Anonops #13: Stop CISPA

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#OpStopG4S

G4S is the UK's biggest private security company, with its government contracts alone worth over £600 million. Responsible for security services, managing detention centers, prisons, and 675 court and police station holding cells, G4S have also just been granted the £100 million contract for providing 10,000 security guards for the upcoming Olympics.

Whilst G4S still seem to be government favorites, their record is far from spotless. The firm lost their previous 'forcible deportation' contract last September after receiving 773 complaints of abuse – both verbal and physical. The final straw came with the death of Jimmy Mubenga in October 2010, an Angolan asylum seeker who died as a result of his forced deportation by G4S guards. Two of the guards are on bail facing criminal charges, whilst G4S is still waiting to hear whether they are to face corporate manslaughter charges.

Now, asylum seekers in Yorkshire and Humberside are expected to accept this multinational, money-hungry, security company as their landlords.

MORE Information - http://notog4s.blogspot.co.uk/

Backup Data On - http://leakster.net/leaks/g4s

All possible Sub-Domains Of G4S hacked!
You Should Have Expected Us!
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twitter:

th3j35t3r twitterde op maandag 25-06-2012 om 22:07:39 #ugnazi @ug #5days or less - #ticktock http://t.co/wi4begDb (PS ya got beef with each other - why would that be? Pressure? SE? See u soon. reageer retweet

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US charges 24 people in massive hacking sting

Suspected hackers arrested in operation spanning four continents that targeted online financial fraud of stolen credit card information

US law enforcement have arrested 24 suspected hackers in a sting operation spanning four continents that targeted online financial fraud of stolen credit card and bank information.

The two-year investigation, in which FBI agents posed as hackers on internet forums, prevented more than $205 million in losses on over 411,000 compromised consumer credit and debit cards, US authorities in New York said.

Eleven people were arrested in the United States and thirteen others were arrested in countries spanning from Britain to Japan.

"Clever computer criminals operating behind the supposed veil of the internet are still subject to the long arm of the law," said Manhattan attorney Preet Bharara.

Two people were arrested in the New York area and were expected to appear in Manhattan federal court later on Tuesday.

One of the men, Mir Islam, known online as "JoshTheGod," was charged with trafficking in 50,000 stolen credit card numbers. Authorities said Islam had admitted to helping emerging hacker outfit UgNazi, which said it had launched a cyber attack against the microblogging platform Twitter last week. A lawyer for Islam did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the charges.

Joshua Hicks, also known as "OxideDox," was charged with one count of access device fraud.

The 24 people arrested were all men and ranged from 18 to 25-years old. Some face up to 40 years or more in prison if convicted on conspiracy to commit wire fraud charges and access device fraud charges.

The FBI operation centred around a "carding forum" that it had secretly created in June 2010, and was in charge of running unbeknownst to its participants, authorities said.

The forum, called "Carder Profit," was essentially an online market for registered users to exchange stolen account numbers. It was shut down in May.

Meanwhile, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against Wyndham Worldwide Corp and three subsidiaries, alleging that the hotel operator failed to secure customer data.

That failure resulted in the theft of hundreds of thousands of consumers payment card numbers, which were sent to an Internet address registered in Russia and $10.6 million in fraudulent charges, according to the complaint.

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Google traint computers om katten te herkennen

Een onderzoeksteam van Google heeft een netwerk van duizend computers getraind om - zonder hulp van buitenaf - afbeeldingen van katten te herkennen. In totaal 16 duizend processorkernen werden met elkaar verbonden op een manier die vergelijkbaar is met de bouw van een biologisch brein.

Dat schrijft de New York Times vandaag. De 'slimme computer' is gebouwd door medewerkers van Google's X-lab. Het team probeert computers zoveel mogelijk een menselijk brein te laten nabootsen. Die kennis kan bijvoorbeeld van pas komen bij het bouwen en verbeteren van indexeringssystemen voor de zoekmachine, of voor de vertaalmachine Google Translate.

Leerproces
Het computernetwerk kreeg tien miljoen plaatjes uit Youtube-video's voorgeschoteld, en ontwikkelde binnen drie dagen zelf een methode om afbeeldingen van katten te herkennen, zonder dat de computers ooit op enigerlei wijze is uitgelegd wat een kat precies is. Het leerproces is vergelijkbaar met hoe een menselijk brein gezichten herkent, hoewel het natuurlijke systeem nog wel vele malen geavanceerder is.

De wetenschappers zijn naar eigen zeggen positief verrast door de resultaten van hun onderzoek. Ze hadden niet verwacht dat met zo weinig context en sturing toch resultaat geboekt zou kunnen worden. De computers leren ook om lichaamsvormen en menselijke gezichten te herkennen.

De duizenden processorkernen vormden een netwerk van een biljoen verbindingen, die signalen aan elkaar doorgeven in een patroon zoals men vermoedt dat neuronen dat doen in een menselijk brein. De onderzoekers durven evenwel niet te speculeren hoe dicht het computersysteem bij menselijke hersenen komt.

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Anonymous linked to Japan's government websites attacks

A series of cyber-attacks have led to a number of Japanese government websites being temporarily taken offline.

A Twitter feed, @op_japan, associated with hacking collective Anonymous claimed responsibility, reacting to the country's new anti-piracy bill.

The new law outlines jail terms for those who download copyrighted content.

This would "result in scores of unnecessary prison sentences to numerous innocent citizens", the Anonymous website stated on Monday.

The websites - of Japan's Finance Ministry, Supreme Court and political parties DPJ and LDP - are now back up.

The new law says "downloading of copyrighted works knowing that they are not free and that it is illegal" could result in a fine of up to two million yen ($25,300; £16,184) or a prison sentence of up to two years - or both.

Ministry official Takanari Horino said a number of the Finance Ministry's web pages had been defaced on Tuesday and an unauthorised link posted on the site.

Free society

"We are aware of the Anonymous statement referring to the new copyright law, but we don't know at this point if the cyber-attacks are linked to the group," he added.

A statement on the website believed to be run by members of Anonymous, anonpr.net, said anti-piracy bills passed last week in Japan would do "little to solve the underlying problem of legitimate copyright infringement".

"The content industry is now pushing ISPs [internet service providers] in Japan to implement surveillance technology that will spy on... every single internet user," it added.

"This would be an unprecedented approach and severely reduce the amount of privacy law abiding citizens should have in a free society."

Staged protests

According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan, 4.36 billion files were illegally downloaded in the country in 2010.

In early June, members of Anonymous staged protests in 16 cities in India, against what they said was internet censorship in the country.

India's Madras High Court has since changed its earlier censorship order, which centred on the issue of internet copyright, making it once again possible for web users to access video and file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay.

In April, Anonymous also claimed responsibility for defacing almost 500 websites in China, including government sites and those of official agencies and trade groups.

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About Anonymous Cleaning Service (ACS)

This operation is a cleanup activity in Japan.

We're planning an offline-meeting in suits and Guy Fawkes' masks. We will pick up garbage and hand out leaflets explaining what Anonymous is and why we are concerned: Anonymous is neither a group nor criminal. We are united citizens of the world who are concerned that our governments and the content industry are trying to take away our liberties on the Internet.

But Anonymous means more than DDoS. We prefer constructive and productive solutions. Very few Japanese know why our concerns about the new copyright laws are valid and sincere, and the media is not showing the entire truth. We want to make our fellow citizens aware of the problem with a productive message.

We are Anonymous. And in this op, we will be cleaning instead of clicking. Expect Us.

More Information upcoming.

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Peeking behind the curtain at Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman at TEDGlobal 2012

Anthropologist and academic Gabriella Coleman starts her talk with a simple-sounding question: “Who is Anonymous?” She promptly confesses that even after “exhilarating and extremely frustrating” years of studying the group, she still finds this question difficult to answer.

First of all, it’s not an organization with one or even a few leaders at the helm. It’s a name adopted by various unrelated groups of hackers and technologists to describe a whole range of actions, from hacks against security firms to technical support for occupiers to those involved in national revolutions. Subgroups such as Antisec, meanwhile, scour servers to look for sensitive national, military or political information they can leak to the world. What links the groups is a spirit of irreverence and disdain for the law as it stands.

It all starts with Internet trolling, a long-established habit in Internet circles. ”Generally this contains a combination of four things: pranking, trickery, deceit and defilement,” says Coleman. Essentially a way to harm someone’s reputation, it often included the release of personal information, even the assault of an individual or company with unpaid-for pizzas. What’s the point? The laughs, or as Anonymous might put it, the “lulz.”

Declared the Internet Hate Machine by Fox News, a name Anonymous entirely embraced, the group has become more serious in recent years. What inspired them? Oddly, the church of Scientology. When they demanded that a leaked recruitment video be taken down, Anonymous got mad — and bombarded Scientology churches with free pizzas (and many other things besides). As an Anonymous member who taught Coleman’s class described it, it was “ultra coordinated motherfuckary.”

And it was at this point that a serious discussion began within Anonymous. Soon enough, it was clear that a political movement had been born. “Participants now saw themselves as bona fide activists–with an admittedly transgressive twist,” she says.

operation humiliated HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, after Barr had boasted that he had infiltrated Anonymous and was ready to hand over names to the FBI. Anonymous instead gutted HBGary’s servers of 70,000 corporate emails. Operation BART happened after the transport agency blocked cell phone reception to block a planned protest. “Just yesterday, there was an operation in Japan after the country passed anti-piracy laws,” Coleman says. “Anonymous is not proactive, it is reactive, event-driven. It rises up most forcefully when internet freedom is in jeopardy.”

3. They put on a good performance, obvious even to their detractors. The political art of Anonymous is spectacle, says Coleman. The group has a formidable PR machine, which becomes a PR nightmare for others. Yet here’s the thing: Spectacle alone won’t engender political change. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of all the spectacle, Coleman posits, is that “they dramatize the importance of anonymity and privacy in an era when both are rapidly eroding. Given that vast databases track us, given the vast explosion of surveillance, there’s something enchanting, mesmerizing and at a minimum thought-provoking about Anonymous’ interventions.”

4. They are visible and invisible. Unlike criminal groups that stay hidden at all costs, Anonymous allegedly announces itself loud and proud. It has received enormous attention, fear and admiration — it won the People’s Choice award on Time magazine’s online poll and was voted the top cybersecurity threat by IT professionals. Yet they’re also evasive and shifty. “It is hard to know how many people are involved,” says Coleman, thanks in part to an internal culture of avoiding personal fame at all costs. Hackers who have risen in visibility are chastised, marginalized, even banned. It’s difficult to know who did what when or how. What’s clear is that even though Anonymous members are so paradoxical and contradictory, “they have tapped into a deep disenchantment with the status quo as concerns censorship privacy and surveillance.”

This is why it doesn’t really matter whether Anonymous as it exists even lasts. Roiled by arrests and paranoia, the group may well implode. But, says Coleman firmly, “irreverent dissent on the internet is not going to go away with Anonymous.” Many geeks and hackers care about protecting the Internet, and they both invent and manage these resources, so it’s not surprising that this movement is under way. It might be difficult to come up with a blanket moral assessment of Anonymous’ influence, but it’s clear that this is just one moment. And, concludes Coleman, “if you try to hurt what’s so valuable about the internet, be careful — because the internet may very well hurt you back.”

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'Black boxes' to monitor all internet and phone data

Internet and mobile phone companies are preparing to install "black boxes" to monitor all internet and phone traffic to and from the UK, and decode encrypted messages including bank transactions.

As part of the Home Office's Communications Data Bill, internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile phone companies will be obliged to collect communications records and keep them for a year.

The government has insisted that the actual content of messages won't be stored, but until now it has not been clear how communications companies will be able to separate content from "header data", such as the sender and recipient of a message, and the date it was sent.

It has now emerged that the Home Office has held meetings with the UK's largest ISPs and mobile network operators, and has given them information about the hardware which companies will have to use to monitor traffic flowing through their systems.

When an individual uses a webmail service such as Gmail, for example, the entire webpage is encrypted before it is sent. This makes it impossible for ISPs to distinguish the content of the message. Under the Home Office proposals, once the Gmail is sent, the ISPs would have to route the data via a government-approved "black box" which will decrypt the message, separate the content from the "header data", and pass the latter back to the ISP for storage.

Dominic Raab, a Conservative MP who has criticised the Bill, said: "The use of data mining and black boxes to monitor everyone's phone, email and web-based communications is a sobering thought that would give Britain the most intrusive surveillance regime in the West. But, many technical experts are raising equally serious doubts about its feasibility and vulnerability to hacking and other abuse."

A representative of the ISPs Association said: "We understand that government wants to move with the times, and we want to work with them on that. But this is a massive project. We'd rather they told us what they want to achieve, then sit down with us to work out how."

"Our other main concern with this is speed. If you're having to route all traffic through one box, it's going to cut down on connection speeds. The hardware can only look at a certain amount of traffic per second - if lots of streams from the BBC iPlayer are going through it, for example, how is it going to handle the traffic?"

The Home Office had not commented at the time of publication.

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Anonymous Hackers Personified As A Clumsy Girl On Japanese Web

Anonymous, a hacker group known by several internet protest attacks against the recently passed Japanese anti-copyright bill which penalized music downloaders, who are being reported to be attacking Japanese government and political parties websites, gets a little troubles on its first contact with Japanese.

Until this attack began, Anonymous and its hacktivism were known as what happened oversea, nothing related to themselves by Japanese.

Their Twitter account on this time activity, @op_japan, tweeted 5 times in Japanese out of the total 100 tweets, but all of them are not natural Japanese, likely done by machine-translation. Though they are understandable enough, it seemed to make Japanese net users an impression that the person(s) inside is a bit dumb.

# like my Asiajin posts ;-)

As the account later admitted [J], on their first attack, they mistakenly attacked a local lake “Kasumigaura” management office website, instead of Japanese ministries, so-called “Kasumigaseki”.

Another one, attacking the opposition party, The Liberal Democratic Party(LDP) website first prior to the ruling party, The Democratic Party of Japan(DPJ), was not a mistake, they announced [J], which may be true as the both parties approved the bill. However, many Japanese web users thought that Anonymous chose targets without enough research.

On Twitter and 2-channel, some started saying that the Anonymous is like “Dojikko”, which is an Anime/Manga word means a clumsy girl whose mistakes are thought as attractive. Some drew personified character of Anonymous by following the line.

On the Japanese web, more people seem against the bill even before Anonymous’ attack, so this anthropomorphism may show that their positive feeling.

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"How am I supposed to go to a judge if the third party is gagged...?"

Greatest hits for your Friday afternoon: internet freedom activist Jake Appelbaum questions the FBI's deputy general counsel on secret Patriot Act subpoenas, called "National Security Letters" (NSLs). Appelbaum has been a target of the secret, gag-imposed orders.

He asks the FBI counsel if there is judicial oversight over the NSL process. Watch to hear what she says. Her answer should alarm us all and remind us that fights like the upcoming battle over the FISA amendments act reauthorization are really big deals. These aren't just arcane laws; they affect real people, in tangible ways.

Jacob Applebaum Questions FBI on National Security Letters.avi

If this is all a little meaningless to you, read this background on NSLs. Basically the secret subpoenas allow the government to force third party holders of our private information to hand over our data to the FBI. As we've written about here, the third party content holders that receive NSLs could include doctors and even mental health professionals like therapists and social workers.

Here's the full segment of the DemocracyNow! show during which the above clip was aired. It's well worth watching if you have some time.

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Op zaterdag 30 juni 2012 13:56 schreef Tukker87 het volgende:

[..]

Ben vooral een lurker hier maar vind het altijd wel interessant om te lezen, blijf zo doorgaan

twitter:

HHAnonymous twitterde op zaterdag 30-06-2012 om 12:15:04 I'm at the #Anonymous #chanology #Megaraid in Dublin - conference Live stream: http://t.co/TMPh6zSm reageer retweet

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OpSaveTheArctic

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" The energy companies that caused the Arctic to melt in the first place are looking to profit from the disappearing ice. They want to open up a new oil frontier to get at a potential 90 billion barrels of oil. That’s a lot of money to them, but it’s only three years’ worth of oil to the world.Previously classified government documents say dealing with oil spills in the freezing waters is “almost impossible” and inevitable mistakes would shatter the fragile Arctic environment.We’ve seen the extreme damage caused by the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters - we cannot let this happen in the Arctic.
To drill in the Arctic, oil companies have to drag icebergs out the way of their rigs and use giant hoses to melt floating ice with warm water. If we let them do this, a catastrophic oil spill is just a matter of time. "
This gave rise to #OpSaveTheArctic put forward by Anonymous.
Listed Targets :
1). Exxon Mobil Corporation
2). Shell Petrochemical Corp.
3). BP Global - British multinational oil and gas company
4). Gazprom Corporation
5). Rosneft Petroleum Corp. - Russia

• Phase-1 of #OpSaveTheArctic has been carried out.
Target - Exxon Mobil Corporation
To show our support to the cause, after the employees of Exxon where hacked, we used their email ids to to sign the petition at - http://www.savethearctic.org/
We suggest you to do the same!

Anonymous #OpJapan & #OpACS - Expect us Japan

SPOILER

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

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Anonymous strikes UAE

A group of “hacktivists” allegedly affiliated with the Anonymous activist organization appears to have infiltrated the United Arab Emirates government computer system.

The group claims to have accessed the servers in charge of filtering internet traffic before it reaches the population within the UAE's borders and posted the information Saturday.

The action seems to have been initiated on what the group referred to as “Operation GodFather” as part of an effort to expose official internet censorship and oppression in the UAE.

“Hello citizens of the world. Here comes another leak. This time our target was UAE and its oppressive Netfilers,” they stated.

“As many of you might already know UAE's internet is fully run and monitored by government run ISP's. We decided to ‘take a look’ we managed to get into the Netfilter server and are leaking this data we extracted from their DB.”

The leak appears to contain a list of blockades set in place with the use of “wildcards” and, according to the hackers, a list of website URLs filtered by the UAE’s Internet service providers.

Including websites that host adult content, the list includes VPN providers and any other site that could help users bypass censorship mechanisms, social media networks and dating sites, and sites that promote religious views different than Islam.

The most “shocking” discovery, as described by the hackers, is the fact that many websites that offer Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services are also on the list.

“A large part of UAE's population is made of migrant workers and the telecom industry made a lot of profit by overcharging them for international phone calls. But with the raise of VOIP and internet communication they were afraid that this would take away their profits and thus went ahead to block VOIP,” they explained.

Anonymous-affiliated hackers were also responsible for the recent Euro 2012 website attack, protesting Ukraine's rounding up and slaughter of stray dogs in advance of a soccer championship held earlier this month.

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Press Releases :: 2012 WhiteHat Security Announcements

WhiteHat Security Marks 2011 as the Year of Radical Reduction in Online Vulnerabilities In Twelfth Edition of Website Security Statistics Report

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – June 27, 2012 – WhiteHat Security, the Web security company, today released the twelfth installment of the WhiteHat Security Website Security Statistics Report. The report reviewed serious vulnerabilities* in websites during the 2011 calendar year, examining the severity and duration of the most critical vulnerabilities from 7,000 websites across major vertical markets. Among the findings in the report, WhiteHat research suggests that the average number of serious vulnerabilities found per website per year in 2011 was 79, a substantial reduction from 230 in 2010 and down from 1,111 in 2007. Despite the significant improvement in the state of website security, organizational challenges in creating security programs that balance breadth of coverage and depth of testing leave large-scale attack surfaces or small, but very high-risk vulnerabilities open to attackers.

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Greenpeace welcomes Anonymous after Exxon Mobil hack

Greenpeace welcomes Anonymous in the fight to preserve the Arctic. Earlier this week, Anonymous enthusiasts hacked Exxon Mobil in solidarity with the ongoing Greenpeace campaign to save the Arctic from oil exploration.

Cyber War News reports Anonymous hacked and released data from Exxon Mobil Corporation on June 27 as part of Operation Save The Arctic (#OpSaveTheArctic).

Greenpeace, an independent global organisation acting to change attitudes and behavior in order to protect the environment and promote peace, welcomed the support of the international hacktivist collective known as Anonymous with the following tweet, issued June 29:

. The Arctic receives ‪#anonymous‬ support. Arctic oil drillers Exxon hacked in operation ‪#OPSaveTheArctic‬ ‪#SaveTheArctic‬

Airdemon Network Security reports Anonymous leaked 300 accounts from Exxon Mobil in #OpSavetheArctic.

The following is an excerpt from a statement released by Anonymous hacktivists announcing solidarity with the efforts of Greenpeace to preserve the Arctic:

. The energy companies that caused the Arctic to melt in the first place are looking to profit from the disappearing ice. They want to open up a new oil frontier to get at a potential 90 billion barrels of oil. That's a lot of money to them, but it's only three years' worth of oil to the world.
Previously classified government documents say dealing with oil spills in the freezing waters is "almost impossible" and inevitable mistakes would shatter the fragile Arctic environment. We've seen the extreme damage caused by the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters -- we cannot let this happen in the Arctic.

To drill in the Arctic, oil companies have to drag icebergs out the way of their rigs and use giant hoses to melt floating ice with warm water. If we let them do this, a catastrophic oil spill is just a matter of time.

This gave rise to #OpSaveTheArctic put forward by Anonymous.

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#OpLithChild - Lithuanian Supreme Court hacked

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This story envelopes a dysfunctional family living within in a devastatingly broken system — the mother accused of selling her daughter to a pedophile ring of high ranking authorities, including judges and politicians. The videos are unsettling, the transcripts of the investigation will make you angry. The murders will make your imagination go wild. The activism, will amaze you. Many factors played a role in uniting a country, demanding justice. Those cries for justice have gone unheard.

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Twitter forced to release Occupy protester's tweets to New York court

Micro-blogging site loses legal challenge to prosecutors' request for three months' worth of messages from Malcolm Harris

Twitter has been ordered to hand over almost three months worth of messages from an Occupy Wall Street protester after losing a legal challenge to prosecutors' demands for the tweets.

The micro-blogging website had argued that the posts belonged to activist Malcolm Harris and as such it would be violating fourth amendment privacy rights if it were to disclose the communications without first receiving a search warrant.

But a Manhattan judge ruled on Monday that under a timeline set out by federal law, a warrant is only needed for the final day's worth of messages from Harris, who is accused of disorderly conduct in relation to a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in October.

All other tweets prior to this date could legitimately be demanded by means of subpoena, it was ruled.

Harris was amongst several hundred Occupy Wall Street demonstrators arrested last year during a protest march across Brooklyn Bridge.
Prosecutors say that messages posted by Harris – who goes by the twitter handle @destructuremal – could show whether the defendant was aware that he was breaking police orders relating to the demo.

In January, the New York County district attorney's office issued a subpoena to Twitter, calling on the firm to hand over "any and all user information, including email address, as well as any and all tweets posted for the period 9/15/2011 – 12/31/2011".

Harris initially attempted to block the move, but was told that he had no proprietary interest to his own messages.

Twitter countered that this contradicts its own terms and conditions, which explicitly states that users "retain their right to any content they submit, post or display on or through". Moreover, in its own legal challenge to the subpoena, the firm accused prosecutors of trying to force its employees to violate federal law.

Lawyers for Twitter also argued that under the Uniform Act, prosecutors would need to obtain a subpoena in California before it could demand documents from a company based in that state.

Monday's ruling found that a search warrant was indeed needed for a final day's worth of tweets by Harris as they fell within a timeline laid out in federal law. All else was fair game for the prosecutors, the judge found.
The court will now review the material and provide the relevant tweets to the DA's office.

In a statement, Chief Assistant District Attorney Daniel Alonso said he was "pleased that the court has ruled for a second time that the Tweets at issue must be turned over".

He added: "We look forward to Twitter's complying and to moving forward with the trial."

Responding to the development, Harris's attorney Martin Stolar said: "I'm not surprised by the ruling, but I'm still disappointed by it." He added that he and Twitter could still mount a further challenge, stating that there was still "plenty of time to do that" before his client's next court appearance.

Stolar suggested that the latest decision shows that the court fails to take into consideration 21st century developments when it comes to what should be covered under the fourth amendment. "That is somewhat bothersome," he added.

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Anonymous Rattles A Chinese Web Giant

Anonymous may be best known for knocking websites offline or stealing data, but one faction of the movement is subverting figures of power in a more circumspect way — by trawling through documents and computer code.

The sub group Anonymous Analytics released a damning report yesterday about Qihoo, the Chinese web giant that claims to be the No. 1 provider of Internet and mobile security products and services in China, as measured by its user base.

Qihoo distributes antivirus software called 360 Safeguard and has a browser called 360 Secure Browser, but in recent years has restructured it business to focus on selling online advertising space, in particular from a single directory page, hao.360.cn. The company claims to get approximately 90% of its advertising revenue “directly or indirectly” from this page and its sub pages; advertising accounted for 73% of the company’s total revenue in 2011 of $22.9 million.

That figure marked an increase of 136% from the year before, meaning hao.360.cn is a serious money-maker for Qihoo. Qihoo recently said that it charged, on average, 1 million yuan ($156,000) per month, per link on the “Famous Sites” section of its directory page — a breed of e-commerce widely known to have dwindled in Western cyberspace.

Anonymous Analytics says there’s something fishy about Qihoo’s directory page. Qihoo recently claimed on its fourth quarter conference call that the page was getting 20% more web traffic than dominant-player Baidu’s similar page and its sub pages, hao123.com. Qihoo confirmed this with me, citing a table of figures from iResearch.

But the Anonymous group claims that Qihoo is “grotesquely exaggerating” its traffic advantage, and their evidence comes in the form of a recent change in the source code of hao.360.cn. Having been monitoring the site since last year, the group noticed that a comScore tag had been added to Qihoo’s HTML source code. (ComScore is the best-known, third-party verifier of a web site’s traffic.)

This seemed fine, until the tag was removed on or around June 20, 2012. Why? Anonymous Analytics thinks that Qihoo didn’t like the figures it was seeing. The group then managed to get what it claims are the actual comScore figures through unnamed third parties — “people we trust,” according to the group’s representative — who had bought them from comScore. The figures show that in the months of February, March and April 2012, Qihoo’s all-important directory page had 56%, 51% and 52% less traffic than Baidu’s.

Anonymous Analytics provided me with what appears to be a legitimate document from comScore showing web traffic figures for Baidu and Qihoo’s main directory pages in April 2012. It states that Baidu’s directory page had 84.689 million unique visitors from China, while Qihoo’s had 40.877 million.

The activist group believes that before Qihoo balked at the figures, it had added the comScore tag to appease analysts, investors and critics, “who have called for management to provide independent verification of Qihoo’s traffic claims.”

The group further believes that management installed the tag with a view figuring out how to manipulate comScore’s traffic analytics. “We are so certain of this that we invite engineers at comScore to analyze data coming out of hao.360.cn since the beginning of the year,” Anonymous Analytics says.

Qihoo has denied these allegations completely, though it seems rattled enough by them. Their chief operating officer, Alex Yu, told me in an email on Monday that “allegations regarding our web site traffic has been put out by several different parties. Most of them are on the short side of our stock. ”

He added that Qihoo had started working with comScore to get a “backup measurement” of Qihoo’s traffic since the beginning of 2012.

“However from time to time, comScore’s tracking tools may trigger some security software,” Yu said. “When such conflict between comScore and security software occurs, we will temporarily remove the comScore tag to make sure users don’t get false alarm.” Yu added that the comScore tag would be put back once such conflicts were resolved.

“There were several such incidences in the past few months, and there may be additional ones in the future until comScore and us come with a solution to completely solve the issue,” Yu said. He added that until the issue was resolved, comScore would not be ready to “officially release” any data regarding Qihoo’s directory site. “Any of the ‘leaked’ data should be viewed as inaccurate and unofficial,” he said.

When I put this to comScore, a spokesperson provided a formal statement from the tracking firm:

. ComScore have been working and is still working with Qihoo and other publishers in China on tagging their websites for Unified Digital Measurement. At this point, comScore has not released any Unified (tagged) data for Qihoo Sites. We do not comment on publisher’s unpublished data or any work in progress.


Anonymous Analytics claims that the comScore data it got on Qihoo came form a third party that had bought it directly from comScore. When I asked comScore how much “unpublished” figures like this counted as legitimate comScore data, they reiterated that they could only comment on data that had been put in the public domain.

A representative of Anonymous Analytics offered some responses to Yu’s denials, and to an official rebuttal that was put out by Qihoo in the form of a press release this morning, which stated that in the recent months in question, a European third-party anti-virus software had “mistakenly identified the tag as a Trojan.” Qihoo said it had temporarily removed the comScore tag from hao.360.cn to “ensure user experience till the issue was resolved.”

“We would love to know which European anti-virus company triggered the tag as a Trojan,” the Anonymous Analytics representative told me. “Any anti-virus company big enough to make a sizeable impact in Qihoo’s traffic volume would know to white flag any data analytics from major companies, such as comScore, Alexa, and Google Analytics. Technical absurdity of that aside, how many people could that have been affected since Qihoo claims most its users use its own anti-virus products? Also, they ‘removed the tag for user experience?’ What does that even mean?”

The Anonymous researchers, who it’s worth noting cannot be accountable for the validity of their claims due to their professed namelessness, are not the first group to question Qihoo’s claims about web traffic. Seeking Alpha did so here, a short seller of the stock called Citron Research did so here, and Qihoo responded to that latter report here. (My own take is that there’s something rather unsustainable about a company with a market capitalization of $1.9 billion getting most of its revenue from a single directory page of web links.)

Anonymous is both a movement and brand of hacktivists and trolls, best known for illegal cyber attacks against targets like the Church of Scientology in 2008, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal in late 2010, and Sony in 2012. There were all manner of motivations at play but underneath it all an attempt to unleash a modern-day form of vigilante justice.

Yet this is also not the first time that Anonymous has pursued legal means of subversion. Recently a faction of Anonymous in Japan announced a clean-up event, encouraging supporters to meet in Shibuya, Tokyo on July 7 to don Guy Fawkes masks, then pick up garbage and hand out leaflets about the cyber collective.

Anonymous Analytics is on the edgier side of these legal activities. It was established less than a year ago and includes ”enough guys with finance backgrounds to know what we are talking about,” its representative said. Its website is a parody of a financial research firm, preluding each report title with “Initiating Coverage.” Last April it targeted Huabao International, claiming in a 44-page report that the Chinese tobacco and fragrance firm overpaid for several companies it bought from its billionaire chairwoman. As a result, Huabao asked to suspend trading of its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange, according to The Financial Times. The September before, the group targeted Chaoda Modern Agriculture. So far it has released three reports.

Why the focus on China? Anonymous Analytics claims on its web site that Chinese companies aren’t very good at covering their tracks. But they’re ready to move on — in their latest report they added that “exposing Chinese frauds” had become cliche, “if not outright boring.” The group says it has already turned its attention to Western companies, and expects to release its first report by year-end.

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How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down

quote:

The arrests deprived Anonymous, at least temporarily, of a well of talent and social inspiration. But even as the small group of hackers who originally comprised AntiSec has all but vanished from the net, the name has now taken on a life of its own. What used to be a traditional hacker group, a structured and elite club of talent within the otherwise chaotic collective, has now—like Anonymous itself—become a banner.

“AntiSec” attacked Florida’s Lake County Sheriff’s Office, with several gigabytes of sensitive data leaked on April 27. In late May, “AntiSec” attacked the website of the Chicago police in retaliation for what anons perceived as harsh treatment of anti-NATO protestors. Around the same time, “AntiSec” also hacked into the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, releasing a sizable cache of internal data. But as far as anyone could tell, these attacks weren’t connected to the fragmented group Sabu had played dean to—and they weren’t even connected to one another. It was as if the destruction of AntiSec had allowed the idea of AntiSec to escape into the Internet’s social ether.

After the arrests, it seemed that Anonymous would never terrify governments and corporations in quite the same way again. But that’s the sort of underestimation that led Aaron Barr to count 10 senior members of Anonymous, right before a mob ruined his life. It’s the type of judgment that led the Stratfor analyst Sean Noonan, on reading a description of Anonymous as “ultra-coordinated motherfuckery,” to write that the group was “completely uncoordinated and couldn’t fuck anything”—in a personal email that we can read, of course, thanks to some truly coordinated fucking of his employer.

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Three NSA Whistleblowers Back EFF's Lawsuit Over Government's Massive Spying Program

EFF Asks Court to Reject Stale State Secret Arguments So Case Can Proceed

San Francisco - Three whistleblowers – all former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA) – have come forward to give evidence in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) lawsuit against the government's illegal mass surveillance program, Jewel v. NSA.

In a motion filed today, the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the "secret room" at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006.

"For years, government lawyers have been arguing that our case is too secret for the courts to consider, despite the mounting confirmation of widespread mass illegal surveillance of ordinary people," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Now we have three former NSA officials confirming the basic facts. Neither the Constitution nor federal law allow the government to collect massive amounts of communications and data of innocent Americans and fish around in it in case it might find something interesting. This kind of power is too easily abused. We're extremely pleased that more whistleblowers have come forward to help end this massive spying program."

The three former NSA employees with declarations in EFF's brief are William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake, and J. Kirk Wiebe. All were targets of a federal investigation into leaks to the New York Times that sparked the initial news coverage about the warrantless wiretapping program. Binney and Wiebe were formally cleared of charges and Drake had those charges against him dropped.

Jewel v. NSA is back in district court after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it in late 2011. In the motion for partial summary judgment filed today, EFF asked the court to reject the stale state secrets arguments that the government has been using in its attempts to sidetrack this important litigation and instead apply the processes in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that require the court to determine whether electronic surveillance was conducted legally.

"The NSA warrantless surveillance programs have been the subject of widespread reporting and debate for more than six years now. They are just not a secret," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "Yet the government keeps making the same 'state secrets' claims again and again. It's time for Americans to have their day in court and for a judge to rule on the legality of this massive surveillance."

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Op woensdag 4 juli 2012 13:00 schreef borisz het volgende:
39 - 478. ACTA = Dood.

Original Party Hard music

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Th3 J35t3r: Project Looking Glass

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As many of you will have noticed, there haven’t been a lot of ‘TANGO DOWNS’ over the last few months. There is a reason for this. I decided that I should concentrate a little more on targeted intelligence gathering and a little less on the violent internet smackdown that is XerXeS and others.

I needed a way to get undisputable evidence as to the real world identity of ‘the mark’ – whatever the ‘mark’ or target was, be it Anons, Jihadist bomb plotters or forum admins, or whoever.

Over the last few months I have been running ‘Project Looking Glass’.

So what is it?

The Looking Glass is based upon the open source Browser Exploitation Framework – I used this as its truly modular framework lends itself well to me modifiying and hacking it to pieces in order to get it to do what I want it to, without losing direction or straying from the confines of the original mission spec or waste time re-inventing the wheel. One of the bonuses of open-source code right?

The entire project comprises of the ‘looking glass’ server, which I will be talking about here, and numerous other ‘bait’ servers which have the the ‘hook code’ embedded in certain pages that they serve up. Once a target hits the page they immediatley pop up on the looking glass HUD and information starts getting logged and a profile of the ‘mark’ starts to form. I am not going into much more detail on this for obvious reasons. But I will say the highly targeted nature of how the hook code is served up to the ‘mark’ leaves very little room for error, mistaken identity or false positives.

Here’s a screenshot of the moment @joshthegod of #UGNazi stumbled through the looking glass after being on the target list for only two days prior. (Click for fullsize) and here’s the tweet I posted that same day (June 14) – https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/213281821704732672

quote:

So why would I let this out of my bag?

I haven’t actually given away any operational details, they key to this is in the delivery of the hook code, location of ‘bait servers’ etc. The hook code, by the way, can also be injected using XSS into any vulnerable 3rd party website, so the target doen’t even have to hit one of my ‘bait boxes’.

Project Looking Glass is not available or downloadable to the public, although I am sure within a few hours there will be claims you can download it here there and everywhere, as was the case with XerXeS. Please be advised I never released XerXeS and I won’t be releasing Project Looking Glass. If some one says they have it, they are lying to you and most likely try to infect you with malware.

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Berlijns nachtleven dreigt aan banden te worden gelegd

De talrijke toeristen die al eens het plaatselijke nachtleven zijn ingedoken zullen het wellicht beamen: de clubscene in de Duitse hoofdstad behoort tot de top in Europa. Daar zou wel 's verandering in kunnen komen nu de Duitse auteursrechtenmaatschappij clubs die laat openblijven in de gaten houdt.

Met legendarische clubs als Berghain, Watergate en Weekend in het aanbod is er voor clubbers keuze te over in het Berlijnse nachtleven. Maar de machtige auteursrechtenmaatschappij Gema, die de belangen van zo'n 65.000 artiesten behartigt, kan daar mogelijk verandering in brengen, meldt The Guardian op zijn website.

'Bijdrage tien keer hoger'
Gema wil vanaf 1 januari een nieuw inningssysteem invoeren dat gebaseerd is op een percentage van de ticketverkoop en de grootte van een club. Daar komt nog een toeslag van 50 procent bovenop voor evenementen die langer dan 5 uur duren, en voor zaken die tot na 3u 's ochtends geopend blijven. 'Dit zal voor 60 procent van de clubs geen enkele prijsverhoging betekenen, integendeel', zegt Gema. Maar de dancings die tot in de vroege uurtjes feestvierders toelaten, vrezen dat ze vijf tot tien keer zoveel zullen moeten ophoesten dan het bedrag dat ze nu betalen.

'Een gemiddelde club die nu 28.000 euro per jaar aan auteursrechten betaalt, zal dan een rekening van 180.000 euro gepresenteerd krijgen', rekende de Berlijnse federatie van clubuitbaters uit. 'In dat geval zullen heel wat dancings de deuren moeten sluiten.'

Doodssteek
Vooral Berghain, dat feestjes organiseert die soms 48 uur lang doorgaan, zegt dat de nieuwe inning een doodssteek zou betekenen. De bijdrage voor de club zou in het nieuwe systeem liefst 1.400 procent hoger liggen dan vandaag. Zelfde verhaal bij Watergate, dat momenteel 10.000 euro per jaar betaalt maar vanaf volgend jaar 200.000 euro zou moeten neertellen. 'Hoe kan je in godsnaam ondernemen in zulke omstandigheden?', vraagt uitbater Steffen Hacks zich in Die Tageszeitung af.

Protestacties
Wat slecht is voor de clubscene, zou ook beroerd kunnen zijn voor het Berlijnse toerisme in het algemeen. Van de ruim 10.000 toeristen die Berlijn elk weekend aandoen, noemt ruim een derde het clubleven als grootste attractie.

Clubbers, toeristen en uitbaters blijven niet bij de pakken neer zitten. Clubs in heel Duitsland hielden op 30 juni vijf minuten stilte om de situatie aan te klagen, en een optocht tegen Gema lokte meer dan 5.000 betogers. Daarnaast wist een petitie tegen de nieuwe Gema-tarieven al ruim 200.000 handtekeningen te verzamelen.

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Your phone may not be safe at protests

Ever wondered why your cell phone reception suddenly becomes terrible at protests? Ever worried that police could use electronic spoofing devices to suck up your mobile data because you are in the streets exercising your rights?

You might have been onto something.

Mobile "IMSI catchers", currently on the market and being pushed to police and intelligence agencies worldwide, enable these creepy, stealth spying tactics. And if they build it and hawk it, history tells us police will buy it and deploy it.

On Tuesday, July 3, 2012, electronic privacy advocate and technology researcher Chris Soghoian tweeted a link to a photograph of a talk he gave at TED in Scotland in late June. Behind him in the photograph is another image, this one taken by privacy researcher Eric King at a surveillance trade show. (King's Twitter bio contains a quote from a representative of the notorious ISS World -- a global surveillance trade firm that often hosts such trade shows: the rep called him an "Anti-lawful interception zealot blogger." High praise.)



Look at the slide behind Soghoian; that's the photo in question. It shows an IMSI catcher strapped onto a model, under the model's shirt.

IMSI stands for "International Mobile Subscriber Identity". The technology is essentially a mobile phone tower with "a malicious operator". It mimics the behavior of a cell tower and tricks mobile phones into sending data to it, instead of to the tower.

. As such it is considered a Man In the Middle (MITM) attack. It is used as an eavesdropping device used for interception and tracking of cellular phones and usually is undetectable for the users of mobile phones.

Once it has made a connection with the phone and tricked it into thinking it is a mobile tower, the IMSI catcher forces the phone to drop its encryption, enabling easy access to the contents of the device. The tool then lets the attacker listen in on mobile conversations and intercept all data sent from a mobile phone, remaining undetected. In some cases the tool also allows the operator to manipulate messages.

Here's a creepy video that a purveyor of IMSI catchers made to advertise its product:

quote:

The FBI uses IMSI catchers and claims it does so legally, even though it says it doesn't need a warrant to deploy them. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is currently pursuing FOIA litigation to find out exactly how the bureau uses the "Stingray" (a brand name IMSI catcher); unsurprisingly, the FBI wasn't forthcoming with documents to reveal its legal standard or other information about how it uses the tool. Stay tuned for more information as that case makes its way through the courts.

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Op vrijdag 6 juli 2012 00:28 schreef Probably_on_pcp het volgende:
Goed werk Papierversnipperaar, ik zie dit topic nu pas!

Blijf zo doorgaan, respect! Ik ga dit topic zeker volgen

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The End. #TeaMp0isoN

So, here we are, at the end of TeaMp0isoN.

I just wanted to say few words before I leave, you can consider them to be motivational or
just bullshit, honestly I dont care.

So, few years ago we started this cause, fighting for freedom, activism, hacktivism etc...
We raised alarm in the government, they have seen that we can win this war, that we can take our own freedom back, our own lives back.
They started fighting back, but we have choose to not give up, to not bow in front of them
and let them take our souls and imprison them.
But im glad to see US all united, painters, musicians, teachers, wives, kids, doctors, lawyers,
im glad that all those people are now united, and they act as one.

War in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Libya etc...
People, realise thats just start, thats not even a glimpse of whats coming,
Im not gonna talk about illuminati, about satan, about faith or religion,
Im just going to tell you that you should check your own town and see how many poor people is there.
How many people were fucked by government, how many people were fucked by banks,
how many homeless people are dyeing in the streets during winter, how many poor people are dyeing from hunger.

Im not gonna tell you that hacking or hacktivism is not illegal, and not dangerous,
im not gonna tell you I enjoyed it.
I wake up 20 times during night because im paranoid, I dont want to end in jail...
You can call me a coward, you can call me whatever you want,
but I, I was here for years, I did fight for people, I did fight for freedom,
but now time has come that I feel im not good for it anymore,
this has drained so much life out of me, and I feel I didnt get enough people to hear
what I fight for, what WE fight for.

Im just begging you one thing, not just hackers, but everyone, even politicians.
Do not be ignorant towards US who are fighting for our freedom,
dont judge us for what we do, we are not terrorists,
we are just normal humans, who are fighting for better cause, fighting for people,
fighting for better future for our kids.
Do not fight each other, there is no sense in that, you are just runing each others
lives, if you hate someone who is fighting same cause as you, dont attack him,
dont troll him, dont prank him, dont ruin his life over little things.

Think bigger, think about future, because today you are a kid, but tomorow you will
have your own kids, and then you will realise how much you could do to help them
live better, to help them not be afraid of their own government.

Dont do work on this cause because of fame, work on because its right.

I ve lost so much in this fight, like every soldier on this battlefield.
So many friends got arrested, TriCk, MLT, Phantom.
I call them heroes, I call them freedom fighters.
I know that they and I will be forgotten in few months,
but I hope this msg will remain on the internet,
and that you the people will share it amongst urselves.

So now, im telling you goodbye.
Thanks for all those supporting us, and helping us fight this war.
Thanks for all those that respected us, and didnt leave us when things went bad.
Thank you alot.

#FreeTriCk
#FreeMLT
#FreePhantom
#FreeUsAll
#Freedom

So this is the end of TeaMp0isoN, we arent coming back anymore,
whoever tells you he is TeaMp0isoN or starts using our name,
do not believe him, because this is the end of us.

root@TeaMp0isoN:$ shutdown -n

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“Anonymous” Hacks Anti-Piracy Takedown Tool

This spring nearly all popular BitTorrent sites were blocked by Indian ISPs following a court order. The blockades were eventually lifted, but the many “Anonymous” groups who revolted are not done yet. The latest target is the anti-piracy group Copyright Labs, whose servers were painfully compromised this week. The hackers didn’t take the site down, but altered the message that is sent to website owners by their automated takedown tool.

Two months ago millions of Indians were shaken up by a mass anti-piracy action.

Internet providers all across the country blocked access to major BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and Torrentz.eu after a local court issued a so-called John Doe order.

The order wasn’t targeted at a specific site or ISP but gave the copyright holder carte blanche to demand broad blockades, which they did. In response, Internet providers, government websites and media companies were targeted in DDoS attack reprisals by “Anonymous” groups.

The blockades were eventually lifted with the Madras High Court ruling that Internet providers can no longer be asked to ban entire sites. With that, millions of Indians were able to access their favorite sites again. In future, copyright holders will have to specify the exact URLs where their content is being made available.

This is where the Indian anti-piracy group Copyright Labs comes in again. The group, who previously demanded site-wide blocks, switched to contacting owners of file-sharing sites with the request to remove specific URLs.

However, a certain “Anonymous” group took exception to this new strategy and let this be known in an unusual way.

Earlier this week the owner of BitSnoop, one of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, received more than a dozen emails from Copyright Labs. The emails in question (see screenshot at the bottom of this article) did not include the usual links, but a special message from “Anonymous.”

Here’s an excerpt taken from one of the the emails:

… The URLs where our copyrighted material is located include:

Kudos to SFLC for following it up and trying to find out how the HC order was misused by ISPs and CopyrightLabs
We are Anonymous you should have expected us
GTFO
best of luck sorting thousands of mails
Get a life
Nobody watches those fucking movies anyway they are flop
You are hated all over the internet
With enough soap you can blow just about anything

You are requested to remove this infringing material from your website immediately and not copy it and not make it available to other websites or viewers. …

Somehow, the person who gained access to the Copyright Labs web server managed to replace the takedown URLs with their message. Using the Anonymous handle the hacker(s) point out that they disapprove of Copyright Labs’ anti-piracy efforts.

This message was sent in hundreds, if not thousands of emails to various website owners. Needless to say, BitSnoop’s owner wasn’t pleased with the bogus takedown emails, and he sent the following reply to Copyright Labs.

. Hello,

Your email is blacklisted, don’t bother sending any more.

We don’t care if you were hacked or whatever – not our job to read this crap.


This left the Indian anti-piracy group with no other option than to apologize.

In their reply the anti-piracy group asks for forgiveness while noting that the BitTorrent site has always been very helpful.

. Dear Sir,

Our apologies for the confusion caused. Our system was hacked. BitSnoop has been great support to us always with speedy responses. We request u to kindly accept our apologies and support us as always.

Best Regards

HARISH RAM L H
CEO
Copyright Labs

It’s interesting to see that Copyright Labs is so fond of BitSnoop, because a letter obtained by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) clearly shows that the group demanded the site to be taken down in April, along with 271 other sites.

How much damage Anonymous has done to Copyright Labs’ server is unknown, but its website has been unreachable for days. At the time of publication the Copyright Labs site is still displaying a “down for maintenance” notice.

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SCIENTOLOGY CRUMBLING: An Entire Church Mission Defects as David Miscavige Faces Leadership Crisis

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For several years, we've been reporting about a crisis in Scientology as key members of the church -- including some of its highest-ranking former executives -- have left the organization and spoken out about its abuses. One by one, longtime, loyal Scientologists have announced that they are fed up and are leaving the church.

But now, for the first time in memory, an entire mission has announced that it is defecting from the church en masse.

quote:

On January 2, Lemberger received a copy of Debbie Cook's infamous New Year's Eve e-mail. Cook, a well-known former executive in the church, stunned her fellow Scientologists by putting out a lengthy message detailing how Miscavige has turned the church over to "extreme fundraising" and is getting away from the precepts of Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The church sued Cook for sending the e-mail, then it later reached a settlement with her in return for her promising to say no more publicly about her experiences.

But Cook's New Year's Eve message continues to do major damage, as other longtime, loyal Scientologists announce that they are leaving the organization because of the same concerns with David Miscavige's leadership.

quote:

"The Freedom magazine had referred to Marty Rathbun having a blog. So I went to the Internet, finally," he says. A loyal (if often complaining) member of Scientology for more than 30 years, Lemberger had never explored the 'Net to see what people were saying about his church -- and he knew nothing about the crisis it was in.

But now he absorbed as much he could stand.

"I found out that the world has changed," he says.

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Blogger: Scientology group asks followers to censor Web comments

quote:

The Katie Holmes-Tom Cruise split apparently has had a negative effect on the Church of Scientology, and a faction of the church is calling for members to take action and silence naysayers.

quote:

The message instructs followers to visit media sites, including Microsoft, Google or any other that requires users to agree to a code of conduct that prohibits comments that threaten, defame or degrade any group or individuals.

Followers should hunt for any comments about the Cruise-Holmes divorce, click the "Report" tag, and report the comments as violations of the site's code of conduct, the email instructs.

quote:

The author of the email notes that if only one person does it, the news site moderators won't act. Thus, the email says, "if you start to have 10 or 20 people reporting it, they are going to take this down."

Blogger Rathbun notes that the attempt to censor website comments is like showing up to a nuclear war with a squirt gun.

. When will David Miscavige (supreme leader of corporate Scientology and Tom Cruise's best man) ever learn that attempts to suppress communication and expression only make more news than the news he attempts to censor?

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A MASKED group, claiming to be allies of global hacker group Anonymous, have picked up litter in Tokyo.

The 80-strong collective said yesterday's busy bee was a protest against Japan's tougher laws against illegal downloads.

In light rain, they took part in an "anonymous cleaning service" for one hour in a park and on pavements in the shopping and entertainment hub of Shibuya, a change from the group's trademark website attacks.

They were dressed in black and wore masks of Guy Fawkes, the central figure in England's 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up parliament, which have become a symbol of protests by the loosely linked alliance around the world.

Last month, Japan's parliament enacted new copyright laws that could mean jail for anyone illegally downloading copyrighted music and movies.
Digital Pass

On June 26, websites of the Japanese finance ministry, the Supreme Court and other public offices were defaced or brought down after an Anonymous online statement denounced the new laws.

The statement claimed Japan's recording industry and other content providers were now pushing internet service providers to implement surveillance technology that will spy on every single Internet user in Japan.

The group, which assembled for the clean-up service in Tokyo, attributed the cyber attacks to other Anonymous elements around the world.

"We prefer constructive and productive solutions," the group said in a statement. "We want to make our fellow citizens aware of the problem with a productive message."

"In IRC (Internet relay chat), somebody proposed cleaning as a means of protest as we didn't want to follow the style of mass anti-nuclear rallies which are getting too much," said a spokesman for the assembly.

"I guess this is the first time that a Japanese-led Anonymous group stages an outside operation," said the man who said he works as an engineer in the computer industry.

"The cleaning service has amused overseas Anonymous allies as something unique to the Japanese," said another spokesman. "We want to continue stating our case on the net."

quote:

Innodata Isogen Databreach

Fukushima Daiichi
Vietnam Nuclear Power Development

On July 5th 2012, Anonymous published 1.2 Gigabyte of internal data from IT-service company Innodata Isogen. In total there is 40 Gigabyte to be released, including communication between top management of business data provider Thomson-Reuters which has yet to be disclosed.

The initial batch of leaked material mostly contains documents from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in particular regarding the development of a nuclear infrastructure in Vietnam. These files include English and Vietnamese documents, scans of diplomatic passports and complete information about key personell like the Vietnamese Vice Minister of Science and Technology and Director General of the Agency for Radiation and Nuclear Safety.

At this moment we decided against mirroring the entire dump to avoid overwhelming information. Instead we start by presenting selected material that we consider interesting, most notably documents from IAEA and The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commision (NRC) about the 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This material is not necessarily classified but nonetheless interesting. We plan to publish all relevant material from the Innodata dump related to Fukushima Daiichi as collected information since it is unknown whether all of this information has already been disclosed to the public or will remain publically accessible. Check back on this site for new documents, the latest entry will be on top.

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Net Neutrality’s Death Rattle Starts July 12

ISPs are about to start policing your downloads on behalf of monolithic organizations like the RIAA and MPAA. Are you ready for the internet nanny state?

Last year, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable agreed to take steps to combat piracy on their networks. Translation: the ISPs said they would monitor your internet traffic and make your life hell if they suspect you're up to illegal file sharing.

Speaking at the Association of American Publishers' annual meeting, RIAA CEO Cary Sherman says that the ISPs are all on track to kick off the "anti-piracy initiative" by July 12th. What exactly that means depends varies from ISP to ISP. CNET reports:

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Anonymous Group Says It Gave Syrian E-mails to WikiLeaks

Days after WikiLeaks began releasing a trove of more than 2 million e-mails stolen from Syrian officials, ministries and companies, members of an Anonymous group have claimed responsibility for the hacks and document dump to Wikileaks.

In a press release published Saturday, a group calling itself Anonymous Op Syria disclosed that its members hacked into multiple domains and dozens of servers inside Syria on Feb. 5 to obtain the e-mails, which it then gave to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks began publishing the e-mails on July 5, working with several media partners outside the United States, but didn’t disclose its partnership with Anonymous.

In its intro to the e-mail cache, WikiLeaks indicated that they came from 678,000 individual e-mail addresses and 680 domains, including ones belonging to Syria’s Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture. At least 400,000 of the e-mails are in Arabic and 68,000 are in Russian.

The documents range from “the intimate correspondence of the most senior Baath party figures to records of financial transfers sent from Syrian ministries to other nations,” according to WikiLeaks.

The Anonymous team, composed of members of three groups known as Anonymous Syria, AntiSec, and the Peoples Liberation Front, says it had been assisting activists in Syria since protests began against the Syrian regime more than a year ago, and that the team worked round-the-clock shifts to hack the servers.

“So large was the data available to be taken, and so great was the danger of detection (especially for the members of Anonymous Syria, many of whom are ‘in country’) that the downloading of this data took several additional weeks,” says the group in its statement.

Last March, the group hinted at the treasure it possessed when it leaked about 3,000 e-mails from the personal e-mail account of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma to the Guardian newspaper in London.

Leaking the entire trove of e-mails, however, proved to be more difficult.

“We gave Syrian mails to Wikileaks after trying unsuccessfully to make a deal with Al Jazeera English,” a member of the group told Wired in an instant message exchange. “We like the Wikileaks concept, and they do a good job of releasing these kinds of things. We successfully released Stratfor together previously, and both learned from our mistakes there.”

Last December, Anonymous hacked into servers belonging to the U.S.-based security firm Stratfor and stole about 5 million e-mails, which the group gave to WikiLeaks. The e-mails were published in February.

The Anonymous member wouldn’t elaborate to Wired on the nature of the mistakes that Anonymous and WikiLeaks had learned from their previous partnership, but added that this time around, the team also gave copies of the Syrian e-mails to the Associated Press news agency, based in the United States.

“We gave a copy to the AP too, for the lulz,” the Anonymous member said.

The group noted in their public statement that there will be “many more disclosures of this type in the future as this wonderful partnership between WikiLeaks and Anonymous continues to grow stronger and change human history.”

So far, only a few dozen e-mails have been published from the cache.

In its intro to the e-mail cache, WikiLeaks boasted that they will “shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy” and “reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another.”

But to date, only one item of news value has been uncovered in the published e-mails, according to Forbes. This regards information that an Italian firm Finmeccania offered a communications system to the Syrian and Iranian governments, which the Italian and Spanish newspapers L’Espresso and Publico published in their coverage of the e-mails.

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Anonymous Operation Syria - Press Release

Friday - July 6, 2012 10:45 PM ET USA

Anonymous has watched with deep satisfaction the recent public disclosure of over 2 million E-Mails belonging to the evil Assad regime and related companies in Syria. Anonymous has been assisting the protesters in Syria since the first week of their revolution over a year ago, and we are grateful to see such a mighty blow dealt to the Assad regime. But as we read through the seemingly endless media coverage of this massive and historic disclosure, there seems to be one very obvious question that no one is asking. Where exactly did WikiLeaks get all these E-Mails? This press release is written and addressed to the media and the world to answer this important un-asked question.

On Febuary 5, 2012 at approx. 4:00 PM ET USA an Anonymous Op Syria team consisting of elements drawn from Anonymous Syria, AntiSec (now known as the reformed LulzSec) and the Peoples Liberation Front succeeded in creating a massive breach of multiple domains and dozens of servers inside Syria. This team had been working day and night in shifts for weeks to accomplish this feat. So large was the data available to be taken, and so great was the danger of detection (especially for the members of Anonymous Syria, many of whom are "in country") that the downloading of this data took several additional weeks.

On March 14, 2012 after analyzing the truly staggering trove of E-Mail recovered in this hack, participants in Anonymous Op Syria isolated the personal E-Mail of the dictator Assad and his wife and publicly released this small trove to the world via a press release similar to this one. This disclosure made headlines around the world, but it remained just a tiny fraction of the total data recovered in the original hack. Anonymous Op Syria, and indeed the entire global collective - were at a bit of a loss as to exactly how to deal with and properly disclose such a vast trove of important information. But there is one organization that is supremely well equipped to handle a disclosure of this magnitude, WikiLeaks. Having already formed a partnership with WikiLeaks in the disclosure of the "Stratfor Files", it seemed natural and obvious to continue this historic partnership between Anonymous and WikiLeaks with the disclosure of the "Syria Files". And thus...

On July 5, 2012 - Five months virtually to the day after the brave hackers of Anonymous and the PLF breached the Assad regime servers, WikiLeaks released to the world 2.4 million E-Mail files belonging to the Syrian regime and various Syrian companies. And this is just beginning, expect many more disclosures of this type in the future as this wonderful partnership between WikiLeaks and Anonymous continues to grow stronger and change human history.

While the United Nations sat back and theorized on the situation in Syria, Anonymous took action. Assisting bloggers, protesters and activists in avoiding surveillance, disseminating media, interfering with regime communications and networks, monitoring the Syrian internet for disruptions or attempts at surveillance - and waging a relentless information and psychological campaign against Assad and his murderous and genocidal government. When world governments would not send so much as a single bandaid worth of medical supplies to the protesters in Syria, it was a team of six European Anons who donned back-packs and walked almost 400 pounds worth of medical supplies over the border (along with ten pounds of chocolate candy for the children) and into Idib, Syria - risking their very lives to assist our dear freedom seeking brothers and sisters inside Syria. And as long as the tyrant remains defiantly in power, Anonymous will continue to work relentlessly day and night - from every country and every timezone, to assist the courageous freedom fighters and activists in Syria.

We Are Anonymous - We Are Everywhere - We Are Legion - We Never Forget - We Never Forgive

Bashar Assad, EXPECT US.

Anonymous Operations - www.AnonymousGlobal.tk

Peoples Liberation Front - www.PeoplesLiberationFront.net

LulzSec -

LulzSec: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

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“Building a Better Anonymous”

This multi-part article, with original artwork by Mar, is a follow-up to a one hour panel discussion at DEFCON 19 titled “‘Whoever Fights Monsters…’ Confronting Aaron Barr, Anonymous and Ourselves” moderated by Paul Roberts, discussed by Josh Corman, Brian Martin and Scot Terban. The views of the authors are not meant to be a criticism of Anonymous, nor are they meant to be encouragement for future criminal activity. It is an inevitable fact that Anonymous, or similar groups, will become bigger, stronger, and more effective. Discussions on how to build a more potent digital hacktivism group (illegal hacking to achieve a political goal) have occurred for over a decade. This article will not attempt to introduce groundbreaking new ideas, but rather will summarize many existing ideas and subject them to analysis from two security practitioners on two sides of this issue. If anything, this will serve more as a ‘Lessons Learned’ with the aim of broadening the reader’s understanding of the topic, while demonstrating that the “problem” is not going away; the “problem” is evolving and growing.

When we say “building a better Anonymous”, we seek to explore the ideas of making such a group truly better. That means better for all parties involved; the group, end users, citizens and law enforcement. “Better” does not mean more criminal acts in the name of the greater good, it means a more efficient organization that can achieve the same (or better) results with less collateral damage. We envision a group with better defined goals, more accountability, a healthy dose of humor and the legendary resolve of the sabertooth squirrel. Of course, the chaotic nature of a group such as Anonymous means that any hopes of improvement will likely come in the form of small numbers of members guiding the rest toward these goals.

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Op-ed: MPAA/RIAA lose big as US backs copyright "limitations"

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To the amazement of everyone, the US Trade Representative (USTR) announced on July 3 it would now include a provision in the intellectual property (IP) chapter recognizing the importance of "limitations and exceptions" to copyright and embracing the international 3-part test for what constitutes suitable limitations and exceptions. (For those not familiar with this term of art, "limitations and exceptions" are things like Fair Use and First Sale Doctrine in the United States. As the name implies, limitations and exceptions to copyright limit the rights of the copyright holder and create exceptions to the general rule against copying without permission.)

It is difficult to convey to people who don’t routinely deal with USTR and the copyright maximalists that dominate trade negotiations just how stunning a turnaround this is, given the fairly well-established limitations and exceptions in US law and the fact that—as USTR acknowledged in its announcement—the three-part test for what constitutes suitable limitations and exceptions is already well-established and incorporated into international law. Indeed, given all this, the incredible thing is that this is, as USTR acknowledges, the first time USTR has included any explicit reference to limitations and exceptions.

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The next day, on July 4, we got what I consider the most likely explanation. The European Parliament utterly rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). And while supporters within the European Commission may still plot to keep it alive, the short-term result is that the insistence on serving the interests of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) by trying to force copyright maximalism on other countries killed the treaty after about six years of negotiation. That’s a lot of wasted time and effort.

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Th3j35t3r’s twitter and other social accounts hacked by Anonymous

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Anonymous group manage to compromise and take control of several social accounts belonging to Th3j35t3r. The jester s a computer vigilante who describes himself as grey hat hacktivist. Previously most famous for claiming credit for an application-based DDoS attack against WikiLeaks and for disrupting pro-Jihadist websites.

Today at 12:00PM GMT the twitter account associated with the jester @Th3j35t3r has been hack and posted several tweets in support of anonymous. Like “without anonymous I will be no one” and “Free Bradley Manning”.

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Kremlin internet bill 'signals growing repression of critics by Putin'

Russian censorship law will be 'like China's great firewall', say activists, as Wikipedia site shuts for day in protest

Two months after Vladimir Putin once again assumed the post of Russian president, the long-feared crackdown on his critics appears to have begun. The internet bill due to be considered by parliament on Wednesday is, say activists, the latest sign of growing repression of civil freedom in Russia.

The bill calls for the creation of a federal website "nolist". Internet providers and site owners would be forced to shut down any websites on this list. According to Wikipedia authors on Tuesday, the bill will "lead to the creation of a Russian analogue to China's great firewall".

The bill's backers in Putin's United Russia party argue that the amendments to the country's information legislation are aimed at child pornography and sites that promote drug use and teen suicide.

But critics, including the Russian-language Wikipedia, say the legislation could be used to boost government censorship over the internet.

In protest, the Russian-language Wikipedia site shut down for 24 hours on Tuesday. The Wikipedia logo was crossed out with a black rectangle, and the words "imagine a world without free knowledge" appeared underneath.

The Russian parliament's consideration of the controversial internet bill comes amid a host of other initiatives that activists say make up the biggest attempt since the Soviet era to silence government critics.

Before the start of the summer recess at the end of the week, MPs are to consider a bill that obliges non-governmental organisations receiving foreign funding to brand themselves "foreign agents".

Amendments to boost fines for defamation are also on the agenda. This year, fines for protesting have been heavily increased.

"This is the first time that we've seen a large-scope crackdown on people who dare challenge the government and express anti-Putin sentiments," said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Centre. "We have never had this before, but then we never had political rallies like this in post-Soviet Russia."

The laws are a response to the mass protests that have drawn tens of thousands of Russians on to the streets following Putin's declaration of returning to the presidency late last year, Lipman said. "There are two options – you either yield to the demands [of the protesters] or you crack down. Putin is not the type who yields to demands," Lipman said. "Putin's whole regime is based on control, on securing the ruling group from any challenge or contest."

She added: "The Kremlin showed some tolerance until the presidential election, but as soon as Putin had his election safely past him, the government began to crack down. Now there are more and more developments on a daily basis."

The internet bill prompted widespread outrage across the Russian network. On Tuesday, the blogging platform LiveJournal joined the protest against the bill.

The Russian justice ministry maintains a register of more than 1,000 websites that have been classed as "extremist" and ordered to be shut down.

The bill appears to realise the biggest fear of opposition activists – a platform that has so far remained relatively free has now become the target of Kremlin ire.

Anton Nossik, a Russian internet expert, wrote in his blog: "For the last 12 years I've lived in happy confidence that the Russian authorities would be smart enough not to censor the internet. But the situation, unfortunately, is changing."

With Russia's main state television channels under the control of the government, and its few free newspapers unable to be distributed across a vast country with poor infrastructure, the internet has become a growing source of free information. But that may now be changing.

According to thousands of emails leaked this year by the Russian arm of Anonymous, the Kremlin, until now, has limited its efforts to control the internet by paying commenters affiliated with the youth group Nashi to leave pro-government comments on certain websites.

Blogs and social networks have been a key aspect of the organisation of the street protests that have swept Moscow recently.

Alexey Navalny, a leading opposition figure, was relatively unknown until he began an anti-corruption blog. On his site on Tuesday he wrote: "The Kremlin swindlers have understood that paid commenters and an army of bots can't help them in any way with their 'ideological struggle for the internet'."

He backed Wikipedia's day-long shutdown, a move that echoes similar action, in January, by the English language Wikipedia concerning protest against the US Congress's consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act.

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Peter Fein at #PDF12: 'Democracy Is Obsolete'

Peter Fein is an agent of Telecomix, which has been described as tech support for the Arab Spring. He gave a talk Tuesday at Personal Democracy Forum in New York. These are his remarks as prepared for delivery, which we are publishing as an op-ed.

I'm going to tell you a story about the future, and the past, and the Internet. I'm here today to tell you that democracy is obsolete. Obsolete doesn't mean worn out, but rather out of date. That we've found better ways of doing something that are cheaper, faster or scale to larger numbers of people. An axe wears out chopping down cherry trees; your first generation iPod still works, but it's obsolete.

Things that are obsolete don't magically disappear and the leftovers are called legacies. Legacies can hang around for quite a long time, because they're large and pervasive and the costs of upgrading all at once are too high. As we push them further and further beyond their limits, legacies accumulate cruft, grow more and more massive. Audio cassette tapes are obsolete; signing your name when you pay by credit card is legacy. If you think this has nothing to do with politics, remember we still name our months after Roman emperors who have been dead for two thousand years.

I'm going to tell a very abbreviated story about democracy and obsolesence. When we talk about democracy, we a mean form of government where citizens vote for a representative who goes off to the seat of power and represents your interests and makes decisions on your behalf. This is the model of the US Constitution, which has been exported around the world and been scaled up & down from your local school board to the United Nations. In 1789, we needed representatives because it took three days to get a letter from Boston to Washington DC, if it arrived at all. Democracy is government for the horseback age.

But this more or less works for about 100 years, so let's skip ahead to the invention of radio, which should finally obsolete hand written letters. But radio never gets a chance to fully develop, because in the late 1920s, it's completely taken over by the government and commercial interests and becomes a one-way broadcast mass medium. While Germany gets the Nazis, in the US we still have this legacy of a horseback democracy. Representation doesn't really scale though, so we implement larger and larger bureaucracies. A "free press" is no longer a literal printing press, but a commercially controlled, government blessed institution. Go forward three generations and the state and the market and the law have completely eaten everything else. There's no space left, to the point where we have non-profits and non-governmental organizations with no identity of their own.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the end of history. In 1996, we get the Internet on speed dial. Within just a few years, broadcast mass media is obsolete. This leaves us some big crufty legacies, like CNN's millions of Twitter followers and the NY Times. The net allows for richer, faster, cheaper communications, directly from person-to-person. So we hope that the Internet will allow us to build a "real democracy" as Doug Rushkoff called it, or fret as he did that it won't, as if we could somehow return to a mythic past that's already several generations obsolete.

Then in 2011, the world just seems to go nuts - the revolution will be tweeted, there's Wikileaks, and Anonymous, and Tahrir and the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous again and the SOPA blackout and huge street protests against ACTA. Yet we keep viewing these events through an obsolete mass media lens. While we know that you can't just add twitter and water and watch your democracy grow, we still have no way to explain what's happening. I've had the privilege of participating in a quite a few of these movements in the past two years. I think we need some new words.

Adhocracy exists in the spaces left over and in between. It's a politics of practice and oral tradition. While I can stand up here and try to explain adhocracy to you like a high school teacher, it's kinda like sex - you can't really understand it until you do it. But here are a few stories about what its like under the covers.

Telecomix is an adhoc activist cluster of a few hundred humans and machines- programmers, network admins, students, punks, politicians, pirates, parents and others. Journalist John Pollock said the Libyan resistance was a network of cousins - you need a ride, or some guns, you get it from a cousin, or from a cousin's cousin. In that sense, Telecomix is a network of friends and datalovers.

We have no formal members, we have no leaders, we have no permanent subgroups. We're all volunteers - we take no money at all, we have no mailing address, there's nowhere you can send a package. We certainly have no official spokespeople. If Telecomix exists anywhere, it's in our chat networks and the relationships of the people who participate. We operate on a simple principle: you show up, find collaborators, and just go do.

I'll be honest, mostly we hang out and chat and do nothing. People have other interests and occupations - remember, it's ad-hoc. But some days, we help keep the Internet running in the Middle East - the press calls us tech support for the Arab Spring. We've deployed advanced encryption and built drones, rebuilt dial up modem pools and spammed fax machines with treatments for teargas. When the Mubarak government blocked Twitter, Egyptians found our chat network and gave us news reports that we tweeted using our account - that's the kind of facilitation of communication that we do. Like the rest of the Internet, Telecomix is put together with bubble gum and popsipcle sticks - some days the server crashes, or gets DDOS'd or someone forgets to pay the domain bill and nothing seems to ever get written down. This turns out to be a good thing, because when the Internet breaks, we can get some more popsicle sticks and go fix it. When the net went down in Egypt, Telecomix didn't call Ron Wyden to call Hillary Clinton to call Obama to call Mubarak and say "pleeeease turn the Internet back on". Instead we took direct action- we got out some modems and faxes and just did it ourselves.

Though Telecomix is just a bunch of telecommunist cipherhippies, we don't have a bank account mainly because we couldn't be bothered to set one up. The paperwork and the forms and incorporation, and "what country is this all located in, sir?" - it's a huge amount of bureaucratic overhead. If you're focused on getting things done, it's actually more cost effective to simply not use money at all.

No really, this works better. The State Department invited me to a workshop on Internet freedom, and after five days of back and forth emails about travel logistics, I finally gave up and booked my own plane ticket. When Telecomix started our Syria operation last July, we had network scans and contacts on the ground inside three days. Those scans uncovered evidence that a US company called Blue Coat's hardware was being used by the Syrian government to censor the net. Within six months we built front page stories on Slashdot and the Wall Street Journal and then politicked in the European Union, which for the first time ever enacted export controls on Internet censorship hardware. A dozen people can set in motion a loose chain of events ending in a change of international law in less time than it takes the goverment to buy a plane ticket.

While this may seem all very new and networked and cool, adhocracy is actually quite old. I met an anthropoligist who's spent the past 20 years studying rural villages in Latin America. She told me they'll have a meeting; 300 people will get together and sit around and talk and argue for an hour or two and nothing really seems to be decided. And then two days later, a bridge has been built. We already know how to do this - adhocracy is as common as negotiating where to go for dinner or seat swaps on an airplane.

Ad-hoc movements are popping up because our formal political institutions have failed - the U.N.'s ongoing inability to act in Syria being an egregious example. We think regressive laws like SOPA & ACTA are a threat to the Internet, and they are, but the radical disconnect between the policies they propose and the practice of our day-to-day lives is in fact a greater threat to the rule of law itself. Politics is no longer left vs. right- it's Internet vs. television.

When you have an obsolete legacy system on the edge of collapse, it can be tempting to just throw it out and start fresh. But experience with technology teaches us to avoid this if we can- revolution is expensive and risky. It doesn't work so well when you have a large, dependent user base and it often turns out you know less than you thought you did going in. Instead, you have to replace a legacy piece by piece from the bottom up. We need to starve the beast- not of dollars, but of our personal investment and energy. It took a long, long time to get into this mess, and the struggle to rebuild a better world is going to take the rest of our lives.

The question we need to ask is not what our country can do for us, or what we can do for our country, but rather what can we rebuild, for ourselves, for each other and for our Internet.

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PayPal sets down stricter regulations for file-sharing sites

After cutting ties with Wikileaks in 2010, and after this year’s raid against Megaupload, PayPal is now imposing increasingly stringent conditions on various online file-sharing sites. According to TorrentFreak, PayPal has recently changed its terms of service, making requirements for file-sharing and newsgroup services far tighter than before.

The payment service, owned by eBay, now requires that "merchants must prohibit users from uploading files involving illegal content and indicate that users involved in such file transfers will be permanently removed from their service," and that "merchants must provide PayPal with free access to their service, so PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy department can monitor the content."

Not surprisingly, locker sites are already grumbling about the changes. Others, like the Palo Alto-based MediaFire, say that there has been little impact their bottom line since the switchover. Neither MediaFire nor PayPal immediately responded to requests for comment.

"This is a complete invasion of privacy on PayPal’s part, as it’s none of their business what files users keep in their account," Putlocker, a UK-based site, told TorrentFreak. "We have a solid abuse handling policy already, and we don’t feel a 3rd party company has any business snooping on our users."

Of course, while PayPal may be a convenient way for companies to receive and send funds, there are plenty of other ways to pay—either directly through credit cards or international bank transfers, or using services like Moneybookers, to say nothing of newer means, like Bitcoin.