Anonops #12: Spy on the Spyers

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Op zondag 4 maart 2012 16:27 schreef YazooW het volgende:

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"Anonymous" heeft daar blijkbaar scheit aan...

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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Op zondag 4 maart 2012 16:31 schreef YazooW het volgende:

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Ik ben zelf ook "anti-religie" of hoe je het ook wilt noemen, maar dit soort acties slaan gewoon helemaal nergens op. Lijkt wel dat ze uit verveling niet meer weten wat ze moeten doen. De rechten van de mens waar ze eerst zo duidelijk voor stonden hebben blijkbaar geen waarde meer voor "hun".

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Op zondag 4 maart 2012 16:43 schreef YazooW het volgende:

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Ik zeg nergens dat Anonymous een organisatie is, wel zeg ik dat Anonymous altijd de boodschap naar buiten bracht dat met name overheden af moeten blijven van de rechten die wij als mens hebben. Vandaar dat ik het nu raar vind dat ze nu religieuze organisaties aanvallen en daarmee dus zelf ook scheit hebben aan onze rechten.

Jessi Slaughter Apologizes [2011]

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Op zondag 4 maart 2012 17:30 schreef YazooW het volgende:

[..]

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Op zondag 4 maart 2012 17:34 schreef YazooW het volgende:

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Onderscheid? Ik snap je ff niet.
100% duidelijk dat /b/ daar achter zat.

edit. overigens vroeg dat kind er zelf om

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Anonymous Appears To Take Down AIPAC Website

The annual policy conference of the pro-Israel Group AIPAC is, as always, a massive show of bipartisan pro-Israel solidarity, and the target of protests from Israel's critics.

This year's protesters include newcomers: A group called "Occupy AIPAC," whose leaders seem to be drawn from the longtime anti-war group Code Pink, and the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

This morning, as President Obama speaks to the group, its website has crashed. An AIPAC spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment, but claims of responsibility could be found on Twitter.

twitter:

jonahogan twitterde op zondag 04-03-2012 om 22:26:06 #Anonymous is an anti-semite organization! reageer retweet

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Hackers Winning Security War, Said Executives At RSA Conference

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Technology security professionals seeking wisdom from industry leaders in San Francisco this week saw more of the dark side than they had expected: a procession of CEO speakers whose companies have been hacked.

"It's pretty discouraging," said Gregory Roll, who came for advice and to consider buying security software for his employer, a large bank which he declined to name because he was not authorized to speak on its behalf. "It's a constant battle, and we're losing."

The annual RSA Conference, which draws to a close on Friday, brought a record crowd of more than 20,000 as Congress weighs new legislation aimed at better protecting U.S. companies from cyber attacks by spies, criminals and activists.

If the bills suggest that hackers are so far having their way with all manner of companies, the procession of speakers brought it home in a personal way.

The opening presentation by Art Coviello, executive chairman of conference sponsor and recent hacking victim RSA, set the tone with the Rolling Stones song "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

RSA, owned by data storage maker EMC Corp, is the largest provider of password-generating tokens used by government agencies, banks and others to authenticate employees or customers who log on away from the office. Not long after last year's RSA conference, the company said an email with a poisoned attachment had been opened by an employee.

That gave hackers access to the corporate network and they emerged with information about how RSA calculates the numbers displayed on SecurID tokens, which was in turn used in an attack on Lockheed Martin that the defense contractor said it foiled.

Coviello said he hoped his company's misfortune would help foster a sense of urgency in the face of formidable opponents, especially foreign governments, who are being aided by the blurring of personal and professional online activities. Some 70 percent of employees in one survey he cited admitted to subverting corporate rules in order to use social networks or smartphones or get access to other resources, making security that much harder.

"Our networks will be penetrated. People will still make mistakes," Coviello said. He argued that with better monitoring and analysis of traffic inside company networks, "we can manage risk to acceptable levels."

If that didn't inspire enough enthusiasm after the worst year for corporate security in history - including the rise of activist hacks by Anonymous, numerous breaches at Sony Corp, and attacks on Nasdaq software used by corporate boards - there was more to come.

Next onstage was James Bidzos, CEO of core Internet infrastructure company VeriSign, which disclosed in an October securities filing that it had lost unknown data to hackers in 2010. [ID:nL2E8D1DFB] He was followed by Enrique Salem, CEO of the largest security company, Symantec, which recently admitted that source code from 2006 version of its program for gaining remote access to desktop computers had been stolen and published. [ID:nL4E8D77TN]

FBI Director Robert Mueller spoke on Thursday, warning that he expected cyber threats to pass terrorism as the country's top threat.

Though all sounded an upbeat call to arms, some watching grumbled that vendors with little credibility were trying to use their own shortcomings to peddle more expensive and unproven technology.

"There's some panic" among the buyers, said a security official with ING Groep NV who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the press. Banks are very sensitive to questions about security breaches and often deny they have any significant problems in this area.

That panic contributed to vigorous panel discussions and hallway debates about who should be in charge of safeguarding defense companies, banks and utilities - private industry itself, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or the National Security Agency, which has the greatest capability but a legacy of civil liberties issues.

A pending bill backed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would put DHS in the lead, with assistance from NSA. Former NSA chief Michael Hayden said in an interview at the conference that should suffice.

"The Net is inherently insecure," Hayden said. "We need to quit admiring the problem and move out. No position could be worse than the one we're in now."

Coviello said one of the few pieces of good news was that the country as a whole is now realizing the gravity of the loss of its trade and government secrets, along with the difficulty of reversing the trend.

"People have definitely talked more seriously after our breach," he said in an interview. "Maybe a sense of realism has settled in."

(Reporting By Joseph Menn; Editing by Richard Chang)

twitter:

AnonInfoWarfare twitterde op maandag 05-03-2012 om 00:27:37 Have an abusive significant other in your life? Document the abuse & report it to @PonyCr3w #OpYoungPony #Anonymous reageer retweet

#OpYoungPony - Engaged.

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It’s Official: US Demands Extradition of Megaupload Suspects

Authorities in the United States have put in an official request to extradite Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and the three other suspects in the “Mega Conspiracy.” While the request doesn’t come as a surprise, the prosecutors waited till the official deadline last Friday before filing the paperwork. It will take a while before the fate of the accused is decided, as the first extradition hearing is planned for August.

Last Friday, US prosecutors filed an extradition request against four New Zealand-based suspects who were allegedly part of the so-called “Mega Conspiracy.”

Kim Dotcom is wanted in the United States alongside other key Megaupload employees on racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering charges.

In the battle to extradite the defendants, US authorities intend to rely on a United Nations treaty aimed at combating international organized crime.

Previously a lawyer working on behalf of the United States government admitted that no copyright offenses are specifically listed in the extradition treaty. However, he also noted that certain offenses which involve transnational crime are covered by New Zealand’s Extradition Act.

In New Zealand crimes must carry a four year prison sentence to be deemed extraditable. Under the country’s Copyright Act, distributing an infringing work carries a five year maximum sentence.

Experts and observers are predicting that due to its groundbreaking status, the extradition battle for the Megaupload defendants will be both complex and prolonged, and could even go all the way to the Supreme Court.

For now, the first extradition hearing has been scheduled for August 20.

Megaupload programmer Bram van der Kolk recently called on the New Zealand authorities to remain dignified in their extradition dealings with the United States.

“I really hope New Zealand will keep its dignity and can show that it is a sovereign state that has its own justice system,” he said, referring to the extradition process.

Talking to TorrentFreak last week, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom said that he and his co-defendants are positive that the law is on their side.

“We’re going for this and we’re confident we’re going to win,” Kim said.

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DMCA: Horrors of a Broad and Automated Censorship Tool

The DMCA was once drafted to protect the interests of copyright holders, allowing them to take infringing content offline. Today, however, the system is systematically abused by rightsholders as an overbroad censorship tool. One third of the notices sent to Google are false, companies like Microsoft censor perfectly legal sites, and others use the DMCA to get back at competitors.

arlier this week one of TorrentFreak’s articles was censored by Google on behalf of a copyright holder.

The article in question was mysteriously flagged as being infringing by an automated DMCA takedown tool. An honest mistake according to the people who sent the notice, but one that doesn’t stand in isolation.

Google previously noted that that 37% of all DMCA notices they receive are not valid copyright claims.

One of the problems is that many rightsholders use completely automated systems to inform Google and other service providers of infringements. They swear under penalty of perjury that the notices are correct, but this is often an outright lie.

Microsoft, for example, has sent Google dozens of notices about the massive infringements that occur on the site Youhavedownloaded.com, a site that is completely non-infringing. As a result, many pages of the website have been de-listed from Google’s search results, directly damaging the site’s owners.

Other rightsholders make even stranger mistakes by massively taking down content that they don’t own. The adult content outfit AFS Media for example asked Google to remove links to the movies Braveheart, Monsters Inc, Green Lantern and many more titles that have nothing to do with the content they produce.

Similar mistakes are made at NBC Universal who got Google to censor the independent and free-to-share movie A Lonely Place for Dying.

Or again by Microsoft, who successfully requested Google to remove a link to a copy of the open source operating system Kubuntu.

And then there’s YouTube’s content-ID system. We previously outlined many mistakes that were made by the DMCA-style anti-piracy filter, resulting in tens of thousands of ridiculously inaccurate claims.

This week yet another example came up when YouTube labeled birds tweeting in the background of a video as copyrighted music. Again a mistake, but one that probably would have never been corrected if Reddit and Hacker News hadn’t picked it up.

Aside from the mistakes outlined above, there’s also a darker side to DMCA abuse. Google previously revealed that 57% of all the DMCA notices they receive come from companies targeting competitors.

The “competition” angle also ties into the row between Megaupload and Universal Music Group. The latter removed a promo video from the cyberlocker from YouTube on copyright grounds, without owning the rights to any of the material.

It’s safe to say that the DMCA is broadly abused. Thousands of automated notices with hundreds of links each are sent out on a daily basis, turning it into a broad censorship tool. Only the tip of the iceberg is visible to the public thanks to companies like Google who publish some of the notices online.

We can only wonder what’s happening behind the scenes at other sites, but it’s not going to be any better.

Just a few months ago the cyberlocker service Hotfile sued Warner Bros. for DMCA abuse. In the suit Hotfile accuses the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software.

Not good.

While we’re the first to admit that copyright holders need tools to protect their work from being infringed, mistakes and abuse as outlined above shouldn’t go unpunished. The DMCA was never intended to be an overbroad and automated piracy filter in the first place.

The above also illustrates why it’s dangerous to allow rightsholders to take entire websites offline, as the SOPA and PIPA bills would allow. The MPAA and RIAA have said many times that legitimate sites would never be affected, but didn’t they say exactly the same about the DMCA?

twitter:

AnonymousIRC twitterde op maandag 05-03-2012 om 22:41:26 Camp David is a lovely place, sorrounded by woods. Just the right place to camp and sing and have fun. #OccupyCampDavid reageer retweet

twitter:

xhdroelf twitterde op maandag 05-03-2012 om 22:45:13 #anonymous will do what goverments did not do #Syria #OpTripToSyria

TRIP TO SYRIA -- don't just watch, help Syria!

http://t.co/aGN2vYl4 READ and RT reageer retweet

twitter:

TripToSyria twitterde op zondag 04-03-2012 om 13:07:21 I have been away at @OccupyStockholm, great ppl! New update: $2257 USD #optriptosyria reageer retweet

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Atari Teenage Riot / Anonymous / Sony Vita advert in the USA

My name is Alec Empire and I am from Atari Teenage Riot.

Some might think it was an evil capitalist greed thing,
others will argue it was some Jesus Christ sacrifice thing,
but let’s not overcomplicate this…

I did it only for my own amusement!

If you are new to my music or me as a person you might not know that I had some beef
with Sony in the year 1999 over a camcorder advert in South East Asia.
(a track of mine was basically used against my permission)

I felt used, exploited, ripped off…everything that a sensitive artist like myself would feel
in that situation… haha (I hope you know I am kidding here….but I have to admit it hurt a little)

if you ever tried to fight a corporation like this in court AND in another country,
let me tell you…you want to do other stuff with that time and money…

Even though the thing got settled in court kind of, I never felt they paid what they owed.

It’s the old question that is being asked again and again:
What’s a song worth? When does copyright start, when does it end?

Around the same time I came to the conclusion that men with guns
employed by the government can’t and won’t protect me from
situations like this in the future.

So when the request for the Sony Vita ad landed on my lap,
I put ‘Black Flags’ into it…it was all hectic and they okayed it.

We needed to tie up a few lose ends on this, until it became unstoppable,
that’s why we had to wait to reveal that

Atari Teenage Riot donate their $$$ to http://freeanons.org/

I cross checked they can’t stop the track from appearing in the OWS online clips of
ATR/Anonymous etc… which makes it even more fun.

Yes, I already got some hate, some even attempted to troll me (on Facebook???)….
but you know what?

I don’t care because it just FELT V E R Y GOOD! HAHA

Some Eloi might also say:

“Uh but this Zong ist an advert so u will sell more Compact Disc now”

Maybe…or maybe you can just download the track, which was free all along, here:
Atari Teenage Riot - Black Flags (feat. Boots Riley) by Alec Empire/ ATR

OR maybe for a change…you could ask yourself a question:

“Have I donated to freeanons.org yet?”

The light at the end of the tunnel is a computer screen …nothing else…

Alec Empire
(Berlin 3/3/2012)

"RAGE"-ATARI TEENAGE RIOT

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A Declaration of the Independence of CyberSpace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, we come from the Internet, the new home of Mind.
On behalf of the future, we ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one; therefore we address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty it always speaks. We declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. You are toothless wolves among rams, reminiscing of days when you ruled the hunt, seeking a return of your bygone power.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. The Internet does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

We have watched as you remove our rights, one by one, like choice pieces of meat from a still struggling carcass, and we have collectively cried out against these actions of injustice. You have neither usage nor purpose in the place we hold sacred. If you come, you will be given no more and no less power than any other single person has, and your ideas will be given the same consideration anyone else would receive You are neither special, righteous, nor powerful here.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. This claim has been used throughout the centuries by many an invading kingdom, and your claims are no different, nor do they ring any less hollow. Your so called problems do not exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours.

The Internet consists of transactions, relationships and thought itself; arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. It is the last truly free place in this world, and you seek to destroy even that freedom. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. A place where anyone, at any time, is as free to come and go, to say and be silent, and to think however they wish, without fear, as anyone else. There is no status beyond the merit of your words and the strength of your ideas.

We are creating a world where anyone anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. There are only ideas and information, and they are free.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions.

The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you repeatedly try to pass unjust legislature in an attempt to restrict us. You disguise this legislature under a variety of different names, and pass excuses that they are for our own protection. We have watched you, time and time again; attempt to censor us under the guise of Copyright protection, or for the protection of Children. These laws come in many shapes and forms, in the name of ACTA, PIPA, COICA, SOPA, but their intentions remain the same. You seek to control what you cannot.

We scorn your attempt to pass these bills, and as a result, our discontent at your misaligned efforts grows each day.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Canada, the United States and many others you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of the Internet. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that is already blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no different than pig iron.

In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our presence in the world we have created immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in the Internet. We have created a medium where all may partake in the forbidden fruit of knowledge, where egalitarianism reigns true. May our society be more humane and fair than yours.

We are the Internet.
We are free.

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Will the internet kill copyright? Here’s hoping …

IDEAS AND OWNERSHIP: The concept of protecting ideas and innovation by legal means dates back to antiquity. But many of our existing laws are under strain, their suitability and ultimate purpose called into question.

Here, Philip Soos considers the faults that plague existing copyright laws and suggests that, in an increasingly online world, we need to find more realistic options.

In the past few months, there’s been substantial media interest in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill in the US, introduced ostensibly as an attempt to crack down on intellectual property rights (IPR) violations.

If adopted, this bill would give the US government even more power to deal with those found infringing IPRs than currently exists under the existing legislation – the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

SOPA has spawned a great deal of debate over the merits and demerits of further expanding protection for IPRs. Some claim SOPA would help protect jobs and profit – hence innovation; while many argue SOPA would impinge upon citizens’ right to privacy.

Opposition to SOPA prompted many websites, including Wikipedia, to close down temporarily in protest.

But this debate leaves much to be desired. It consists of arguing IPR protection should be strengthened, weakened or left alone. Few, if any, are critical of the reigning assumption that IPR is a necessary intervention in the economy.

The question that needs to be asked is: why is a 16th century medieval government monopoly being used to spur innovation and creative art in the technologically-advanced 21st century?

The usual story trotted out is that markets will produce a less than optimal level of research and development and creative works without some form of government intervention. We are told that without such intervention, many of the technologies and modes of entertainment we enjoy today would simply not exist.

Thus the need for copyrights to provide the stimulus for firms to invest to meet consumer wants and needs.

The state-driven tech revolution of the late 1990s has seen an explosion of IPR-protected content being shared over the internet. Evolving technology (such as peer-to-peer networking) has made it easy for almost anyone with a decent internet connection to continuously download and upload files, whether that’s video games, music, books, magazines, comics, TV episodes, films, documentaries, or programs.

Anything that can be converted into electronic data and stored on a computer can be shared. It has been estimated that the sharing of content through the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol accounts for one-third of internet traffic today.

Given authorities across the world have often had to catch up to the evolving uses of the internet via legislation, it is difficult for individuals and firms to simultaneously enforce their state-granted rights in many countries, all with differing laws in regards to IPRs.

(That said, the World Trade Organization has attempted to standardise international and national law through its Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).)

Industry and governments have certainly tried hard in this respect. Every iteration of copyright protection law appears to be more draconian than the last. It is unsurprising that the US is in the lead of protecting IPR, as its industries are the largest and often most profitable (as in the case of pharmaceuticals and biotech).

The TRIPS and DMCA legislation have clearly done little to prevent file sharing, which appears to be ever-increasing in magnitude. Draconian laws have done little to deter users from violating copyrights and other forms of IPRs.

Online content is really no different to drugs that are currently illegal: people who want them will always get them, with entrepreneurs and cartels operating within the black market to meet demand. The sane course of action is to carefully legalise and regulate the supply of drugs/ content, not impose wildly invasive, expensive and equally ineffective government intervention against producers and consumers.

Ever more draconian legislation has not and will not prevent people from file-sharing and violating IPRs. Industry will claim IPRs, as private property, must be respected. But to claim IPR, as information, should be covered by private property rights is as nonsensical as if the government were to assign a property right to an autoworker’s job, allowing the employee the right to hold it or sell to another.

Ownership under copyright is twisted to the point where consumers do not own the software they purchase; rather, they are merely extended a license to use the software that the company owns.

The problems with copyright (and other forms of IPRs) are extensive. The most obvious flaw is the monopolistic pricing inherent to this form of intervention. Any introductory economic textbook tells us the efficiency is met when outputs are produced and sold at marginal cost – what it costs to produce the next good or service.

In the information age, electronic data or informational goods can be copied for free. Accordingly, this is what goods should be priced at: zero, instead of monopoly pricing.

Ironically, pirates are acting as conventional economists claim people should – that is, they are rational agents seeking to maximise their utility (happiness) by obtaining copies of informational goods at marginal cost.

Other costs include those associated with the court system and patents offices, which have effectively become a joke. People and firms are endlessly suing each other over potential and real copyright infringements, with these legal expenses essentially acting as a tax on innovation that is passed on to consumers.

Bureaucrats at the patent office are under a difficult burden to ensure that software patents are truly innovative and do not violate previously-granted patents.

Under SOPA, citizens’ online activities would be watched and recorded in ever-greater detail, in a futile attempt to crack down on piracy. What industry is calling for is an ever-stronger police state to ensure legislative compliance, despite what the evidence may say about the loss of sales pertaining to piracy.

It should be obvious by now that a new form of funding research, development and creative works needs to be implemented. The cornerstone of any new system should ensure goods are sold at the cost of production: either free on the internet or a few dollars for the physical product. Creative Commons and free software licenses should become the new mode.

The extremes of wealth also need to be avoided: there is no natural law that says Bill Gates should become a billionaire via government monopoly while many creative artists just scrape by.

It is imperative that the wastes and inefficiencies of the IPR system be eliminated and not reproduced under alternative systems.

It is time for some creative thinking on the part of the public (industry isn’t going to help) to design alternate models of financing. Otherwise, the nanny state that operates on behalf of the rich is going to become ever more authoritarian.

This is part five of Ideas and Ownership. To read the other instalments, click on the links below:

. Part One: IP, patents, copyright, you
. Part Two: Do patents promote innovation?
. Part Three: The art of war: know your enemys patents, and your own
. Part Four: Evergreening patents: playing monopoly with solar fuels and medicine innovations

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Well, my concern would be then stealing our credit card data from
customers somehow. If that happens, it would bury us. Not a lot of people
look at our website in hits.

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Anonymous Campaign to Feed the Homeless

One of the most significant activist groups of the 21st century looks to provide food for those living on the streets.

There is no doubt about the pulling power of Anonymous, as a force to mobilise people around the world.

It was this idea made cyber-reality which initially came up with the hash-tag #OccupyWallStreet. Other groups were involved; but it was the behemoth of the Anonymous publicity machine, which named the entire Occupy Movement.

The denizens of Reddit might have been the ones to think of an internet strike against SOPA and PIPA. It was arguably the support of Anonymous, which made that initiative huge. At least members of the Polish government judged that to be the case, when they donned Guy Fawkes masks in the aftermath.

These are just two examples from a whole back catalogue of social issue activism. So what will happen now the collective takes up the cause of the starving homeless?

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Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 15:33 schreef YazooW het volgende:

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owned

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Hector Xavier Monsegur

twitter:

mikko twitterde op dinsdag 06-03-2012 om 15:18:44 Big news about LulzSec and @anonymouSabu: "Infamous international hacking group LulzSec brought down by own leader" http://t.co/LdfVv7jN reageer retweet

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Alleged LulzSec Hackers Arrested as Leader Turns Snitch

Lulz Security, a hacking group that stole data from law enforcement, defaced the websites of major publications and published troves of user names and passwords from online services, has suffered a critical blow at the hands of law enforcement.

Agents across two continents arrested two of LulzSec‘s alleged top hackers on Tuesday morning, along with a member of the larger hacking collective Anonymous. Law enforcement also slapped new charges on two LulzSec members who were already behind bars, Fox News reports.

(MORE: ‘We Do It for the Lulz’: What Makes LulzSec Tick?)

In a story that sounds like movie fodder, LulzSec’s informal leader reportedly turned against his former hacking buddies, secretly helping the FBI in the months leading up to the arrests.

The group’s alleged leader is Hector Xavier Monsegur, an unemployed, 28-year-old father of two who used the alias “Sabu.” The FBI reportedly arrested him last June, and he pleaded guilty in August to a dozen hacking-related charges. Monsegur then started working with the FBI to bring down the rest of LulzSec’s top-ranking hackers.

The details on the arrests aren’t official yet, but Fox News has apparently spoken with FBI agents for its story. “This is devastating to the organization,” one FBI official involved with the investigation said. “We’re chopping off the head of LulzSec.”

More details should become available later today, when court documents including Monsegur’s admissions are expected to be unsealed in New York’s Southern District Court. A conspiracy indictment will reportedly name the five LulzSec members facing charges: Ryan Ackroyd, aka “Kayla” and Jake Davis, aka “Topiary,” of London; Darren Martyn, aka “pwnsauce” and Donncha O’Cearrbhail, aka “palladium,” of Ireland; and Jeremy Hammond, aka “Anarchaos,” of Chicago.

Fox News’ law enforcement sources described Hammond as a member of Anonymous who is being charged in a separate indictment. He is allegedly the main person behind Anonymous’ hacking of security think tank Stratfor in December.

LulzSec began making a name for itself last May, with attacks on Fox.com and PBS.com. The group then hacked Sony Pictures’ servers and made off with user names, passwords, addresses and dates of birth. Other high-profile hacks included a breach against Arizona law enforcement and a big takedown of popular gaming services such as Eve Online and Minecraft.

However, the group announced last June that it was disbanding, facing pressure from law enforcement and other hackers. At the time, little did we know that LulzSec’s alleged leader had been arrested. For the rest of the group, it was already too late.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/(...)nitch/#ixzz1oLtfnmcF

twitter:

BarrettBrownLOL twitterde op dinsdag 06-03-2012 om 16:51:30 My apartment was raided this morning by the FBI. Feds also came to another residence where I actually was. Sabu is a traitor. #Anonymous reageer retweet

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Anon_Central twitterde op dinsdag 06-03-2012 om 16:55:28 @BarrettBrownLOL why aren't you in jail? reageer retweet

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BarrettBrownLOL twitterde op dinsdag 06-03-2012 om 16:59:38 @Anon_Central Because they didn't arrest me. They wanted laptops. reageer retweet

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Lulzsec mastermind Sabu: an elite hacker and star FBI informant

US authorities say Hector Xavier Monsegur, a celebrity for his attacks on the US senate, was 'flipped' after his arrest

He was the self-taught "elite hacker" behind devastating attacks on the US Senate, the Zimbabwean government and a string of enemies in between.

From the New York apartment block he shared with his two children, 28-year-old Hector Xavier Monsegur led an audacious double life as the internet activist "Sabu" – something of a celebrity in the world of hackers.

But Monsegur was finally unmasked on Tuesday after it emerged that he had pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges and had acted as an informant for the FBI since August 2011, just as the international crackdown on the notorious Anonymous hacker collective gathered pace.

Monsegur was deeply involved in attacks on behalf of WikiLeaks in December 2010, according to court papers unsealed in New York on Tuesday.

The hacker acted as a "rooter", identifying weak spots in the websites of multinational firms including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal which his Anonymous group of "hacktivists" would then attempt to exploit.

The 27-page indictment of Monsegur reads like a hall of fame of online sabotage. According to the FBI, Sabu was intimately involved in the WikiLeaks "Operation Payback" attacks that managed to steal documents from the Yemen and Zimbabwe governments and deface the website of the Tunisian prime minister.

Sabu was always quick to claim responsibility for the attacks, aiming to taunt law enforcement bodies and gain respect from his peers. And although rumours of his identity began to circulate in the hacker community, his precise details remained unknown.

On 7 June last year, the act was over. FBI officials found Monsegur at his Manhattan apartment. According to the US media, the expert hacker had been foiled by his own carelessness. The FBI discovered that he had logged into an internet chatroom from his own internet address – a schoolboy error of computer hacking.

Unknown to his fellow hackers, Monsegur quietly pleaded guilty to 12 charges related to computer interception on 15 August last year. And, threatened with 124 years in prison, he agreed to become an FBI informant. The FBI took his own battered laptop and replaced it with their own – which they monitored around the clock.

Online, he maintained his bravura attitude. "Next thing you'll say is I work for the CIA and I'm a blackop," he snapped at a Guardian inquiry on Twitter after the Sun's website was hacked in July.

"Am I snitch/informant? Lets be real – I don't know any identities of anyone in my crew," said an online post attributed to Monsegur in October last year – weeks after he was "flipped" by US authorities. "And the last thing I'd ever do is take down my own people. I am a grown ass man I can handle my own issues. I've been to jail before – I don't fear it. In fact there is very little I am afraid of especially these days."

The post was a response to other hackers who were increasingly accusing Sabu of being a "media whore" and an informant. The rumours were rife – little more than 14 hours after he avoided imprisonment by assisting the US government, one group claimed Sabu was a "Chinese infiltrator".

"Lately I've been chilling; enjoying time off to focus on my personal life. I'm not tied to this the rest of my life," said the post linked to Sabu's Twitter account. "I've already made my impact. If I disappear now or get knocked, its already too late … Sadly people want to exonerate themselves from their responsibility – like emailing the feds for immunity."

Monsegur described himself in the post as a professional security researcher, but the computer genius had been unemployed since the closure of filesharing giant LimeWire, according to US authorities who spoke to Fox News.

The broadcaster cited Monsegur's handlers, who described him as an anti-government, anti-capitalist hacker who had a political edge. They said his now-infamous online moniker had been taken from a professional wrestler born on nearby Staten Island, known as Sabu the Elephant Boy.

The hacker clearly drew inspiration from the New York fighter. He routinely responded aggressively to police, journalists and others on social networking websites. "I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks, I also don't give a fuck if you have a beef with me," said a post attributed to him on the Pastebin website. "The end result is always going to be: You. Can. Not. Stop. Me. Deal with it."

The FBI handlers described Monsegur as brilliant but lazy. According to Fox News, US authorities found him selling stolen credit card details to others on Facebook.

It is not clear how lucrative Monsegur's brief reign of terror was. But the downfall of Sabu will continue to send reverberations through online hacker collectives for a long time to come.

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Barrett Brown, who has spoken on behalf of Anonymous in past attacks, including the attack on Stratfor in December, said that his home in Dallas had been raided and that the F.B.I. had sent three agents to his mother’s house, where he stayed last night.

“I received an advance warning of the raid and put all my laptops in very specific places where they couldn’t be found,” Mr. Brown said. He said the agents left without making an arrest.

Mr. Brown said the arrests elsewhere would not slow down the Anonymous movement. “There are lots and lots of people here that continue to work. The F.B.I. did not really cut the head off of anything. Anonymous will go forward as usual. So will I. We hired an army of lawyers last January. We are prepared for a big slug-out.”