Anonops #13: Stop CISPA

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RIAA: Online Music Piracy Pales In Comparison to Offline Swapping

A leaked presentation from the RIAA shows that online file-sharing isn’t the biggest source of illegal music acquisition in the U.S. The confidential data reveals that 65% of all music files are “unpaid” but the vast majority of these are obtained through offline swapping. The report further shows that cyberlockers such as Megaupload are only a marginal source of pirated music.

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In total, 15 percent of all acquired music (paid + unpaid) comes from P2P file-sharing and just 4 percent from cyberlockers. Offline swapping in the form of hard drive trading and burning/ripping from others is much more prevalent with 19 and 27 percent respectively.

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Hong Kong Facebook user arrested over hacking threat

HONG KONG — Hong Kong police said on Sunday they had arrested a 21-year-old man after he reportedly said on social networking site Facebook that he would hack several government websites.

Police said the man, who was later released on bail, was held on suspicion of "access to a computer with criminal or dishonest intent" after he allegedly threatened to hack seven government websites between June and August this year.

"The Internet is not a virtual world of lawlessness," a police spokesman said, adding that the man was required to report back to the police in October.

The unidentified man was arrested on Friday before being released on bail, the spokesman told AFP.

He faces up to five years imprisonment if found guilty.

The man is a member of the global hacker group Anonymous, the South China Morning Post said. The group is said to have 20 members in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory, which guarantees civil liberties not seen on the mainland, including freedom of speech.

The police spokesman declined to confirm his link to Anonymous. The last posting on the "Anonymous HK" Facebook page on July 22 urged authorities to show "respect" to citizens.

The notorious group, which is believed to be a loosely affiliated network of "hacktivists", has attacked sites of groups as varied as MasterCard and Visa, the US Justice Department, and the Tunisian and Yemen governments.

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Internet Pirates Will Always Win

STOPPING online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole.

Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow.

Take as an example YouTube, where the Recording Industry Association of America almost rules with an iron fist, but doesn’t, because of deceptions like the one involving a cat.

Total Eclipse of the Heart Literal Video Version (REFRAMED) - YouTube.flv

YouTube, which is owned by Google, offers a free tool to the movie studios and television networks called Content ID. When a studio legitimately uploads a clip from a copyrighted film to YouTube, the Google tool automatically finds and blocks copies of the product.

To get around this roadblock, some YouTube users started placing copyrighted videos inside a still photo of a cat that appears to be watching an old JVC television set. The Content ID algorithm has a difficult time seeing that the video is violating any copyright rules; it just sees a cat watching TV.

Sure, it’s annoying for those who want to watch the video, but it works. (Obviously, it’s more than annoying for the company whose product is being pirated.)

Then there are those — possibly tens of millions of users, actually — who engage in peer-to-peer file-sharing on the sites using the BitTorrent protocol.

Earlier this year, after months of legal wrangling, authorities in a number of countries won an injunction against the Pirate Bay, probably the largest and most famous BitTorrent piracy site on the Web. The order blocked people from entering the site.

In retaliation, the Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire Web site, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers. People began setting up hundreds of new versions of the site, and the piracy continues unabated.

Thus, whacking one big mole created hundreds of smaller ones.

Although the recording industries might believe they’re winning the fight, the Pirate Bay and others are continually one step ahead. In March, a Pirate Bay collaborator, who goes by the online name Mr. Spock, announced in a blog post that the team hoped to build drones that would float in the air and allow people to download movies and music through wireless radio transmitters.

“This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system,” Mr. Spock posted on the site. “A real act of war.” Some BitTorrent sites have also discussed storing servers in secure bank vaults. Message boards on the Web devoted to piracy have in the past raised the idea that the Pirate Bay has Web servers stored underwater.

“Piracy won’t go away,” said Ernesto Van Der Sar, editor of Torrent Freak, a site that reports on copyright and piracy news. “They’ve tried for years and they’ll keep on trying, but it won’t go away.” Mr. Van Der Sar said companies should stop trying to fight piracy and start experimenting with new ways to distribute content that is inevitably going to be pirated anyway.

According to Torrent Freak, the top pirated TV shows are downloaded several million times a week. Unauthorized movies, music, e-books, software, pornography, comics, photos and video games are watched, read and listened to via these piracy sites millions of times a day.

The copyright holders believe new laws will stop this type of piracy. But many others believe any laws will just push people to find creative new ways of getting the content they want.

“There’s a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it’s an inverse relationship,” said Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit technology organization that is trying to stop new piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. “The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online.”

The hit HBO show “Game of Thrones” is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don’t really want to solve the piracy problem.

“If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement,” he said. “But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money.”

The way people download unauthorized content is changing. In the early days of music piracy, people transferred songs to their home or work computers. Now, with cloud-based sites, like Wuala, uTorrent and Tribler, people stream movies and music from third-party storage facilities, often to mobile devices and TV’s. Some of these cloud-based Web sites allow people to set up automatic downloads of new shows the moment they are uploaded to piracy sites. It’s like piracy-on-demand. And it will be much harder to trace and to stop.

It is only going to get worse. Piracy has started to move beyond the Internet and media and into the physical world. People on the fringes of tech, often early adopters of new devices and gadgets, are now working with 3-D printers that can churn out actual physical objects. Say you need a wall hook or want to replace a bit of hardware that fell off your luggage. You can download a file and “print” these objects with printers that spray layers of plastic, metal or ceramics into shapes.

And people are beginning to share files that contain the schematics for physical objects on these BitTorrent sites. Although 3-D printing is still in its infancy, it is soon expected to become as pervasive as illegal music downloading was in the late 1990s.

Content owners will find themselves stuck behind ancient legal walls when trying to stop people from downloading objects online as copyright laws do not apply to standard physical objects deemed “noncreative.”

In the arcade version of Whac-A-Mole, the game eventually ends — often when the player loses. In the piracy arms-race version, there doesn’t seem to be a conclusion. Sooner or later, the people who still believe they can hit the moles with their slow mallets might realize that their time would be better spent playing an entirely different game.

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Anonymous releases sample of Australian telco's data

A campaign using the name and much of the iconography of activist group Anonymous has released data it hopes will embarrass the Australian Government into backing away from even considering data retention laws.

Data has been posted to a number of file sharing sites and appears to have been released at around 2:00AM Sunday AEST.

The Register has visited three of the sites and the data concerned is far from explosive as it lists the addresses of government agencies and foreign embassies in Australia. Some lines of data reveal the first names of individuals. Some record hobbies. A field for mobile phone numbers and phone numbers that will reach individuals in the evening is also present in many records.

The group has described the attack and its motives in a blog post and video in which the group justifies the release by describing it as a “proof of concept attack” that used “the very same methods your government uses on the Australian population.” Those methods, Anonymous or those using that name assert, could mean any data held by the Australian Government could be exposed in similar ways, to the detriment of individuals' liberty and privacy.

The attack is said to have exploited a flaw in an un-patched and forgotten AAPT ColdFusion server hosted at a third party, Melbourne IT. How that represents a method Australia's government uses is not explained.

The speech accompanying the video diverges from the written text, and at around 2:25 in the video issues a threat of further action:

Do not underestimate what a nation settled by convicts can do. You must keep the people happy. Do that and there is no drama. Otherwise, you'd better expect us.

The soundtrack to the video is spoken in a mock Australian accent that even some anons, in a chat room the Anonymous' Op_Australia twitter feed has promoted as a reliable source of information on its antipodean activities, found risible.

The decision to claim the video is spoken by a member of the Australian public is also noteworthy, as some people in the chat room appear not to reside in Australia. One has told The Reg he or she resides in France. Others keep hours that indicate they either have very unusual sleeping patterns or reside in time zones beyond Australia.

Chat in the room also indicated the group had difficulty preparing the data for release, as the size of the stolen data - 40 gigabytes and several hundred database tables – presented technical challenges. Banter also seemed to indicate that different opinions about what to release were being debated among activists. Some argued that AAPT's confirmation of data loss achieved the group's aims and that the eventual release therefore did not need to make additional revelations.

The eventual decision preserved some column headers, but the majority of cells are replaced with the word “NULL”.

On Saturday the blog post above was also, for a time, removed from the AnonPR.net site. Chat in the group also suggested activists were attacking the web site of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. ®

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Operation Demonoid Engaged

Greetings World,

The collective has noticed that Demonoid, a popular bittorrent tracker has been removed from the Internet. This atrocity was carried out by the copywrong police of Ukraine, as their gift to the United Fascists of America http://bit.ly/OW2D0y. This is unacceptable, we cannot stay silent while this ruthless attack has occured on our freedom of speech. Internet has always been free and should stay free forever! We hold these rights of freedom to be self evident.

Despite Demonoid blocking all Ukranian IP addresses to avoid upsetting local law, the site still attracted the attention of the authorities. The raid on Demonoid was timed to coincide with the first trip of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky‘s to the United States on the agenda: copyright infringement. This implies that the attack against Demonoid was a preplanned operation, and a deliberate and malicious attack against Internet Freedom. We will not let this go unpunished. We will seek revenge against all criminals responsible and their punishments will be severe.

We can no longer sit around and watch this censorship happen right in front of us. Haven’t you, Ukraine, learned anything from the Anonymous “Collective”? You were attacked once, and yet feel the need to keep censoring us, your people, and every day hard working citizens?

What do you gain? What and or who are you protecting?

No need to answer those questions. It’s plain and simple, money, power, & greed are your driving forces to keep humanity enslaved and deprived of the freedom of information, and freedom of speech.

We would like to remind you to take notice of what is happening around the globe, with governments, agencies, and companies trying to suppress us as people, as human beings! It only takes one idea, one person to voice an opinion and the masses will rise up and follow as one.

Ukrainian Government, you have committed a crime against Humanity & Freedom. We will not tolerate this. We will take direct actions against you and your criminal friends until you realize the crimes you’ve committed and restore our beloved Demonoid.

The history of Ukraine, former Soviet Union, has always been corrupted and filled with fallacies. What brings you to the United States? Why is this a gift? We weren’t aware we were exchanging gifts. You can already Expect your gifts from us!

Operation Demonoid, Engaged.

We are Anonymous,
We are legion,
We do not forgive,
We do not forget,
Ukranian government, You should have expected us.

irc.anonops.pro | 6667/SSL: +6697
#OpDemonoid

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London Olympics 2012: Anonymous Targets Italian Race Walker Alex Schwazer after Dope Scandal

The Italian branch of the Anonymous hacking collective has defaced the homepage of Italian Olympic 50km race walk champion Alex Schwazer, who was disqualified from London 2012 for testing positive for performance-enhancing blood booster EPO.

Featuring a Guy Fawkes' mask which says "no to doping", the website also carries a statement by the syndicate which condemns the use of banned substances.

"Doping kills sport. Doping kills life," said the hacktivists. "Anonymous Italy condemns the doping practice in sport.

"Dear Alex, besides being an athlete you are also a carabinieri [a member of the Italian army who has civil responsibilities]. You should not have committed this mistake as your life, your job, your sport bring too much responsibility for us, your family and your people.

"We, Anonymous, join those who fight and work to "clean" the sport of the doping plague."

Schwazer, who has been suspended by CONI, the Italian Olympic Committee, had been one of Italy's big medal hopes in the 50 km race walk - having won gold at Beijing 2008, breaking the Olympic record by more than a minute.

However he tested positive for EPO, a supplement which increases the aerobic capacity of the body's blood cells, and was banned before even reaching London.

In a televised interview with Italian public broadcast RAI, Schwazer said he obtained EPO on his own, and used it because he felt immense pressure to win again.

Sobbing during the interview, Schwazer insisted that he won gold at Beijing without the assistance of drugs, adding: "I wanted the gold again at all costs."

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Mars Landing Videos, and Other Casualties of the Robot Wars

NASA's successful landing on Mars of an SUV-sized nuclear rover from a rocket-skycrane should have marked a high point in collaborative accomplishments between humans and robots. But here on Earth the situation was a bit more tense. That's because, just hours after the celebrated touchdown, Vice Magazine's Motherboard blog broke the news that one of NASA's official clips from the mission had been pulled from YouTube, replaced with a notice from the video site indicating that the "video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds."

Motherboard points the finger of blame at the DMCA, the law that provides the terms under which online service providers must enforce copyright policies in order to avoid liability. But as Ars Technica has since pointed out, the problem likely lies not with the DMCA itself, but with the additional (and voluntary) automated Content ID system YouTube has developed. Content ID uses digital fingerprinting technology to identify duplicate audio and video on YouTube and, depending on the "business rules" configuration of the designated rightsholder, blocks or places ads next to videos. Unfortunately, the robots behind that copyright enforcement machine have the tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, even when it ends up silencing real — human — speech.

The balance struck in the DMCA is not perfect, and it's certainly subject to abuse. For example, the clause saying that takedown notices must be sent in good faith under penalty of perjury very rarely shows its teeth. And even in cases where content is non-infringing and the uploader is willing to file a counter-notice, the accuser gets 10-14 days of censorship for free, before the service provider can put it back up. In the case of newsworthy videos or commentary on current events, those 10-14 days can make or break the message.

Despite this, the DMCA at least strives to limit those abuses by, among other things, providing an appeal process with a safe harbor for providers who allow content back up after a counter-notice.

Content ID, by contrast, is an opaque and proprietary system where the accuser can serve as the judge, jury, and executioner. Worse, the person whose speech is being silenced has little recourse. The Content ID system tips whatever balance is present in the DMCA and allows even more pernicious forms of manipulation and abuse. In a Wired column earlier this year, Andy Baio enumerated some of the problems that YouTube users encounter:

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Open Letter from Anonymous regarding #opAnaheim

Subject: Flash mob this Saturday, August 18, 2012

Dear Citizens of Anaheim,

This is Anonymous from Operation Anaheim.

As you were chanting outside city hall, “THE WORLD IS WATCHING” to the police, we watched youtube videos of citizens being shot in Anaheim, and then saw a mother with child being attacked by a police canine.

When we saw that, we were outraged. We started working as a collective to help you fight these racist cops. In solidarity with Anaheim, we have been working online, trying to bring awareness to this issue. We have also sent food to protesters on the ground, and will continue to support you during future protests.

When we saw the paramilitary police force respond to peaceful protesters, we were shocked.

When we saw youtube videos of children describing being shot by police, we were disgusted. ( http://gg.gg/fp0)

In complete solidarity with you all, we understand that your community has been terrorized by the police and paramilitary forces that have been called in to suppress your protests. Because of the past few stressful weeks, in a planned meeting with our on-the-ground informants, we would like to help the community unwind.

We’re now calling on the citizens of Anaheim, and outlying areas to assemble for a flash mob on their streets, away from the police. We’re calling for the citizens of Anaheim and their supporters to take a night off and relax, please. On Saturday, August 18, 2012 at 5pm, please leave your home and head into the streets and try to find others. March down your sidewalks looking for for other people in your community. Start to gather in a decentralized fashion using Twitter, texting and phones to gather everyone to a single spot decided by the rule of mass mob.

Please bring drums, boomboxes, drinks, and share your stories over a peaceful evening where there is no other call to action against the police. Take the night off and build your community.

We encourage all supporters in the area surrounding Anaheim to join in solidarity with the residents of Anaheim.

We continue to stand with you, Anaheim. We will be posting news on our Twitter @opAnaheim or email us at opanaheim@yandex.com .

Local 99% groups to alert:
@OccupySD / http://www.sandiegooccupy.org/forum
web@Occupylosangeles.org / http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=forum
email to mexicamovement@sbcglobal.net
http://nationalbrownberets.com/contactus.html

In solidarity,

We are Anonymous Operation Anaheim and the 99%.
Together we are legion,
We do not forgive,
We do not forget,
Anaheim,
Expect to party with us.

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wikileaks twitterde op dinsdag 07-08-2012 om 05:58:10 WikiLeaks has been under sustained large scale DDoS attacks since August 3. Help us purchase more bandwidth: http://t.co/p9sNjWBK reageer retweet

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AntiLeaks twitterde op woensdag 08-08-2012 om 06:35:52 #Wikileaks #AntiLeaks We are behind the attacks on Wikileaks and it's supporters. We will be issuing a statement shortly. reageer retweet

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enquerre twitterde op vrijdag 10-08-2012 om 09:40:21 From what I can observe across the cyberverse #Anonymous is seriously pissed off with @antileaks. They'll be exposed soon. #Wikileaks reageer retweet

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Stratfor emails reveal secret, widespread TrapWire surveillance system

Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program’s public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year’s hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing.

Hacktivists aligned with the loose-knit Anonymous collective took credit for hacking Stratfor on Christmas Eve, 2011, in turn collecting what they claimed to be more than five million emails from within the company. WikiLeaks began releasing those emails as the Global Intelligence Files (GIF) earlier this year and, of those, several discussing the implementing of TrapWire in public spaces across the country were circulated on the Web this week after security researcher Justin Ferguson brought attention to the matter. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks was relentlessly assaulted by a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, crippling the whistleblower site and its mirrors, significantly cutting short the number of people who would otherwise have unfettered access to the emails.

On Wednesday, an administrator for the WikiLeaks Twitter account wrote that the site suspected that the motivation for the attacks could be that particularly sensitive Stratfor emails were about to be exposed. A hacker group called AntiLeaks soon after took credit for the assaults on WikiLeaks and mirrors of their content, equating the offensive as a protest against editor Julian Assange, “the head of a new breed of terrorist.” As those Stratfor files on TrapWire make their rounds online, though, talk of terrorism is only just beginning.

Mr. Ferguson and others have mirrored what are believed to be most recently-released Global Intelligence Files on external sites, but the original documents uploaded to WikiLeaks have been at times unavailable this week due to the continuing DDoS attacks. Late Thursday and early Friday this week, the GIF mirrors continues to go offline due to what is presumably more DDoS assaults. Australian activist Asher Wolf wrote on Twitter that the DDoS attacks flooding the WikiLeaks server were reported to be dropping upwards of 40 gigabytes of traffic per second on the site.

According to a press release (pdf) dated June 6, 2012, TrapWire is “designed to provide a simple yet powerful means of collecting and recording suspicious activity reports.” A system of interconnected nodes spot anything considered suspect and then input it into the system to be "analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”

In a 2009 email included in the Anonymous leak, Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence Fred Burton is alleged to write, “TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.” Burton formerly served with the US Diplomatic Security Service, and Abraxas’ staff includes other security experts with experience in and out of the Armed Forces.

What is believed to be a partnering agreement included in the Stratfor files from August 13, 2009 indicates that they signed a contract with Abraxas to provide them with analysis and reports of their TrapWire system (pdf).

“Suspicious activity reports from all facilities on the TrapWire network are aggregated in a central database and run through a rules engine that searches for patterns indicative of terrorist surveillance operations and other attack preparations,” Crime and Justice International magazine explains in a 2006 article on the program, one of the few publically circulated on the Abraxas product (pdf). “Any patterns detected – links among individuals, vehicles or activities – will be reported back to each affected facility. This information can also be shared with law enforcement organizations, enabling them to begin investigations into the suspected surveillance cell.”

In a 2005 interview with The Entrepreneur Center, Abraxas founder Richard “Hollis” Helms said his signature product “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” He calls it “a proprietary technology designed to protect critical national infrastructure from a terrorist attack by detecting the pre-attack activities of the terrorist and enabling law enforcement to investigate and engage the terrorist long before an attack is executed,” and that, “The beauty of it is that we can protect an infinite number of facilities just as efficiently as we can one and we push information out to local law authorities automatically.”

An internal email from early 2011 included in the Global Intelligence Files has Stratfor’s Burton allegedly saying the program can be used to “[walk] back and track the suspects from the get go facial recognition software.”

Since its inception, TrapWire has been implemented in most major American cities at selected high value targets (HVTs) and has appeared abroad as well. The iWatch monitoring system adopted by the Los Angeles Police Department (pdf) works in conjunction with TrapWire, as does the District of Columbia and the "See Something, Say Something" program conducted by law enforcement in New York City, which had 500 surveillance cameras linked to the system in 2010. Private properties including Las Vegas, Nevada casinos have subscribed to the system. The State of Texas reportedly spent half a million dollars with an additional annual licensing fee of $150,000 to employ TrapWire, and the Pentagon and other military facilities have allegedly signed on as well.

In one email from 2010 leaked by Anonymous, Stratfor’s Fred Burton allegedly writes, “God Bless America. Now they have EVERY major HVT in CONUS, the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC as clients.” Files on USASpending.gov reveal that the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense together awarded Abraxas and TrapWire more than one million dollars in only the past eleven months.

News of the widespread and largely secretive installation of TrapWire comes amidst a federal witch-hunt to crack down on leaks escaping Washington and at attempt to prosecute whistleblowers. Thomas Drake, a former agent with the NSA, has recently spoken openly about the government’s Trailblazer Project that was used to monitor private communication, and was charged under the Espionage Act for coming forth. Separately, former NSA tech director William Binney and others once with the agency have made claims in recent weeks that the feds have dossiers on every American, an allegation NSA Chief Keith Alexander dismissed during a speech at Def-Con last month in Vegas.

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Anonymous Vows Revenge For Wikileaks And Demonoid Blackouts

Wikileaks sites remain down, as does Demonoid, and Anonymous isn’t happy

Anonymous has said it will not take lightly this week’s actions against Wikileaks and Demonoid, one of the world’s oldest torrent-tracking websites.

Wikileaks sites remain down today, including the main portal, wikileaks.org, and many of its mirror sites which are spread around the world, such as wikileaks.de in Germany. Julian Assange’s organisation claims to have been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The websites have been down for almost a week now.

Subsequently, an organisation going by the name of @AntiLeaks on Twitter claimed to be behind the DDoS. “Wikileaks survives through donations that pay for their cyber terrorism and Assange’s legal defense. We will continue to enforce a blockade on Wikileaks and it’s [sic] supporters whom attempt to raise donations on it’s [sic] behalf,” the account holder tweeted.

A real hit?

In response, this morning one of Anonymous’ most-followed Twitter accounts, @Anon_Online, tweeted: “This means #War.”

A number of onlookers have suggested Wikileaks could just be looking for attention, using the DDoS as a way of gaining sympathy, but André Stewart, president international at Corero Network Security, said it appeared to be a genuine attack.

“What is interesting is how the attack not only targeted Wikileaks, but also the donation portal, ‘Justice for Assange’, and affiliates websites, showing that this attack was not a flash in the pan, but a targeted DDoS attack against Wikileaks,” Stewart said.

“Due to the highly organised nature of the attack it is unlikely to have been an individual who has carried out the attack.”

Meanwhile, Anonymous has issued a clarion call to exact revenge upon the authorities who shut down Demonoid. Earlier this week, Ukrainian law enforcement raided the data centre that hosted Demonoid’s servers and took the site offline.

An apparent release from the hacktivist collective claimed the raid on Demonoid was timed to coincide with the first trip of first vice prime minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky to the US on the agenda of copyright infringement. “This implies that the attack against Demonoid was a preplanned operation and a deliberate and malicious attack against Internet freedom,” the message read.

“We will not tolerate this. We will take direct actions against you and your criminal friends until you realize the crimes you’ve committed and restore our beloved Demonoid.”

twitter:

M4RT1N15URF3R twitterde op zaterdag 11-08-2012 om 07:19:18 #Trapwire is mass surveillance of YOU. 24/7. So, we #OpTrapWire!How to disable cameras:http://t.co/1jYJwV79Love, #Anonymous reageer retweet

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Guide to Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) destruction.

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The following has been blatantly robbed from an outrageous Web site we stumbled upon. We've included it here for entertainment purposes only. Honest.

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Fault Lines - Controlling the web

Are US authorities increasingly trying to limit user freedom on the internet in the name of national security?

In January 2012, two controversial pieces of legislation were making their way through the US Congress. SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, were meant to crack down on the illegal sharing of digital media. The bills were drafted on request of the content industry, Hollywood studios and major record labels.

The online community rose up against the US government to speak out against SOPA, and the anti-online piracy bill was effectively killed off after the largest online protest in US history. But it was only one win in a long battle between US authorities and online users over internet regulation. SOPA and PIPA were just the latest in a long line of anti-piracy legislation US politicians have passed since the 1990s.

"One of the things we are seeing which is a by-product of the digital age is, frankly, it's much easier to steal and to profit from the hard work of others," says Michael O'Leary, the executive vice-president for global policy at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The US government says it must be able to fight against piracy and cyber attacks. And that means imposing more restrictions online. But proposed legislation could seriously curb freedom of speech and privacy, threatening the internet as we know it.

Can and should the internet be controlled? Who gets that power? How far will the US government go to gain power over the web? And will this mean the end of a free and global internet?

Fault Lines looks at the fight for control of the web, life in the digital age and the threat to cyber freedom, asking if US authorities are increasingly trying to regulate user freedoms in the name of national and economic security.

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Anonymous Operation TrapWire – Press Release

Sunday – August 12, 2012 11:00 AM ET USA

Greetings Citizens of the United States of America –

This weekend, it was disclosed by Wikileaks the details about a system known as “TrapWire” that uses facial recognition and other techniques including high-end artificial intelligence to track and monitor individuals using countless different closed-circuit cameras operated by cities and other institutions, including private businesses. This program also monitors all social media on the internet. The software is billed as a method by which to prevent terrorism, but can of course also be used to provide unprecedented surveillance and data-mining capabilities to governments and corporations – including many with a history of using new technologies to violate the rights of citizens. TrapWire is already used in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Texas, DC, London, and other locales around the USA.

The ex-CIA agents who help run the firm are old friends of Stratfor vice president Fred Burton, whom they’ve briefed on their own capabilities in e-mails obtained by Anonymous hackers and provided to WikiLeaks. Stratfor has engaged in several surveillance operations against activists, such as those advocating for victims of the Bhopal disaster – on behalf of large U.S. corporatons; Burton himelf was revealed to have advocated “bankrupting” and “ruining the life” of activists like Julian Assange in e-mails to other friends. TrapWire is extremely expensive to maintain, and is usually done so at taxpayer expense; Los Angeles county alone has spent over $1.4 million dollars on the software’s use in a single three-month period of 2007.

Although most of the regions in which TrapWire operates don’t share information with each other, all of this is set to change; as Abraxas Applications president Dan Botsch told Burton via e-mail, “I think over time the different networks will begin to unite,” noting that several networks had already begun discussions on merging their information. Abraxas itself has always had the ability to “cross-network matches” from every region at their own office. By June 2011, Washington D.C. police were engaged in a pilot project under the Departent of Homeland Security that’s likely to lead to more cities using TrapWire on a more integrated basis.

Abraxas, the firm whose spin-off Abraxas Applications developed TrapWire in 2007, has long been involved in a lesser-known practice known as persona management, which involves the use of fake online “people” to gather intelligence and/or disseminate disinformation. The firm Ntrepid, created by Abraxas owner Cubic Corporation, won a 2010 CENTCOM contract to provide such capabilities for use in foreign countries; several board members of Ntrepid also sit on Abraxas.

The more we learn about TrapWire and similar systems, it becomes absolutely clear that we must at all costs shut this system down and render it useless. A giant AI electronic brain able to monitor us through a combination of access to all the CCTV cameras as well as all the online social media feeds is monstrous and Orwellian in it’s implications and possibilities. The Peoples Liberation Front and Anonymous will now put forth a call to arms, and initiate the doom of this evil and misbegotten program. We will use the following tactics to accomplish this goal:

1) The PLF and Anonymous will work closely with WikiLeaks and Project PM to gather, collate, disclose and disseminate as much information as possible about TrapWire and it’s related technologies and programs. This was begun this weekend, and already much has been learned. And they are scared of this, already many sites and repositories of data on TrapWire are disappearing – being taken down by those who do not want you to know the truth about what they are doing. And WikiLeaks is at this writing enduring a massive and historic DdoS attack in an attempt to conceal this information from the public. We will do this not only to educate the general public regarding TrapWire, but to move them to pressure their representatives to shut down funding for this and similar programs of massive surveillance, and to pass laws outlawing the creation of future projects of this type.

2) ACTION ALERT – “Smash A Cam Saturday”: TrapWire has access to virtually all CCTV’s that have IP/internet connectivity. We have prepared an initial map/database of these cameras across the USA, and we will continue to expand this knowledge base.

http://bit.ly/PcByYJ

While this database is a good guide to high priority camera targets, we encourage everyone to target any camera with IP/internet connectivity. We are asking everyone to sabotage at least one CCTV per week on what we are calling “Smash A Cam Saturday”. We have provided this excellent manual of different tactics and strategies for disabling or destroying these “eyes of the beast”.

http://bit.ly/1Qjp

3) As stated above, this “monster” doesn’t just have eyes that need gouging out – it also has “ears”. TrapWire constantly monitors social media. In a strange twist of fate, the company that developed TrapWire also works on something called “sock-puppet” programs. These are projects designed to create thousands of fake personas on social media. We will turn this idea and software against them, creating thousands of phony accounts and use them to produce a deluge of false triggers for the TrapWire program – essentially drowning it in “white noise”.

4) Finally, the Peoples Liberation Front and Anonymous will do what we do best. We will find, hack – and destroy the servers where the AI “electronic brain” of this program is housed.

Operation TrapWire is a direct action of the over-arching Anonymous Operation USA. TrapWire is but one instance of how the government of the USA has turned against it’s own citizens, designating them as suspects and enemies. Now those citizens rise, and take back their country and their freedom. Welcome to the Second American Revolution.

We Are Anonymous

We Are Legion

We Never Forgive

We Never Forget

Government of the USA, it’s to late to EXPECT US.

twitter:

Robyn_DaHood twitterde op maandag 13-08-2012 om 07:31:03 #OpTrapWire definitely underway, peeps are pissed. We will not forgive, We will not forget. #Anonymous #PoliceState #OWS reageer retweet

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Trapwire surveillance system exposed in document leak

Papers released by WikiLeaks show US department of homeland security paid $832,000 to deploy system in two cities

It sounds like something from the film Minority Report: a CCTV surveillance system that recognises people from their face or walk and analyses whether they might be about to commit a terrorist or criminal act. But Trapwire is real and, according to documents released online by WikiLeaks last week, is being used in a number of countries to try to monitor people and threats.

Founded by former CIA agents, Trapwire uses data from a network of CCTV systems and numberplate readers to figure out the threat level in huge numbers of locations. That means security officials can "focus on the highest priorities first, taking a proactive and collaborative approach to defence against attacks," say its creators.

The documents outlining Trapwire's existence and its deployment in the US were apparently obtained in a hack of computer systems belonging to the intelligence company Stratfor at the end of last year.

Documents from the US department of homeland security show that it paid $832,000 to deploy Trapwire in Washington DC and Seattle.

Stratfor describes Trapwire as "a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance and logistical planning", and cites the Washington DC police chief mentioning it during a Senate committee hearing. It serves "a wide range of law enforcement personnel and public and private security officials domestically and internationally", Stratfor says.

Some have expressed doubts that Trapwire could really forecast terrorist acts based on data from cameras, but Rik Ferguson, security consultant at Trend Micro, said the software for such systems had existed for some time.

"There's a lot of crossover between CCTV and facial recognition," he said. "It's feasible to have a camera looking for suspicious behaviour – for example, in a computer server room it could recognise someone via facial recognition or your gait, then can identify them from the card they swipe to get in, and then know whether it's suspicious if they're meant to be a cleaner and they sit down at a computer terminal."

The claims might seem overblown, but then the idea that the US could have an international monitoring system seemed absurd until the discovery of the Echelon system, used by the US to eavesdrop on electronic communications internationally.

Trapwire has not yet commented on the leak.

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TrapWire investigation links transit systems and Anonymizer in global surveillance network

The facts behind TrapWire continue to surface in the days since WikiLeaks exposed the state-of-the-art surveillance system, but minute-by-minute more is being revealed about not just the scary intelligence infrastructure but its questionable ties.

Last week, WikiLeaks published their latest addition to trove of the so-called Global Intelligence Files — emails uncovered from Texas-based Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) by Anonymous late last year — in turn revealing a widespread surveillance system blanketing much of the United States and abroad. The project, TrapWire, is the brainchild of Abraxas, a Northern Virginia corporation that has cut countless deals with the federal government and is staffed by former agents out of not just the Pentagon but practically every leading intelligence agency in the country. As those connections are examined under a magnifying glass by researchers and hacktivists alike, though, more and more is being brought to light about the correlations that exist between the biggest of brothers and an entire industry that profits from pulverizing what is left of privacy.

In addition to Abraxas overseeing perhaps the most-secret and advanced surveillance system in the world, other entities directly connected to the company have a monopoly in America’s mass-transit system and have also advertised themselves as the purveyors behind a tool designed to protect the privacy of US citizens.

Much remains unknown about the actual technology behind TrapWire, but Abraxas founder Richard Helms explained it in a 2005 interview as being “more accurate than facial recognition.” A system of surveillance cameras in select locales across the world are connected to analysis centers that aggregate other data, which can be combined to examine suspicious activity reports and routinely monitor every move across vast areas of public space. Publically available information links the TrapWire system to projects in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, among others, but the ties beyond just that one Abraxas endeavor open the operation up to an infinite number of possibilities.

San Diego-based Cubic Corporation acquired Abraxas in 2010 for only $124 million in cash, close to the same amount that the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense awarded the contractor during just the last 11 months. Within the vast Cubic empire exist other facets, though, ones that could very well be working hand-in-hand with what is quickly unfolding as one of the best-kept law enforcement operation secrets ever.

Included in the sale of Abraxas to Cubic in 2010 was Anonymizer, described by its publicists as “the leader in consumer online anonymity solutions.” Anonymizer exists under the alleged platform of providing identity masking while making communiqué and clandestine transactions over the Web, and its then-newly-hired vice president for consumer products, Chaminda Wijetilleke, said in 2010, “As the online privacy space continues to mature, Anonymizer is in a great position to increase its lead in the industry and to be at the forefront of bringing innovative products to market.”

“Consumers need state-of-the-art solutions to protect themselves from relentless threats to their online privacy,” added Wijetilleke, who went on to add, “I’m excited to join the Anonymizer team and to help drive this evolving business forward.” In Cubic’s acquisition of Abraxas and Anonymizer, though, real life privacy may have been put under immense risk thanks to TrapWire.

TrapWire was first unraveled in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks by Abraxas back in 2004, and a decade down the road their connections within the private sector have surpassed more than just counterterrorism companies. In addition to being now under the same umbrella is Anonymizer, its parent company, Cubic, manages a massive transportation division that is reported to be the world’s leader in terms of automated fare collection cards and its related infrastructure in mass-transit systems across the globe.

Cubic confirms on their own website that, “Over the past decade, Cubic has implemented more than 80 percent of the major smart card systems in the U.S. now active today,” including network in New York, DC, Los Angeles and Chicago. And although no written connection has been discovered in only the few days since TrapWire was exposed, researchers are on the ready to point out what these systems can do when combined with one another.

Through Cubic’s transportation division, customers can use identity-linking credit cards to purchase unique fare tickets that grant them access to the biggest metro systems in the United States. Once walking away from the ticket machine, though, those same passengers are placed under surveillance in certain markets that not just rely on Cubic for their metro fare needs, but use TrapWire to track suspicious activity.

According to a 2009 GIF email believed to be from Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence Fred Burton, the intelligence officer writes, “TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.” In 2011, Burton allegedly writes that the same surveillance system can be used to “[walk] back and track the suspects from the get go facial recognition software.” When combining the state-of-the-art face-tracking with the same technology that can tell you the precise location and time that a person is performing a financial transaction at a Cubic machine, the company’s control over certain cities is almost all-encompassing.

In one email alleged to have come from Strafor VP Burton in November 2011, he writes of TrapWire coverage in DC that “National Park Police have approached us for a proposal to cover all of the Mall area – in addition to the Fed and Military sites already covered.”

“Our network there is growing almost daily,” the email reads. In terms of TrapWire’s blanketing of New York, Burton writes in a separate email that the “NYPD has done what no US Govt Agency has been able to do” in the counterterrorism arena because of TrapWire. How, exactly, the company creates profiles of suspicious persons using state-of-the-art surveillance and an endless array of mysterious information remains a matter yet to be made public.

Anonymous: Operation BART - August 13, 2012

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:

TrapWire scandal: mainstream media whitewashes the facts behind massive surveillance program

The discovery of a surveillance system named TrapWire has connected state and federal law enforcement agencies with a vast intelligence infrastructure, raising questions everywhere — except in the mainstream media.

The New York Times finally brought TrapWire into discussion late Monday in an article published on their website that has journalist Scott Shane discarding initial reports made about the surveillance system as “wildly exaggerated.” A piece published hours earlier in Slate says stories about TrapWire are “rooted in hyperbole and misinformation” and “heavier on fiction than fact,” and even Cubic Corporation, the San Diego, California company reported as the parent company to developers Abraxas Corp., have been driven to dismiss that rumored relationship with a formal press release.

“Cubic Corporation acquired Abraxas Corporation on December 20, 2010,” a Monday afternoon statement from Cubic claims. “Abraxas Corporation then and now has no affiliation with Abraxas Applications now known as Trapwire, Inc.”

But four days after RT first broke the news of a nationwide surveillance system operated underneath the noses of millions of Americans — and even citizens abroad — the mainstream media and the major players are going to great lengths to abolish any and all allegations about TrapWire. As private researchers, journalists and hacktivists correspond with one another over the Web, though, the information becoming increasingly available about Cubic, Abraxas and TrapWire — facts meant to be left under wraps — is opening up details about a vast operation with strict ties to the intelligence community, the federal government, the US Defense Department contractors and countless others across the globe.

While the New York Times has indeed finally come forth with a story on TrapWire, their rushed exposé about a story sparked by “speculation” contains references to allegations that are argued directly in emails obtained from Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, the intelligence company that was hacked by the Anonymous collective last year. Emails uncovered in the attack were provided to WikiLeaks, who on their part published the trove in installments, including a dump last week. Thanks to a red flag being raised by independent researcher Justin Ferguson last week, the TrapWire system was linked to Stratfor staffers, in turn causing a colossal investigation to be launched from all corners of the Internet.

So far, that probing has proved at least one thing: that the allegations made by both Cubic and sources speaking to the Times are either dead wrong or represent a quickly snowballing attempt at a cover-up.

Speaking to the Times for Shane’s article, New York Police Department chief spokesman Paul Browne says that rumors the city’s subway system is covered by 500 cameras linked to TrapWire are false. Explicitly, Browne says, “We don’t use TrapWire,” but the Times stops short of printing a quote from the NYPD that exceeds six syllables. While Browne has not publically weighed in yet as to if the NYC surveillance cams were formerly part of the TrapWire system, emails uncovered in the Stratfor attack seem to suggest exactly that.

In an email dated September 26, 2011, Stratfor Vice President of Intelligence Fred Burton is believed to have responded to a memo about the NYPD’s counter-terrorism efforts by writing, “Note their TrapWire intuitive video surveillance capabilities. NYPD has done what no US Govt Agency has been able to do in the CT [counter-terrorism] arena.”

In a separate correspondence sent one year earlier on July 16, 2010, Burton writes that “TrapWire may be the most successful invention on the GWOT [Global War on Terror] since 9-11.”

“I knew these hacks when they were GS-12's at the CIA. God Bless America. Now they have EVERY major HVT in CONUS, the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC as clients,” he adds, referring to “high-value targets.”

Contrasting the statements made by the NYPD rep and Stratfor’s VP open up nothing more than a he-said-she-said scenario that makes it impossible, at this point, to put a finger on who exactly is in the right. Since New York City has readied their own domain-awareness-system, openly admitted to conducting undercover surveillance of Muslim residents and installed thousands of cameras on the island of Manhattan alone, though, it doesn’t seem all that odd that Mayor Bloomberg would have authorized the use of TrapWire in at least some capacity during the past few years.

Also brought into question are the merits behind Cubic Corporation's claims about their relationship with TrapWire. “Abraxas Corporation then and now has no affiliation with Abraxas Applications now known as Trapwire, Inc.,” the company claims in their press release issued this Monday. According to a 2007 report in the Washington Business Journal, though, that as well is a full-on fib.

“Abraxas Corp., a risk-mitigation technology company, has spun out a software business to focus on selling a new product,” the article reads. “The spinoff – called Abraxas Applications – will sell TrapWire, which predicts attacks on critical infrastructure by analyzing security reports and video surveillance.”

Published more than five years before the Stratfor emails prompted a probe into TrapWire and its affiliates, the Washington Business Journal article answers a lot of questions that are being asked today.

“Reston-based Abraxas Applications will seek federal, state and local government clients as [well] as companies in financial services, oil and gas, chemicals, transportation and other industries with critical infrastructure,” the article alleges.

Just as today, though, Business Journal also acknowledges a cloud of secrecy that keeps the juiciest part of TrapWire under wraps: “The 300-person company has spent millions of dollars developing TrapWire, but won't say precisely how much,” their article reads.

Elsewhere, the Journal adds another piece to the puzzle involving the surveillance system and the NYPD: “Abraxas Applications hits the ground running. Abraxas Corp. previously won contracts to test TrapWire with the New York Police Department, Los Angeles Police Department, Department of Energy and Marine Corps.”

Meanwhile, current investigations conducted by RT and other outlets have suggested that TrapWire may be connected to as many as thousands of cameras in Washington, DC and others in London, Las Vegas as elsewhere.

twitter:

RayBeckerman twitterde op donderdag 16-08-2012 om 00:50:42 RT @Min_Reyes #Anonymous and #Wikileaks calling for activists to come to the Ecuadorian embassy in London to protect Julian Assange. reageer retweet

quote:

UK 'threatened' to arrest Assange inside Ecuador's embassy

quote:

Patino also released details of a letter he said was delivered through a British embassy official in Quito, the capital of the South American country.

The letter said: "You need to be aware that there is a legal base in the UK, the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987, that would allow us to take actions in order to arrest Mr Assange in the current premises of the Embassy."

The letter added: "We need to reiterate that we consider the continued use of the diplomatic premises in this way incompatible with the Vienna Convention and unsustainable and we have made clear the serious implications that this has for our diplomatic relations."

An Ecuadorean government spokesman said: "We are deeply shocked by the British government's threats against the sovereignty of the Ecuadorean Embassy and their suggestion that they may forcibly enter the embassy.

"This a clear breach of international law and the protocols set out in the Vienna Convention.