Anonops #16: Snowden leaked it all, who is next?

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

LOLPRAH: OVER 9000 PENISES!

Tom Cruise Scientology Video - ( Original UNCUT )

Message to Scientology

Operation Payback #Anonymous Message RE: ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, Internet Censorship & Copyright

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BarrettBrownLOL twitterde op maandag 03-09-2012 om 02:16:10 And all this because man put in motion systems that returned to enslave him #ProjectPM reageer retweet

Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church Website LIVE

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http://www.thinq.co.uk/20(...)persecute-anonymous/
NATO leaders have been warned that WikiLeaks-loving 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous could pose a threat to member states' security, following recent attacks on the US Chamber of Commerce and defence contractor HBGary - and promise to 'persecute' its members.

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From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world

(Reuters) - It all started innocuously enough with a July 13 blog post urging people to #OccupyWallStreet, as though such a thing (Twitter hashtag and all) were possible.

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Gabriella Coleman Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. Her first book, "Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking" is forthcoming with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. She is the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Institute for Advanced Study.

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Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action

^{Gabriella Coleman, April 6 2011}

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Our Weirdness Is Free

The logic of Anonymous—online army, agent of chaos, and seeker of justice.

_{by Gabriella Coleman, [01.13.2012]}

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Coding Fredom [PDF]

The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking

^{Gabriella Coleman 2013}

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Anonymous And The War Over The Internet

This article is the first in a two-part series tracing the development of the amorphous online community known as Anonymous, pranksters who have become a force in global affairs.

^{The Huffington Post, Saki Knafo. Posted: 1/30/12 12:20 PM ET | Updated: 2/1/12 07:36 PM ET}

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Anonymous by Anonymous

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Freedom fighters or cyber-terrorists?

Internationally famous for cyber-attacks against the Church of Scientology, government agencies of the US, Israel, Tunisia, Uganda, and others; child pornography sites; copyright protection agencies; the Westboro Baptist Church; and corporations such as PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Sony, who are the hacktivist collective known as ‘Anonymous’? What do they think? What motivates them?

In November 2012, The Imaginary Book Co. invited Anonymous to share their thoughts. We wanted to try and capture something of the essence of an imaginary non-organisation, to preserve it as a time-capsule for the future. We believe we’re witnessing the birth of something important, although perhaps it’s too early to even say what it is yet: a new form of democracy? Time will tell...

We assured Anonymous we would not edit, collate, correct, censor, comment upon, or judge what we received. That’s for others to do. We would simply print. We didn’t know what we’d get, if anything. This is what we got.

Anarchic, chaotic, sensible, deep, shallow, thoughtful, radical, revolutionary, and funny, this book is the first time Anonymous have written in their own words; plenty has been written about them, most of it inaccurate. And who’s to say this book itself isn’t more disinformation? Does it express the hopes and desires and motivations of the entire collective? Undoubtedly not; just a small sample of the thousands of reasons why anyone would associate themselves. Nevertheless, it’s a snapshot of Anonymous, right here and now, at this moment in time. If you want to know where Anonymous is headed, this is the book for you. When your government starts burning books, this is the one they’ll come for first…

Published to coincide with Anonymous’ worldwide “Million Mask March” on November 5th 2013, this 212 page paperback book, measuring 190mm x 250mm (7.72 x 10.08 inches) is packed with images, slogans and texts that explain, not only what Anonymous think, but how to get involved yourself.

All royalties from this book are being donated to FreeAnons, which provides legal and moral support for activists facing prosecution for involvement, alleged or otherwise, in Anonymous actions.

twitter:

YourAnonNews twitterde op maandag 14-04-2014 om 15:28:57 "I just miss - I miss being anonymous." - Barack Obama” -.- reageer retweet

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Barrett Brown's New Book 'Keep Rootin' for Putin' Skewers Mainstream Media Pundits

Next week, Barrett Brown's legal defense fund is publishing the jailed journalist's hilarious new book, Keep Rootin' for Putin: Establishment Pundits and the Twilight of American Competence. Brown's new work takes down talking heads and argues for the revolutionary potential of the Internet. The book couldn't address his case directly, since his prosecutors secured a gag agreement, but implicitly shows why his legal battles are so important.

You remember Barrett Brown, the colourful author who loudly defended the hacktivist collective Anonymous. After the 2007 release of his first book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, Brown embraced the cutting edge by publishing his deep research into WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and leaked documents from military and corporate “cybersecurity” contractors in the Guardian, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. He did it all with gonzo flair, publicly labeling himself “Cobra Commander” after the cartoon character, addressing fellow activists by video from bubble baths while drinking wine, and the like.

His new book tears apart the error-ridden blather of five influential pundits and calls for their replacement by populist researchers and activists equipped with the Internet. He envisions a sort of cyber-Library of Alexandria, a more lateral space for public discourse based on the historical record rather than on opinion, often reckless or incoherent, paraded as fact and bestowed from above.

But the kind of inanity he blasts in Keep Rootin' for Putin is now aimed at him by the government. He faces more than a century in prison chiefly for sharing a hyperlink, allegedly, to cancelled credit card data from the Stratfor hack, which landed five million of the Austin-based intelligence firm's emails on WikiLeaks. The credit card data didn't come from him; he just pointed fellow researchers to it during the media buzz generated by the hack. His prosecutors shared the same link by putting it in his indictment, right there on Page 1. So it's okay, ethically, for the Department of Justice to share the link, but not for him to do it?

The government's stupidity extends to charging him for allegedly making threats against the FBI agent who raided his and his mother's homes. In addition to Brown's now-infamous YouTube rants against Special Agent Robert Smith, the prosecution cited his disapproving tweet quoting Fox News analyst Bob Beckel saying of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: “A dead man can't leak stuff...illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” They argue Brown's quoting of Beckel represents a threat against the FBI agent. But Assange is “not the alleged victim” Smith, Brown's lawyers say dryly in their January motion to dismiss the threat charges. “Mr. Beckel, to wit, remains unindicted.”

In that motion, the defense points out Brown's much-cited video quote that he was “going to ruin [Smith's] life and look into his fucking kids” was immediately preceded by the words “I don't say I'm going to kill him.” They point out the First Amendment requires such statements to rise to the level of a “true threat” of “physical harm” to become offenses. The motion lists the prosecution's selections from Brown's videos and Twitter timeline and shows which statements don't threaten bodily harm, which are conditional, and so on. Further, the context in the videos and on Twitter suggested he meant the sort of journalistic investigation/character assassination widely practiced by Anonymous.

Such Department of Justice stupidity is shielded by the sorts of pundits Keep Rootin' for Putin criticizes, because their professional output is noisy bullshit behind which the authorities can conspire unexamined. Brown aims to burn down the pundits' credibility.

First on the book's hit list is Thomas Friedman, unfortunately a bestselling author and twice-weekly columnist for the New York Times. He told readers in 2001 to “keep rootin' for Putin” as the man to reform Russia, in a column that paid attention to Moscow sushi bars but not the wily leader's creepy backstory. Brown points out that in 1999, Putin had been director of the Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB, while the Kremlin was planning to bomb Moscow and blame it on Chechen terrorists. Agents from the Service were caught planting explosives in the city; other bombings were attributed to Chechens. Putin, elevated to prime minister, used the supposed attacks as a pretext to invade Chechnya, a war so popular it helped propel him to the presidency. Friedman ignored this deadly intrigue, and instead complimented the “California-Kremlin” rolls.

By itself, Friedman's mistake would be a story of a failed prediction and misplaced focus, but it gets worse. In an August 2008 column entitled “What Did We Expect?” Friedman mocked the Clinton and George H. W. Bush administrations for “short-sightedness” in foreign policy choices the columnist said fueled Putin's rise to power—with nary a word about his own, earlier propaganda for the Russian politician. These are day-in, day-out mistakes for Friedman, the book shows, but the New York Times has been feeding them to us for two decades straight.

The Washington Post gives us the same sort of serial nonsense, Brown explains, taking on Richard Cohen and Charles Krauthammer, two pundits for the paper whose columns have hit newsstands nationwide for 30 years. He traces how Cohen in 2007 accused Hillary Clinton of “forever” lying, then a year later blamed those who made the same claim, accusing them of committing a “ferocious mugging of memory.” He proves Krauthammer has been wrong about basically “every military and foreign policy matter on which he's opined from 1999 to 2010.” As Keep Rootin' for Putin piles up evidence, you begin to realize the mainstream media isn't there to inform you, but, whether through design or sheer incompetence, to distract you.

Brown wipes out William Bennett, host of a nationally syndicated talk radio show, anti-intellectual chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Secretary of Education under President Reagan, and author of such bestsellers as The Children's Book of Virtues. As drug czar under President George H.W. Bush, Bennett said beheading drug dealers would be morally appropriate (“I used to teach ethics—trust me,” he explained to talk show host Larry King) and blamed addiction on Satan. “Bennett is so full of horse shit,” Brown writes. “He could fertilize every bombed-out coca field from the Yucatan to Bolivia.”

The book's last target is Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic for 37 years. Brown ridicules Peretz's writing style, quoting this example: “The New York Post and Reuters both report not exactly that Bernie Madoff has cancer. But that he's told his fellow inmates that he has cancer, pancreatic cancer, at that. Which means that, if the tale is true, he'll be a goner soon, very soon. Unless there's a medical miracle, as sometimes there is even in such terrible afflictions of the pancreas.” Peretz's logic is no less tortured.

Keep Rootin' for Putin, in contrast, is a quick, fun read. You can knock it out in two or three sittings, and you need not be a news junkie to follow the arguments and get most of the jokes. It's written in a bloggy style, with interludes of Led Zeppelin lyrics and surreal examples. “Let us say that I am a Roman pundit named Barriticus,” Brown writes at one point, “and I am living a few years after the initial food riots have occurred. When I givemy magnificent oration, after first having made love to several high-born young ladies...” There are also plenty of Easter eggs for bookworms, with allusions to such writers as H.G. Wells and Dostoevsky.

The book is certainly not dumbed down. His analysis ranks up there with the best of the brilliantly paranoid political authors. You have to hope the Texas juries in his April and May trials scrutinize his case as closely as he does the pundits. Given that gag agreement, it seems Brown's prosecutors fear his intelligence.

Keep Rootin' for Putinis a manifesto, not just some book version of Media Matters, the liberal fact-checking outfit whose articles you email your right-wing uncle to refute the articles he emails you. Brown argues the Internet is our superpower for removing the pundits. It allows us to catalog and cross-reference their mistakes, making a book such as his easier to produce. He has an admirable way of calling for taking up arms without scolding us. “We have a chance to dismantle the obsolete media structure that has already crippled our nation to some great extent and will cripple it further,” he says, “unless those of us who recognize this problem take some sort of, like, action.”

Cutting through the hubris of the pundits, he points out, will clear the way for our own communications. “The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual on the planet can now communicate with any other individual on the planet,” he says, explaining that we are no longer beholden to nationalist pundits who, as leech-like intermediaries, filter and firewall information. With global networks, we can conduct our own projects for news, analysis, and action. If you want to communicate with revolutionaries the pundits ignore until it's profitable, as Brown and Anonymous did to support the Arab Spring uprisings, you can. If you want to crowdsource research into leaked emails of the government's shady contractors, as Brown's ProjectPM did, you can.

That is, unless the government shuts you down—as they're trying to shut down Brown. This new power for the people, the Internet, with its ability to forge bonds between activists worldwide and publicly archive forbidden data on sites such as WikiLeaks, terrifies the authorities. He takes it all in stride. “Life is full of possibilities,” he notes, “most of them sarcastic.”

Brown, who pleaded not guilty to every charge, is ready for the courtroom battle. On his team is legal heavyweight Charles Swift, who represented former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Salim Hamdan before the Supreme Court in the most significant case to date dealing with the war on terror, winning Geneva Conventions protections for the prisoners and limits to presidential power. Hamdan was ultimately acquitted of all charges. Attorney Ahmed Ghappour, an expert in national security cases, is also on Brown's team. Free speech advocates Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have rallied to his defense.

The prosecution, despite the gag agreement, is already losing on the media front. This month, on House of Cards, a show popular enough to be mentioned on President Obama's Twitter timeline, the hacker character Gavin told the FBI to drop all of Brown's charges. Venues big and small, from this one to the New York Times to WhoWhatWhy, have been questioning the government's case.

Keep Rootin' for Putin has its faults. It could have been buttressed a bit with some statistically-minded analysis of the flows of capital and patronage that put the media institutions and their pundits in power. His asides sometimes get a little distracting, as when he states, “I'm also increasingly irritated by my own writing style.” But for the most part, the style is jazz.

As a generalist, Brown tended to shift focus, which allowed him to draw connections between disparate subjects, but gave the book a bit of a rocky history. He started writing it in 2006, then stopped, then finished it in 2010 before diving into the wild world of Anonymous. The book was originally contracted with Cambridge House Press to be published under the title Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures Of America’s Chattering Class.

If you're at all interested in the media and its failures or the Internet and its potential, you'll find Keep Rootin' for Putin entertaining and, despite the pundits' ridiculousness, inspiring. To get a copy, visit the Free Barrett Brown website and follow @FreeBarrett_on Twitter for announcements. The book will be available for donors to his legal defense fund.

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Barrett Brown Signs Plea Deal in Case Involving Stratfor Hack

Barrett Brown, whose case became a cause célèbre after he was charged with crimes related to the Stratfor hack, has agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors, according to court filings.

Prosecutors filed a motion this week in a Texas court agreeing to seal the plea agreement, which the court granted (.pdf).

Brown’s attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, won’t discuss the matter, due to a court-ordered gag, but another document filed by the government this week (.pdf) hints at the nature of the deal.

In the document, which supercedes two of Brown’s previous three indictments, the government charges Brown with two crimes: allegedly assisting the person who hacked Stratfor after the fact, and obstructing the execution of a search warrant targeting Brown.

The first charge is a new one and relates to assistance Brown allegedly gave the person who hacked Stratfor “in order to hinder and prevent [his] apprehension, trial and punishment.”

According to the government Brown worked to create confusion about the hacker’s identity “in a manner that diverted attention away from the hacker,” which included communicating with Stratfor after the hack in a way that authorities say drew attention away from the hacker. The hacker is not named, and it’s not clear if it’s convicted Stratfor intruder Jeremy Hammond, or an earlier hacker who’s known to have penetrated the company first.

The obstruction charge relates to an attempt by Brown and his mother to hide a laptop from authorities during a search of her home in March 2012. Brown’s mother was separately charged with obstruction and given six months probation.

The two charges greatly reduce the amount of time he could face at a sentencing hearing, which previously had been estimated at more than 50 years.

Brown’s earlier indictments were poised to become a First Amendment test case. He was charged with 12 counts centered around a link he posted in a chat room that pointed to a file containing data stolen in 2011 from the intelligence firm Stratfor, or Strategic Forecasting. The data, stolen by Hammond, a member of the loosely affiliated Anonymous collective, included company emails as well as credit card numbers belonging to subscribers of Stratfor’s service.

Brown didn’t steal the data but simply copied a hyperlink from one public chatroom and reposted it to another.

Eleven of his charges accused him of aggravated identity theft for possessing and trafficking in stolen authentication features — which authorities identified as the three- and four-digit card verification value (CVV) printed on the back of the cards.

Last month prosecutors dropped these eleven charges against Brown, after his attorney filed a motion to dismiss on grounds that Brown’s alleged conduct did not violate identity theft statutes as written.

The twelfth charge, for access device fraud, had remained in place. That one accused Brown of illegally possessing the stolen cards — presumably cards that were found on his computer after he downloaded the Stratfor cache himself.

But that charge has disappeared from the superceding document the government filed this week, which replaced the indictment. In its place is the new charge for accessory after the fact.

Brown is scheduled to be re-arraigned, on the charges on the superceding document, on April 29 in Texas.

Brown is also facing charges related to threats he allegedly made against an FBI agent. It’s unclear if the plea agreement will cover that indictment as well. If it does, and the two cases are combined, Brown’s maximum statutory sentence would likely be five years.

Brown has been in custody since he was arrested in 2012 while in the middle of an online chat.

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How to Chain VPNs for Complete Anonymity

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Big name individual hackers and hacker groups everywhere in the news are getting caught and thrown in jail. Every time I see something like this happen, I won’t lie, I get a little sad. Then I wonder, how are these guys getting caught? If a group like LulzSec, with all the fame and “1337-ness” can get caught, I think my hacker comrades are doing something wrong.

When members of LulzSec started getting captured, it was because proxy and VPN services complied to federal request and handed over the private information of its users. I think this is wrong for a number of reasons—foremost, people should be able to have their own privacy respected. Today’s Null Byte will be demonstrating one of the methods around this: Chaining VPNs.

A VPN allows you to connect to a remote network, and over all ports, encrypt and forward your traffic. This also changes your IP address. Chaining VPNs is a tricky task, though there is a simple and uncommon method I know of. Using multiple VPNs together has the huge perk of being completely anonymous.

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F.B.I. Informant Is Tied to Cyberattacks Abroad

WASHINGTON — An informant working for the F.B.I. coordinated a 2012 campaign of hundreds of cyberattacks on foreign websites, including some operated by the governments of Iran, Syria, Brazil and Pakistan, according to documents and interviews with people involved in the attacks.

Exploiting a vulnerability in a popular web hosting software, the informant directed at least one hacker to extract vast amounts of data — from bank records to login information — from the government servers of a number of countries and upload it to a server monitored by the F.B.I., according to court statements.

The details of the 2012 episode have, until now, been kept largely a secret in closed sessions of a federal court in New York and heavily redacted documents. While the documents do not indicate whether the F.B.I. directly ordered the attacks, they suggest that the government may have used hackers to gather intelligence overseas even as investigators were trying to dismantle hacking groups like Anonymous and send computer activists away for lengthy prison terms.

The attacks were coordinated by Hector Xavier Monsegur, who used the Internet alias Sabu and became a prominent hacker within Anonymous for a string of attacks on high-profile targets, including PayPal and MasterCard. By early 2012, Mr. Monsegur of New York had been arrested by the F.B.I. and had already spent months working to help the bureau identify other members of Anonymous, according to previously disclosed court papers.

One of them was Jeremy Hammond, then 27, who, like Mr. Monsegur, had joined a splinter hacking group from Anonymous called Antisec. The two men had worked together in December 2011 to sabotage the computer servers of Stratfor Global Intelligence, a private intelligence firm based in Austin, Tex.

Shortly after the Stratfor incident, Mr. Monsegur, 30, began supplying Mr. Hammond with lists of foreign websites that might be vulnerable to sabotage, according to Mr. Hammond, in an interview, and chat logs between the two men. The New York Times petitioned the court last year to have those documents unredacted, and they were submitted to the court last week with some of the redactions removed.

“After Stratfor, it was pretty much out of control in terms of targets we had access to,” Mr. Hammond said during an interview this month at a federal prison in Kentucky, where he is serving a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty to the Stratfor operation and other computer attacks inside the United States. He has not been charged with any crimes in connection with the hacks against foreign countries.

Mr. Hammond would not disclose the specific foreign government websites that he said Mr. Monsegur had asked him to attack, one of the terms of a protective order imposed by the judge. The names of the targeted countries are also redacted from court documents.

But according to an uncensored version of a court statement by Mr. Hammond, leaked online the day of his sentencing in November, the target list was extensive and included more than 2,000 Internet domains. The document said Mr. Monsegur had directed Mr. Hammond to hack government websites in Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey and Brazil and other government sites, like those of the Polish Embassy in Britain and the Ministry of Electricity in Iraq.

An F.B.I. spokeswoman declined to comment, as did lawyers for Mr. Monsegur and Mr. Hammond.

The hacking campaign appears to offer further evidence that the American government has exploited major flaws in Internet security — so-called zero-day vulnerabilities like the recent Heartbleed bug — for intelligence purposes. Recently, the Obama administration decided it would be more forthcoming in revealing the flaws to industry, rather than stockpiling them until the day they are useful for surveillance or cyberattacks. But it carved a broad exception for national security and law enforcement operations.

Mr. Hammond, in the interview, said he and Mr. Monsegur had become aware of a vulnerability in a web-hosting software called Plesk that allowed backdoor access to thousands of websites. Another hacker alerted Mr. Hammond to the flaw, which allowed Mr. Hammond to gain access to computer servers without needing a user name or password.

Over several weeks in early 2012, according to the chat logs, Mr. Monsegur gave Mr. Hammond new foreign sites to penetrate. During a Jan. 23 conversation, Mr. Monsegur told Mr. Hammond he was in search of “new juicy targets,” the chat logs show. Once the websites were penetrated, according to Mr. Hammond, emails and databases were extracted and uploaded to a computer server controlled by Mr. Monsegur.

The sentencing statement also said that Mr. Monsegur directed other hackers to give him extensive amounts of data from Syrian government websites, including banks and ministries of the government of President Bashar al-Assad. “The F.B.I. took advantage of hackers who wanted to help support the Syrian people against the Assad regime, who instead unwittingly provided the U.S. government access to Syrian systems,” the statement said.

The court documents also refer to Mr. Monsegur’s giving targets to a Brazilian hacker. The hacker, who uses the alias Havittaja, has posted online some of his chats with Mr. Monsegur in which he was asked to attack Brazilian government websites.

One expert said that the court documents in the Hammond case were striking because they offered the most evidence to date that the F.B.I. might have been using hackers to feed information to other American intelligence agencies. “It’s not only hypocritical but troubling if indeed the F.B.I. is loaning its sting operations out to other three-letter agencies,” said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University and author of a forthcoming book about Anonymous.

During the prison interview, Mr. Hammond said that he did not have success hacking a large number of the Plesk websites that Mr. Monsegur had identified, and that his ability to create a so-called back door to a site depended on which operating system it ran on.
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TN
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I hope the FBI kept a tighter leash on these informants than they did on Whitey Bulger, but I doubt it. Last I checked, neither Brazil nor...
FC
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Given the current foreign situation between the US and Iran, Syria and Pakistan, I can understand the interest in gathering as much...
Norman Pollack
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More evidence of the National Security State under Obama as a threat to US civil liberties, in this case, the FBI, presumed to operate only...

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He added that Mr. Monsegur never carried out the hacks himself, but repeatedly asked Mr. Hammond for specific details about the Plesk vulnerability.

“Sabu wasn’t getting his hands dirty,” he said. Federal investigators arrested Mr. Monsegur in mid-2011, and his cooperation with the F.B.I. against members of Anonymous appears to have begun soon after.

In a closed hearing in August 2011, a federal prosecutor told a judge that Mr. Monsegur had been “cooperating with the government proactively” and had “literally worked around the clock with federal agents” to provide information about other hackers, whom he described as “targets of national and international interests.”

“During this time the defendant has been closely monitored by the government,” said the prosecutor, James Pastore, according to a transcript of the hearing. “We have installed software on a computer that tracks his online activity. There is also video surveillance in the defendant’s residence.”

Mr. Monsegur’s sentencing hearing has been repeatedly delayed, leading to speculation that he is still working as a government informant. His current location is unknown.

Exactly what role the F.B.I. played behind the scenes during the 2012 attacks is unclear. Mr. Hammond said he had been in constant contact with Mr. Monsegur through encrypted Internet chats. The two men often communicated using Jabber, a messaging platform popular among hackers. Mr. Monsegur used the alias Leondavidson and Mr. Hammond used Yohoho, according to the court records.

During a conversation on Feb. 15, 2012, Mr. Hammond said he hoped all the stolen information would be put “to good use.”

“Trust me,” Mr. Monsegur said, according to the chat logs. “Everything I do serves a purpose.”

Now, sitting in prison, Mr. Hammond wonders if F.B.I. agents might also have been on the other end of the communications.

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More context for Jeremy Hammond's allegations against FBI



New York Times - F.B.I. Informant Is Tied to Cyberattacks Abroad - April 23, 2014
nytimes.com/2014/04/24/world/fbi-informant-is-tied-to-cyberattacks-abroad.html

"But according to an uncensored version of a court statement by Mr. Hammond, leaked online the day of his sentencing in November, the target list was extensive and included more than 2,000 Internet domains."

The article refers to a previous paste, http://pastebin.com/xy8aQY9W
In view of NYT's reporting, we would like to add some additional context to this statement, with 3 previously unpublished paragraphs from Jeremy.

- -

On August 22, 2013, on what was supposed to be the eve of the sentencing of Hector Monsegur, aka “Sabu,” a former Anonymous comrade turned FBI informant, I released a short statement about the FBI’s use of Sabu, and by extension, me and my co-defendants, to break into the websites of numerous targets of the government’s choosing – including those belonging to foreign governments. The following day, we learned that Sabu’s sentencing was again postponed. The reasons behind these adjournments are not publicly known. But in any case, Sabu is not the real issue. What is important is how the FBI used him, and how they may still be using other hacktivists to gather intelligence and illegally break into websites without oversight, accountability or reprisal.

In my case, the FBI used Sabu to infiltrate and monitor hundreds of public and private hacker chatrooms where he was able to gain influence within Anonymous by claiming responsibility for hacks carried out by others, bragging to the media with hyperbolic quotes, accusing others of being sellouts and snitches, and encouraging hacks into government and corporate websites. He enabled hackers and facilitated hacks by supplying several servers for storage of hacked emails and databases, cracking encrypted password lists, suggesting specific targets, and offering step-by-step technical advice to people as they were breaking into systems. Impressionable and less experiences hackers, eager to please a visible Anonymous "leader" would send him their half-finished vulnerability findings; Sabu would then pass this information along to skilled hackers to finish the job.

The United States government hypes the hacker threat and celebrates convictions in order to justify the multi-billion dollar cyber security industrial complex, but they are guilty of the same crimes they aggressively prosecute and claim to work to prevent. Manipulating hackers to break into international websites to steal emails and databases is a previously undisclosed aspect of the wide-ranging cyber and surveillance operations being carried out by the NSA and other agencies. The government hopes that my conviction will legitimize the abusive tactics and illegal objectives it sponsors. I took responsibility for my actions, now it is time for the government to answer for its own crimes.

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Anonymous' Airchat Aims to Allow Communication Without Needing Phone or Internet Access

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Online hacktivist collective Anonymous has announced that it is working on a new tool called Airchat which could allow people to communicate without the need for a phone or an internet connection - using radio waves instead.

Anonymous, the amorphous group best known for attacking high profile targets like Sony and the CIA in recent years, said on the Lulz Labs project's Github page: "Airchat is a free communication tool [that] doesn't need internet infrastructure [or] a cell phone network. Instead it relies on any available radio link or device capable of transmitting audio."

The idea is that people all over the world, including those in rural areas and developing countries, will one day be able to communicate for free without the need for a mobile phone network, phone line or internet access.

While the project is workable at the moment, it is simply a proof of concept at this stage and Anonymous has revealed Airchat in the hope to get more people involved in developing the technology as well as raising funds.

twitter:

Anon_Cherry twitterde op vrijdag 25-04-2014 om 23:01:11 #Anonymous We are everywhere, even in #GTST lol 😁 #RTL4 #DutchSoapSerie http://t.co/1aRFziTZdL reageer retweet

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Barrett Brown lawyer: US tried to 'kill a fly with a sledgehammer'

Ahmed Ghappour speaks out after gag order was lifted and says effect of prosecutorial overreach is 'chilling to free speech'

The lawyer for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist in jail in Texas on charges related to his involvement with computer hackers, has called for an overhaul in the way technology cases are handled by the criminal justice system to counteract potential abuses and excessive prosecutorial aggression on the part of the US government.

In his first substantive comments since a gagging order on Brown and his legal team was lifted last week, Ahmed Ghappour told the Guardian that in his opinion, the US government had tried to "kill a fly with a sledgehammer”. He accused prosecutors of imposing overly broad charges that had put unnecessary strain on the system, had profound personal implications for Brown who has been in custody for more than 500 days, and sent a chill across public debate.

“There needs to be discussion about how we avoid this kind of prosecutorial overreach in future. Prosecutors need to be more cautious in how they deal with complex cases like these to make sure the charges better reflect the conduct described, otherwise the effect is chilling to free speech,” Ghappour said.

He added: “The government’s original allegations did not fit the evidence, or the conduct, character or reputation of Barrett Brown.”

Last month the US government dropped 11 of the 17 counts it had brought against Brown, who faces three separate indictments. The dismissed allegations all related to a breach of the website of the private intelligence firm Stratfor that was carried out in 2011 by the hacking collective Anonymous.

The main instigator of the hack, Jeremy Hammond, was sentenced to 10 years in prison last November.

Brown was charged, most notoriously, with transferring stolen property, because he had posted a hyperlink on his own personal chat room, Project PM, to a website containing the hacked Stratfor material. Technology commentators warned that such a prosecution posed a threat to free speech on the internet because it raised a barrier to linking across sites on which so much of the culture of the web is based.

A day after Ghappour and the defence team filed a motion to dismiss those charges, the prosecution rolled over without explanation and dropped them.

“The government had no choice to drop the charges because they contained errors that were so wide of the mark they could not be put right by re-indicting him,” Ghappour said.

In a document released after the gagging order was lifted, the precise nature of Brown’s involvement with Anonymous over the Stratfor hack has been revealed. Paradoxically, far from attempting to commit fraud or to profit personally from the computer breach, Brown offered to contact the CEO of Stratfor to ask him whether the company wanted any redactions to be made in the hacked material before it was posted.

The document, which signed by both Brown and US attorney Sarah Saldana as a truthful account of events, quotes from internet chats between the journalist and the Anonymous hacker who carried out the Stratfor breach, named only as “O”. Brown writes to the hacker: “It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to tell Stratfor that you guys will consider making any reasonable redactions to emails that might endanger, say, activists living under dictatorships with whom they might have spoken… If they fail to cooperate, it will be on them if any claims are made about this yield endangering anyone”.

Ghappour told the Guardian that he found it ironic that the government had accused Brown of something so vastly different from what he actually did. “The government charged Brown with criminally transferring credit card information, when in fact what he did was to offer to redact sensitive material.”

The lawyer, a former computer engineer with considerable experience in super-computers, and who now teaches at the University of Texas law school, said hacking cases and other prosecutions involving new technology were so complex that grand juries and attorneys alike were often bamboozled by the evidence. “That makes the potential for abuse by the government much greater, so safeguards have to be better established.”

Brown will appear on court on Tuesday to plead guilty to all the remaining charges against him. The charges include: acting as an accessory after the fact to the Stratfor hack, threatening an FBI agent in a YouTube video, and interfering with a law enforcement officer serving a warrant on him.

The charges carry a maximum punishment of more than eight years, but Brown’s legal team will argue that the sentences should run concurrently and that given the insubstantial damage caused by the YouTube video, he should be released on time served. “Barrett expresses deep regret for what he did in making the threat, which he did impulsively at a time when he felt cornered and was unable to make rational decisions,” Ghappour said.

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Silencing Barrett Brown

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The previously unreleased transcript of Barrett Brown’s September 4 gag hearing in Dallas, obtained by WhoWhatWhy, shows just how far the government tried to go to shut up a “hacktivist journo” who challenged the status quo.

The lead prosecutor, Candina Heath, told the judge that, during the trial, Brown should be forbidden from publishing criticism of the government. That conversation, revealed in the transcript, was out of earshot of those in the gallery when WhoWhatWhy attended the hearing.

At the time of that hearing, Brown faced more than a century in prison for, allegedly, threatening an FBI agent, sharing a link to credit card data publicized during a hack, and conspiring to hide his laptops. Free speech advocates, such as Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, labeled the charges nothing less than retribution for his anti-establishment work.

But prosecutors sought to go further, with a gag order that undoubtedly would have been among the most sweeping restrictions on an American journalist’s free speech—reminiscent of the eighteenth-century Alien and Sedition Acts, which jailed writers and editors for criticizing the authorities.

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hai Cambodia, Anonymous knocking on your backdoors

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The National Police were cooperating with the FBI to conduct an investigation on [hacking] when we found out these two suspects hacked the NEC…and other government institutions." - Lieutenant General Chhay Sinarith, Cambodia's Ministry of Interior internal security department ************************************************************************************************* inviting the FBI in to your country to bust Anonymous is a bad idea. anyone reading this should be wondering why the FBI are even in Cambodia, is this US tax payer dollars at work, chasing students engaging in online protest around the world? th prime minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen has kept himself in office more than 27 years, does that sound like a democratic ruler to you? there are a lot of questions here:

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Op zaterdag 3 mei 2014 12:40 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Het is lang geleden dat Snowden iets gelekt heeft. Zou hij nog iets achter de hand hebben?