Anonops #13: Stop CISPA

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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The Piracy Crusade

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

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Reliance Internet Hacked By Anonymous India

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

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

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The Internet Defense League

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Answers.usa.gov Cross Site Scripting

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

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

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Kim Dotcom Wins Access to FBI Arrest Files

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CDA wil bevoegdheden MIVD uitbreiden door aanpassing wet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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Montreal F1 ticket-buyers hacked by Anonymous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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30 Years of Political Hacking

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

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

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LulzSec: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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#TwitterPedoRing: Anonymous launches attack on child predators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Hello, I Am Sabu ... ”

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

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Open Letter from Anonymous to Government of India

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

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Anonymous India

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

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Battle of the hacktivists: Anonymous vs. Telecomix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Löwdin himself plans to soon start a PhD in rhetoric.

This perhaps explains the friction with Anonymous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Anon, but not alone: Anonymous helps its fallen brethren

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Anonymous takes down MTNL website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Blue cabinet

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

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