luck."

The proposed plan for censorship pushes for a government-run 50-member body to control the web. The government's web takeover plan has already been placed before the United Nations (UN).

The UN is expected to discuss the proposal in the next 72 hours. The proposal would end "equal say" process for internet governance and push the civil society to the fringes.

The proposed Committee for Internet Related Polices (CIRP) would be 50-member body funded by the UN. It would meet once a year and would have the power to oversee all internet standards bodies.

If put into force, the move carries a huge potential of hurting India's image. The move has already been raising the hackles of some MPs. Headlines Today accessed letter of Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrasekhar to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh objecting to the proposed watchdog.

"India's proposal, though cleverly worded, hurts its reputation. It hurts advancement of internet as a vehicle for openness, democracy. If accepted, it will be harmful to the interests of Indian citizens. India's position is closely associated with countries none of which is a sparkling example of democracy. Any attempt to expand government's power over internet should be turned back," Chandrasekhar wrote in his letter.

Meanwhile, reacting to the proposal for an internet watchdog, Gagandeep S Sapra, had tweeted, "Block The Internet, Ban the Cartoons, Change Text in Textbooks, Delay Justice, Forget the Citizen, Oh What a Beautiful Country #India"

Ashwin Siddaramaiah tweeted, "Not just TPB, but also vimeo, dailymotion, pastebin and many more sites are blocked. This Govt. Has been the worst I've seen."

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday(...)bsites/1/189182.html

quote:

UK government staff caught snooping on citizen data

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Dont worry about hackers illegally accessing government systems. It turns out government workers and civil servants who are trusted with private citizen data are more likely to access your data illegally.

The U.K. government is haemorrhaging data private and confidential citizen data from medical records to social security details, and even criminal records, according to figures obtained through Freedom of Information requests.

Just shy of 1,000 civil servants working at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), were disciplined for accessing personal social security records. The Department for Health (DoH), which operates the U.K.s National Health Service and more importantly all U.K. medical records, saw more than 150 breaches occur over a 13-month period.

And all this comes to light no more than a fortnight after the Queen formally announced the U.K. government will monitor all Web and email traffic, and log all landline, mobile phone, and Skype calls.

And its the privacy campaigners who are in the wrong to say that the data wont be illegally accessed or abused?

There is one, simple fact: from health records to criminal records, employment details and other personal data, government databases are not only open to abuse, but are actively being exploited by the very people we supposedly trust with our data.

Crunching the numbers: the DWP has a database of around 100 million people. More than 200,000 civil servants have to be vetted to extremely high standards before they can access this database.

Between April 2010 and March 2011, 513 civil servants were found to have made unauthorised disclosures of official, sensitive, private and/or personal information. The year continuing, between April 2011 and January 2012, more than 460 staff were disciplined.

The DoH on the other hand said it did not log each and every breach of unlawful access to U.K. medical records. It did say there were 158 recorded breaches in 2011. Only four years earlier, there were only 28 cases, representing a fivefold increase.

The FOI requests were made by Channel 4s investigative series, Dispatches.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of employees in both departments, the numbers represent only a fraction of the total staff. Having said that, it took only one person allegedly to leak more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the largest unauthorised release of classified data in the history of the United States.

Currently, under the Data Protection Act, it is a criminal offence to obtain or disclose personal data without permission or procure disclosure to other persons. The penalties for a criminal offence go up to £5,000 ($7,900) in a lower magistrates court, or an unlimited fine in a higher Crown court.

Some British politicians even called for some extreme data breaches to result in prison sentences something dismissed by other parliamentary committee members.

Rarely does the fine rise to five-figures, let alone six. Only recently, one Scottish local authority was fined £140,000 ($220,000) for five separate data breaches the highest fine imposed by the courts to date.

But as is often the case, the financial benefits from selling personal data are rarely outweighed by the fines or penalties imposed.

Under new legislation presented by Europe, if a data breach occurs, whether by an individual deliberately acting outside the law, or accidentally due to unforeseen events, the person for which that data relates to must be informed.

But those laws are at least two or three years away, and until then, companies and public sector organisations will face meagre fines compared to the ¤1 million flat-rate or 2 percent of their annual global turnover.

Anonymous: message to Chicago Police Department

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

quote:

http://newspri.com/anonymous-hackers-claim-to-take-down-chicago-police-website/

quote:

The Chicago Police Department website is down, and “hactivists” from the group Anonymous are taking credit. It’s part of a protest in Chicago against the NATO summit, where U.S. President Barack Obama is meeting with world leaders.

Activists are protesting NATO’s policies, holding signs such as “War (equals) Debt,” and “NATO, Go Home.” Members of the hacker group Anonymous, calling themselves “AntiS3curityOPS,” posted a video on YouTube with an ominous message to the Chicago Police Department, but that video has since been made private. We added a full transcript of the video to the bottom of this post.

quote:

Hackers Anonymous leggen website NAVO plat

quote:

CHICAGO - De bekende hackersgroep Anonymous zegt de website van de NAVO te hebben aangevallen.

De site was zondagavond uit de lucht.

Het militaire bondgenootschap komt zondag en maandag bijeen in de Amerikaanse stad Chicago.

Als reden noemen de hackers het politieoptreden tegen demonstranten rond de NAVO-top. ''Als jullie ons censureren, zullen wij uit noodzaak jullie censureren'', schrijft Anonymous op internet.

Een andere hackersgroep, AntiS3curityOPS, claimt de websites van de gemeente Chicago en van de lokale politie te hebben platgelegd.

quote:

Hof VS: torenhoge boete voor downloaden blijft staan

quote:

Een Amerikaanse student die in 2009 werd veroordeeld tot het betalen van 675 duizend dollar (bijna 530 duizend euro) voor het illegaal downloaden en online delen van 30 muzieknummers, moet die boete gewoon betalen. Het Amerikaanse Hooggerechtshof weigerde vandaag het hoger beroep dat de student had aangespannen, te behandelen.

De student Joel Tenenbaum was aangeklaagd door de Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Een jury legde hem de boete van 22 duizend dollar per nummer op, maar een federale rechtbank schrapte dat later omdat de boete excessief en niet in lijn met de grondwet zou zijn.

Maar een aantal grote platenmaatschappijen, waaronder Sony BMG Music Entertainment en Warner Brothers, deden hun beklag over het schappen van de boete. Een federaal hof van beroep stelde hen in het gelijk, en oordeelde dat Tenenbaum alsnog moest betalen. De student tekende hoger beroep aan, maar dat werd vandaag afgewezen. Het Hof heeft dat besluit niet nader toegelicht.

RIAA, dat een aantal van de grootste Amerikaanse platenlabels vertegenwoordigt, heeft in totaal ruim 12 duizen Amerikanen voor de rechter gesleept wegens het schenden van het auteursrecht. Tenenbaum verklaarde voor de rechter dat hij vindt dat individuele downloaders die muziek delen zonder daar geld aan te verdienen niet hetzelfde behandeld moeten worden als bedrijven die voor eigen gewin materiaal stelen dat auteursrechten bevat.

quote:

supreme court will hear aclu case challenging warrantless wiretapping law

The Supreme Court has just agreed to consider whether plaintiffs represented by the ACLU have the right to challenge the constitutionality of a controversial law that authorizes the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans international emails and phone calls.

quote:

Hollywood planning a second SOPA for 2013

If a few remarks by Chris Dodd are to be believed, the next version of the Stop Online Piracy Act, whatever that might look like, will likely come in early 2013.

Dodd, the CEO of the Motion Picture Association of AmericaHollywoods lobbying arm, as well as a major proponent and lobbying agent for SOPAwas quoted Saturday referencing his eagerness to directly lobby Congress for a new copyright bill on the MPAAs behalf.

"I can't say anything to them about this for another seven months, but I think my colleagues understand how important this is," he said in an interview with Variety.

Dodd has to wait until January to personally lobby members of Congress. For 30 years, until he assumed leadership of the MPAA in 2011, he was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. Ethics regulations prohibit him from making deals with Washington until two years after his departure.

The only other hint Dodd left about the next SOPA is that the MPAA will no longer try and equate Web piracy with physical theft, a notion widely mocked online.

"We're going to have to be more subtle and consumer-oriented," he said. "We're on the wrong track if we describe this as thievery."

Its unclear if Dodd is interested in a much milder form of combating web piracy, or if hes interested in similar legislation that would simply be less likely to rile up the public.

He did, at least, note that he was caught off guard by the publics voracious opposition to SOPA and its sister bill, the Protect IP Act. "My learning curve about understanding this industry is still climbing," he said.

How much he meant to reveal about the MPAAs next legislative push is unclear. The organization refused to comment on this story.

quote:

Computer hackers access US Justice Dept. website-spokeswoman

quote:

WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) - One or more unauthorized
users gained access to the inner workings of a website run by
the U.S. Justice Department, a department spokeswoman said on
Monday after the hacker group Anonymous said they were behind
the incident.

The hackers accessed a server that operates the Bureau of
Justice Statistics' website, the spokeswoman said.

The bureau is responsible for collecting and analyzing data
about crime - including computer security incidents - from
throughout the United States.

The department spokeswoman declined to say when the alleged
unauthorized access occurred or what data the hackers might have
obtained. The department is looking into whether the
unauthorized users broke criminal laws, she said.

Online statements attributed to Anonymous said they were
responsible for the security breach and that the files they
obtained include emails.

quote:

EXCLUSIVE: Hacker Adrian Lamo Who Betrayed Wikileaks' Manning Turns Fire on Anonymous

Adrian Lamo, dubbed the "world's most hated hacker" after he exposed the alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning to the US authorities, has poured scorn on the myth of Anonymous's power and influence, in an exclusive interview with the IBTimes UK.
The Boston-born Lamo, 31, who is now an outcast from the hacker underground, condemned Anonymous as "an illogical continuation of hacker activity" that needs to be de-escalated by the media.

The ex-hacker, who was once feted for his attacks on the servers at The New York Times, WorldCom and Microsoft, warns of media misrepresentations that make Anonymous appear almost unbeatable. According to the Colombian-American, Anonymous enjoys a rather big "PR success" among media organisations, and it is not being effectively questioned by journalists.

"There's a societal trend to make Anonymous appear rather larger than life, cheerleaded by Anonymous themselves, various security and threat analysis firms who benefit from the added stress on the market, and by the media itself which well knows the public is head-over-heels for a vaguely human villain," he told the IBTimes UK.

Taking for instance the latest attack on the US Department of Justice, in which Anonymous claimed to have stolen and posted 1.7 gigabytes of data, Lamo stresses that the collective hacked only "a sub-office in charge of compiling crime statistic".
"Nothing seriously classified, no major data breach, no 'DOJ [Department Of Justice] hack' as implied and no far-reaching consequences," he said.

"Yet, all too many outlets see 'DOJ' and 'hacked' in the same breath and go hog-wild."
"I don't want to minimise a significant hack, just to state the real value of the attack," he said.


Read more: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/(...)ks.htm#ixzz1vnATbwU7

quote:

Manning was 22 when arrested, the same age as Lamo when he was detained for computer intrusion after The New York Times hack. But Lamo is convinced he that he did the right thing.

"I never did harm, or demanded money, and offered to help my victims, free."
"Before I became a threat analyst for my current client, and before my myriad cooperation with the military to mitigate the less warm and fuzzy Wikileaks threat that most people don't see [...] I was a less morally evolved, prolific intruder," he told the IBTimes UK.


Read more: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/(...)ks.htm#ixzz1vnBWr3xR

quote:

The Piracy Crusade

quote:

This site hosts the peer-to-peer review of the in-progress manuscript The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry’s War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties by Aram Sinnreich. The project is currently under contract with University of Massachusetts Press, which has allowed me to post the pieces here for pre-publication and open-review. The draft manuscript with comments will continue to live online here, even after the book has been published. This entire text is available to access freely under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

quote:

Reliance Internet Hacked By Anonymous India

quote:

This news might come as a shock to many reliance users. Anonymous India Compromised intranet of Reliance Broadband. It seems that they hacked into the admin panel for the filtering server.

Below is their message when users tried to open any site.

quote:

The Internet Defense League

quote:

The Internet Defense League takes the tactic that killed SOPA & PIPA and turns it into a permanent force for defending the internet, and making it better. Think of it like the internet's Emergency Broadcast System, or its bat signal!

quote:

Pirate Bay Ready For Perpetual IP-Address Whac-A-Mole

quote:

Last week The Pirate Bay added a new IP-address which allows users to circumvent the many court-ordered blockades against the site. While this proved to be quite effective, the Hollywood backed anti-piracy group BREIN has already been to court to demand a block against this new address. But that won’t deter The Pirate Bay, who say they are fully prepared for an extended game of whac-a-mole using the hundreds of IP addresses they have available.

The Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and the end is still not in sight.

Within a few days, a new deadline for five UK and five Dutch Internet providers passes. This means that millions more will be unable to access The Pirate Bay, at least, that is the plan.

Last week The Pirate Bay team responded to the blockades by adding a new IP-address. The new location was setup to make it easier for people to start their own dedicated proxy sites, but it also allows blocked Pirate Bay visitors to gain access to the site.

Instead of the normal address they simply go to 194.71.107.80, bypassing the court order – for the time being at least.

The new IP-address represents a new thorn in the side of Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, who quickly asked ISPs to censor that too. Unfortunately for them the providers refused to do so, so the group had to go to court once again last week to get the added IP-address blocked as well.

Right before the weekend BREIN succeeded with the court ordering an ex-parte injunction for the new address. However, according to comments coming out of The Pirate Bay, this could just be the start of an extended game of whac-a-mole.

“Let me get the next IP-address lined up,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak. “We have hundreds, so let’s see many times they will respond,” he added.

We were told that if the new IP-address is blocked again, they will simply add a new one. This means that BREIN would have to file for another ex-parte injunction, a process that may repeat itself hundreds of times.

The Pirate Bay insider did emphasize that the new IP wasn’t meant for people to bypass the blocks directly, but to make it easier and more safe to create proxy sites. In this regard, it is irrelevant whether the IP-address is blocked or not.

However, it’s well known that The Pirate Bay isn’t averse to a little dueling with anti-piracy outfits, so they’re going to play along.

“Now that I know it’s annoying to BREIN, of course we’ll add more IPs. Every time they get an order, we’ll add a new one, for the next year or so,” TorrentFreak was told.

The result is an almost endless IP-address whac-a-mole.

The Pirate Bay blockades are a good example of how hard it is to completely get a website offline. Even if all Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses are blocked there are plenty of other ways to access the torrent site, including hundreds of proxy sites.

At the same time, the blockades make The Pirate Bay front page news. As we’ve seen before, this can result in a healthy traffic boost for the deviant torrent site. That begs the question of whether these censorship attempts aren’t doing more ‘harm’ than ‘good’ for copyright holders.

quote:

Answers.usa.gov Cross Site Scripting

quote:

Answers.usa.gov suffers from a cross site scripting vulnerability.

twitter:

AnonHackNews twitterde op maandag 28-05-2012 om 20:14:53 http://t.co/JjhtKOQ0 Pwned : http://t.co/zjHeDaYt #LOL #FailSecurity #Anonymous #AntiSec #FuckGOV reageer retweet

quote:

Kim Dotcom Wins Access to FBI Arrest Files

quote:

A New Zealand court granted Megaupload.com founder Kim Dotcom, accused of orchestrating the biggest copyright infringement conspiracy in U.S. history, access to FBI files that led to his arrest.

Judge David Harvey ruled yesterday that withholding the information could threaten Dotcom’s right to a fair trial, according to a copy of the ruling e-mailed to Bloomberg News. The U.S. government opposed the disclosure.

Dotcom, 38, was indicted in what U.S. prosecutors dubbed a “Mega Conspiracy,” accusing his file-sharing website of generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds from the exchange of pirated film, music, book and software files. He faces as long as 20 years in prison for each of the racketeering and money-laundering charges in the indictment.

“A denial of the provision of information that could enable a proper adversarial hearing in my view would amount to a denial of the opportunity to contest,” Harvey said in the ruling. “That would effectively mean that the process is one- sided.”

Dotcom wasn’t given the right to all information that had been gathered on him, according to the ruling. Documents to be disclosed include those relating to allegations of copyright breaches, money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud.

In a separate court ruling yesterday, German-born Dotcom was also allowed to return to his leased luxury mansion in an Auckland suburb after his bail terms were relaxed. He was no longer deemed to be a flight risk, according to a report on the stuff.co.nz website.

Dotcom was arrested at his residence in late January and spent four weeks in jail before being released to await an extradition hearing, currently scheduled for Aug. 20.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Bourke in Wellington at cbourke4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Douglas Wong at dwong19@bloomberg.net

quote:

CDA wil bevoegdheden MIVD uitbreiden door aanpassing wet

quote:

De militaire inlichtingendienst MIVD overtreedt soms de wet bij het verzamelen van informatie met behulp van internettaps. Dat erkende demissionair-minister Hillen (Defensie, CDA) vanmiddag in een Kamerdebat. Hij wil de wet aanpassen om de bevoegdheden van de dienst uit te breiden.

quote:

Opnieuw grote klap voor ACTA: eurocommissies wijzen anti-piraterijverdrag af

quote:

De kans dat ACTA niet doorgaat, is vandaag een stuk groter geworden. Drie invloedrijke commissies binnen het Europees Parlement hebben vandaag tegen het omstreden anti-piraterijverdrag gestemd. Een vierde commissie zal over drie weken een oordeel vellen.

Bij de commissie Industrie, onderzoek en energie (ITRE) stemden 31 leden vóór en 12 leden tegen een voorstel dat het europarlement oproept om ACTA te verwerpen. Een lid onthield zich van stemming. Bij JURI, de juridische commissie van het europarlement, stemden tien leden vóór en 12 tegen. Twee leden onthielden zich van stemming, waardoor de tegenstanders van het verdrag alsnog aan het langste eind trokken. Bij de commissie voor Burgerrechten LIBE stemden 31 leden vóór, één lid tegen, en waren er 21 onthoudingen.

Handelscomité
Daarmee is het omstreden verdrag echter nog niet van de baan. Een vierde commissie zal op 21 juni haar oordeel over het verdrag geven. En laat dat nu net de meest invloedrijke club op dit gebied zijn: het internationale handelscomité INTA. De voorzitter van dat comité, die tevens ACTA-rapporteur voor het Europees Parlement is, heeft echter al afstand van het verdrag genomen.

Maar ook als INTA tegenstemt, is het finale oordeel van het Europees Parlement nog niet geveld. Dat moet gebeuren tijdens een plenaire bijeenkomst die begin juli wordt gehouden. Het europarlement is dan klaar, maar het allerlaatste woord is tenslotte aan de Raad van Ministers van de Europese Unie. Ondertussen heeft de Europese Commissie het verdrag ook nog voorgelegd aan het Europese Hof van Justitie, die moet toetsen of het verdrag zich aan de Europese burgerrechten houdt. Het oordeel kan wel jaren op zich laten wachten.

Somber
Maar dat het er somber uit ziet voor de voorstanders van ACTA, wordt wel steeds duidelijker. In veel Europese landen is hevig geprotesteerd tegen het verdrag.

In Nederland heeft de Tweede Kamer dinsdag een motie van D66 en de VVD aangenomen, die erop aandringt dat Nederland niet akkoord gaat met ACTA. Ook een PVV-motie hierover werd aangenomen. Het kabinet is echter van mening dat het ACTA-verdrag niet in strijd is met de Europese of Nederlandse grondrechten, en wil het oordeel van het Europees Hof van Justitie daarover eerst afwachten.

De Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is bedoeld om de internationale standaarden voor de bescherming van de rechten van producenten van muziek, films, farmaceutica, mode en tal van andere producten te harmoniseren. Het bestrijden van piraterij is een veelbesproken onderdeel van het verdrag. Tegenstanders noemen het ook wel de 'censuurwet', omdat het de internetvrijheid drastisch zou beperken.

twitter:

_TigAnon_ twitterde op donderdag 31-05-2012 om 21:01:11 #OpAap Targets: http://t.co/FaFnQtG4 http://t.co/TpTsqfgj http://t.co/djyWblOm FIRE #anonymous reageer retweet

quote:

The Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation, which happens to be the sole telecommunication service provider in Ethiopia, has deployed or begun testing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) of all Internet traffic. We have previously analyzed the same kind of censorship in China, Iran, and Kazakhstan.

Reports show that Tor stopped working a week ago -- even with bridges configured. Websites such as https://gmail.com/, https://facebook.com/, https://twitter.com/, and even https://torproject.org/ continue to work. The graphs below show the effects of this deployment of censorship based on Deep Packet Inspection:

quote:

Op donderdag 31 mei 2012 21:21 schreef YazooW het volgende:

[..]

Beetje jammer weer, een democratisch land bedriegen omdat ze een nieuwe wet doorvoeren. Hadden ze ook acties bij landen waar de F1 werd gehouden die het niet zo nauw nemen met de mensenrechten?

quote:

Op donderdag 31 mei 2012 21:33 schreef YazooW het volgende:

[..]

Tuurlijk, maar dan is het aan het Canadese volk om bij de volgende verkiezingen niet meer op die partijen te stemmen die hun nu naaien door het schoolgeld te verhogen.

quote:

Protest is ook helemaal niks mis mee, maar dreigen om de site te hacken en vervolgens creditcard gegevens van gewone mensen die gewoon even een weekendje F1 wilden kijken te publiceren vind ik te ver gaan.

quote:

Op donderdag 31 mei 2012 21:39 schreef YazooW het volgende:

[..]

1 zin later zeg ik: Protest is ook helemaal niks mis mee.



[..]

Ik ook, maar ik ben slecht een individu, net zoals Anonymous maar een heeeeeeel klein groepje is. Wat geeft hun het recht zoveel te eisen van een regering?

quote:

Montreal F1 ticket-buyers hacked by Anonymous

quote:

Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone said he isn't aware of any cyber threats against ticket holders for the upcoming Montreal Grand Prix race.

More than 130 people who bought F1 Montreal tickets received threatening emails warning them not to attend the race.

Their personal information was also leaked online, including names, phones numbers, email addresses and the prices they paid for their tickets.

International internet activist group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for the hacking attack.

When contacted by CBC News, Ecclestone said he wasn't aware of any internet security problems, and suggested people contact authorities.

"If someone is threatening them, they should report it to the police," he said Thursday, when reached on his cellphone. "I don't think it's a nice thing for people to do."

Threatening emails were sent to some of the people whose information was leaked.

CBC contacted several people on the list who confirmed all the information posted about them was correct.

Anonymous had threatened to go after the Montreal F1 race as part of its campaign against the Quebec government over Bill 78, the emergency legislation adopted May 18 to temper nearly 3½ months of student protests over tuition hikes.

quote:

Hello China, TeamGhostShell is breaching your sites with a vengeance: Meet #OpDragonFly

quote:

A related faction of Anonymous, TeamGhostShell, is targeting China with a vengeance in its newest operation, #ProjectDragonFly.

Their focus is set keenly on the Chinese government, its institutions, corporations and companies. As the leader of TeamGhostShell, @DeadMellox words it, “I’m declaring war on China’s cyberspace.”

quote:

#ProjectDragonFly began by breaching every site in their way, including national and regional sites, giving as examples, Hong Kong (hk), Beijing (bj), Shanghai (sh), Macau (mo), Tianjin (tj), Anhui (ah), etc.Included in the leaks are usernames, passwords, addresses, phone numbers, passports, flight numbers, private messages, project descriptions, and much more.DeadMellox states, This is merely an introduction, after today the real fun will begin.

One of TeamGhostShells main members, Zoone, was arrested for being involved (ironically) with Anonymous work, in addition to another leader behind @AnonymousChinas account.

In their honor, DeadMellox states the arrests will not discourage his operation, in fact, quite the opposite, This made me reconsider my position and leak a bit more than just gov/edu/ac data, but also company information. While sitting on around 800k chinese accounts, ive decided to leak around 100k from different places. The police world-wide got the best of us this time, but now its time to strike back, therefore Im bringing to you all, a real cyberwar. Enjoy!

quote:

In depth Interview with @DeadMellox , hacker who breached Chinese government

Few days ago, as most know by now @DeadMellox of TeamGhostShell had dropped a huge amount of accounts and information from many Chinese websites, mainly government based.

Last night we got the chance to interview them with the responses being very in depth.

quote:

Anonymous hacker attack on Power Corp’s Desmarais family is absurd

Hacker collective Anonymous has sent Quebec’s political and media classes into a fit by posting a two-hour video on YouTube that shows the highlights of a swanky birthday party Power Corp. founder Paul Desmarais threw for his wife, Jacqueline.

In an instant, the Internet activists have served warning to Canada’s billionaires that their private lives are fair game for public consumption. But the only thing they’ve really proven is that their list of enemies is terribly indiscriminate. Hacking into the emails of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to reveal how his wife shopped for luxury goods online while his army cracked down hard on protesters, as Anonymous did this year, is one thing. Exposing the intimate moments of a family whose only victims have been a few pheasants hunted for sport is quite another.

“I saw in this video a vulgar display of wealth,” lawyer and former Parti Québécois cabinet minister Richard Le Hir declared Thursday on Quebecor Inc.’s all-news station LCN. “It had something indecent and obscene about it. It’s bling-bling to death.”

Conservative commentator Eric Duhaime said he had no problem with Quebec Premier Jean Charest attending private events, as he did in this case as an invitee of Mr. Desmarais. “But it’s very difficult to say when it’s normal and at what point it becomes cronyism.”

The video is believed to have been shot at the Desmarais Sagard estate in Quebec’s Charlevoix region in August of 2008, on the occasion of Jacqueline Desmarais’ 80th birthday. It begins with a time-lapsed montage showing the assembly of a temporary concert hall for the event before showing guests arriving in their formal attire — women in long flowing gowns, men in white ties and tails with their various government-bestowed honour medals on display.

Among the guests seen are U.S. TV personality Charlie Rose, former U.S. President George H. Bush, former Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney, former governor general Adrienne Clarkson and singer Robert Charlebois. A contingent from Montreal’s Orchestre Metropolitain, to which the family is a major benefactor, plays live music.

quote:

30 Years of Political Hacking

The Chaos Computer Club, the celebrated and influential German hacker collective, turns 30 this autumn. OWNI meets Andy Müller-Maguhn, CCC board member and long-time spokesman, to discuss the challenges and successes of the last three decades.

quote:

Op zondag 3 juni 2012 18:47 schreef Die_Hofstadtgruppe het volgende:

[..]

LulzSec: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

quote:

Megaupload has no rights? US broke its own rules by going after Internet giant

More than four months after federal agents shut-down the file-sharing service Megaupload and ordered a raid on the New Zealand mansion of its founder Kim Dotcom, attorneys are asking a US court to dismiss the case against the website.

Ira Rothken, the California-based attorney of both Megaupload.com and Dotcom, is calling for a US federal court in Virginia to dismiss the criminal case against the website. According to Rothken, the website’s Fifth Amendment rights were violated when the FBI ordered for Megaupload to be taken off the Internet earlier this year. As a result of the agency’s demands, Megaupload’s servers were seized and millions of files uploaded to the website — including those owned by paying subscribers — were made unavailable and are still inaccessible today. Now Rothken says that the prosecutors in the case failed to guarantee due process for his clients and is asking the court to dismiss the charges. Since Megaupload was hosted overseas, argues the site’s attorney, the Department of Justice has acted improperly in its attempts to prosecute.

“Both prongs of the procedural due process test are plainly met here. The Government has seized Megaupload’s property and domain name, ruined its reputation and destroyed its business pursuant to an indictment which is fatally flawed as a jurisdictional matter. Megaupload now finds itself in a state of abeyance, with no end in sight,” writes Rothken in a newly released statement.

“As a result of the Government’s inability to properly serve the summons on Megaupload, this Court lacks jurisdiction over the company. In the absence of effective service of process, criminal proceedings against Megaupload cannot commence, and as the Court has aptly noted, we ‘frankly don’t know that we are ever going to have a trial in this matter’.”

Indeed, those were the words US District Court Judge Liam O'Grady had for the case in April, when the proceedings against Megaupload were already three months old yet grossly underdeveloped. Rothken condemned the court system at the time for failing to properly play by the rules by opening a case against Megaupload and Dotcom over copyright infringement and other related crimes by seizing the website without first bringing charges against it. Last month Judge O’Grady even warned the FBI that the trial was in jeopardy because the Justice Department jumped the gun on the case.

In an interview with Radio New Zealand last week, Rothken added, "We're optimistic that the case against Megaupload will be dismissed” and called the entire federal witch-hunt “flawed.”

"Megaupload is a Hong Kong corporation, it does not have an office in the United States and we're just asking the US to play by the rules," said Rothken. "One would think that they'd have done more legal research before filing this type of indictment against a foreign corporation."

Speaking to AFP, Rothken added, "The rules in this instance didn't allow a foreign corporation to be served and indicted as it has not have a presence in the US. We believe the law is clear in that issue, and we're asking the court to dismiss the case."

Dotcom, a German national, is currently under house-arrest in New Zealand. American prosecutors are hoping to extradite him for charges relating to his involvement with Megaupload though have been unable to do as much so far. A court hearing scheduled for the matter is slated for this August. In the meantime, though, his attorney says that the shortcuts that the US government tried to take in the case might very well cost the court a victory.

"This case was flawed from the start, once this case gets dismissed it can't be fixed,” Rothken added to the radio network.

Dotcom previously told the website Torrent Freak that he predicts he will prevail over America’s attempt at prosecuting him but that the government has already made their point.

“We have already been served a death sentence without trial and even if we are found ‘not guilty’ which we will, the damage can never be repaired,” said Dotcom.

Rothken adds this week, “Megaupload is thus deprived of any procedure to clear its name or recoup its property, in clear violation of its due process rights.”

quote:

#TwitterPedoRing: Anonymous launches attack on child predators

David’s Twitter profile is simple, and probably should be. After all, he is only in junior high.

“I’m 14 year [sic] old” is how he describes himself in his online bio. On his timeline, David tweets what you might expect: praise for professional wrestling, Family Guy excerpts and 140-character reviews of his afternoon pick-up games. Every now and again, however, David’s profile in punctuated by messages penned by elusive perverts stalking cyberspace for young boys just like him.

In an August 19 tweet, David writes, “Only one thing can control me and that’s you.” Angela, another young teen with a love for singer Mandy Moore and vlogging, is the only person that retweets David’s message, accompanied by an emoticon. Somewhere on the Web, though, a man nearly four times his senior sees David’s love tweet and offers an unprovoked response.

“I wld luv that,” writes John from Ohio. His Twitter profile is much more simple and to the point.

“52 yr gay love boys” is John self-description. For pages and pages, any user of Twitter can comb through his often one-sided correspondence with unsuspecting minors.

“I like the braces,” John tweets 9-year-old rap artist and Internet personality Matty B. last week, “but u probaly been weearing them awhile.” That same day, John sends a 13-year-old Twitter users named Pat, “can we talk?”

John — who uses the Twitter handle “@jjrjr_”— is an outlier, of course, among one of the world’s most celebrated social media sites that claims to have around 140 million registered users. That isn’t to say he’s alone, though. On Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere on the Web, grown men are patrolling for pre-teens and young boys and girls and are sending them sexually suggestive messages over the Internet.

That could all end soon, but not necessarily under the watch of the FBI or any local law enforcement agency. This week the profiles of John and dozens of other child predators were released to the Web by the same group that the government has linked to acts of terrorism.

The trove of Twitter accounts was leaked to the Web on Monday by the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and the group is looking to prove that they aren’t necessarily a club that’s hell bent on causing chaos without an agenda.

“This is a list of pedophiles that Twitter hasn't deemed important to remove despite their affiliations with each other, their posts of children participating in lewd acts, and their requests for this sort of material. We are releasing these names in hopes that Twitter will work together with LEA in order to catch and stop these scumbags,” an operative with the loose-knit hacktivist collective explains in a preface to the collective of user names. “You mess with our children, you mess with us.”

This is not the first time that Anonymous has taken on child predators that lurk on the Web, but given their ever-expanding notoriety, it might be the last time they’ll be left to take matters into their own hands. Last year the group released the results of #OpDarkNet, a mission its members engaged in to expose pedophiles who relied on encryption programs and masking technology such as the Tor Project — the same used by hacktivists to elude global censors — to swap pornographic material of children. In that instance, they published the IP addresses and online histories of 190 users linked to shady, underground sex sites frequented by fans of barely clad youngsters.

“The purpose of #OpDarknet was to collect evidence and prove that [one percent] of Tor users who use Tor for [Child Pornography] are the ones causing the problems for the rest of the Tor community, the 99%,” an operative with the group wrote at the time.

Back then, another operative told the website Gawker that it was necessary to make a move before the authorities did because “they’ll take forever.”

“Due process for some of these guys are so weak,” one Anon told Gawker. "The best way for Law Enforcement to react is for us to release it. They can chose to follow or not."

Should the FBI chose not to capitalize on Anonymous’ latest endeavor, they might be left with more than just a little explaining to do. In recent years, the online collective of international hacktivists have increasingly become the target of law enforcement agencies. This year’s highly-publicized arrest of Hector Xavier Monsegur, 28, a programmer that hacked for the Anonymous offshoot LulzSec under the handle “Sabu,” revealed that the FBI had infiltrated the group months earlier and had at least one mole working to rat out the rest of the group, with a membership believed to extend into the tens of thousands across all corners of the globe. According to a book released this week by Forbes’ Parmy Olson, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sought assistance with Anonymous and LulzSec last year and spoke directly with Sabu all while the hacker was working directly for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Authorities alleged that, before turning mole, Sabu was instrumental in Anonymous-led hacks of, among other firms, two agencies with governmental ties: Stratfor and HBGary Federal. In those instances, US agents charged Monsegur with compromising data from the company’s servers in an attempt to expose corruption within entities on Uncle Sam’s payroll; in the case of the Stratfor attack (which was released well after Sabu’s arrest), government-hired intel gatherers were linked to spying on Occupy Wall Street encampments.

After helping expose the government’s surveillance of peaceful protesters, Sabu stands to face life in prison. Pedophiles and predators, however, are tweeting en masse without seemingly any infiltration from law enforcement. More than 12 hours after Anonymous began posting the Twitter accounts of alleged predators, many of them are still active.

Immediately following the publishing of Sabu’s arrest in March, an FBI official close to the investigation told reporters that they were “chopping off the head of LulzSec” and said that the news would be “devastating” to the rest of Anonymous. Self-proclaimed Anons were quick to fire back, though, saying that it’s impossible to arrest and erode the meaning behind their message.

“We don't have a leader,” read one tweet from the YourAnonNews account. “A movement against authority without leaders drives authority insane; they can’t break down a movement by corrupting the leader,” they add.

Nearly three months later, Anonymous seems to be right. Judging by the recent hack of the US Department of Justice, the collective shows no sign of slowing down. It’s been seven months since Anonymous last tackled child predators and clearly that’s a battle still underway. Given their latest release, however, Anonymous might be better at policing the Web than any of the government agencies paid billions to protect children.

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'Leak it all!' Anonymous calls for Fight Club-style 'Project Mayhem-2012'

Anonymous are set to activate the dormant cells of a global 'Fight Club’ to battle corruption by calling on supporters to leak a massive cache of state and corporate secrets for the world to see.

­“Imagine you purchase a USB drive. Imagine you take it to your work place. Imagine you collect evidence of illegality and corruption. Imagine together we expose all lies. Imagine we leak it all.”

Those ominous words scrolled across the crimson backdrop of a glowing Anonymous logo in a video released Tuesday by the hacktivist collective.

But instead of a Fight Club-inspired Project Mayhem bent on wiping the debt slate clean by bombing the credit card industry to the ground, Anonymous are set to disinfect the world one thumb drive at a time.

Fight Club was the 1999 film adaptation of the book of the same name. In it, disgruntled men engaged in bare-knuckle underground fights and anti-corporate sabotage to wage “spiritual war” against the modern era.

And while the first rule of Fight Club was not to “talk about Fight Club,” Anonymous hopes the "Leak it All" campaign will spread like wildfire.

During a 10 day period from 12-12-2012 to 12-21-2012, the collective says “the World will see an unprecedented amount of Corporate, Financial, Military and State leaks that will have been secretly gathered by millions of CONSCIENTIOUS citizens, vigilantes, whistle blowers and insiders worldwide.”

Due to the decentralized nature of the movement, it is difficult to tell exactly how much widespread support the campaign will gather over the next six months.

The Anonymous campaign could come as a response to the 2010 funding blockade against the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks. Last October, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the banking blockade had destroyed 95% of WikiLeaks' revenues, forcing the organization to suspend operations.

However, despite its financial troubles, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – “more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered 'global intelligence' company Stratfor” – this past February.

But with WikiLeaks on the rocks, the most recent Anonymous campaign could usher in a golden age of grassroots document disclosure and anti-corruption muckracking.

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“Hello, I Am Sabu ... ”

From a housing project on Avenue D, a hacker mastermind of Anonymous and LulzSec was out to upend many worlds. Including his own.

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Open Letter from Anonymous to Government of India

Anonymous writes an open letter to Government of India before nation wide protest on Saturday.

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Anonymous India

We are Anonymous, We are legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget, Expect us!
The Department of Telecom has ordered all internet service providers to block all file sharing websites, it's time for you to stand up and show that the corrupt government cannot stop you!

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Battle of the hacktivists: Anonymous vs. Telecomix

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — When a member of the hacker group Anonymous in February posted online the email addresses and passwords of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian President, his wife Asma al-Assad, and countless other senior figures in the regime, it won plaudits worldwide.

But it didn’t much impress Telecomix, a rival "hacktivist" group that takes itself altogether more seriously.

“The Syrian battle had already gone from something that can be fought on the internet via hacked emails into a general civil war," says Martin Löwdin, a Telecomix activist. "Anonymous seem to think that we can still always fight all battles on the internet somehow.”

“There’s an ideological divide,” he shrugs. “We don’t really like the culture.”

I meet Löwdin late in the afternoon in a central Stockholm cafe he’s selected for its “awesome coffee.” In some ways he fits the hacker image. He goes by the code-name "mlowdi" online. He has a prominent tattoo of the infinity symbol. His netbook is plastered with hacker stickers. And he was up alone until 4 a.m. the previous night.

He shows me the chats streaming live from activists in Australia, the US and Europe on Telecomix’s message system, which he runs on a customized, Linux-based Nokia phone, loaded with open-source encryption technology.

“We’re not really that keen on nationality and real names and stuff like that,” he says of the group. “But there’s a core of maybe between 20 and 70 people pretty involved, some of them dropping out or dropping in depending on ordinary workload. And sometimes when there’s a lot of action, like when everything kicked off in Egypt, we had somewhere around 200 nicknames.

“We really had no plan, no agenda, no real organization. It’s just throwing things around and seeing what sticks. If people jump on a project, it’s a good project.”

Despite this anarchic approach, Telecomix is a fairly highbrow bunch, as interested in politics and philosophy as it is in programming.

Christopher Kullenberg, the group’s main founder, has just finished writing a PhD thesis on the theory of science. His 2010 book, "The Net Politics Manifesto," was reviewed in all Sweden’s serious newspapers.

Löwdin himself plans to soon start a PhD in rhetoric.

This perhaps explains the friction with Anonymous.

"There’s a lot of cross-over between Telcomix and Anonymous," says Löwdin. "A lot of us old-timers on the network, we get really pissed off when one of the chat servers that Anonymous uses goes down, because they sort of flood into our servers."

He cites the Tunisian uprising at the start of 2011 as an example of the difference in how the two groups work. Anonymous brought down the websites of the country’s prime minister and government. Telecomix instead disseminated encryption technology to Tunisian activists, helping them to communicate safely.

“Breaking into a system is one part, sure, but we don’t do that because we find it to be destructive, and it brings heat. If you want to help develop democracy and develop free speech you can’t just bring stuff down, you have to build stuff up, you have to create.”

Telecomix has won accolades that would embarrass Anonymous. Its co-founder Christopher Kullenberg was made Swede of the Year 2011 by Fokus Magazine, the Nordic country’s answer to Newsweek.

The magazine cited Telecomix’s work reopening the Egyptian internet for some 50 activists when the regime of Hosni Mubarak closed it down in January 2011.

It also commended the Telecomix operation last September, under which all internet users in Syria were redirected to an Arabic website instructing them on internet security.

“This is a deliberate, temporary Internet breakdown," read the message users were presented with. "Please read carefully and spread the following message. Your Internet activity is monitored.”

But it saved the most congratulations for what was arguably the group’s biggest coup: discovering that the Syrian regime was using internet-filtering equipment from Blue Coat Systems, a US vendor, to spy on — and then presumably arrest and torture — its dissident citizens.

Telecomix is still actively working with Syrian bloggers and activists, ensuring they can post and communicate safely, but the job is too time-consuming to cater to more than a handful of them.

“You can’t have tech support for 100 Syrians, because that would take 1,000 net activists to deal with it,” Kullenberg tells me over the phone from his home in Gothenburg. “It’s a continuous process, circumventing censorship is always a cat-and-mouse game, so if you find a method, this works for a few weeks, and then you have to find a new method.”

He’s conscious of the limits of online activism. “In Syria it’s actually very dangerous to use the internet, because they are actively looking for dissidents. Sometimes the advice is: ‘Don’t use the internet. It’s less optimal than some other forms of communication.’”

So Telecomix does more on the ground than Anonymous tends to.

Löwdin's father is a professor at Stockholm University’s computer science department, so he grew up knowing how to program.

Still, the night before I met him it turns out that he wasn’t hacking into the wee hours, but instead researching the laws of a country he’s visiting to teach political activists there how to secure their communications.

He wants to make absolutely sure he can’t be imprisoned for any of the encryption software he plans to bring.

“I’ve been teaching Belarusian dissidents as well, and Ukrainian democratic movement and people like that, going from place to place,” he says.

Telecomix dates its origins to a party at Kullenberg’s house in April 2009. Later that year, it had started helping activists protest a fixed Iranian election, and then in 2011 it got involved in the Arab Spring.

But that wasn't its original goal. It was set up initially to fight telecoms legislation proposed by the European Union. Kullenberg was one of a number of Swedish activists radicalized by the Swedish government’s crackdown on The Pirate Bay, a site that allowed users to share illegally ripped films and music.

“There was this new generation of net activists being shaped, and 2009, when there was the trial against the Pirate Bay, was perhaps the first time that this movement got together in a physical space because everybody went to the court house,” he explains.

Löwdin believes that with the upheaval of the Arab Spring now ebbing away, and Syria bogged down in revolution, the hacktivist mission has changed.

“The battle’s moved off the internet in many ways,” he says. “That’s why we’ve been focusing on pressuring corporations and pressuring governments into pressuring corporations.”

He believes that Telecomix should return to its roots as a campaign group against excessive government control and surveillance of the internet, both in the West and in the world’s dictatorships

Partly that means getting to the bottom of how Western surveillance technology gets into the hands of dictators. Blue Coat, for instance, is adamant it did not sell Syria any of the eight machines identified there. But it also means getting involved in fighting legislation in the European Parliament and US Congress.

Anonymous, meanwhile, continues to raise hackles. In mid-May, its activists hacked the US Department of Justice website and posted 1.7 gigabytes of its data online.

“We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us,” its activists wrote alongside the posting.

But it conceded that it had no idea what was in the data, or any focused goal in posting it beyond letting people “know the corruption in their government.” It’s exactly the kind of thing to make Telecomix try to keep its distance.

“Anomymous are kind of destructive,” says Löwdin. “We want to be more creative."

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Anon, but not alone: Anonymous helps its fallen brethren

Anonymous is an organization famous for its disorganization with no leaders or power structure. When it comes to helping those who are down, an outsider might expect that anons who fall behind are left behind. But when an anon is apprehended by the government for cybercrime, a support network springs up around him or her, thanks to the orchestrations of a subset of Anonymous called FreeAnons, the "Anonymous Solidarity Network." Members of FreeAnons help arrested anons in various ways, from sending them care packages while they're in jail to sending a volunteer to court to monitor their case.

The front-facing part of the FreeAnons networks consists of several sites dedicated to raising money for arrested or imprisoned anons like Topiary or Mercedes, as well as a general fund for smaller cases. The general fund, which has been accepting money since October, has collected only $3,780.88—a paltry sum considering the number of cases multiplied by the cost of bail and lawyers' fees (that amount represents "the majority of collected funds," Nancy Norelli, a Florida lawyer and the public face of FreeAnons told Ars). Norelli and Barton, an anonymous FreeAnons member (nick changed to protect the anon), told Ars that no one does much to promote the funds and solicit donations outside of the AnonOps IRC or a session on Radio AnonOps—the nature of the support cast doesn't exactly lend itself to a high-profile charity ball.

But time is a more frequent donation than money. Barton laid out a hypothetical case: "An anon gets into trouble and is arrested. We would gather information that would aid in their defense, might help them find an attorney. Work with said attorney in their fact gathering, [collecting] relevant information or evidence if needed, send our persecuted anon a care package, perhaps help them improve their quality of life by adding to their prison fund."

Norelli and Barton went on to explain that while "the government wants [the anon] to feel alone… we stand with our brothers all the way." FreeAnons has "a number of tools" to help them do all these things while remaining anonymous, Barton said. Having a public and authorized proxy like Norelli helps.

In addition to helping with fact-finding and legal cases, FreeAnons also keeps in contact with an arrested anon's friends and family. When the anon has court hearings, FreeAnons will send a volunteer to each one to provide "real-time reporting of what is happening" to AnonOps' IRC, someone who is either "public or willing to take a risk." Barton said the volunteer anon uses a "discreet" tool (presumably a cell phone) that sends updates via SMS.

Given the faceless, structureless sea that is Anonymous, it may be surprising to learn that outed members aren't tossed overboard and forgotten, that anyone might care about anyone else. "We are the public library… the Red Cross," Barton said. "There are those who would see a new weak spot and try to cut it out, but when you look at the totality of our missions, we are glue that helps bind everyone together in certain ways."

Of course, there may be a measure of self-defense to this approach: if compromised anons keep receiving support from their fellow anons, complete cooperation and submission to the government doesn't seem like the only option.

Norelli and Barton pointed out that the support network is fairly large. An educational bot on some of AnonOps' IRC channels delivers a tutorial on laws regarding computer activity, how to stay anonymous on the Internet, and similar lessons (educating anons on how to be anons is one of FreeAnons' four core aims). The bot has been run an average of 36 times every day in the last year, for a total of over 13,000 possible individuals educated in the ways of FreeAnons.

Even upon conviction, an anon lost to the legal system is not lost forever. When asked whether anons who have been compromised are welcomed back, Norelli and Barton said that it's not impossible for them to regain anonymity. "We see nicks here we know have had contact with law enforcement," said Norelli.

Barton adds, "becoming anonymous is something that can be reestablished… the Internet and technology are more our world than it is theirs. This is a place where, ultimately, ideology speaks louder than stated affinity… All people have value."

It must be the ideology ("freedom" and "liberty" were often repeated) keeping the FreeAnons network together; it's certainly not the funding. Norelli expressed more fondness for good sentiments than cash: "lots of people send in a $5 donation and a note, and those are awesome… the notes are really touching."

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Restricted U.S. Army Psychological Operations Process Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures Manual

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Field Manual (FM) 3-05.301 describes the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) for the implementation of United States (U.S.) Army Psychological Operations (PSYOP) doctrine presented in the higher-level publication, FM 3-05.30, Psychological Operations. FM 3-05.301 provides general guidance for commanders, staffs, and Soldiers who plan and conduct PSYOP across the range of military operations. The TTP in this manual are presented within the framework of the seven-phase PSYOP process, a mainstay for effective PSYOP executed at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels.

FM 3-05.301 is the principal reference for the PSYOP process. The contents of this manual supersede the discussion of the PSYOP process in FM 3-05.302, Tactical Psychological Operations Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (28 October 2005). Any mention of the PSYOP process in other preceding doctrine or training literature should be validated by the contents of FM 3-05.301. This manual incorporates updated organizational structures, terminology, and capabilities to provide PSYOP Soldiers with the latest guidance to support a broad range of missions. This manual describes procedures and strategies derived from applied scientific and academic disciplines in an effort to improve the efficacy of the PSYOP process. These TTP are designed to facilitate the successful execution of each phase of the process: planning; target audience analysis; series development; product development and design; approval; production, distribution, and dissemination; and evaluation.

The PSYOP community, in general, is the intended audience for this manual. Members of the tactical, regional, and dissemination PSYOP battalions should find the information particularly useful. Written to give PSYOP officers, noncommissioned officers (NCOs), enlisted Soldiers, and civilians standardized PSYOP doctrine, FM 3-05.301 is a comprehensive how-to guide that focuses on critical PSYOP tasks, duties, and responsibilities.

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Anonymous takes down MTNL website

The hacker-group Anonymous has struck again in India. This time the victim is the MTNL website. The group posted on their website, saying, ”We are against Internet Cencorship. Instead of blocking few URLs the ISP blocked the whole domain of various file sharing websites. The HC Madras, DoT didn’t isssue any list of websites to be blocked still ISP supported internet censorship.”

MTNL's corporate website could not be accessed, following the attack since afternoon and officials said efforts were underway to restore it. MTNL Delhi, Deputy - GM (Internet), Deepak Sharma said it was not hacking but 'denial of service attack' under which the server is unable to provide services to the customers.

Anonymous has called for non-violent protests across several cities in India on June 9 to protest against what it alleges as ‘censorship’ of the internet. It accused the department of telecom of instructing the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block file-sharing websites unilaterally, while the courts had ordered blocking of certain websites.

As part of the protests, Anonymous has also asked all citizens to wear Anonymous’ (Fawkes) mask, dress completely in black and step out on the streets to protests.

This is the latest in a series of such attacks in the over the past month by the group, which has targeted the websites of the Internet Service Providers Association of India, the Trinamool Congress and Reliance Communications.

The government has so far refrained from making any comments on the concerted campaign by Anonymous over the last 15 days.

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Blue cabinet

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Blue Cabinet is a working wiki project to document vendors and manufacturers of surveillance equipment that are used in dictatorships and democracies around the internets.

The purpose of this page is to create an overview and to share resources between Telecomix and other projects out there that have the same goal as us; to name, shame and expose those who profit on selling the surveillance equipment that enables the intimidation, harassment and killing of innocent people.

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Internet without borders: Anonymous protests Indian web censorship (PHOTOS)

Hundreds gathered in several Indian cities to rally against "growing government censorship of the internet." The events were held under the banner of Anonymous, the global hacktivist group that earlier downed India’s largest Internet provider.

Hundreds of Indians in the Guy Fawkes masks associated with the Anonymous and Occupy movements staged rallies in New Delhi and 15 other major cities, including Mumbai and Bangalore.

The call for demonstrations by the Indian branch of the group follows a March 29 court order issued in the southern city of Chennai, demanding 15 Indian Internet providers block access to file-sharing websites such as The Pirate Bay and video sharing sites such as Vimeo and Dailymotion.

On Wednesday, the Anonymous forum fired an opening shot by attacking the website of state-run telecom provider MTNL, pasting Guy Fawkes, who has become a logo of sorts for the group, on MTNL’s home page.

In an open letter the same day, the group accused the government of trying to create a "Great Indian Firewall" to establish control on the web and issuing a "declaration of war from yourself… to us."

The government has been embroiled in a row with social networks after a series of meetings with internet giants Google, Yahoo! and Facebook to discuss how questionable content can be pre-screened.

But concerns for Internet freedom in India are not new, and stem from an update to the country’s Information Technology Act in April last year.

The new rules regulating Internet companies – providers, websites and search engines – instruct them that they must remove "disparaging" or "blasphemous" content within 36 hours if they receive a complaint from an "affected person."

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Caught in the ACTA: Protests sweep Europe (PHOTOS)

Thousands of Europeans rallied as one against the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which they believe is a draconian attack on online privacy.

In Brussels, hundreds turned up at the city center with banners and slogans denouncing the bill, drawing parallels between the treaty and George Orwell’s seminal novel 1984; a reference to the increased internet surveillance ACTA would allow.

German protesters got in on the act too, wearing the Guy Fawkes masks associated with the Anonymous and Occupy movements, brandishing banners saying "don’t give ACTA a chance".

More protests are expected on Saturday in the United States, with hundreds in New York and Kansas City using social networks to confirm their attendance at the rallies.

ACTA, which has been in the works since 2007, is a multinational treaty for the purpose of establishing international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement. It aims to establish a global legal framework for targeting counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet, and would create a new governing body outside existing forums like the World Trade Organization or the United Nations.

Its supporters claim the treaty is the only way to respond to “the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works.” But opponents consider it an act of war, clamping down on freedom of expression and privacy.

The future of ACTA is already in question, not only because of continuous global protests, but because of dwindling government support as well. Earlier this year, the treaty lost three crucial European Parliament committee votes – which many say may reflects on how the EU Parliament will vote on the treaty in July.

The European Union suspended efforts to ratify the treaty in February amid a storm of protest from human rights activists. Thousands demonstrated across the EU against ACTA and the amount of power it would give to big corporations.

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Anonymous did Protest and IT ministry says 'Anonymous' is lying

The call for demonstrations by the Indian arm of the group follows a March 29 court order issued in the southern city of Chennai demanding 15 Indian Internet providers block access to file-sharing websites such as PirateBay.

The order has resulted in access being denied to a host of websites that carry pirated films and music among other legal content, including www.isohunt.com and www.pastebin.com.On Wednesday, the Anonymous forum fired an opening shot by attacking the website of state-run telecom provider MTNL, pasting the logo of the group the mask of 17th century revolutionary Guy Fawkes on www.mtnl.net.in.

Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), the country's premier agency dealing with cyber security contingencies, said that its website was neither attacked nor brought down on Saturday. Hackers allegedly belonging to the group called Anonymous had earlier claimed they had attacked CERT-IN website with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

A spokesperson from ministry of communications & IT told TOI, "The claim that CERT-IN website was attacked and brought down by hackers is without any basis and at complete variance with the facts. The fact is that the website has been running continuously & uninterruptedly including the whole of today."

"We don't want anything to be censored online because now-a-days the web is an effective tool to express thoughts and share things with others - be it through social networking or emails," said a volunteer from the group. "Without Internet, people cannot be liberated," added another participant.

The minister was said to have shown Internet executives examples of obscene images found online that risked offending Muslims or defamed politicians, including his boss, the head of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi.

Earlier Anonymous, which protested against what it perceives web censorship in several Indian cities today evening, had claimed that it attacked and took down CERT-IN website. "This is your response team #india! They can't even protect themselves. How will they protect others," read a tweet from @opindia_revenge, the group's Twitter handle.

"We will keep attacking http://cert-in.org.in and http://india.gov.in ! #GOI, ready to face ups and downs?" said the hackers.

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http://thehackernews.com/2012/06/anonymous-takes-down-mtnl-website.html

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_{Posted On 6/08/2012 06:37:00 PM By THN Security Analyst}

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MTNL's corporate website could not be accessed, following the attack since afternoon and officials said efforts were underway to restore it. MTNL Delhi, Deputy - GM (Internet), Deepak Sharma said it was not hacking but 'denial of service attack' under which the server is unable to provide services to the customers.

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Am I Anonymous?

Learning how Anonymous works means learning to be one. Gabriella Coleman narrates her experience of being in between worlds.

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Ein erster Blick in die geleakten Mails von Scientology-Österreich …

Am vergangenen Wochenende hackte Anonymous Austria die Emails einer der beiden Scientology-Organisationen in Wien und gewährte derart einen aktuellen Einblick. Neben internem Bla-Bla gab es eine ganz wesentliche Information – und natürlich auch die eine oder andere Absonderlichkeit der besonderen Art.

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Online privacy: Home Office to write blank cheque for 'snoopers' charter'

Internet and phone companies will be forced to track email, Twitter, Facebook and other online data under new legislation

The government is to offer a blank cheque to internet and phone firms that will be required to track everyone's email, Twitter, Facebook and other internet use under legislation to be published on Thursday.

The Home Office has confirmed it will foot the bill, thought to run into tens and possibly hundreds of millions, for collecting and storing the extra social media and web browsing records needed to implement the scheme, which critics have dubbed an "online snooper's charter".

Ministers did not put a figure on the cost of the new scheme but said it would be far less than the £2bn price tag estimated when Labour put forward a web-tracking scheme based on a central Home Office database in 2006.

The Liberal Democrats are expected to scale back their criticism of the legislation, which is to be published in draft form on Thursday, after Nick Clegg's intervention secured a series of safeguards, including a scrutiny inquiry by MPs and peers that will report by the end of November.

But the measure is expected to continue to attract fierce criticism from libertarian Conservatives, led by the former shadow home secretary David Davis, who this week attacked it again, calling it "expensive, unnecessary and a huge invasion of everyone's privacy".

An online petition run by the campaign group 38 degrees has already attracted more than 163,000 signatures under the slogan: "Our civil liberties have taken a battering in recent years from politicians of all backgrounds. Now it's time to for us to push back."

Tom Brake MP, co-chair of the Lib Dem home affairs committee, said the decision to publish the bill in draft meant there was now an opportunity to examine all its aspects before it was voted on in parliament.

Brake said there was no objection in principle to extending the capability of the police and security services to access communications data from emails, texts and mobile phones to Twitter, Facebook and other new forms of social media. But the party wanted assurances that it was technically possible to access the "who sent what to whom, when and where" traffic data without accessing content – a point about which there is much debate.

Brake said they wanted to see the list of state agencies who could not access such personal data without a warrant extended to cover bodies such as the Food Standards Agency.

He said he also wanted to know what proportion of the 500,000 requests for communications data already made each year successfully contributed to investigations and whether it was possible to reduce the volume.

The safeguards secured by Clegg include the joint scrutiny committee of MPs and peers, who will hear expert evidence, including that from the Home Office, and examine all aspects to ensure the measure is not "rammed through parliament". It has already been quietly agreed that the committee should report by the end of November, implying a timetable that could see the measure on the statute book within 12 months.

It is also expected that inquiries into the bill will be mounted by parliament's intelligence and security and home affairs committees before it emerges in its final form.

Other safeguards to be detailed in the draft bill are a "case-by-case" oversight by the interception of the communications surveillance commissioner, the publication of a privacy impact statement, and powers for the information commissioner to ensure the stored data is kept secure then destroyed when the 12-month retention period expires.

Individuals who feel they have been subject to unlawful tracking will be able to complain to a panel of senior judges in the investigatory powers tribunal.

It will also remain the case that the police and security services will not be allowed to access the content of emails, texts, mobile calls and other confidential web use, without a warrant signed by the home secretary.

The communications data police and others may seek about an individual includes email addresses and phone numbers of people who have been in contact, when this happened, and where, the details giving the police records of suspects' associates and activities.

Internet and phone companies are already required to give the police and security services access to the communications data they retain for their own billing and business purposes. But the Home Office states that the rapidly changing nature of the net, including the widespread use of social media that is not billed item by item, means that this power is no longer sufficient for tracking the activities of criminals online.

Officials say that 25% of requests for communications data by the police and security agencies can no longer be met.

The legislation to be published today will break new legal ground in requiring internet and phone companies to collect this new communications data and not just pass on data they already retain.

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In Flawed, Epic Anonymous Book, the Abyss Gazes Back

It’s hard to report on Anonymous.

It’s a non-organization of pranksters-turned-activists-turned-hackers-turned-hot-mess-of-law-enforcement-drama — a story that is hard to get, and hard to write.

To work with a secretive and hunted group requires making many non-obvious choices. One of the unnamed but extensively quoted hackers in Forbes London bureau chief Parmy Olson’s new book on the group, titled We Are Anonymous, told me once that anons were “by nature deceptive” — and they are. (How do I know it’s the same person? I recognized their way of talking. Then I asked.)

Anons lie when they have no reason to lie. They weave vast fabrications as a form of performance. Then they tell the truth at unexpected and unfortunate times, sometimes destroying themselves in the process. They are unpredictable. The nihilistic fury that Olson describes in the lifestyle of young anons goes in every direction, including inward, and it often spills over onto people like Olson and me for no obvious reason.

You can’t follow the money in Anonymous, or look at the power structures, or hunt for a greater rationale in a collective that on most days doesn’t have one. But we still have to make the choice about what we believe, why, and how it fits into a larger picture. We use circumstances, gut instincts, and plenty of what hackers call social engineering to tease out the evidence we need to write about the collective, to fulfill our role in the story.

Make no mistake, we have a role. You just can’t not join. It’s impossible to not be part of the thing, when the thing uses the media to talk to itself.

So what makes Parmy Olson’s We Are Anonymous so frustrating is that it plays the narrative straight, as if these issues don’t exist at all.

But Olson and I, like professor Biella Coleman and former CNN correspondent Amber Lyon, documentary filmmaker Brian Knappenberger, and even Gawker’s Adrian Chen, cannot avoid shaping the thing and having it shape us. We are the medium the collective uses to define itself, and we end up owning some of what it becomes. We are, no matter what rules we’ve set up to avoid it, an organ of the Hive Mind. It is Schrödinger’s media landscape, and our observations always affect the outcome.

For this reason its vital that we expose our methods and internal rules. Who do we name, and more importantly, who do we not? I avoided this particular ethical issue by publicly refusing to name anyone who is not, as they say in Anonymous, namefagged already. Olson plunges through hundreds of pages without even a nod in the issues direction.

How has Olson chosen who she trusts and when? Her methods are hidden, her notes not referenced in the text, and she appears nowhere in her book. While thats a traditional choice for journalism, in this strange case it harms Olsons credibility. In an environment where all your sources lie to you, you must tell the world how you came to believe the story youre telling.

The social systems of the internet, of which Anonymous is a highly evolved example, disrupt the established pathways of consequence. Instead of looking for the expert or person in charge for quotes, the heart of the story may be almost anywhere. Searching for the right source in Anonymous is often more like investigating a murder than crawling up the chain of command looking for an interview.

Anonymous made us, its mediafags, masters of hedging language. The bombastic claims and hyperbolic declarations must be reported from their mouths, not from our publications. And yet still we make mistakes and publish lies and assumptions that slip through. There is some of this in all of journalism, but in a world where nothing is true and everything is permitted, its a constant existential slog. Its why theres not many of us on this beat.

Journalism is part of a world of institutions, hierarchies, and social traditions codified by nation states and organizations. We create laws and rules to control who gets to do things that matter, so we can concentrate power where we want it. Its meant to create a predictable world we can inhabit within Natures capricious grasp. The tools of journalism were built for this world, its what shaped our rhetoric and narrative. Its partly why were always so keen on printing peoples titles, or age, or race, placing them within a hierarchy, telling you how important they are. The techniques of contemporary journalism are the Big Man theory of history, writ small and fast.

Anonymous breaks all that, and its a huge headache. But for reporters who had to file stories on the group, the rise of Lulzsec, an exclusive club of hacker elites that acted just like the normal world from within the larger collective, was a godsend. It finally provided a fast way to tell an outrageous and popular story, and we responded with predictable enthusiasm.

And thats how Parmy Olson gets around the problems of writing about Anonymous by not actually writing much about Anonymous. Her real topic is Lulzsec. In the 414 pages of Olson book, she only explores the worldwide collective where its relevant to the formation of the small spinoff group of six that burned intensely for a few weeks in the summer of 2011, drawing media attention like no hacker group before.

quote:

Razzia gegen Anonymous in Deutschland

Ermittelt wird gegen 106 Beschuldigte wegen einer Attacke auf die Server der Gema

Das deutsche Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) hat mehrere Wohnungen von angeblichen Mitgliedern von Anonymous durchsucht. Zuvor hatte die der deutschen Musikrechteverwertung Gema IP-Adressen an die Ermittler übergeben.

106 Beschuldigte

Ermittelt wird gegen insgesamt 106 Beschuldigte wegen Teilnahme an einer Attacke auf die Server der Gema. Die Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt entsprechende Medienberichte. Bei den Verdächtigen soll es hauptsächlich um Jugendliche und Heranwachsende handeln.

Denial-of-Service-Attacken

Die Aktivisten setzten bei ihren Angriff Denial-of-Service-Attacken ein. Bei solchen Attacken werden Server gezielt mit Anfragen bombardiert, bis diese wegen Überlastung nur noch langsam funktionieren oder ganz zusammenbrechen. Bei den Razzien am Dienstag und Mittwoch seien unter anderem Computer, externe Festplatten, Karten-Lesegeräte und Mobiltelefone beschlagnahmt worden, meldet "Spiegel Online".

Streit mit Google

Hintergrund der Angriffe auf die Gema sind Streitereien um die Vergütung für Musikvideos auf der Internetplattform Youtube. Die Gema, eine Vertretung von Urheberrechtsinhabern wie Komponisten, Textautoren oder Musikverlegern, streitet seit langem mit Google um die Abgaben beim Abspielen von Musikvideos der Videoplattform YouTube. Deshalb sind viele Musikvideos für Nutzer aus Deutschland nicht verfügbar.(red/APA, 14.06. 2012)

quote:

Every call, every email, every text: UK unveils bill aimed at logging citizens’ Web activity

LONDON — British authorities on Thursday unveiled an ambitious plan to log details about every Web visit, email, phone call or text message in the U.K. — and in a sharply-worded editorial the nation’s top law enforcement official accused those worried about the surveillance program of being either criminals or conspiracy theorists.

The government insists it’s not after content. It promises not to read the body of emails or eavesdrop on phone calls without a warrant. But the surveillance proposed in the government’s 118-page draft bill would provide authorities a remarkably rich picture of their citizens’ day-to-day lives, tracking nearly everything they do online, over the phone, or even through the post.

All that data would be kept for up to a year — ready for browsing whenever anyone in authority wanted it. In some cases, the bill envisages monitoring the information in real time.

Home Office Secretary Theresa May said in an editorial published ahead of the bill’s unveiling that only evil-doers should be frightened.

“Our proposals are sensible and limited,” she wrote in The Sun, the country’s top-selling daily. “They will give the police and some other agencies access to data about online communications to tackle crime, exactly as they do now with mobile phone calls and texts. Unless you are a criminal, then you’ve nothing to worry about from this new law.”

Yet plenty of people were worried, including a senior lawmaker from May’s governing Conservative Party.

“This is a huge amount of information, very intrusive to collect on people,” David Davis, one of the proposal’s most outspoken critics, told BBC radio. “It’s not content, but it’s incredibly intrusive.”

Human rights defenders were aghast. Privacy group Big Brother Watch said the proposal risked turning Britain into a “nation of suspects.” Civil rights organization Liberty said the law would mean the “indiscriminate stockpiling of private data.”

Authorities and civil libertarians have been debating the plan for weeks, but Thursday marked the first time that the government itemized exactly what kinds of activity it wanted to track.

The list is long.

The bill would force providers — companies such as the BT Group PLC or Virgin Media Inc. — to log where emails, tweets, Skype calls and other messages were sent from, who was sending them, who they were sent to, and how large they were. Details of file transfers, phone calls, text messages and instant conversations, such as those carried over BlackBerry Messenger, would also be recorded.

The bill demands that providers collect IP addresses, details of customers’ electronic hardware, and subscriber information, including names, addresses, and payment information.

What May didn’t mention in her editorial — and the Home Office left off its press release — was that the government also is seeking to keep logs of citizens’ Internet history, giving officials access to the browsing habits of roughly 60 million people — including sensitive visits to medical, dating, or pornography websites.

Prefer to send mail the old-fashioned way? That would be monitored, too. Address details and other markers printed onto envelopes would be copied; parcel tracking information would be logged as well.

Officials say they need all that information to stay on top of a rapidly-changing technological landscape. Britain’s online child protection agency said Thursday it was missing out on a quarter of the traffic used by child pornography networks. In an editorial in the Times of London entitled “Trust me, I need to know about your emails,” Scotland Yard chief Bernard Hogan-Howe said that the collection of communications data played a role in 95 percent of serious organized crime operations.

The measure remains a draft bill, which means it’s subject to change before it is presented to Parliament.

In a nod to controversy surrounding the bill, the government has taken the unusual step of submitting it for comment to two parallel legislative bodies: A joint legislative committee composed of members of Britain’s House of Lords and the House of Commons as well as Parliament’s intelligence committee.

In a statement to fellow lawmakers, May struck a measured tone, saying she recognized “that these proposals raise important issues around personal privacy” but that the law would be balanced.

She was less measured in The Sun, where she dismissed worries that the bill would stomp on free expression as “ridiculous claims” dreamed up by “conspiracy theorists.”

“Without changing the law the only freedom we would protect is that of criminals, terrorists and pedophiles,” she said.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

quote:

FOIA Documents Show TOR Undernet Beyond the Reach of the Federal Investigators

Recently released documents detail the federal government's inability to pursue cybercriminals shrouded by the tricky anonymity tools used by the Silk Road marketplace and other darknet sites - tools which are funded in part by the federal government itself. In this particular case, a citizen reported stumbling upon a cache of child pornography while browsing the anonymous Tor network's hidden sites, which are viewable with specialized, but readily available, tools and the special .onion domain.

Documents, released through a Freedom of Information Act request by Jason Smathers on MuckRock, show that after being given details of the illicit material, investigators were stymied as to the origin of the pornography's host. In the investigators' own words, "there is not currently a way to trace the origin of the website. As such no other investigative leads exist."



Smathers' request was originally for all Justice Department records mentioning the Silk Road marketplace. The Justice Department forwarded the request on to the FBI for processing. In fact, the FBI had received an almost identical request, also filed by Smathers, and rejected it, claiming at the time that responsive records could not be found.

While he is currently appealing the FBI's initial response, 11 pages of responsive documents were withheld from the Justice Department's release. The FBI cited Exemption (b)7(d) in that case, which excludes from disclosure "records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes which could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source and information furnished by a confidential source."

The FBI and DEA had been directed to investigate Tor networks, and specifically the Silk Road marketplace where users can buy and sell legal and illegal goods anonymously using a combination of Tor and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, by Senator Charles Schumer who stated that the DEA was "aware of the site" and most likely investigating it.

A nearly identical request regarding Silk Road to the Drug Enforcement Agency was rejected as being too broad or burdensome to process, while the Secret Service claimed it had no responsive documents, as did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The DEA has touted infiltrating similar anonymous Tor marketplaces in the past.

Despite the illegal ends of these marketplaces, the technology was begun and still operates with more noble aims: It was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Lab, and later maintained by the Tor Project, a non-profit group supported financially at various times by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, various governmental and NGO entities, Google and the National Science Foundation. The technology has proven important in puncturing through Internet censorship and tracking attempts around the world.

quote:

Anonymous-like group threatens to 'take down' corrupt system

A SELF-STYLED group of local hacktivists has threatened to "take down the system" in Cyprus, and are demanding an end to corruption in political life and to media manipulation of the masses, according to a video posted on YouTube.

The clip, featuring the typical graphics and audio effects of the Anonymous videos with a person donning the Guy Fawkes mask from the 2005 movie "V for Vendetta," warns:

"Governments are elected as representatives of their people so as to make their voices heard. This is, as it seems, the last thing the governments of today do. This is unacceptable and those who commit this kind of fraud should be strictly punished. We will take down your corrupted system and guess what?! We have already started!"

Dated June 8, the video is signed by AvengersOn-, whose Facebook page describes them as "a group of hacktivists from the island of Cyprus which supports Anonymous and the ideology around them." It can be viewed here:

Anonymous Message To Cyprus | By AvengersOn- #opCyprus

.

The authors take issue with what they perceive as widespread corruption and nepotism in government: "Bribery, which can take the form of votes as well as money, is a big issue in Cyprus. It is disgusting and it only undermines your social and cultural life and values. Reconsider! The government of Cyprus is totally corrupted and we don't like corrupted systems.

"There are a lot of people who are bribed within the government and they therefore employ people who do not deserve to hold the position they are given due to the bribery, depriving the jobs from those who truly deserve them."

The clip goes on to blame the Mari explosion of last July on "your governments' mistakes and the negligence they show during their service."

It also reprimands both the government and the media in Cyprus for concealing the truth about ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), a multinational treaty which aims at the establishment of standards for intellectual property and rights’ enforcement.

"The people of Cyprus, the smashing majority of them," the video says, "does not even know what ACTA is and what its purpose is. Its purpose is to render downloading from the internet movies or music a criminal offence. Again, it is repeated that illegal downloading will now be a criminal offence within the states who signed it and people will even go to jail for doing so. Its sole purpose is to protect the music and movie industries which lead the world and, therefore, have no regard to the people's freedoms."

ACTA, which has generated a great deal of controversy around the world, is currently being debated at the European Parliament. Back in February the Cabinet here approved the agreement, but a bill has yet to be sent to parliament.

Activists and hacktivists alike are calling on Cypriot MPs to suppress any such legislation should it come to the House.

Meanwhile an online petition against ACTA in Cyprus has been launched (http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/stop-acta-in-cyprus.html).

twitter:

Anon_Fighter twitterde op zaterdag 16-06-2012 om 21:50:11 Who's ready for #OpRacism?! 10 mins until attack on http://www.americannaziparty.com #DDoS #NoRacism #Anonymous CHARGE UR LAZ0RS #ReTweet reageer retweet

twitter:

AnnieElch twitterde op zondag 17-06-2012 om 21:32:59 #Anonymous you have done well WhiteHonor.com disappeared from the internet an hour ago. When we say Expect Us, we mean it. #OpRacism reageer retweet

quote:

Retirement of Reckz0r

Hello world,

I am Reckz0r.

I was a former member of the hacktivist group known as Anonymous, UGNazi, and other paragons of hacking history.

I made a group known as 'SpexSecurity'.

I've realized that I am doing this shit for nothing.

I am officially..a whitehat.

I will use my intelligence for good.

I've done over 50 large hacks, and leaked many essential information, I am sorry if I harmed you, or affected your families.

This is my departure from the hacking scene.

I am no-longer a hacker, I'm a whitehat.

twitter.com/Reckz0r

quote:

'Hacker steelt 50 GB gegevens Visa- en MasterCard-klanten'

Een hacker beweert 50 gigabyte aan gegevens van Visa- en MasterCard-klanten gestolen te hebben. Hij publiceerde al een lijst van 113 pagina's waarop hij de kaartnummers heeft weggelaten 'om de onschuldigen te beschermen'.

Een woordvoerder van Visa Europa laat intussen weten dat Visa 'samen met partners, waaronder ook de politie, de bewering onderzoekt'. Bij MasterCard konden ze het nieuws nog niet bevestigen.

Volgens de veiligheidsexperts van het gespecialiseerde blog Belsec is die hacker geen bluffer. 'Hij heeft de reputatie te doen wat hij zegt. En als hij inderdaad voor 50 gigabyte aan gegevens heeft van Visa- en MasterCard-klanten, dan is dit waarschijnlijk de hack van het jaar, vergelijkbaar met die op Sony in 2011.'

Het is nu wachten tot wanneer de hacker, die zichzelf Reckz0r noemt, meer informatie geeft. 'Voorlopig is de afkomst van die gegevens niet duidelijk', aldus Belsec. 'Waarschijnlijk komen ze van een e-commercebedrijf of een betalingsverwerker. Uit de lijst die al gelekt is, blijkt dat de data niet geëncrypteerd zijn, net zoals dat het geval was bij de gegevens die van Dexia en AGO-Interim ontvreemd werden.'

Een andere hacker, Rex Mundi, die er vorige week mee dreigde vandaag de gegevens van 10.000 AGO-Interimklanten online te zetten als het uitzendbureau geen losgeld betaalde, heeft de deadline verschoven naar de nacht van dinsdag op woensdag. 'Wij zijn niet ingegaan op hun vraag, en zullen dat ook niet doen', aldus Dirk Clarysse, advocaat van AGO-Interim.

quote:

Google: overheden willen steeds meer censureren

Google krijgt steeds meer verzoeken van overheden wereldwijd om filmpjes van YouTube te halen die met politiek te maken hebben. Dat blijkt uit het laatste Transparency Report van Google met onder meer de verzoeken van internationale autoriteiten om materiaal te verwijderen of te overhandigen. Het aantal verzoeken die te maken hebben met kritiek op de lokale politieke is in 2011 toegenomen.

Google verzamelt deze informatie elk half jaar sinds 2010 en elke keer nemen de verzoeken toe. "Dat is niet alleen zorgwekkend vanwege de vrijheid van meningsuiting, maar ook omdat die verzoeken soms uit landen komen waarvan je het niet verwacht. Westerse landen die niet bekendstaan om censuur." Het gaat dan onder meer om Spanje en Polen.

Terrorisme
Verder hebben ze in de tweede helft van vorig jaar zo'n 640 filmpjes van YouTube gehaald omdat die terrorisme zouden promoten. Dat deden ze na klachten van de Britse politiebond. Ook verwijderden ze vijf accounts.

Het bedrijf voldeed aan meer verzoeken: zo verwijderden ze meer dan 100 filmpjes uit Thailand die beledigend zouden zijn voor de monarchie en een video met haatzaaiende inhoud uit Turkije. Google zegt dat ze aan 68 procent van de verzoeken hebben voldaan.

Wc
Maar Google haalde dus niet alles weg. Een Canadees die over z'n paspoort plast en hem vervolgens de wc spoelt, mag op YouTube blijven staan. Het Canadese paspoortbureau had om verwijdering gevraagd. We hadden je graag de video willen laten zien, maar Google zegt dat het links naar video's die ze niet verwijderd hebben niet kunnen delen, om de privacy te beschermen van de uploaders. "Immers, wij zouden in dat geval onze gebruikers ongevraagd in het midden van een publieke discussie plaatsen. Niet iedere gebruiker wil dat wij via de media communiceren dat de overheid van het land waarin zij leven, ons gevraagd heeft hun video te verwijderen", aldus Google.

Hier zie je de verzoeken per land. Nederland deed minder dan 10 verzoeken om verwijdering, maar vroeg 37 keer om gebruikersgegevens.

quote:

'Operation Payback' accused says he has no regrets

A member of Anonymous, the group that launched a cyber-attack on some of America's biggest corporations, has defended the action saying: "I don't regret anything that I've done. I would do it all again."

Called Operation Payback, the cyber-assault was a denial of service attack intended to avenge the campaign against the WikiLeaks website and the pursuit of its founder Julian Assange.

An interview with one of the men who is alleged to have organised Operation Payback is being aired on the ABC's Four Corners program tonight.

Four Corners interviewed the man in Washington early last year as it pieced together the story of Private Bradley Manning and his alleged theft of US state secrets.

At that stage the man was concerned the interview, if it was shown, could allow US authorities to track him and charge him.

In July last year, the man was arrested and subsequently charged, together with other hacktivists in the United States and Europe. Now the interview is being shown tonight for the first time.

The man admitted to Four Corners that he had mixed thoughts about giving an interview, saying he was "actually kind of terrified" to be filmed in Washington, but he added, "If we have been identified and they decide to take action against us, they're going to attempt to silence us and the story might not even get out."

The story tells how in December 2010, nearly 8,000 hackers launched a denial of service attack on some of America's biggest corporations including Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, which were refusing to process donations to WikiLeaks.

The operation was organised on AnonOps, a focal meeting point for the worldwide group Anonymous. The AnonOps member interviewed for tonight's program says that Operation Payback was carried out in support of WikiLeaks: "They were discussing various options and the suggestion came up that since they cut off the funding, why don't we cut off theirs and it was born out of that."

The charges against those alleged to have organised Operation Payback carry possible fines of $US1 million, and 15-year jail terms.

Wikileaks saga

US soldier Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked more than 250,000 US State Department diplomatic cables and more than 500,000 US Army logs to WikiLeaks. Private Manning faces a court martial later this year on 22 charges, one of which - "aiding the enemy" - is a capital offence. However, military prosecutors have indicated that they will not be seeking the death penalty if Private Manning is convicted.

As Julian Assange fights to prevent his own extradition to Sweden to face questioning on allegations of sexual assault, speculation is mounting that a Grand Jury sitting in secret in Washington has already prepared a sealed indictment, which would allow American officials to seek his onward extradition to the United States.

Australia's Federal Government has refused to confirm this. In Question Time on May 31, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said: "At this stage we do not have any advice from the United States that there is an indictment against Mr Assange or that the United States has decided to seek his extradition."

But evidence that an indictment may have been issued comes from confidential emails hacked into last December, allegedly by members of Anonymous, and published by WikiLeaks. The emails were written by staff at the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor, who have close ties with the US administration.

One internal email, written by Stratfor's vice president of intelligence, Fred Burton, says: "Not for pub – We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect."

Until now the company has refused to say whether this email is genuine. Stratfor chief executive George Friedman says on the company website: "Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies. Some may be authentic. We will not validate either, nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimised twice by submitting to questions about them."

But following an approach from Four Corners, Stratfor has told the ABC: "We have made the practice not to comment on stolen emails. However, given the extensive coverage of this email, we will make an exception here. The email is authentic. It represented information from a source who asked that it not be published.

"However, in our further investigation we determined the source to be unreliable and could get no further information on the subject. At this time, there are many unsubstantiated claims floating around on this subject. We therefore never published anything on it. We have no special insight on an indictment nor ever claimed to have. This email represents one of many passed around internally each day on many subjects. It was dismissed by us as unreliable information."

quote:

FBI wants to ban new Internet protocol

With the recent unveiling of the newest Internet protocol system, trillions upon trillions of devices are being paved access to the Internet for the unforeseeable future. And right on cue, the FBI is already up in arms over IPv6.

With computing devices around the globe already switching from the current Internet protocol system, IPv4, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation is predictably picking a fight with the biggest names in cyberspace to ensure that the FBI and other agencies across North America will be able to inch themselves into the personal Web surfing habits of citizens across the world. Now requests from the FBI to ready a system to easily snoop through Internet traffic has proponents of IPv6 and industry reps alike scrambling to make sense of the feds’ demands.

Under the original and quickly antiquating Internet protocol system, IPv4, only 4.3 billion computers, modems, smart phones and other wired devices can send and receive information through cyberspace. When the latest rollover to IPv6 is complete, however, 340 undecillion addresses (that’s a lot) will be able to be assigned. On the plus side, trillions of more devices will able to be delivered information over the Internet. The FBI, however, wants to make sure that they can still catch cyber criminals and suggest that they might have to insist that the private sector aids them in their future endeavors.

According to report filed this week by Cnet’s Declan McCullagh, the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Royal Canadian Mounted Police officials have jointly asked Internet representatives that traceability features be enabled with IPv6 that will allow federal agents to identify suspected cybercriminals with the same kind of ease evident with IPv4. Given that the government is already having trouble trying to find alleged cyberterrorists over the Internet as is, though, they might seriously have their work cut out for them. That’s where McCullagh reports, “The FBI has even suggested that a new law may be necessary if the private sector doesn't do enough voluntarily.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an official with the FBI clues Cnet in on just why the agency is against the next-generation Internet protocol:

“An issue may also arise around the amount of registration information that is maintained by providers and the amount of historical logging that exists. Today there are complete registries of what IPv4 addresses are ‘owned’ by an operator. Depending on how the IPv6 system is rolled out, that registry may or may not be sufficient for law enforcement to identify what device is accessing the Internet.”

If hunting for cybercriminals is comparable to searching for a needle in a haystack under IPv4, with IPv6 it will be on par with scouring the stratosphere for a single molecule of oxygen.

John Curran of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) tells Cnet, "We're looking at a problem that's about to occur," and adds that, “as service providers start to roll out V6,” that’s exactly what they’ll receive. The answer, according to the FBI, might be a whole new set of legislation that will let them scour cyberspace for the answers for federal inquiries into alleged Internet crimes.

"We're hoping through all of this you can come up with some self-regulatory method in which you can do it," FBI supervisory special agent Bobby Flaim said at an ARIN meeting earlier this year, reports Cnet . "Because otherwise, there will be other things that people are going to consider."

quote:

Leaked Documents Show the U.N.'s Internet Power Grab...

With very low visibility, a small agency in the United Nations - the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) - might be about to quietly try and regulate the entire Internet.

The ITU has planned a meeting this upcoming December where each of the 193 member nations will vote on various proposed Internet regulations. What's striking is that the details of the proposals have been kept secret, so it was impossible to know what authoritarian governments were plotting or how the U.S. was responding.

Until now. A pair of researchers from George Mason University created a website called WCITLeaks.org in the hopes that someone with access to the secretive proposals would leak them and make them available to the public. Last Friday, that's exactly what happened. Someone leaked the 212-page planning document being used by governments to prepare for the December conference. You can read it yourself here.

What it shows is breathtaking. First, China is proposing "to give countries authority over the information and communication infrastructure within their state" and require that online companies "operating in their territory" use the Internet "in a rational way"- in short, to legitimize full government control.

Second, several proposals would give the U.N. power to regulate online content for the first time, under the guise of protecting against computer malware or spam.

Third, Russia and some Arab countries are proposing to be able to inspect private communications such as email.

Fourth, Iran and Russia are proposing new rules to measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic, as with international phone calls - essentially creating national toll booths for data.

Fifth, there is a proposal that would give the U.N. control over the Internet's Domain Name System, replacing ICANN which operates under a contract from the U.S. Commerce Department.

Take all of this in its totality and what we see are proposals that would A) grant power and authority over the very functioning of the Internet to the United Nations, and B) grant authoritarian governments the ability to censor, monitor, and more strictly control both the content of the Web itself and people's behavior on it. What's at stake is nothing less than a system based on open flows of information, as opposed to an "information world order" based on government controls.

L. Gordon Crovitz from the Wall Street Journal is right in his assessment: "Authoritarian regimes are busy lobbying a majority of the U.N. members to vote their way. The leaked documents disclose a U.S. side that has hardly begun to fight back. That's no way to win this war."

Everyone better wake up. Soon.

quote:

Anonymous arrested? Six nabbed in Quebec cyber attacks

MONTREAL - Six people have been arrested amid a rash of cyber-attacks launched by the activist group Anonymous against Quebec government websites.

The arrests were made in different Quebec cities in an operation that involved five police forces — the RCMP, the Surete du Quebec, and three municipal forces.

Those arrested faced a variety of charges Tuesday, including mischief, conspiracy, and unlawful use of a computer. Three of them were minors. The arrests took place in Rimouski, Sherbrooke, Forestville, Montreal and Longueuil, Que.

Police offered no other clues about the case, other than to say the attacks were on "public" and "parapublic" websites. They said they did not want to jeopardize their ongoing case by sharing details, such as whether those arrested operated under the "Anonymous" name.

Cyber-activists have, under the group name "Anonymous," mounted numerous campaigns in different countries and on occasion defaced websites of organizations they oppose. A recent target has been the Quebec government because of its anti-protest law.

Self-described Anonymous activists have recently hacked into a variety of websites linked to the Quebec government — including the province's education and public-safety departments, as well as that of the provincial Liberal party.

But police Tuesday did not specifically link the arrests to Anonymous. They also did not specify what websites those arrested were accused of attacking.

"Police authorities want to indicate that they take this kind of crime very seriously," the police said in a statement. "They will use every means at their disposition to find the authors. These people expose themselves to criminal charges, regardless of whatever intention prompted their action."

Last month, hackers managed to disable more than a dozen websites, including the sites of the Education Department, the Quebec Liberal party and the Montreal police force.

The circle then appeared to broaden. In addition to Formula One car-race spectators having their information published online, footage was released from an exclusive birthday party held for a member of the powerful Desmarais family.

People claiming to operate under the name "Anonymous" sent an ominously worded email to more than 100 people who bought tickets to the Formula One Grand Prix weekend in Montreal.

"If you intend to use a car, know that your road may be barricaded," said a document described as a ‘Notice to Grand Prix Visitors.’

"If you want to stay in a hotel, know that we may enter it. If you seek to withdraw money from a bank, know that the shattering glass may sting. If you plan on watching a race, know that your view may be obscured, not by exhaust fumes but by the smoke of the fires we set. Know that the evacuation order may not come fast enough."

There were protests at a number of sites related to the June 7-10 Grand Prix, and attempts to paralyze some of them, but police acted pre-emptively. Over that weekend, they either created barriers blocking access to certain public places, or detained people suspected of planning to disrupt events.

The police reaction brought a counter-reaction from protesters and their supporters: that law enforcement violated fundamental freedoms, such as the right to free mobility and expression, by making arbitrary detentions in what amounted to "political profiling."

quote:

ISP's moeten nieuwste adres Pirate Bay blokkeren

Anderhalve week nadat bekend werd dat The Pirate Bay het IP-adres 194.71.107.81 is gaan gebruiken, moeten de providers het gaan blokkeren, op last van de rechter. Wederom via een ex parte verbod.

Stichting BREIN neemt de handschoen van The Pirate Bay op en speelt het kat-en-muisspel om de blokkade van de torrentsite mee. Voor de tweede maal in 3 weken krijgt de piraterijbestrijder een ex parte bevel toegewezen die verordonneert dat KPN, UPC, Tele2 en T-Mobile het IP-adres 194.71.107.81 moeten blokkeren. De blokkade moet binnen 10 werkdagen effectief zijn.

Dit adres werd nog geen twee weken geleden in gebruik genomen door The Pirate Bay, als antwoord op een eerdere ex parte blokkade van 194.71.107.80. Dat adres werd geactiveerd om het vonnis van 10 mei te omzeilen, omdat toen de rechter bepaalde dat de blokkadelijst niet door BREIN zelf mag worden uitgebreid.

Te kwader trouw

"Hoewel duidelijk is dat The Pirate Bay te kwader trouw adreswijzigingen invoert, blijven de ISP's weigeren de extra adressen vrijwillig te blokkeren", aldus de stichting. Via een ex parte verbod is de uitbreiding van de blokkadelijst alsnog afgedwongen. Een ex parte is een spoedprocedure, waarbij de rechter beslist zonder dat de gedaagde partij zich kan verdedigen.

Voor Ziggo en XS4ALL hoeft BREIN niet naar de rechter te stappen. Want in het vonnis van januari bepaalde de rechtbank BREIN de blokkadelijst voor deze twee isp's wel mag uitbreiden.

Blok van 256 IP-adressen

Reservella, het schimmige postbusbedrijfje achter The Pirate Bay, beschikt over een blok van 256 IP-adressen, waarmee het BREIN provoceert. "Nu we weten dat het BREIN ontstemt gaan we natuurlijk meer IP's toevoegen. Elke keer dat zij een verbod toegewezen krijgen, voegen we een nieuwe toe, voor het komende jaar of zo."

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Telefoontaps opgeleukt

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In aanvulling op de vingerafdrukteller en CIOT-teller heb ik weer eens een nieuwe privacybewustwordingstool ontwikkeld: de Tapradar.

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U.S., Israel developed Flame computer virus to slow Iranian nuclear efforts, officials say

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The United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected critical intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage attacks aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort.

The massive piece of malware was designed to secretly map Iran’s computer networks and monitor the computers of Iranian officials, sending back a steady stream of intelligence used to enable an ongoing cyberwarfare campaign, according to the officials.

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The emerging details about Flame provide new clues about what is believed to be the first sustained campaign of cyber-sabotage against an adversary of the United States.

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Online innovation threatened by governments, Clinton adviser warns

State department's Alec Ross tells London conference that governments will 'lash back' in bid to regain internet control

Governments that attempt to regain control of the internet pose the greatest threat to innovation online, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton has warned.

Alec Ross, an adviser on innovation in the US state department, told a conference in London on Wednesday that governments across the globe will soon begin "lashing back" in a bid to regain control of cyberspace.

"The biggest threat to your ability to innovate actually comes from government, and I say that from Hillary Clinton's office in the state department," he told the Le Web London conference.

"What I think is going to take place – and that is of marginal awareness to the digerati right now – is I think you all need to fear governments seeking to control our networks, seeking to take away your internet freedom."

Ross said he was not just referring to autocratic regimes in the Middle East, but included the US government in his remarks.

He highlighted the US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), which attracted fierce criticism from open internet groups, as one example where the balance of power has shifted from government to organised groups online.

"This is why what was looking like it was going to become a piece of law flopped like that and is now gone," he told the conference for internet startups.

His comments reflect a growing mood of concern among internet advocacy groups. Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, told the Guardian in April that the open internet was facing its greatest threat ever from a combination of government interference and control by private companies.

Ross said seeking to regain control of the internet through legislation or surveillance was pointless.

His pointed remarks are likely to be read with interest in Theresa May's Home Office, which is attempting to push through a bill that will allow authorities to track Britons' Facebook, Twitter, email and internet use for the first time.

Ross said: "What you an all anticipate I believe is that as movement making accelerates, as innovation increasingly makes use of connectivity technologies, as countries pour massive amounts of money into things like surveillance and still can't control the information environment, as pieces of legislation with massive corporate backing get shot in the head because the citizens set up networks, one of the things you can expect is a lashing back from government and it's something you should always be aware of."

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Indian ISPs get court relief, Torrent Sites Unblocked

After weeks of confusion and frustration with blocked websites, the mess finally looks to be clearing. Indians are all heaving a sigh of relief because their ISPs have unblocked the access to the file-sharing, video-streaming BitTorrent sites that include The Pirate Bay, Torrentz.eu, Vimeo among others.

It was in news last month that following Reliance, Airtel had also blocked torrent services and video sites after they received the ‘John Doe’ court order. Thousands of users from various states of India found the access to torrents blocked.

India's Medianama is reporting today that the Madras High Court recently limited a badly drafted April ruling on the subject. The court said in its updated ruling, according to Medianama, which obtained a copy of it, that "the interim injunction is granted only in respect of a particular URL where the infringing movie is kept and not in respect of the entire website. Further, the applicant is directed to inform about the particulars of URL where the interim movie is kept within 48 hours."

MediaNama reports that the Madras High Court, on an appeal filed by a conglomerate of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), has passed an order saying that entire websites cannot be blocked on the basis of "John Doe" orders.

Starting with the movie Singham, for which Reliance Entertainment had taken a John Doe order last year, movie studios have been consistently getting John Doe orders blocking access to file sharing, video sharing and torrenting websites.

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The Pirate Bay says BT block already breached

BT has joined other UK internet service providers (ISPs) in blocking access to The Pirate Bay, a ban the group says users have already circumvented.

TalkTalk, Sky, Virgin, O2 and Everything Everywhere have already cut off access to the site, which hosts links to pirated music and video.

A High Court ruling in April ordered ISPs to prevent users accessing the site.

BT customers attempting access receive the message: "Error - site blocked".

Boosted traffic

BT has also cut off access to other addresses, known as proxy sites, made available by The Pirate Bay.

But a representative of the UK Pirate Party - a political group that opposes the bans - told BBC News more proxy sites had been made available "within minutes".

About 10% of traffic to its proxy sites now seemed to be coming from BT customers, 30% from VirginMedia customers, 15% via Sky, 6% via TalkTalk and 3% via O2, he said.

BT declined to comment on reports the block had been circumvented.

The Pirate Party spokesman said public interest in the service following the ban had also boosted traffic to the party's website.

Democratic process

"This increased traffic isn't just about The Pirate Bay; it seems that the proxy has sparked an interest in the Pirate Party itself, and we are seeing a significant uptick in membership and people navigating the rest of the site," he said.

"The volume of emails and phone calls into the party has also increased markedly."

The spokesman added: "Blocks on Pirate Bay have effectively short-circuited the democratic process.

"Our internet policy is not being run by our elected representatives, it is being dictated by the music industry."

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Fifth EU Committee Recommends Rejection Of ACTA By European Parliament

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Another major milestone has been achieved in the push to get ACTA rejected by the EU: a fifth parliamentary committee has recommended that the European Parliament should refuse to ratify it when it is put to the vote on July 4th, effectively killing it in Europe. The other committees on legal affairs, civil liberties, industry and international development recommended rejection a few weeks ago, but today's vote by the international trade committee (INTA) was seen as the most important.

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Gaining the support of five EU committees out of five is an extraordinary achievement -- six months ago, most commentators expected ACTA to sail through the European ratification process without much trouble. European politicians themselves have said that this change of heart is entirely due to the massive wave of protests against ACTA, both on the streets and in the form of thousands of emails and phone calls.

Although the battle is not over yet, it will be hugely significant if such citizen action does succeed in stopping ACTA, since it would send a message to politicians that the views of the public cannot be ignored when it comes to such major policy decisions about the Internet. In this respect, it would complement the similar revolt over SOPA and PIPA in the US -- something that made the current string of European victories against ACTA possible.

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Anonymous Operation Ethiopia

Friday - June 22, 2012 9:45 PM ET USA

To government of Ethiopia --

For far too long you have worked effortlessly to try to stifle the voices of your own people and infringe on their basic human rights. One of the last and most resourceful voices the citizens have left in Ethiopia was the internet, even with the heavy amount of censorship the government employs. Until Now…….

The government of Ethiopia recently passed a law outlawing the use of anonymity and VOIP services such as TOR and Skype. Usage of either one of these services can now result in a 15 year prison sentence. Simply providing these services to an individual can land you in prison for up to 8 years.

Anonymous will no longer stand by and watch the people of Ethiopia lose their basic right to communicate openly and freely on the Internet or their right to use anonymity services to protect themselves from criminals or anti freedom of speech crusaders.

Ethiopia has consistently dropped in it’s ranking as a free country in recent years according to the Democracy Index report released every year. This is a trend the government in Ethiopia seems intent on continuing. The time has come for the world to fight back.

Regardless of where you live in the world, situations like these should be a concern for anyone who believes in a free and open Internet. This is a call to all fellow anons and concerned citizens across the globe, stand up and fight for and with the people of Ethiopia.

OPERATION ETHIOPIA ENGAGED. Come join us on irc at anonops in #opethiopia, email us at opethiopia@hushmail.com, and follow us on twitter @opethiopia_

We Are Anonymous
We Are Legion
We Do Not Forgive
We Do Not Forget
Ethiopia, Did You Really Not Expect Us?

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Japan Passes Jail-for-Downloaders Anti-Piracy Law

Japan’s legislature has approved a bill revising the nation’s copyright law to add criminal penalties for downloading copyrighted material or backing up content from a DVD. The penalties will come into effect in October.

The Upper House of the Japanese Diet approved the bill by a vote of 221-12, less than a week after the measure cleared the lower house with almost no opposition. Violators risk up to two years in prison or fines up to two million yen (about $25,000).

Opponents of the bill worry it will lead to unnecessary prosecutions because of the way it is written. To face charges, a person must be aware that the material is illegal to download.

“We shouldn’t risk making the general public — including youths — the subject of criminal investigations,” said Upper House member Yuko Mori, as quoted in the Japan Times.

Japanese attorney Toshimitsu Dan told IT Media that even watching a YouTube video could be grounds for arrest “if the viewer is aware that downloading [such material] is illegal.”

Unauthorized uploading and downloading of copyrighted material such as music, movies and video games have been illegal in Japan for years, but until now only uploaders were subject to criminal penalties: up to 10 years in prison or fines as much as 10 million yen ($125,000), according to the Times.

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Colombian hackers attack govt, political website to protest justice reform

Hacker collective Anonymous announced the shut-down of the Justice Ministry website on Friday evening. The website was back online Saturday morning.

The website of Cambio Radical, the political party of Interior Minister German Vargas Lleras, was hacked later Friday evening and was still showing a message saying " You have been hacked" on Saturday morning.

Anonymous said on its facebook page the Ministry's website was shut down to protest "impunity" granted to corrupt politicians by a justice reform that had been approved by Congress but was sent back to the legislative branch by President Juan Manuel Santos on Thursday because of its unconstitutionality and inconsistencies that “do not favor justice and transparency.”

Following Santos' decision to not ratify the constitutional reform, Justice Minister Juan Carlos Esguerra -- who had been defending the bill on behalf of the President -- resigned.

The constitutional reform of the judicial branch had widely been critized. The country's high courts boycotted talks leading up to the approval of the bill, claiming the reform would only increase the level of impunity in cases against politicians and public officials. Opposition party Polo Democratico called the reform "a deadly kick for the constitution."

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The Synthetic Marijuana Epidemic

Citizens of the World,

Since the middle of the 20th Century we have been deprived of access to legal cannabis, leading to many noticeable negative consequences including the increasing cases of cancer, the increase in incarcerated citizens, and the increased cost of healthcare. One of the less publicized aspects of marijuana prohibition though, is the fact that it has in no way lowered the demand by society for what this plant provides: chemical comfort.

While marijuana remains illegal, it also remains one of the least dangerous substances know to humankind. There is not a single recorded death from it in all of history, due to the fact that it is physically impossible to overdose on. However, man-made “alternatives”, although legal, cannot be said to be as safe at all.

Synthetic marijuana is sometimes sold as “legal bud” and other times under the guise of household items such as incense and bath salts. Many of these products, which go by flashy names like K2 and Spice, are labelled Not For Human Consumption, but are sold solely for that purpose anyway. These are substances are designed to create an effect similar to smoking weed, and are put out on the legal market without regulation, nor certification of safety. These substances have led to many health problems, including heart attacks and the tragic “zombification” of users, as was seen in Miami this past Memorial Day. Unfortunately, because they are legal while natural marijuana is not, they are very accessible. They can even be ordered over the internet, and are advertised for in a very misleading manner.

People who use synthetic marijuana are citizens that wish to be law-abiding, who do not deserve a detriment upon their health for doing so. The fact of the matter is that this situation shouldn’t exist at all, we should not have individuals faced with the decision of legal/harmful vs illegal/safe. It is an unfair and immoral choice to force on consumers, that completely undermines the purpose of the free market.

During Alcohol Prohibition, there existed an atmosphere conducive to crime and a general disregard for the authority of law, which exists again today. Marijuana Prohibition is why the Drug Cartels are selling a safer product than the one available in the store. Cannabis needs to be legalized, simply as a matter of public health.

- Anonijuana

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Richard O'Dwyer: living with the threat of extradition

Student who set up website posting links to TV and film content fears being used as a guinea pig by Hollywood giants

Richard O'Dwyer, a 22-year-old Sheffield undergraduate studying multimedia, rose uncharacteristically early for a student on 29 November 2010, in preparation for a lecture later that morning. So the knock on the door of his small hall of residence room before 7am didn't wake him – but he was far from prepared for what would come next.

On the other side of the door waited two officers from the City of London police, accompanied by two leather-jacketed men from the US Immigration and Customs Executive (ICE).

O'Dwyer's next two years were about to take a dramatic turn for the worse. The call would place him at the heart of the titanic running battle between the Hollywood giants – struggling to keep their beleaguered business model intact in the online era – and a new digital generation unwilling to play by the old rules.

What brought the ICE agents to O'Dwyer's door was his role in setting up a small website, TVshack.net, linking to sites where people could watch US TV and movies online. To prosecutors of New York, this made him a worthwhile target in the battle against copyright infringement.

Although several recent extradition cases to the US have attracted controversy, in none does the gap between the alleged crime and the punishment sought by US prosecutors yawn as wide. Many have been angered by the US's eight-year effort to extradite Asperger's sufferer Gary Mackinnon for allegedly hacking into Pentagon computers; O'Dwyer faces extradition and a potential sentence of up to 10 years simply for letting people in the UK find somewhere to watch Iron Man 2 before its release.

In his first big interview, O'Dwyer tells how he became the unlikely poster boy of the 21st century's culture war. "I was up early, I don't know why," he recalls. "Then policemen turned up with two American men, wearing matching Top Gun jackets.

"I was half waking-up, half-confused. When they started talking I couldn't hear what they were saying, because I was too tired, but it was something about TVShack. So I was like 'okay … bugger'."

O'Dwyer, a quiet, clean-shaven man who looks younger than his 24 years, had set up the site in 2007, at 19, at the suggestion of a friend. It was a "human-powered search engine" for people looking for places to watch films, TV, and documentaries online.

Users could post links to video content – on YouTube, the now-defunct Google Video, MegaVideo or elsewhere – that contained full TV programmes or films. O'Dwyer's site would check the link worked and add it to its search engine. The site quickly became a specialised search engine for TV and film content, plus a forum for people to discuss and review the films.

"I told a few friends, and maybe they told a few friends, and it sort of spiralled from there, and shot up fairly quickly, popularity-wise."

As the site grew, eventually reaching an audience of around 300,000 people a month, so did O'Dwyer's workload – and website hosting bills. "It's hard to maintain, with so many people [using it], I had to put adverts on to pay for the webhosting to get more servers to cope.

"Lots of advertisers seemed to email the contact address on the website. I just basically picked one out of the hat and put them on the website. And obviously, when traffic went up, so did the revenue. That's the way websites work."

Over the three years it ran, according to court documents, the site's growing audience generated more than £140,000 in advertising revenue. O'Dwyer hasn't denied the figure, but says a lot of it went on running the site. The rest didn't make for a lavish lifestyle: takeaways, pub rounds, electronics and cinema tickets, saw it dwindle away, he claims.

"I frittered it away – I haven't really got anything. I bought a computer, a few other things," he says. "[I] spent it like buying other people their things when we were at an event or something. Say at the cinema, I'd just buy everyone's cinema tickets."

O'Dwyer – perhaps ironically given his circumstances – is a cinema buff. With revenues from his site, he made four visits a week, and still visits twice a week: "it's much better to see a film in the cinema."

However, the US authorities became concerned about a site linking to content often still within copyright. To sell a counterfeit CD or DVD of a copyrighted work is an offence, as is deliberately uploading such a work to the internet.

American customs officials, after campaigning from industry bodies, contended that linking to such items on other sites (as search engines and others automatically do) would also be covered by such laws.

This is a contentious interpretation of the law, even in the US, where linking has in some court cases been regarded as protected speech under the first amendment. Part of the reason for the huge backlash against proposed copyright laws, the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect [Intellectual Property] Act (Pipa) was that this provision would come under attack.

O'Dwyer says he hadn't really considered the legality of his site – he didn't know much about copyright, and knew he was only posting users' links to material hosted elsewhere – but did comply with legal notices from publishers asking him to remove links, on the few occasions he received them.

ICE targeted TVShack.net in June 2010 by taking his web address, known as a domain, and replacing it with a large warning against copyright infringement.

"One day my domain just disappeared. You'd just receive a massive warning message from ICE in America. We fixed that shortly afterwards by registering another domain name. Nothing ever was emailed to me, or letters. The priority was getting it back up."

The site was quickly back up and running at a new address, tvshack.cc. All ran smoothly until the knock on the door in November 2010.

After a quick search of his room, resulting in the seizure of his computer equipment and paperwork relating to the site, O'Dwyer was taken by the City of London police to his local police station.

"I had to direct them there because they didn't know, they were from London. They said I was the most polite person they'd arrested – and for that they gifted me no handcuffs."

O'Dwyer was taken for interview. Hoping to get the process over quickly, he refused a lawyer.

"I didn't have a solicitor with me, because they told me it'd take two hours to get one. I wanted to make it to my uni lecture, so I thought I'd just get it over with. Turns out the solicitor is next door to the police station."

O'Dwyer had a 45-minute interview with the officers – missing his lecture – and was bailed for around six months to appear at a London police station. He texted his mother, Julia, to tell her he'd be heading to the family home in Bolsover, Derbyshire that evening. "Weird day," he concludes, laconically.

Unknown to O'Dwyer, his mother had been having a similar day: at 7am, a team of five police officers had turned up at her home, which was half-demolished inside owing to renovation work, and searched it for his possessions. She'd then been taken to her local police station and interviewed about her son's activities.

"It was a bit of a shock really. They came in, said they wanted to talk about Richard and his website. I knew he'd got it, I didn't know an awful lot about it. They wanted to look in Richard's bedroom. There was no stairs, we had a ladder, I said you'll have to go up there," says Ms O'Dwyer.

After taking the family computer, and documents. She did a recorded interview with police but, unlike her son, had a lawyer.

"I've seen the telly, you see. I said to them 'do I need a lawyer?', and they said 'we're not allowed to tell you that' and I said 'well, maybe I'd better have one then'."

Reunited at the end of the day, they made sure TVShack.net was taken down, PayPal accounts closed, and other email accounts shut. The site was finished.

"We just thought maybe he was going to get charged with a copyright offence," says Ms O'Dwyer. "He was a bit upset, and I said 'don't worry, we'll get a lawyer and we'll sort it out'."

It was not so simple. When O'Dwyer reported to the London police station in May 2011, he was told that the UK case against him wouldn't be pursued – but there was a sting in the tail.

"So we had a momentary sigh of relief, says Ms O'Dwyer. "Then – I'm not kidding – the next sentence is 'oh, we've got an extradition warrant for you from America instead, so you must go immediately to the court', and then the handcuffs were on, he was taken away."

O'Dwyer was presented with two US charges: criminal infringement of copyright, and conspiracy to commit criminal infringement of copyright. Each carries a maximum five-year prison sentence.Ms O'Dwyer recalls the wait in the extradition court.

"I had to sit in the courtroom, waiting for Richard's turn, and see all these people being processed by the judge for extradition to Europe. And I just thought 'Crikey! This is going to be Richard soon.' It was the most terrifying day so far."

As O'Dwyer's case wasn't to be heard that day, his hearing was simply for bail, which he says the US prosecutor opposed. Bail was agreed – with him suggesting terms to the non-technical solicitors and judge. But as O'Dwyer didn't have his passport or the £3,000 bail bond by 5pm, he spent the evening in Wandsworth prison.

"Being in prison for setting up a website was something myself, all the other inmates I talked to, and the policemen, were confused with," says O'Dwyer. "It's not something you'd expect, would you?"

When his bail was cleared the following day, the legal challenge he faced was considerably bigger than he had expected.

His extradition hearings are based solely on proving he has a case to answer in the US, that his actions, if proven, would be a crime in both countries, and other technical points. Challenging the details of the case could only be done in US courts – not in the UK. O'Dwyer finds himself baffled that it's the US that's prosecuting him: "The evidence is here, I'm here, I've never been to America since I was about 10," he says.

"There's literally no reason I can think of why it has to be heard in America … at no point was the site ever in America.

"I think they're trying to use my website as a sort of guinea pig to try to scare everyone else making linking websites."

In an attempt to give her son a relatively normal life as his case progresses, and to keep him in the UK, Ms O'Dwyer – a community nurse working with terminally-ill children – has become a campaigner against the extradition of her son and others to the US.

Having previously barely used the internet, and having never heard of Twitter or other social networking, she has raised more than 20,000 signatures on a petition for O'Dwyer, and spends a lot of her day online, starting before work and often going until 1am or later.

"I just went straight home after we got Richard the next day and started looking at the internet to find out about extradition. That was the first thing. I was just on it, full on, looking at copyright law, looking at extradition, trying to find a good barrister," she says.

"I don't think I started any campaigning until June or July. People helped me – I thought 'what do you do with Twitter?' – but people helped me and I got going."

It's an effort not lost on her son, who has continued his course in multimedia studies at Sheffield Hallam university against the background of his extradition hearings. He is working with Sheffield consultancy Rocca Creative as a year in industry.

"I don't let their extradition warrant ruin my life. Otherwise you'd fail, just sit in your room all day moaning. They'd be winning if I let it do that.

"[Julia O'Dwyer] seems to be doing it all day, I think. Non-stop. She does a lot of the actual work on things. And if she didn't … I think I'd probably be there by now. I'm very grateful for her doing that."

So far, their efforts have proved unsuccessful. Despite gaining the support of senior politicians including Liberal Democrat president Tim Farron and home affairs select committee chief Keith Vaz, O'Dwyer's extradition was approved in court, and by home secretary Theresa May, who must clear all UK/US extraditions. His appeal efforts are currently centred on a high court hearing, due later this year.

As his case continues, O'Dwyer is trying to keep his focus on his studies, and what he'd like to do afterwards. Described as an "enterprising young man" by Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher and Walton, one of the MPs who have spoken in support of his case, O'Dwyer wants to continue developing websites – despite the TVShack experience.

"I like doing web development, and hope to keep making various websites. It'd be good to join a big web company I think, just for the experience, I like Twitter, Facebook. I did apply to Google for a placement once, too," he says. "But eventually I'd like to start my own project. New startup companies keep coming up all the time, don't they?"

But until his battle through the UK courts – and with the home secretary – is over, any career plans O'Dwyer wants to make for the next decade come with a hefty degree of uncertainty.

And if O'Dwyer were to be extradited, the people behind other sites which link to TV shows and films – which include Google, Bing, Reddit and many of the other sites at the heart of the web – may have their own reasons to fear for the future.

twitter:

parmy twitterde op maandag 25-06-2012 om 12:46:30 Seeing a mixture of guilty and not guilty pleas from alleged LulzSec hackers at their plea hearing in London. #Anonymous #LulzSec reageer retweet

twitter:

parmy twitterde op maandag 25-06-2012 om 12:52:58 Ryan Ackroyd, accused of being 'Kayla,' pleads not guilty to all four charges against him. #LulzSec reageer retweet

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Kabinet ondertekent omstreden ACTA-verdrag nie

Het Kabinet zal ACTA verdrag niet ondertekenen en ratificeren. Dat schrijven demissionair staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie Fred Teeven en demissionair minister van Economische Zaken Maxime Verhagen vandaag in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer.

Tweede Kamer tegen ACTA

In mei nam de Tweede Kamer twee moties aan tegen ratificatie en ondertekening van het omstreden ACTA-verdrag. Daarin stond onder meer dat ACTA ruimte laat voor “onbedoelde interpretaties met negatieve gevolgen”. Nu blijkt dat het Kabinet de moties niet naast zich neerlegt. Wel zou een volgend Kabinet anders kunnen besluiten, zo staat er in de brief:

. “De regering heeft het standpunt ingenomen niet tot ondertekening over te gaan tot onomstotelijk vaststaat dat het verdrag in lijn is met de grondrechten.”

De Europese Commissie heeft het Hof gevraagd een oordeel te vellen over de grondwettelijkheid van ACTA, nadat verschillende landen zich kritisch over het verdrag hadden uitgelaten. Dat oordeel wordt pas over ruim een jaar verwacht. De stemming van het Europees Parlement staat over een week al op de planning, op woensdag 4 juli.

Commissies verwerpen ACTA

Vorige week bleek dat de Internationale Handelscommissie het verdrag met een meerderheid verwerpt. Dat lijkt erop te wijzen dat het Parlement dit ook zal doen. Eerder stemden al vier andere adviescommissies tegen. ACTA-rapporteur David Martin adviseerde het Parlement tegen te stemmen. Eurocommissaris Neelie Kroes, met de portefeuille ICT en Telecommunicatie, zei op een conferentie te verwachten dat ACTA het niet zal halen wegens de massale protesten.

ACTA, het Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is een internationaal handelsverdrag dat auteursrechten op het internet wil beschermen. Het verdrag is omstreden omdat gevreesd wordt dat het de internetvrijheid en het recht op privacy aantast. Door het verdrag zou het internet verder kunnen worden gecontroleerd en individuele internetters worden aangepakt. De onderhandelingen voor ACTA vonden grotendeels achter gesloten deuren plaats.

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Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology

Wikipedia has banned the Church of Scientology from editing any articles. It’s a punishment for repeated and deceptive editing of articles related to the controversial religion. The landmark ruling comes from the inner circle of a site that prides itself on being open and inclusive.

In a 10-1 ruling Thursday, the site’s arbitration council voted to ban users coming from all IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology and its associates, and further banned a number of editors by name. The story was first reported by The Register.

Self-serving Wikipedia edits are hardly new. Wired.com readers pulled in an award for discovering the most egregious Wikipedia whitewashes by corporation and government agencies, but this is the first time the site has taken such drastic actions to block those edits.

And the edits are unlikely to stop, now that the user-created encyclopedia has become one of the net’s most popular sites and is often the top result for searches on a subject. Being able to massage an entry about oneself or one’s company has proven difficult to resist, even for founder Jimmy Wales — despite Wikipedia’s official warnings to the contrary.

The Church of Scientology, founded by sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1953, has had a long and bloody history on the net — dating back to Usenet groups, where critics maintain that the organization is a cult that brainwashes its members and sucks them dry financially. The Church, which teaches that humans are reincarnated and lived on other planets, says it is a legitimate religion.

The case, which began in December, centers on more than 400 articles about the ultra-secretive Church and its members. Those pages have hosted long-running, fierce edit wars that pitted organized Church of Scientology editors — using multiple accounts — against critics of Scientology who fought those changes by citing their own or one another’s self-published material. In fact, this is the fourth Wikipedia arbitration case concerning Scientology in as many years.

The committee also banned a number of editors individually, prohibiting them from editing any Scientology-related articles for at least six months. Those privileges can be reinstated afterward if they show they can play nicely by Wikipedia’s rules.

While most disputes involving the Web and Scientology in the past year have involved anti-Scientology activists who bind together under the name Anonymous, that group is largely not involved in this argument, because only registered accounts are able to edit the articles under dispute.

The Church of Scientology did not immediately return a voice message, asking for comment.

quote:

New site Megabox from Megaupload's Kim Dotcom

Megaupload owner Kim Dotcom has announced his plans to launch a new website, despite still being under arrest.

The 38-year-old tweeted an image of Megabox, a site he said would allow recording artists to sell music directly to fans.

It is not clear when the new website will be launched.

Mr Dotcom was arrested in January in New Zealand because, alleged the FBI, his site was being used for piracy.

Speaking about his new site, Mr Dotcom tweeted: "The major record labels thought Megabox is dead. Artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you."

In an interview with bit torrent news site TorrentFreak.com last year, Mr Dotcom said the service would allow artists to keep 90% of earnings from their music.

Hearing set

Following his arrest, Mr Dotcom's assets were frozen and he has been placed under house arrest at his New Zealand mansion.

Prominent internet rights group the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) is taking the FBI to court over its handling of users' files, with a hearing set for 29 June.

It argues that users of the site have a right to access their files which were seized in raids prior to the arrest of Mr Dotcom and several of his team.

"We've asked the court to implement a procedure for all consumers, not just our client, to recover their data," the EFF told technology news site Ars Technica.

Among Mr Dotcom's tweets is a picture of himself with Steve Wozniak.

Mr Dotcom told TorrentFreak that the Apple co-founder was "totally supportive" of the efforts of the EFF.

The trial of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and the site's management team is due to start on 6 August.

quote:

Washington’s cyber war - at home and abroad

After reports that the US designed the greatest cyber viruses in history with Flame and Stuxnet, Washington faces a predicament in justifying the duality in its cyber policy and defending its anti-piracy rhetoric.

While the US has repeatedly condemned cyber-attacks and hacking when aimed at itself, Washington’s involvement in the coordinated US-Israeli cyber attack on the Natanz nuclear facility raises a troubling problem for the government.

“We’re setting a precedent for other nations,” Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told RT. “And that’s where the real problem lies, because we’ve been criticizing China for allegedly attacking United States companies and the US government, while at the same time we’ve been engaging in the same conduct with other countries.”

Given the US policy of cyber-espionage, some analysts are concerned that this aggressiveness may provoke a reciprocal response.

“When you attack, for instance, Iran’s nuclear program, you provide the Iranians with your weapon, your worm, which they can then reverse-engineer, take apart, figure out how it works, turn it around, and send it your way,” said John Feffer, a co-director at Foreign Policy in Focus.

But while Washington has supposedly clandestinely been using the Flame virus to steal files, photographs, keystrokes, and video from Middle Eastern computers, it has been trumpeting internet security at home and abroad.

The US is working hard to extradite Kim Dotcom on piracy charges. Federal prosecution wants Kim Dotcom for allegedly inflicting $500 million damage in lost revenue to copyright holders, and the FBI has shut down his website Megaupload for the illegal distribution of copyrighted material via filesharing.

The US has also vigorously pursued Wikileaks’ Julian Assange while starting court martial proceedings against Bradley Manning, the US officer responsible for sharing material. Washington claimed that the leaks represented a threat to national security and the safety of its soldiers abroad.

However, not only has Washington been complaining about its own security breaches while engineering the Flame virus to essentially do the same, but the CISPA bill threatens to infringe upon the civil liberties of the American public.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is a bill which would allow for the US government and certain technology and manufacturing companies to share internet information in order to prevent cyber-terrorism.

But organizations such as ACLU and Strategy for Free Press are fully aware of the risks of allowing the US government to snoop on its own citizens in the interests of national security, and have criticized the bills.

“One of the things that we’re concerned about at Free Press is that we’re fanning all of these fears about cyber-security that will cause us to over-react, to actually pass cyber-security legislation that cuts into our free speech rights as individuals, that compromises free speech on the internet in ways that would ultimately be harmful to everyone,” Tim Karr, Senior director of Strategy for Free Press told RT in an interview.

“We saw that CISPA recently went through the house… so they obviously feel that the climate is right to pass this kind of legislation. Again I think we have to be really careful because nobody really knows how significant the threat is. The fear is that Congress will overstep in ways that cut into our basic civil liberties.”

quote:

#OpStopG4S

G4S is the UK's biggest private security company, with its government contracts alone worth over £600 million. Responsible for security services, managing detention centers, prisons, and 675 court and police station holding cells, G4S have also just been granted the £100 million contract for providing 10,000 security guards for the upcoming Olympics.

Whilst G4S still seem to be government favorites, their record is far from spotless. The firm lost their previous 'forcible deportation' contract last September after receiving 773 complaints of abuse – both verbal and physical. The final straw came with the death of Jimmy Mubenga in October 2010, an Angolan asylum seeker who died as a result of his forced deportation by G4S guards. Two of the guards are on bail facing criminal charges, whilst G4S is still waiting to hear whether they are to face corporate manslaughter charges.

Now, asylum seekers in Yorkshire and Humberside are expected to accept this multinational, money-hungry, security company as their landlords.

MORE Information - http://notog4s.blogspot.co.uk/

Backup Data On - http://leakster.net/leaks/g4s

All possible Sub-Domains Of G4S hacked!
You Should Have Expected Us!
------------------------------------

twitter:

th3j35t3r twitterde op maandag 25-06-2012 om 22:07:39 #ugnazi @ug #5days or less - #ticktock http://t.co/wi4begDb (PS ya got beef with each other - why would that be? Pressure? SE? See u soon. reageer retweet

quote:

US charges 24 people in massive hacking sting

Suspected hackers arrested in operation spanning four continents that targeted online financial fraud of stolen credit card information

US law enforcement have arrested 24 suspected hackers in a sting operation spanning four continents that targeted online financial fraud of stolen credit card and bank information.

The two-year investigation, in which FBI agents posed as hackers on internet forums, prevented more than $205 million in losses on over 411,000 compromised consumer credit and debit cards, US authorities in New York said.

Eleven people were arrested in the United States and thirteen others were arrested in countries spanning from Britain to Japan.

"Clever computer criminals operating behind the supposed veil of the internet are still subject to the long arm of the law," said Manhattan attorney Preet Bharara.

Two people were arrested in the New York area and were expected to appear in Manhattan federal court later on Tuesday.

One of the men, Mir Islam, known online as "JoshTheGod," was charged with trafficking in 50,000 stolen credit card numbers. Authorities said Islam had admitted to helping emerging hacker outfit UgNazi, which said it had launched a cyber attack against the microblogging platform Twitter last week. A lawyer for Islam did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the charges.

Joshua Hicks, also known as "OxideDox," was charged with one count of access device fraud.

The 24 people arrested were all men and ranged from 18 to 25-years old. Some face up to 40 years or more in prison if convicted on conspiracy to commit wire fraud charges and access device fraud charges.

The FBI operation centred around a "carding forum" that it had secretly created in June 2010, and was in charge of running unbeknownst to its participants, authorities said.

The forum, called "Carder Profit," was essentially an online market for registered users to exchange stolen account numbers. It was shut down in May.

Meanwhile, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against Wyndham Worldwide Corp and three subsidiaries, alleging that the hotel operator failed to secure customer data.

That failure resulted in the theft of hundreds of thousands of consumers payment card numbers, which were sent to an Internet address registered in Russia and $10.6 million in fraudulent charges, according to the complaint.

quote:

Google traint computers om katten te herkennen

Een onderzoeksteam van Google heeft een netwerk van duizend computers getraind om - zonder hulp van buitenaf - afbeeldingen van katten te herkennen. In totaal 16 duizend processorkernen werden met elkaar verbonden op een manier die vergelijkbaar is met de bouw van een biologisch brein.

Dat schrijft de New York Times vandaag. De 'slimme computer' is gebouwd door medewerkers van Google's X-lab. Het team probeert computers zoveel mogelijk een menselijk brein te laten nabootsen. Die kennis kan bijvoorbeeld van pas komen bij het bouwen en verbeteren van indexeringssystemen voor de zoekmachine, of voor de vertaalmachine Google Translate.

Leerproces
Het computernetwerk kreeg tien miljoen plaatjes uit Youtube-video's voorgeschoteld, en ontwikkelde binnen drie dagen zelf een methode om afbeeldingen van katten te herkennen, zonder dat de computers ooit op enigerlei wijze is uitgelegd wat een kat precies is. Het leerproces is vergelijkbaar met hoe een menselijk brein gezichten herkent, hoewel het natuurlijke systeem nog wel vele malen geavanceerder is.

De wetenschappers zijn naar eigen zeggen positief verrast door de resultaten van hun onderzoek. Ze hadden niet verwacht dat met zo weinig context en sturing toch resultaat geboekt zou kunnen worden. De computers leren ook om lichaamsvormen en menselijke gezichten te herkennen.

De duizenden processorkernen vormden een netwerk van een biljoen verbindingen, die signalen aan elkaar doorgeven in een patroon zoals men vermoedt dat neuronen dat doen in een menselijk brein. De onderzoekers durven evenwel niet te speculeren hoe dicht het computersysteem bij menselijke hersenen komt.

quote:

Anonymous linked to Japan's government websites attacks

A series of cyber-attacks have led to a number of Japanese government websites being temporarily taken offline.

A Twitter feed, @op_japan, associated with hacking collective Anonymous claimed responsibility, reacting to the country's new anti-piracy bill.

The new law outlines jail terms for those who download copyrighted content.

This would "result in scores of unnecessary prison sentences to numerous innocent citizens", the Anonymous website stated on Monday.

The websites - of Japan's Finance Ministry, Supreme Court and political parties DPJ and LDP - are now back up.

The new law says "downloading of copyrighted works knowing that they are not free and that it is illegal" could result in a fine of up to two million yen ($25,300; £16,184) or a prison sentence of up to two years - or both.

Ministry official Takanari Horino said a number of the Finance Ministry's web pages had been defaced on Tuesday and an unauthorised link posted on the site.

Free society

"We are aware of the Anonymous statement referring to the new copyright law, but we don't know at this point if the cyber-attacks are linked to the group," he added.

A statement on the website believed to be run by members of Anonymous, anonpr.net, said anti-piracy bills passed last week in Japan would do "little to solve the underlying problem of legitimate copyright infringement".

"The content industry is now pushing ISPs [internet service providers] in Japan to implement surveillance technology that will spy on... every single internet user," it added.

"This would be an unprecedented approach and severely reduce the amount of privacy law abiding citizens should have in a free society."

Staged protests

According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan, 4.36 billion files were illegally downloaded in the country in 2010.

In early June, members of Anonymous staged protests in 16 cities in India, against what they said was internet censorship in the country.

India's Madras High Court has since changed its earlier censorship order, which centred on the issue of internet copyright, making it once again possible for web users to access video and file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay.

In April, Anonymous also claimed responsibility for defacing almost 500 websites in China, including government sites and those of official agencies and trade groups.

quote:

About Anonymous Cleaning Service (ACS)

This operation is a cleanup activity in Japan.

We're planning an offline-meeting in suits and Guy Fawkes' masks. We will pick up garbage and hand out leaflets explaining what Anonymous is and why we are concerned: Anonymous is neither a group nor criminal. We are united citizens of the world who are concerned that our governments and the content industry are trying to take away our liberties on the Internet.

But Anonymous means more than DDoS. We prefer constructive and productive solutions. Very few Japanese know why our concerns about the new copyright laws are valid and sincere, and the media is not showing the entire truth. We want to make our fellow citizens aware of the problem with a productive message.

We are Anonymous. And in this op, we will be cleaning instead of clicking. Expect Us.

More Information upcoming.

quote:

Peeking behind the curtain at Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman at TEDGlobal 2012

Anthropologist and academic Gabriella Coleman starts her talk with a simple-sounding question: “Who is Anonymous?” She promptly confesses that even after “exhilarating and extremely frustrating” years of studying the group, she still finds this question difficult to answer.

First of all, it’s not an organization with one or even a few leaders at the helm. It’s a name adopted by various unrelated groups of hackers and technologists to describe a whole range of actions, from hacks against security firms to technical support for occupiers to those involved in national revolutions. Subgroups such as Antisec, meanwhile, scour servers to look for sensitive national, military or political information they can leak to the world. What links the groups is a spirit of irreverence and disdain for the law as it stands.

It all starts with Internet trolling, a long-established habit in Internet circles. ”Generally this contains a combination of four things: pranking, trickery, deceit and defilement,” says Coleman. Essentially a way to harm someone’s reputation, it often included the release of personal information, even the assault of an individual or company with unpaid-for pizzas. What’s the point? The laughs, or as Anonymous might put it, the “lulz.”

Declared the Internet Hate Machine by Fox News, a name Anonymous entirely embraced, the group has become more serious in recent years. What inspired them? Oddly, the church of Scientology. When they demanded that a leaked recruitment video be taken down, Anonymous got mad — and bombarded Scientology churches with free pizzas (and many other things besides). As an Anonymous member who taught Coleman’s class described it, it was “ultra coordinated motherfuckary.”

And it was at this point that a serious discussion began within Anonymous. Soon enough, it was clear that a political movement had been born. “Participants now saw themselves as bona fide activists–with an admittedly transgressive twist,” she says.

operation humiliated HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, after Barr had boasted that he had infiltrated Anonymous and was ready to hand over names to the FBI. Anonymous instead gutted HBGary’s servers of 70,000 corporate emails. Operation BART happened after the transport agency blocked cell phone reception to block a planned protest. “Just yesterday, there was an operation in Japan after the country passed anti-piracy laws,” Coleman says. “Anonymous is not proactive, it is reactive, event-driven. It rises up most forcefully when internet freedom is in jeopardy.”

3. They put on a good performance, obvious even to their detractors. The political art of Anonymous is spectacle, says Coleman. The group has a formidable PR machine, which becomes a PR nightmare for others. Yet here’s the thing: Spectacle alone won’t engender political change. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of all the spectacle, Coleman posits, is that “they dramatize the importance of anonymity and privacy in an era when both are rapidly eroding. Given that vast databases track us, given the vast explosion of surveillance, there’s something enchanting, mesmerizing and at a minimum thought-provoking about Anonymous’ interventions.”

4. They are visible and invisible. Unlike criminal groups that stay hidden at all costs, Anonymous allegedly announces itself loud and proud. It has received enormous attention, fear and admiration — it won the People’s Choice award on Time magazine’s online poll and was voted the top cybersecurity threat by IT professionals. Yet they’re also evasive and shifty. “It is hard to know how many people are involved,” says Coleman, thanks in part to an internal culture of avoiding personal fame at all costs. Hackers who have risen in visibility are chastised, marginalized, even banned. It’s difficult to know who did what when or how. What’s clear is that even though Anonymous members are so paradoxical and contradictory, “they have tapped into a deep disenchantment with the status quo as concerns censorship privacy and surveillance.”

This is why it doesn’t really matter whether Anonymous as it exists even lasts. Roiled by arrests and paranoia, the group may well implode. But, says Coleman firmly, “irreverent dissent on the internet is not going to go away with Anonymous.” Many geeks and hackers care about protecting the Internet, and they both invent and manage these resources, so it’s not surprising that this movement is under way. It might be difficult to come up with a blanket moral assessment of Anonymous’ influence, but it’s clear that this is just one moment. And, concludes Coleman, “if you try to hurt what’s so valuable about the internet, be careful — because the internet may very well hurt you back.”

quote:

'Black boxes' to monitor all internet and phone data

Internet and mobile phone companies are preparing to install "black boxes" to monitor all internet and phone traffic to and from the UK, and decode encrypted messages including bank transactions.

As part of the Home Office's Communications Data Bill, internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile phone companies will be obliged to collect communications records and keep them for a year.

The government has insisted that the actual content of messages won't be stored, but until now it has not been clear how communications companies will be able to separate content from "header data", such as the sender and recipient of a message, and the date it was sent.

It has now emerged that the Home Office has held meetings with the UK's largest ISPs and mobile network operators, and has given them information about the hardware which companies will have to use to monitor traffic flowing through their systems.

When an individual uses a webmail service such as Gmail, for example, the entire webpage is encrypted before it is sent. This makes it impossible for ISPs to distinguish the content of the message. Under the Home Office proposals, once the Gmail is sent, the ISPs would have to route the data via a government-approved "black box" which will decrypt the message, separate the content from the "header data", and pass the latter back to the ISP for storage.

Dominic Raab, a Conservative MP who has criticised the Bill, said: "The use of data mining and black boxes to monitor everyone's phone, email and web-based communications is a sobering thought that would give Britain the most intrusive surveillance regime in the West. But, many technical experts are raising equally serious doubts about its feasibility and vulnerability to hacking and other abuse."

A representative of the ISPs Association said: "We understand that government wants to move with the times, and we want to work with them on that. But this is a massive project. We'd rather they told us what they want to achieve, then sit down with us to work out how."

"Our other main concern with this is speed. If you're having to route all traffic through one box, it's going to cut down on connection speeds. The hardware can only look at a certain amount of traffic per second - if lots of streams from the BBC iPlayer are going through it, for example, how is it going to handle the traffic?"

The Home Office had not commented at the time of publication.

quote:

Anonymous Hackers Personified As A Clumsy Girl On Japanese Web

Anonymous, a hacker group known by several internet protest attacks against the recently passed Japanese anti-copyright bill which penalized music downloaders, who are being reported to be attacking Japanese government and political parties websites, gets a little troubles on its first contact with Japanese.

Until this attack began, Anonymous and its hacktivism were known as what happened oversea, nothing related to themselves by Japanese.

Their Twitter account on this time activity, @op_japan, tweeted 5 times in Japanese out of the total 100 tweets, but all of them are not natural Japanese, likely done by machine-translation. Though they are understandable enough, it seemed to make Japanese net users an impression that the person(s) inside is a bit dumb.

# like my Asiajin posts ;-)

As the account later admitted [J], on their first attack, they mistakenly attacked a local lake “Kasumigaura” management office website, instead of Japanese ministries, so-called “Kasumigaseki”.

Another one, attacking the opposition party, The Liberal Democratic Party(LDP) website first prior to the ruling party, The Democratic Party of Japan(DPJ), was not a mistake, they announced [J], which may be true as the both parties approved the bill. However, many Japanese web users thought that Anonymous chose targets without enough research.

On Twitter and 2-channel, some started saying that the Anonymous is like “Dojikko”, which is an Anime/Manga word means a clumsy girl whose mistakes are thought as attractive. Some drew personified character of Anonymous by following the line.

On the Japanese web, more people seem against the bill even before Anonymous’ attack, so this anthropomorphism may show that their positive feeling.

quote:

"How am I supposed to go to a judge if the third party is gagged...?"

Greatest hits for your Friday afternoon: internet freedom activist Jake Appelbaum questions the FBI's deputy general counsel on secret Patriot Act subpoenas, called "National Security Letters" (NSLs). Appelbaum has been a target of the secret, gag-imposed orders.

He asks the FBI counsel if there is judicial oversight over the NSL process. Watch to hear what she says. Her answer should alarm us all and remind us that fights like the upcoming battle over the FISA amendments act reauthorization are really big deals. These aren't just arcane laws; they affect real people, in tangible ways.

Jacob Applebaum Questions FBI on National Security Letters.avi

If this is all a little meaningless to you, read this background on NSLs. Basically the secret subpoenas allow the government to force third party holders of our private information to hand over our data to the FBI. As we've written about here, the third party content holders that receive NSLs could include doctors and even mental health professionals like therapists and social workers.

Here's the full segment of the DemocracyNow! show during which the above clip was aired. It's well worth watching if you have some time.

quote:

Op zaterdag 30 juni 2012 13:56 schreef Tukker87 het volgende:

[..]

Ben vooral een lurker hier maar vind het altijd wel interessant om te lezen, blijf zo doorgaan

twitter:

HHAnonymous twitterde op zaterdag 30-06-2012 om 12:15:04 I'm at the #Anonymous #chanology #Megaraid in Dublin - conference Live stream: http://t.co/TMPh6zSm reageer retweet

quote:

OpSaveTheArctic

quote:

" The energy companies that caused the Arctic to melt in the first place are looking to profit from the disappearing ice. They want to open up a new oil frontier to get at a potential 90 billion barrels of oil. That’s a lot of money to them, but it’s only three years’ worth of oil to the world.Previously classified government documents say dealing with oil spills in the freezing waters is “almost impossible” and inevitable mistakes would shatter the fragile Arctic environment.We’ve seen the extreme damage caused by the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters - we cannot let this happen in the Arctic.
To drill in the Arctic, oil companies have to drag icebergs out the way of their rigs and use giant hoses to melt floating ice with warm water. If we let them do this, a catastrophic oil spill is just a matter of time. "
This gave rise to #OpSaveTheArctic put forward by Anonymous.
Listed Targets :
1). Exxon Mobil Corporation
2). Shell Petrochemical Corp.
3). BP Global - British multinational oil and gas company
4). Gazprom Corporation
5). Rosneft Petroleum Corp. - Russia

• Phase-1 of #OpSaveTheArctic has been carried out.
Target - Exxon Mobil Corporation
To show our support to the cause, after the employees of Exxon where hacked, we used their email ids to to sign the petition at - http://www.savethearctic.org/
We suggest you to do the same!

Anonymous #OpJapan & #OpACS - Expect us Japan

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

quote:

Anonymous strikes UAE

A group of “hacktivists” allegedly affiliated with the Anonymous activist organization appears to have infiltrated the United Arab Emirates government computer system.

The group claims to have accessed the servers in charge of filtering internet traffic before it reaches the population within the UAE's borders and posted the information Saturday.

The action seems to have been initiated on what the group referred to as “Operation GodFather” as part of an effort to expose official internet censorship and oppression in the UAE.

“Hello citizens of the world. Here comes another leak. This time our target was UAE and its oppressive Netfilers,” they stated.

“As many of you might already know UAE's internet is fully run and monitored by government run ISP's. We decided to ‘take a look’ we managed to get into the Netfilter server and are leaking this data we extracted from their DB.”

The leak appears to contain a list of blockades set in place with the use of “wildcards” and, according to the hackers, a list of website URLs filtered by the UAE’s Internet service providers.

Including websites that host adult content, the list includes VPN providers and any other site that could help users bypass censorship mechanisms, social media networks and dating sites, and sites that promote religious views different than Islam.

The most “shocking” discovery, as described by the hackers, is the fact that many websites that offer Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services are also on the list.

“A large part of UAE's population is made of migrant workers and the telecom industry made a lot of profit by overcharging them for international phone calls. But with the raise of VOIP and internet communication they were afraid that this would take away their profits and thus went ahead to block VOIP,” they explained.

Anonymous-affiliated hackers were also responsible for the recent Euro 2012 website attack, protesting Ukraine's rounding up and slaughter of stray dogs in advance of a soccer championship held earlier this month.

quote:

Press Releases :: 2012 WhiteHat Security Announcements

WhiteHat Security Marks 2011 as the Year of Radical Reduction in Online Vulnerabilities In Twelfth Edition of Website Security Statistics Report

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – June 27, 2012 – WhiteHat Security, the Web security company, today released the twelfth installment of the WhiteHat Security Website Security Statistics Report. The report reviewed serious vulnerabilities* in websites during the 2011 calendar year, examining the severity and duration of the most critical vulnerabilities from 7,000 websites across major vertical markets. Among the findings in the report, WhiteHat research suggests that the average number of serious vulnerabilities found per website per year in 2011 was 79, a substantial reduction from 230 in 2010 and down from 1,111 in 2007. Despite the significant improvement in the state of website security, organizational challenges in creating security programs that balance breadth of coverage and depth of testing leave large-scale attack surfaces or small, but very high-risk vulnerabilities open to attackers.

quote:

Greenpeace welcomes Anonymous after Exxon Mobil hack

Greenpeace welcomes Anonymous in the fight to preserve the Arctic. Earlier this week, Anonymous enthusiasts hacked Exxon Mobil in solidarity with the ongoing Greenpeace campaign to save the Arctic from oil exploration.

Cyber War News reports Anonymous hacked and released data from Exxon Mobil Corporation on June 27 as part of Operation Save The Arctic (#OpSaveTheArctic).

Greenpeace, an independent global organisation acting to change attitudes and behavior in order to protect the environment and promote peace, welcomed the support of the international hacktivist collective known as Anonymous with the following tweet, issued June 29:

. The Arctic receives ‪#anonymous‬ support. Arctic oil drillers Exxon hacked in operation ‪#OPSaveTheArctic‬ ‪#SaveTheArctic‬

Airdemon Network Security reports Anonymous leaked 300 accounts from Exxon Mobil in #OpSavetheArctic.

The following is an excerpt from a statement released by Anonymous hacktivists announcing solidarity with the efforts of Greenpeace to preserve the Arctic:

. The energy companies that caused the Arctic to melt in the first place are looking to profit from the disappearing ice. They want to open up a new oil frontier to get at a potential 90 billion barrels of oil. That's a lot of money to them, but it's only three years' worth of oil to the world.
Previously classified government documents say dealing with oil spills in the freezing waters is "almost impossible" and inevitable mistakes would shatter the fragile Arctic environment. We've seen the extreme damage caused by the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters -- we cannot let this happen in the Arctic.

To drill in the Arctic, oil companies have to drag icebergs out the way of their rigs and use giant hoses to melt floating ice with warm water. If we let them do this, a catastrophic oil spill is just a matter of time.

This gave rise to #OpSaveTheArctic put forward by Anonymous.

quote:

#OpLithChild - Lithuanian Supreme Court hacked

quote:

This story envelopes a dysfunctional family living within in a devastatingly broken system — the mother accused of selling her daughter to a pedophile ring of high ranking authorities, including judges and politicians. The videos are unsettling, the transcripts of the investigation will make you angry. The murders will make your imagination go wild. The activism, will amaze you. Many factors played a role in uniting a country, demanding justice. Those cries for justice have gone unheard.

quote:

Twitter forced to release Occupy protester's tweets to New York court

Micro-blogging site loses legal challenge to prosecutors' request for three months' worth of messages from Malcolm Harris

Twitter has been ordered to hand over almost three months worth of messages from an Occupy Wall Street protester after losing a legal challenge to prosecutors' demands for the tweets.

The micro-blogging website had argued that the posts belonged to activist Malcolm Harris and as such it would be violating fourth amendment privacy rights if it were to disclose the communications without first receiving a search warrant.

But a Manhattan judge ruled on Monday that under a timeline set out by federal law, a warrant is only needed for the final day's worth of messages from Harris, who is accused of disorderly conduct in relation to a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in October.

All other tweets prior to this date could legitimately be demanded by means of subpoena, it was ruled.

Harris was amongst several hundred Occupy Wall Street demonstrators arrested last year during a protest march across Brooklyn Bridge.
Prosecutors say that messages posted by Harris – who goes by the twitter handle @destructuremal – could show whether the defendant was aware that he was breaking police orders relating to the demo.

In January, the New York County district attorney's office issued a subpoena to Twitter, calling on the firm to hand over "any and all user information, including email address, as well as any and all tweets posted for the period 9/15/2011 – 12/31/2011".

Harris initially attempted to block the move, but was told that he had no proprietary interest to his own messages.

Twitter countered that this contradicts its own terms and conditions, which explicitly states that users "retain their right to any content they submit, post or display on or through". Moreover, in its own legal challenge to the subpoena, the firm accused prosecutors of trying to force its employees to violate federal law.

Lawyers for Twitter also argued that under the Uniform Act, prosecutors would need to obtain a subpoena in California before it could demand documents from a company based in that state.

Monday's ruling found that a search warrant was indeed needed for a final day's worth of tweets by Harris as they fell within a timeline laid out in federal law. All else was fair game for the prosecutors, the judge found.
The court will now review the material and provide the relevant tweets to the DA's office.

In a statement, Chief Assistant District Attorney Daniel Alonso said he was "pleased that the court has ruled for a second time that the Tweets at issue must be turned over".

He added: "We look forward to Twitter's complying and to moving forward with the trial."

Responding to the development, Harris's attorney Martin Stolar said: "I'm not surprised by the ruling, but I'm still disappointed by it." He added that he and Twitter could still mount a further challenge, stating that there was still "plenty of time to do that" before his client's next court appearance.

Stolar suggested that the latest decision shows that the court fails to take into consideration 21st century developments when it comes to what should be covered under the fourth amendment. "That is somewhat bothersome," he added.

quote:

Anonymous Rattles A Chinese Web Giant

Anonymous may be best known for knocking websites offline or stealing data, but one faction of the movement is subverting figures of power in a more circumspect way — by trawling through documents and computer code.

The sub group Anonymous Analytics released a damning report yesterday about Qihoo, the Chinese web giant that claims to be the No. 1 provider of Internet and mobile security products and services in China, as measured by its user base.

Qihoo distributes antivirus software called 360 Safeguard and has a browser called 360 Secure Browser, but in recent years has restructured it business to focus on selling online advertising space, in particular from a single directory page, hao.360.cn. The company claims to get approximately 90% of its advertising revenue “directly or indirectly” from this page and its sub pages; advertising accounted for 73% of the company’s total revenue in 2011 of $22.9 million.

That figure marked an increase of 136% from the year before, meaning hao.360.cn is a serious money-maker for Qihoo. Qihoo recently said that it charged, on average, 1 million yuan ($156,000) per month, per link on the “Famous Sites” section of its directory page — a breed of e-commerce widely known to have dwindled in Western cyberspace.

Anonymous Analytics says there’s something fishy about Qihoo’s directory page. Qihoo recently claimed on its fourth quarter conference call that the page was getting 20% more web traffic than dominant-player Baidu’s similar page and its sub pages, hao123.com. Qihoo confirmed this with me, citing a table of figures from iResearch.

But the Anonymous group claims that Qihoo is “grotesquely exaggerating” its traffic advantage, and their evidence comes in the form of a recent change in the source code of hao.360.cn. Having been monitoring the site since last year, the group noticed that a comScore tag had been added to Qihoo’s HTML source code. (ComScore is the best-known, third-party verifier of a web site’s traffic.)

This seemed fine, until the tag was removed on or around June 20, 2012. Why? Anonymous Analytics thinks that Qihoo didn’t like the figures it was seeing. The group then managed to get what it claims are the actual comScore figures through unnamed third parties — “people we trust,” according to the group’s representative — who had bought them from comScore. The figures show that in the months of February, March and April 2012, Qihoo’s all-important directory page had 56%, 51% and 52% less traffic than Baidu’s.

Anonymous Analytics provided me with what appears to be a legitimate document from comScore showing web traffic figures for Baidu and Qihoo’s main directory pages in April 2012. It states that Baidu’s directory page had 84.689 million unique visitors from China, while Qihoo’s had 40.877 million.

The activist group believes that before Qihoo balked at the figures, it had added the comScore tag to appease analysts, investors and critics, “who have called for management to provide independent verification of Qihoo’s traffic claims.”

The group further believes that management installed the tag with a view figuring out how to manipulate comScore’s traffic analytics. “We are so certain of this that we invite engineers at comScore to analyze data coming out of hao.360.cn since the beginning of the year,” Anonymous Analytics says.

Qihoo has denied these allegations completely, though it seems rattled enough by them. Their chief operating officer, Alex Yu, told me in an email on Monday that “allegations regarding our web site traffic has been put out by several different parties. Most of them are on the short side of our stock. ”

He added that Qihoo had started working with comScore to get a “backup measurement” of Qihoo’s traffic since the beginning of 2012.

“However from time to time, comScore’s tracking tools may trigger some security software,” Yu said. “When such conflict between comScore and security software occurs, we will temporarily remove the comScore tag to make sure users don’t get false alarm.” Yu added that the comScore tag would be put back once such conflicts were resolved.

“There were several such incidences in the past few months, and there may be additional ones in the future until comScore and us come with a solution to completely solve the issue,” Yu said. He added that until the issue was resolved, comScore would not be ready to “officially release” any data regarding Qihoo’s directory site. “Any of the ‘leaked’ data should be viewed as inaccurate and unofficial,” he said.

When I put this to comScore, a spokesperson provided a formal statement from the tracking firm:

. ComScore have been working and is still working with Qihoo and other publishers in China on tagging their websites for Unified Digital Measurement. At this point, comScore has not released any Unified (tagged) data for Qihoo Sites. We do not comment on publisher’s unpublished data or any work in progress.


Anonymous Analytics claims that the comScore data it got on Qihoo came form a third party that had bought it directly from comScore. When I asked comScore how much “unpublished” figures like this counted as legitimate comScore data, they reiterated that they could only comment on data that had been put in the public domain.

A representative of Anonymous Analytics offered some responses to Yu’s denials, and to an official rebuttal that was put out by Qihoo in the form of a press release this morning, which stated that in the recent months in question, a European third-party anti-virus software had “mistakenly identified the tag as a Trojan.” Qihoo said it had temporarily removed the comScore tag from hao.360.cn to “ensure user experience till the issue was resolved.”

“We would love to know which European anti-virus company triggered the tag as a Trojan,” the Anonymous Analytics representative told me. “Any anti-virus company big enough to make a sizeable impact in Qihoo’s traffic volume would know to white flag any data analytics from major companies, such as comScore, Alexa, and Google Analytics. Technical absurdity of that aside, how many people could that have been affected since Qihoo claims most its users use its own anti-virus products? Also, they ‘removed the tag for user experience?’ What does that even mean?”

The Anonymous researchers, who it’s worth noting cannot be accountable for the validity of their claims due to their professed namelessness, are not the first group to question Qihoo’s claims about web traffic. Seeking Alpha did so here, a short seller of the stock called Citron Research did so here, and Qihoo responded to that latter report here. (My own take is that there’s something rather unsustainable about a company with a market capitalization of $1.9 billion getting most of its revenue from a single directory page of web links.)

Anonymous is both a movement and brand of hacktivists and trolls, best known for illegal cyber attacks against targets like the Church of Scientology in 2008, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal in late 2010, and Sony in 2012. There were all manner of motivations at play but underneath it all an attempt to unleash a modern-day form of vigilante justice.

Yet this is also not the first time that Anonymous has pursued legal means of subversion. Recently a faction of Anonymous in Japan announced a clean-up event, encouraging supporters to meet in Shibuya, Tokyo on July 7 to don Guy Fawkes masks, then pick up garbage and hand out leaflets about the cyber collective.

Anonymous Analytics is on the edgier side of these legal activities. It was established less than a year ago and includes ”enough guys with finance backgrounds to know what we are talking about,” its representative said. Its website is a parody of a financial research firm, preluding each report title with “Initiating Coverage.” Last April it targeted Huabao International, claiming in a 44-page report that the Chinese tobacco and fragrance firm overpaid for several companies it bought from its billionaire chairwoman. As a result, Huabao asked to suspend trading of its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange, according to The Financial Times. The September before, the group targeted Chaoda Modern Agriculture. So far it has released three reports.

Why the focus on China? Anonymous Analytics claims on its web site that Chinese companies aren’t very good at covering their tracks. But they’re ready to move on — in their latest report they added that “exposing Chinese frauds” had become cliche, “if not outright boring.” The group says it has already turned its attention to Western companies, and expects to release its first report by year-end.

quote:

How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down

quote:

The arrests deprived Anonymous, at least temporarily, of a well of talent and social inspiration. But even as the small group of hackers who originally comprised AntiSec has all but vanished from the net, the name has now taken on a life of its own. What used to be a traditional hacker group, a structured and elite club of talent within the otherwise chaotic collective, has now—like Anonymous itself—become a banner.

“AntiSec” attacked Florida’s Lake County Sheriff’s Office, with several gigabytes of sensitive data leaked on April 27. In late May, “AntiSec” attacked the website of the Chicago police in retaliation for what anons perceived as harsh treatment of anti-NATO protestors. Around the same time, “AntiSec” also hacked into the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, releasing a sizable cache of internal data. But as far as anyone could tell, these attacks weren’t connected to the fragmented group Sabu had played dean to—and they weren’t even connected to one another. It was as if the destruction of AntiSec had allowed the idea of AntiSec to escape into the Internet’s social ether.

After the arrests, it seemed that Anonymous would never terrify governments and corporations in quite the same way again. But that’s the sort of underestimation that led Aaron Barr to count 10 senior members of Anonymous, right before a mob ruined his life. It’s the type of judgment that led the Stratfor analyst Sean Noonan, on reading a description of Anonymous as “ultra-coordinated motherfuckery,” to write that the group was “completely uncoordinated and couldn’t fuck anything”—in a personal email that we can read, of course, thanks to some truly coordinated fucking of his employer.

quote:

Three NSA Whistleblowers Back EFF's Lawsuit Over Government's Massive Spying Program

EFF Asks Court to Reject Stale State Secret Arguments So Case Can Proceed

San Francisco - Three whistleblowers – all former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) – have come forward to give evidence in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) lawsuit against the government's illegal mass surveillance program, Jewel v. NSA.

In a motion filed today, the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the "secret room" at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006.

"For years, government lawyers have been arguing that our case is too secret for the courts to consider, despite the mounting confirmation of widespread mass illegal surveillance of ordinary people," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Now we have three former NSA officials confirming the basic facts. Neither the Constitution nor federal law allow the government to collect massive amounts of communications and data of innocent Americans and fish around in it in case it might find something interesting. This kind of power is too easily abused. We're extremely pleased that more whistleblowers have come forward to help end this massive spying program."

The three former NSA employees with declarations in EFF's brief are William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe. All were targets of a federal investigation into leaks to the New York Times that sparked the initial news coverage about the warrantless wiretapping program. Binney and Wiebe were formally cleared of charges and Drake had those charges against him dropped.

Jewel v. NSA is back in district court after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it in late 2011. In the motion for partial summary judgment filed today, EFF asked the court to reject the stale state secrets arguments that the government has been using in its attempts to sidetrack this important litigation and instead apply the processes in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that require the court to determine whether electronic surveillance was conducted legally.

"The NSA warrantless surveillance programs have been the subject of widespread reporting and debate for more than six years now. They are just not a secret," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "Yet the government keeps making the same 'state secrets' claims again and again. It's time for Americans to have their day in court and for a judge to rule on the legality of this massive surveillance."

quote:

Op woensdag 4 juli 2012 13:00 schreef borisz het volgende:
39 - 478. ACTA = Dood.

Original Party Hard music

quote:

Th3 J35t3r: Project Looking Glass

quote:

As many of you will have noticed, there haven’t been a lot of ‘TANGO DOWNS’ over the last few months. There is a reason for this. I decided that I should concentrate a little more on targeted intelligence gathering and a little less on the violent internet smackdown that is XerXeS and others.

I needed a way to get undisputable evidence as to the real world identity of ‘the mark’ – whatever the ‘mark’ or target was, be it Anons, Jihadist bomb plotters or forum admins, or whoever.

Over the last few months I have been running ‘Project Looking Glass’.

So what is it?

The Looking Glass is based upon the open source Browser Exploitation Framework – I used this as its truly modular framework lends itself well to me modifiying and hacking it to pieces in order to get it to do what I want it to, without losing direction or straying from the confines of the original mission spec or waste time re-inventing the wheel. One of the bonuses of open-source code right?

The entire project comprises of the ‘looking glass’ server, which I will be talking about here, and numerous other ‘bait’ servers which have the the ‘hook code’ embedded in certain pages that they serve up. Once a target hits the page they immediatley pop up on the looking glass HUD and information starts getting logged and a profile of the ‘mark’ starts to form. I am not going into much more detail on this for obvious reasons. But I will say the highly targeted nature of how the hook code is served up to the ‘mark’ leaves very little room for error, mistaken identity or false positives.

Here’s a screenshot of the moment @joshthegod of #UGNazi stumbled through the looking glass after being on the target list for only two days prior. (Click for fullsize) and here’s the tweet I posted that same day (June 14) – https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/213281821704732672

quote:

So why would I let this out of my bag?

I haven’t actually given away any operational details, they key to this is in the delivery of the hook code, location of ‘bait servers’ etc. The hook code, by the way, can also be injected using XSS into any vulnerable 3rd party website, so the target doen’t even have to hit one of my ‘bait boxes’.

Project Looking Glass is not available or downloadable to the public, although I am sure within a few hours there will be claims you can download it here there and everywhere, as was the case with XerXeS. Please be advised I never released XerXeS and I won’t be releasing Project Looking Glass. If some one says they have it, they are lying to you and most likely try to infect you with malware.

quote:

Berlijns nachtleven dreigt aan banden te worden gelegd

De talrijke toeristen die al eens het plaatselijke nachtleven zijn ingedoken zullen het wellicht beamen: de clubscene in de Duitse hoofdstad behoort tot de top in Europa. Daar zou wel 's verandering in kunnen komen nu de Duitse auteursrechtenmaatschappij clubs die laat openblijven in de gaten houdt.

Met legendarische clubs als Berghain, Watergate en Weekend in het aanbod is er voor clubbers keuze te over in het Berlijnse nachtleven. Maar de machtige auteursrechtenmaatschappij Gema, die de belangen van zo'n 65.000 artiesten behartigt, kan daar mogelijk verandering in brengen, meldt The Guardian op zijn website.

'Bijdrage tien keer hoger'
Gema wil vanaf 1 januari een nieuw inningssysteem invoeren dat gebaseerd is op een percentage van de ticketverkoop en de grootte van een club. Daar komt nog een toeslag van 50 procent bovenop voor evenementen die langer dan 5 uur duren, en voor zaken die tot na 3u 's ochtends geopend blijven. 'Dit zal voor 60 procent van de clubs geen enkele prijsverhoging betekenen, integendeel', zegt Gema. Maar de dancings die tot in de vroege uurtjes feestvierders toelaten, vrezen dat ze vijf tot tien keer zoveel zullen moeten ophoesten dan het bedrag dat ze nu betalen.

'Een gemiddelde club die nu 28.000 euro per jaar aan auteursrechten betaalt, zal dan een rekening van 180.000 euro gepresenteerd krijgen', rekende de Berlijnse federatie van clubuitbaters uit. 'In dat geval zullen heel wat dancings de deuren moeten sluiten.'

Doodssteek
Vooral Berghain, dat feestjes organiseert die soms 48 uur lang doorgaan, zegt dat de nieuwe inning een doodssteek zou betekenen. De bijdrage voor de club zou in het nieuwe systeem liefst 1.400 procent hoger liggen dan vandaag. Zelfde verhaal bij Watergate, dat momenteel 10.000 euro per jaar betaalt maar vanaf volgend jaar 200.000 euro zou moeten neertellen. 'Hoe kan je in godsnaam ondernemen in zulke omstandigheden?', vraagt uitbater Steffen Hacks zich in Die Tageszeitung af.

Protestacties
Wat slecht is voor de clubscene, zou ook beroerd kunnen zijn voor het Berlijnse toerisme in het algemeen. Van de ruim 10.000 toeristen die Berlijn elk weekend aandoen, noemt ruim een derde het clubleven als grootste attractie.

Clubbers, toeristen en uitbaters blijven niet bij de pakken neer zitten. Clubs in heel Duitsland hielden op 30 juni vijf minuten stilte om de situatie aan te klagen, en een optocht tegen Gema lokte meer dan 5.000 betogers. Daarnaast wist een petitie tegen de nieuwe Gema-tarieven al ruim 200.000 handtekeningen te verzamelen.

quote:

Your phone may not be safe at protests

Ever wondered why your cell phone reception suddenly becomes terrible at protests? Ever worried that police could use electronic spoofing devices to suck up your mobile data because you are in the streets exercising your rights?

You might have been onto something.

Mobile "IMSI catchers", currently on the market and being pushed to police and intelligence agencies worldwide, enable these creepy, stealth spying tactics. And if they build it and hawk it, history tells us police will buy it and deploy it.

On Tuesday, July 3, 2012, electronic privacy advocate and technology researcher Chris Soghoian tweeted a link to a photograph of a talk he gave at TED in Scotland in late June. Behind him in the photograph is another image, this one taken by privacy researcher Eric King at a surveillance trade show. (King's Twitter bio contains a quote from a representative of the notorious ISS World -- a global surveillance trade firm that often hosts such trade shows: the rep called him an "Anti-lawful interception zealot blogger." High praise.)



Look at the slide behind Soghoian; that's the photo in question. It shows an IMSI catcher strapped onto a model, under the model's shirt.

IMSI stands for "International Mobile Subscriber Identity". The technology is essentially a mobile phone tower with "a malicious operator". It mimics the behavior of a cell tower and tricks mobile phones into sending data to it, instead of to the tower.

. As such it is considered a Man In the Middle (MITM) attack. It is used as an eavesdropping device used for interception and tracking of cellular phones and usually is undetectable for the users of mobile phones.

Once it has made a connection with the phone and tricked it into thinking it is a mobile tower, the IMSI catcher forces the phone to drop its encryption, enabling easy access to the contents of the device. The tool then lets the attacker listen in on mobile conversations and intercept all data sent from a mobile phone, remaining undetected. In some cases the tool also allows the operator to manipulate messages.

Here's a creepy video that a purveyor of IMSI catchers made to advertise its product:

quote:

The FBI uses IMSI catchers and claims it does so legally, even though it says it doesn't need a warrant to deploy them. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is currently pursuing FOIA litigation to find out exactly how the bureau uses the "Stingray" (a brand name IMSI catcher); unsurprisingly, the FBI wasn't forthcoming with documents to reveal its legal standard or other information about how it uses the tool. Stay tuned for more information as that case makes its way through the courts.

quote:

Op vrijdag 6 juli 2012 00:28 schreef Probably_on_pcp het volgende:
Goed werk Papierversnipperaar, ik zie dit topic nu pas!

Blijf zo doorgaan, respect! Ik ga dit topic zeker volgen

quote:

The End. #TeaMp0isoN

So, here we are, at the end of TeaMp0isoN.

I just wanted to say few words before I leave, you can consider them to be motivational or
just bullshit, honestly I dont care.

So, few years ago we started this cause, fighting for freedom, activism, hacktivism etc...
We raised alarm in the government, they have seen that we can win this war, that we can take our own freedom back, our own lives back.
They started fighting back, but we have choose to not give up, to not bow in front of them
and let them take our souls and imprison them.
But im glad to see US all united, painters, musicians, teachers, wives, kids, doctors, lawyers,
im glad that all those people are now united, and they act as one.

War in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Libya etc...
People, realise thats just start, thats not even a glimpse of whats coming,
Im not gonna talk about illuminati, about satan, about faith or religion,
Im just going to tell you that you should check your own town and see how many poor people is there.
How many people were fucked by government, how many people were fucked by banks,
how many homeless people are dyeing in the streets during winter, how many poor people are dyeing from hunger.

Im not gonna tell you that hacking or hacktivism is not illegal, and not dangerous,
im not gonna tell you I enjoyed it.
I wake up 20 times during night because im paranoid, I dont want to end in jail...
You can call me a coward, you can call me whatever you want,
but I, I was here for years, I did fight for people, I did fight for freedom,
but now time has come that I feel im not good for it anymore,
this has drained so much life out of me, and I feel I didnt get enough people to hear
what I fight for, what WE fight for.

Im just begging you one thing, not just hackers, but everyone, even politicians.
Do not be ignorant towards US who are fighting for our freedom,
dont judge us for what we do, we are not terrorists,
we are just normal humans, who are fighting for better cause, fighting for people,
fighting for better future for our kids.
Do not fight each other, there is no sense in that, you are just runing each others
lives, if you hate someone who is fighting same cause as you, dont attack him,
dont troll him, dont prank him, dont ruin his life over little things.

Think bigger, think about future, because today you are a kid, but tomorow you will
have your own kids, and then you will realise how much you could do to help them
live better, to help them not be afraid of their own government.

Dont do work on this cause because of fame, work on because its right.

I ve lost so much in this fight, like every soldier on this battlefield.
So many friends got arrested, TriCk, MLT, Phantom.
I call them heroes, I call them freedom fighters.
I know that they and I will be forgotten in few months,
but I hope this msg will remain on the internet,
and that you the people will share it amongst urselves.

So now, im telling you goodbye.
Thanks for all those supporting us, and helping us fight this war.
Thanks for all those that respected us, and didnt leave us when things went bad.
Thank you alot.

#FreeTriCk
#FreeMLT
#FreePhantom
#FreeUsAll
#Freedom

So this is the end of TeaMp0isoN, we arent coming back anymore,
whoever tells you he is TeaMp0isoN or starts using our name,
do not believe him, because this is the end of us.

root@TeaMp0isoN:$ shutdown -n