Anonops #8: Occupy Wall Str.

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

LOLPRAH: OVER 9000 PENISES!

Tom Cruise Scientology Video - ( Original UNCUT )

Message to Scientology

Operation Payback - Anonymous Message About ACTA Laws, Internet Censorship and 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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LulzSec and Anonymous police and FBI investigation sees two more arrested

Two men arrested in South Yorkshire and Wiltshire as part of investigation into international online hacking gangs

Two men have been arrested in connection with online attacks by hacking gangs Anonymous and LulzSec, Scotland Yard said.

The men, aged 24 and 20, were arrested on Thursday in Mexborough, near Doncaster, South Yorkshire, and Warminster, Wiltshire, for conspiring to commit offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

Scotland Yard said the arrests were part of a continuing investigation in collaboration with the FBI, South Yorkshire Police and other law enforcement bodies, into activities of Anonymous and LulzSec, especially in connection with suspected offences under the cover of online identity "Kayla".

A spokesman said the men were arrested separately. He said the Doncaster address was searched by police and computer equipment was removed for forensic examination.

Detective Inspector Mark Raymond from the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), said: "The arrests relate to our inquiries into a series of serious computer intrusions and online denial-of-service attacks recently suffered by a number of multi-national companies, public institutions and gPressovernment and law enforcement agencies in Great Britain and the US.

"We are working to detect and bring before the courts those responsible for these offences, to disrupt such groups, and to deter others thinking of participating in this type of criminal activity."

In a separate investigation two men were charged on Thursday over online attacks by Anonymous, Scotland Yard said.

Christopher Weatherhead, 20, from Northampton, and Ashley Rhodes, 26, from Kennington, south London, have been charged with conspiracy to carry out an unauthorised act in relation to a computer.

Police had already charged a youth from Chester aged 17 and student Peter David Gibson, 22, from Hartlepool, in relation to the same offences.

All four will appear on bail at City of Westminster Magistrates Court on September 7.

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The ethics of digital direct action

Denial-of-service attacks and similar tactics are becoming more widely used as protest tools.
^{By Gabriella Coleman}

The political movement known as Anonymous has managed to capture the attention of the media, the hearts of many supporters, and the ire of many spectators after an eight-month spree of political interventions, stretching from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) campaigns, to human rights technical assistance in Tunisia, to a more recent spate of hacks under the guise of Operation Antisec.

The state has now fully entered the fray with its own flurry of activity. In the past month, twenty-two alleged participants in the United States and the United Kingdom have been arrested, the bulk of them (14) in connection with a single operation: the spectacular wave of DDoS attacks aimed directly at protesting actions taken by Mastercard and Paypal in December 2010. These were launched after these companies refused to accept donations for Wikileaks front man Julian Assange, soon after the activist organisation released a trove of diplomatic cables. Hackers and activists supporting the DDoS campaign (and certainly not all do support the campaign) regard this act as legitimate protest activity, akin to a blockade or "digital sit-in". Yet, if convicted, the participants of Anonymous could be charged with felonies and land in prison with excessive punishments.

On July 20, 2011, a day after the US-based arrests, FBI officials offered a rare glimpse into its justification for the crackdown, citing a need to nip "chaos" in the bud: "We want to send a message that chaos on the internet is unacceptable," said Steven Chabinsky, deputy assistant FBI director.

Although most of the arrests were for the DDoS campaign, the FBI official never differentiated between hacking and DDoSing. The former is defined by computer break-ins or trespassing, while the latter refers to gumming up a server by bombarding it with too many requests. Curiously, this official also never went so far as to label the alleged participants criminals, terrorists, or vigilantes.

By complaining about Anonymous’ (hereafter Anons) tactics in the absence of any stated criminal offense, the FBI appears to acknowledge, if in a somewhat oblique fashion, that the hunt for some Anons is politically motivated. The FBI also appears to acknowledge that, in contrast to terrorists and criminals, whom the state is justified in prosecuting since they have violated the contract that ostensibly undergirds social norms in modern civil society, Anons are in fact exercising their rights as citizens to demonstrate on behalf of "causes" they believe in: "[Even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts. There has not been a large-scale trend toward using hacking to actually destroy websites, [but] that could be appealing to both criminals or terrorists. That's where the 'hacktivism,' even if currently viewed by some as a nuisance, shows the potential to be destabilising," insisted Chabinsky, in language that mirrors critiques of 1960s-era social movements.

Of course these brief statements should not be taken as the state's sole, much less its final, words on Anonymous. They are interesting insofar as they gesture toward a social fact concerning Anonymous’ increasingly prominent role in social protest movements: Many of their actions are politically motivated and conscientious, and the December 2010 DDoS campaign, Operation Avenge Assange, was no exception.

DDoS campaigns can be legitimate tactics

Whether or not one agrees with all of Anonymous’ many tactics - some of them being illegal and disruptive, others falling in the province of peaceful and legal human rights assistance, and still others in a gray moral and legal zone - under certain circumstances, the DDoS can be considered as non-violent protest in line with well-recognised protocols for public assembly, the difference being the medium. Of course, as with any form of public assembly, some Anons are merely along for the ride. Others might in fact exhibit reckless behaviour.

But this is an inevitable feature of Anonymous' platform, open to seasoned activists and newcomers alike: Some novice participants cut their teeth on politics for the first time with their Anonymous brethren, forming, no doubt, an individual political consciousness, which has fed into a more robust sense of democracy in action, especially after Anons held campaigns in support of the uprisings in the Middle East and Africa that have helped to displace authoritarian regimes that had managed to exploit their constituencies for decades on end.

Even if the FBI is ambivalent about explicitly denouncing Anonymous as a criminal threat, its tactics of arrest and intimidation and their criminalisation of all tactics used by Anons, such as DDoS, constitute an approach to security and surveillance that deserves critical attention, especially if any of these arrests move to trials.

There are many ways to think of the DDoS campaign against PayPal and Mastercard, but one way we might think of it is as digital direct action. Emerging organically, this movement did not wait for a judge, politician, nor a journalist to declare a legal or moral judgment. Citizens took matters into their own hands. In less than 24 hours, a large assembly of citizens took not to the streets where protest activity traditionally unfolds, but to the digital agora to act on their own accord, to loudly assert their opinion on a matter, and to act directly against those actors they felt were acting unjustly. If they happened to break laws, these laws were viewed, with good reason, to be unjust.

Like all traditions, direct action is diverse in its make-up, tactics, history, and purpose. At times, activists seek to block access in order to protect a resource, as with tree sit-ins in the Pacific Northwest or blocking Japanese whaling ships in the Southern Ocean as carried out by Sea Shepherd. In the long tradition of Plowshares actions, the intent is to get arrested in order to publicise an issue. Anonymous rendered Mastercard and Paypal's webpages defunct for a number of days by flooding their servers with too many requests and did so to garner media attention, to make their platform visible, and to demand that Assange be given due process. In this sense, they were successful, no matter what the outcome of the case made against them.

What made the events of December 2010 unusual - and extraordinary - as a moment of direct action poses a challenge for prevailing theories of civil disobedience. Many of the most notable acts of civil disobedience, even virtual sit-ins, have been organised by small affinity groups in which participants are public and typically well aware of the legal consequences of their actions.Some participants in these actions even have their lawyer's phone number written on their arm in permanent marker.

Anonymous, which prides itself on not having a readily identifiable, corporate form, was powerless to defend itself using these methods. Thus, as the December events unfolded, I was glued to the computer watching how Anons would or even could minimise the risk and chaos that to some degree characterised these interactions. Remarkably, "the hive mind", as they refer to themselves, never spun out of control. They stayed on target and conjoined their disruptions with manifestos and videos explaining their rationales.

But at the time, one thing was clear and has been repeated by sympathetic and unsympathetic observers alike: Many participants were likely unaware of the legal risk they were taking, and did not have lawyers to contact in the face of a future arrest. The spectacular events of December, combined with the recent arrests, have of course changed all of this; many of us have now been educated as to the risks at hand. The legal risks and the philosophical subtleties of DDoS as a disruptive direct action tactic no longer reside within the sole province of a smaller circle of activists who have practiced and theorised this tradition for over a decade. A much larger swath of citizens have subsequently entered the fray.

In light of these arrests, whether or not DDoS campaigns are always an effective political sword to wield (and they are strong arguments to be made on both sides) is not the primary question that should concern us. The key issue is the evidence used to decide who is involved and to determine what they ought to be charged with doing. If a DDoS action is deemed as always and under every circumstance unacceptable - always a tactic of chaos - this will in the short term result in excessive penalties; in the long term, an excessive clamp down, such as felony charges for those that stand accused, could stifle these tactics altogether on the internet.

This is damaging to the overall political culture of the internet, which must allow for a diversity of tactics, including mass action, direct action, and peaceful of protests, if it is going to be a medium for democratic action and life.

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Are Anonymous hackers really on trial, or is FBI payback misdirected?

It’s a scene reminiscent of a thousand police dramas: the FBI arrived at the door of 20-year-old journalism student Mercedes Haefer, guns drawn, at 6am one morning last July.

She was still in her pyjamas, getting ready for work.

Haefer is one of 14 individuals who last week pleaded not-guilty in San Jose for waging cyber attacks against e-commerce giant PayPal.

The warrant for Haefer stated federal officers were looking for anything associated with hacking, infiltrating or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Oh, and they were looking for a Guy Fawkes mask – evidence that would link Mercedes with the hacker group Anonymous (who have claimed such masks as their own) and, specifically, Operation Payback.

Payback

Operation Payback saw DDoS attacks on a number of companies, in particular Paypal. Anonymous claimed the attacks were retribution for decisions by executives at these companies to withdraw payment facilities from Wikileaks.

The FBI knew Haefer was associated with Anonymous because of her involvement on the group’s IRC channels, where she was known as “NO”.

But she denied having taken part directly in any of the DDoS attacks on PayPal.

Haefer was indicted along with 13 others on two charges of causing damage against PayPal’s computers. They carry a maximum penalty of 15 years in jail and a fine of $500,000. Two other people were charged separately.

Haefer is enrolled in a journalism and media pre-major course at the University of Nevada and Las Vegas.

Commenting on the charges against Haefer, the director of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media, Professor Daniel Stout said, “We don’t condone unethical behavior that results in the harm of the audience."

He also said that if Haefer had continued her studies she would have taken courses that ultimately produce journalists with a strong sense of ethics (Haefer is still enrolled at UNLV and Professor Stout has since moderated his comments).

Despite a superficial understanding of what a DDoS attack comprises (and despite the fact Haefer had not been tried when he made his statement), he was ready to brand both the act and Haefer as criminal and unethical.

In an examination of the ethics of DDoS attacks Gabriella Coleman, a socio-cultural anthropologist at New York University, makes a distinction between criminal acts such as hacking and non-violent political acts such as sit-ins.

In doing so, she raises the possibility of regarding DDoS as the digital equivalent of an occupation.

That said, in the case of a sit-in, the aim may include being arrested to draw more attention to a cause – and it’s not clear that any of the alleged members of Anonymous were anticipating being arrested.

The indictment used for the so-called Anonymous 16 includes the charge of intentional damage to a computer.

DDoS

A DDoS works by sending repeated requests to a website very quickly, exhausting resources and blocking access to regular users.

In the grand scheme of hacks, DDoS is a nuisance but not a major threat to a company, unlike, say, losing the details of user accounts and passwords.

This was a view shared by Deputy Assistant FBI Director Steven Chabinski.

“There has not been a large-scale trend toward using hacking to actually destroy websites, [but] that could be appealing to both criminals or terrorists,” Chabinsky told radio station NPR in July.

“That’s where the ‘hacktivism,’ even if currently viewed by some as a nuisance, shows the potential to be destabilizing.”

Ethics

Leaving aside considerations as to whether DDoS attacks are themselves ethical, the charge that the Anons lack a sense of ethics, as suggested by Professor Stout and others, seems even less certain.

If anything, it’s the Anons' sense of righting the wrongs of corporations and governments that underpins most of their activities.

Haefer said she became interested in the activities of Anonymous in part because of a sense of injustice at the inappropriate punishment for a woman accused of distributing 24 songs.

She was referring to the US$2 million fine imposed on Jammie Thomas-Rasset for sharing music, a fine which was later reduced to a US$54,000.

Haefer’s case can be contrasted by that of a 16-year-old woman from France who claimed the hack of San Fransisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transport Police Officers Association last month.

The young hacker had released the personal details of 100 officers. Going by the handle “Lamaline_5mg”, she claimed this was her first hack, and that she had little experience and had picked up enough information to hack the site in less than four hours.

Whereas Haefer claimed no previous technical knowledge, Lamaline was technically savvy enough to use techniques to cover her tracks, making her protestations of technical naivety slightly suspect.

Interestingly, Lamaline had not associated herself with Anonymous – in fact, some people on an Anonymous chat room condemned the attack as irresponsible.
Kicking an open door

One confounding factor in the actions of Anons is the relatively low barrier to entry for participation.

A simple search online will provide links to downloadable software to enable the participation in a DDoS.

Software such as the LOIC is simple to use and requires no technical expertise. There are readily accessible videos that demonstrate their use.

Anyone can go on to the Anonymous IRC channel and listen in. You can follow the activities of Anonymous and others on Twitter.

Accompanying this ease of access is the separation of actions and consequence – a separation encapsulated by using DDoS software.

Unsophisticated users would potentially struggle to understand how traceable their actions are.

The fact the FBI had little trouble in rounding up the 14 suspects being tried together in the DDoS attacks is more a testament to the ease of tracing individuals than a reflection of the technical abilities of the FBI.

Their single unifying feature of those arrested in connection with Operation Payback is their young age, given most of those charged are in their twenties.

The reaction against Anonymous from the general public, lawmakers and security specialists comes across almost as a generational conflict.

This is epitomised by Haefer having to leave her father’s home because he supposedly viewed his daughter (in Haefer’s words) as “a terrorist”.

And Haefer? She still believes in the positive things Anonymous is doing and is looking forward to making that known, without a mask, at her day in court.

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One on One: Cole Stryker, Author of ‘Epic Win for Anonymous’

Cole Stryker, a freelance writer and media consultant living in New York, spent years digging into Internet culture and communities, both as a participant and as a blogger covering viral phenomena. He’s the author of a new book called “Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web.” He discussed with me what it’s like exploring the seedy underbelly of the Internet, the rise of Anonymous, and why it and 4chan, widely considered one of the darkest and most subversive corners of the Internet, may be one of the most important and influential creations to emerge from the modern Web.

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Anonymous and LulzSec case: four accused males appear in court

Peter David Gibson, Ashley Rhodes, Christopher Weatherhead and a 17-year-old student released on bail

Four British males have been banned from using online nicknames after they appeared in court charged with attacks connected to Anonymous and LulzSec.

The four men – Peter David Gibson, 22, Ashley Rhodes, 26, Christopher Weatherhead, 20, and a 17-year-old student – were released on bail after the hearing at Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday morning.

The group's bail conditions mean they are prohibited from using specific online nicknames on sites including Facebook and Twitter.

Gibson, from Hartlepool, is banned from using the name "Peter" on the internet. Weatherhead, from Northampton, is prohibited from using "Nerdo"; Rhodes, from Kennington, south London, cannot use "NikonElite", and the 17-year-old, from Chester, is also banned from using his online nickname.

The four men are also banned using so-called "internet relay chat", the online forums where Anonymous members are alleged to have coordinated many of the attacks.

The four men are separately charged with conspiracy to carry out an unauthorised act in relation to a computer. They were arrested earlier this year by police investigating online attacks by the notorious hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec.

Rhodes, the oldest of the group who was arrested in September, appeared in court dressed in a grey waistcoat over a black shirt, with short dark hair.

Weatherhead, who was also arrested in September, wore a blue shirt under a short black jacket. Gibson has been on police bail since his arrest in April. He wore a smart grey suit, with a white open-necked shirt.

They will appear at Southwark crown court on 18 November for a plea and case management hearing.

Two other men, aged 24 and 20, have been released on bail following their arrest last week as part of the Metropolitan police investigation into Anonymous and LulzSec.

The unnamed men were arrested in Mexborough, near Doncaster, South Yorkshire, and Warminster, Wiltshire for conspiring to commit offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 using the online identity "Kayla".

The pair are due to return to a London police station in November.

HELLO ANONYMOUS WE ARE ANONYMOUS

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Greetings Anonymous,

We are Anonymous. We direct this message at ourselves to clarify that Anonymous, is not a group or a political organisation. Anonymous is an idea. An idea that is the spark that ignites the fires of change.

We must also clarify that as humans, we are not always going to agree on everything and as it has become apparent recently, there seems to be certain individuals attacking others because they do not agree with their views or vice versa.

The solution is simple, if you agree with an Anonymous operation then support it one hundred percent and help to make it happen. Why waste energy fighting against an operation that may or may not happen. Let the hivemind decide.

There are also certain individuals that seem to have forgotten simple mathematics, that seem to think that one equals more than one. So let us remind these leader fags that one equals one, No more no less.

We are all equal, Everyones contribution is equal, We are all one. We have no leaders or official representatives. Those claiming to officially work for or represent Anonymous do not.

There are no recruitment officers as you cannot recruit an idea. Those that assume that they are more than the one and try to be leader fags will be devoured by the whole. Let us work together as a whole for the better of the whole.

Anyone dictating to the whole as to who can be Anonymous or suppressing anothers right to free speech is doing what Anonymous stands against and therefore becomes a target for the Internet hate machine.

Be a part of the whole, do not attack each other can you not see that this is what they want?
Unite as one and let us be the spark that ignites the fires of change.

United as One.
Divided by 0.
We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive.
We do forget.
Expects Us.

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Anonymous U.R.G.E Release

To the people of the interwebz,

We recently have become tired of seeing trending topics on twitter that were redundant and “pop culture” like. We have also grown tired of Twitter not trending hash tags that actually serve a cause and mean something to free thinkers of the world. We have taken note of why Twitter would not do so, they only trend topics which would “appeal” to people and can get people to tweet more. This was pathetic in our eyes, and we could not stand by and take it anymore. We have developed a program called “U.R.G.E. Universal Rapid Gamma Emitter (twitter edition)” which hijacks trending topics of our choice and and lets us tweet messages within them. This will help raise awareness of problems going on in this world and show people that real problems exist outside of “Jersey Shore” and “Sex”. We will distribute this program amongst Anonymous and anyone else who cares to use this for awareness and bashing corrupt politicians. This is not a hacking tool nor is it an exploit tool, it was created to make it easier for us to tweet faster without copying and pasting constantly.

You will need .net framework four to run this program:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569263

U.R.G.E Users Manual:
http://pastebin.com/DGsgHFLQ


We Are Anonymous
We Are Legion
We Do Not Forgive
We Do Not Forget
EXPECT US!

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BREIN Wants PayPal To Cut Payments To File-Sharing Sites

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN says that it wants to form partnerships with payment processors such as PayPal in order to strangle the finances of file-sharing sites.

“We are in talks with the Dutch payment providers and are working towards partnerships,” BREIN chief Tim Kuik told Tweakers.net.

“These providers offer payment services to Web sites and since those sites are unlawful, then you should not deliver those services.”

Controversially, Kuik also says he is hoping that services such as PayPal, who take steps to identify their customers, can help where traditional methods of discovering the names of file-sharing site operators have failed.

“We are often faced with services that operate anonymously and have given their hosting provider false information,” Kuik said.

“We suspect that the payment providers have a good track, because the money they send has to go somewhere.”

While BREIN is mainly interested in shutting down sites offering unauthorized movies, according to a July announcement by IFPI, PayPal has already agreed to cut off funds destined for sites offering unauthorized music.

_{This post is from the News Bits section of TorrentFreak where we present stories from around the web in a concise summary format. Full TorrentFreak articles can be found here. If you have a tip please let us know. News Bits have their very own RSS feed}

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Federal authorities take on Anonymous hackers

SAN FRANCISCO — Anonymous is not so anonymous anymore.

The computer hackers, chat-room denizens and young people who make up the loosely affiliated Internet collective have drawn the attention of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal investigators.

What was once a small group of pranksters has become a potential national security threat, federal officials say.

The FBI has carried out more than 75 raids and arrested 16 people this year in connection with illegal hacking claimed by Anonymous.

Since June, Homeland Security has issued three “bulletins” warning cybersecurity professionals of hacking successes and future threats by Anonymous and related groups — including a call in Manhattan to physically occupy Wall Street on Sept. 17 to protest various U.S. government policies.

San Francisco police arrested more than 40 protesters last month during a rowdy demonstration organized by Anonymous that disrupted the evening commute. The group called for the demonstration after the Bay Area Rapid Transit system blocked cellphone service in San Francisco stations to quell a planned protest over a police shooting on a subway platform.

“Anonymous’ activities increased throughout 2011 with a number of high-profile attacks targeting both public- and private-sector entities,” one of the bulletins issued last month said.

Some members of the group have called for shutting down Facebook in November over privacy issues, though other Anonymous followers are disavowing such an attack, underscoring just how loosely organized the group is and how problematic it is to police.

“Anonymous insist they have no centralized operational leadership, which has been a significant hurdle for government and law enforcement entities attempting to curb their actions,” an Aug. 1 Homeland Security bulletin noted. “With that being said, we assess with high confidence that Anonymous and associated groups will continue to exploit vulnerable publicly available Web servers, Web sites, computer networks and other digital information mediums for the foreseeable future.”

Followers posting to Twitter and conversing on Internet Relay Chat insist there are no defined leaders of Anonymous and that it’s more of a philosophy than a formal club, though a small group of members do the most organizing online.

“Anonymous is not a group, it does not have leaders, people can do ANYTHING under the flag of their country,” wrote one of the more vocal members who asked not to be identified.

“Anything can be a threat to National Security, really,” the member said in an e-mail interview. “Any hacker group can be.”

Some members ‘dangerous’

The member said that the group as a whole is not a national security threat but conceded that some individuals acting under Anonynous’s banner may be considered dangerous.

DHS’s latest bulletin, issued Sept. 3, warned that the group has been using social-media networks to urge followers working in the financial industry to sabotage their employers’ computer systems.

The DHS warning comes on the heels of several Anonymous-led protests of the San Francisco Bay area’s transit agency that led to FBI raids of 35 homes and dozens of arrests, as well as to the indictment of 14 followers in July on felony computer hacking charges in connection with a coordinated “denial-of-service attack” against PayPal’s Web site last year.

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BART Doesn’t Want Media Detained…

San Francisco, CA – In previous articles, we’ve discussed the various arrests at a protest organized by “No Justice No BART” Thursday. Including, the arrests of journalism students, journalists, and protesters. Another protest is planned for today.

Today’s protest, is a part of ongoing weekly protests by “Anonymous”, an online collective, that has no membership or group structure. They call their protests “Operation Bart” or “#OpBart”, and have been protesting at the BART Civic Center station for the last 4 weeks, and are now on #OpBart-5.

According to statements from people related to Anonymous, today’s protest will be outside of the BART Civic Center station, and may include a march towards other stations as they have done during previous protests.

In a phone interview with BART spokesperson Jim Allison, he told us that there was “internet activity” about a possible protest today, however he was not sure whether or not there would be a protest. When asked about the arrests of journalists during the last protest, Thursday, he said that if, during protests to come — the stations are closed, he would have a zone set up behind a police line, where journalists were a safe distance away, but could still cover the story.

The OpBart tumblr page, which has been particularly active in promoting/creating this operation, has made a statement of “demands”, that they want, to end the protesting at BART. Earlier this week, they revised those demands. When asked about whether or not he had read the demands, and what BART’s response to them was, he told us that “our focus is on making sure the customers are safe and that the trains are on time”. BART has been particularly quiet about these demands, and seem to be assuming that it will “blow over”.

You can find the revised list of demands of #OpBart here.

Follow us on Twitter for continuing updates on today’s protests.

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European Governments in Massive Sell-Out to Recording Industry

In a move heavily lobbied for by the music industry, the EU Council has voted, without debate, to extend copyright monopolies on sound recordings from 50 to 70 years. Despite opposition from many countries, and the European Parliament, governments across the EU have once again shown how out of touch they are with the public mood.

Despite a lack of any credible evidence that it will help content creators, the EU has sanctioned a huge grab of public property, which steals music from the public domain and hands it to record companies. The extension flies directly in the face of the recent Hargreaves Review which observed:

In the case of ... copyright policy..., there is no doubt that the persuasive powers of celebrities and important UK creative companies have distorted policy outcomes.

Yet the British government has chosen to ignore the advice they claim to support, and instead back "Cliff Richard's Law".

Swedish Pirate Party MEP Christian Engström commented:

The purpose of the European Union is to keep the various lobbyists for big business happy, in this case the big record companies that own the rights to 80 percent of all music that has been recorded in history.

Andrew Robinson, Culture, Media and Sport Spokesperson for the Pirate Party UK said

There can be no justification for this change, other than sheer greed on behalf of record companies. Copyright law is normally justified by saying that artists need to be compensated for their work, or they wouldn't make music, but virtually the whole of modern pop music was produced under the 50 year term.

Extending the rights of Elvis, Hendrix, and Amy Winehouse won't get them to produce more work. All this copyright extension will do is channel more money into the pockets of record company executives, at the cost of depriving the public access to work for which the record companies have already been paid.

This change will simply mean the music industry will rely more on their back-catalogue, rather than investing in new artists.

While EU politicians may do what the IFPI wants, the public they are supposed to represent grow increasingly sceptical of perpetually extended copyright. Lobbyists may be able to buy the laws they want, but growth of the Pirate Party movement shows that the public will not put up with corruption forever."

The Pirate Party UK calls on the Government to reject this cynical copyright extension, and implement a copyright policy based on evidence, not lobbying.

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'Leaked' FBI document calls Anonymous a national security threat

Psych profiles show LulzSec, Anons older, more politically focused than they let on, FBI concludes

September 12, 2011, 1:52 PM — According to a PDF containing what purports to be a leaked psychological assessment of the leaders of LulzSec and Anonymous by the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (which also profiles serial killers), Anonymous is not only not a collection of individuals, it's a coherent group that poses a threat to national security.

Neither the FBI nor Dept. of Homeland Security have commented on the "leak," which may be a fake according to the TechHerald, but seems to reflect accurately the thinking behind a series of DHS warning bulletins and crackdowns that have resulted in 75 raids and 16 arrests of Anonymous members just this year.

Anons themselves refer to the group as a rough, almost coincidental collective of individuals that occasionally cooperate on projects to protest specific things.

There are approximately eight vortices of special interest within the collective, according to interviews, postings and counter-arguments posted by various Anonymi in response to invective by those it attacked.

Attacks are the work of small groups of interested individuals who, on their own initiative and using public argument as their weapon, gather like-minded Anonymi to protest governmental outrages or attack injustice in whatever form they find it, according to de facto leaders in the non-existent but vocal #OPpublicrelations.

In March, for example, members of Anonymous and 4Chan debated, in the finest traditions of American Democracy and citizen activism, whether to attack and defeat the Internet scourge that is Rebecca Black – the annoying but harmless pop "singer" whose made herself famous with a mom-and-dad-funded music video on YouTube that repeated the same lyrics so often it became apparent those might be the only words she knows.

(Other, less world-shaking Anonymous projects resulted in significant attacks against the embattled governments of Egypt and Syria, the exposure of government atrocities in Bolivia, civil protest against censorship on the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, attacks on Visa, Mastercard and Paypal in support of whistleblower site WikiLeaks and a long-simmering, high-profile protest against unrestricted greed, corrosive dishonesty of Wall Street and the and economic destruction from which the rest of the country suffers while financiers continues to prosper.)

The FBI has analyzed various instant messages, forum postings, emails, Twitter posts and other documentation and decided Anonymous behaves more like a coherent organization led by a small number of powerful and focused activists, not a politically involved group of individuals using the Anonymous banner as gathering point.

"The Anonymous ‘collective’ has risen from an amorphous group of individuals on the Internet to the current state of a potential threat to national security. Due to the nature of Anonymous, they believe that they are a leaderless collective. However, it has been shown that there is a defined leadership group," the document reads.

"A thorough assessment of each UNSUB’s online activities, speech patterns, and general writings was collected by the FBI. Each UNSUB was individually assessed by members of the SBU (sic) and a psychological profile created from these datasets."

Most of the members of Anonymous are under 30, but the bulk of its leadership are not teenage hacker/script-kids as many portray themselves, according to the FBI.

"It is likely" that Sabu, one of the more vocal spokestrolls for the LulzSec mini-collective of Anonymous, "works in the information security sector and has been doing so since the early days of the internet and hacking activities. His use of net speak is interspersed with proper American English diction and grammar that implies he is an American citizen and has been educated,” the FBI notes said.

BS, quoth the Anon:

"Anonymous is not a group, it does not have leaders, people can do ANYTHING under the flag of their country," according to one member in an email interview with the AP. "Anything can be a threat to National Security, really," the member said in an email interview. "Any hacker group can be."

If the document is real, it ends on a disturbingly dangerous and presumptive conclusion: that attacks and protests by Anonymous will eventually lead to the death of members of Anonymous, law enforcement or the public that will drive many supporters away from Anonymous.

Until then, Anonymous, whether collectively or individually, may be unstoppable in practical terms.

The overall assessment for the movement however is the following:

1. The movement is out of control and there seems to be no real coherent motivation


2. The leaders have begun to hide themselves a bit more due to arrests that have been made


3. Their reliance on technology will eventually be their downfall


4. Their interpersonal relationships are weak points, as such they should be leveraged


5. Their increasing attacks on infrastructure will eventually lead to serious results that could in fact lead to deaths

It is after the first real attributable deaths that there may be a tapering off of their ranks as the members realize that by outing individuals, actual physical actions can occur that cause great damage. Until such time though, the movement will continue with the masses used as fodder and the command structure urging them on to carry out their commands. – Psychological Profiles of Anonymous Leadership, FBI BSU Quantico, Aug., 2011

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Did Anonymous Hack WikiLeaks or Were They Being Framed?

On August 31st, 2011, as WikiLeaks scrambled to secure their cables ahead of a massive leak, their website was attacked. AnonCMD claimed responsibility.

It is being called Cablegate. The entire, unredacted collection of WikiLeaks documents have been leaked into the public domain, on August 31st, 2011, in an apparent clash of egos and information negligence. The whistleblowing, anti-secrecy site knew that this situation was about to become common knowledge. In a last ditch attempt to secure their data, an encrypted file was made available for download amongst their supporters. The password, they were informed, would be released at a later date. It was understood. This was insurance.

Within fifteen minutes of the announcement, as thousands rushed to grab the file, the WikiLeaks site was attacked by hackers for the second time in two days. However, there was a claim and it came from a surprising source. Anonymous have traditionally supported WikiLeaks, but now one of their purported members, AnonCMD, was repeatedly Tweeting responsibility for it.

Why Would Anonymous Hack WikiLeaks?

Over the course of the next few hours, AnonCMD described their motivation variously as being a test for their Denial of Service (DOS) program RefRef; a personal vendetta between themselves and Julian Assange over money; and an action in-keeping with the spirit of AntiSec and the Hackers' Ethic, which deems that all information should be free. Every couple of hours, AnonCMD would delete his historical Tweets, refusing to answer questions as to why.

RefRef is believed to be a program that is being developed to help hacktivists disable websites. It is due for release on September 17th, 2011. AnonCMD claimed that it is based on Javascript and they were testing it. Some responded with speculation that these tests were actually part of a publicity machine, designed to let everyone know about RefRef.

During the course of the day, their Tweets also stated that Pastebin (a site popular with Anonymous members for posting code and press releases) and 4Chan (a forum from which the original Anonymous meme was derived) had been temporarily overwhelmed with RefRef DOS packets.

What was the Reaction from Other Members of Anonymous?

Anonymous and their supporters were amongst those condemning the actions of AnonCMD. On Twitter especially the comments have been coming thick and fast. For example, AnonSikko Tweeted, 'any #anonymous supporter who supports @anoncmd needs to take a good long look at what hes done'. Earlier, he had raged, '@AnonCMD i dont give a **** who you are there are #anons who are having trials this week 4 supporting #wikileaks and yet you attack them.' WisdomsGrave added, '@AnonCMD Learn to put your ego aside and do what is right regardless of your 'personal disagreements'. Rationality over emotions plz.'

They were just two amongst the stream of other largely antagonistic reactions. Some bordered upon the paranoid or the astute, accusing AnonCMD of being a fake account set up to sully the name of Anonymous. AnonPhlex was amongst them, saying, '@AnonCMD O HAI there CIA gai trying to stir up dissent within Anonymous!'

A recent interview noted that Anonymous is more of an idea, made physical as disparate cells of Hacktivists and protestors, than a single, top down entity. AnonCMD may claim responsibility as their branch of the meme, and have sympathisers elsewhere, but the response on Twitter indicated that the majority of Anonymous members seemed unsupportive of the repeated attacks upon WikiLeaks.

Read more at Suite101: Did Anonymous Hack WikiLeaks or Were They Being Framed? | Suite101.com http://www.suite101.com/n(...)386922#ixzz1XqslusoJ

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Defending 'Anonymous': Lawyers For Alleged 'Hacktivists' Speak Out

The cases are still in their early stages. But bit by bit, the lives and personalities of the suspects arrested and charged in July as members of the 'hackivist' collective 'Anonymous' are coming to light.

The prosecutions, stemming from cyber attacks on PayPal, AT&T, and a law enforcement website, represent the government's first major salvo against a group whose operations it considers an increasing criminal threat, at the same time as its basic construction has remained largely opaque.

But while the charges are clear cut, the potential motives of the accused are less so. Indeed that's the key question. Who are Anonymous, and what do they want, if anything? Is Anonymous even a real organization, or is it an ethos? And does that distinction really matter, when there are real crimes being committed under the Anonymous banner?