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

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Anonymous Shuts Down Oakland Police, Fire Dept, City Websites.

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The online hacktivist Anonymous has conducted a massive cyber attack on the official website of Oakland police, fire department and city website. As a result all targeted sites have been shut down.

Anonymous targeted the Oakland City Hall, Oakland police and fire departments website around 11 a.m.

It’s been few hours now that all sites are still down and readers are welcomed with warning messages like ”The page cannot be displayed Explanation: There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.”

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The news of targeting these sites was announced by Anonymous on their Twitter account. The cyber attack was conducted under the banner of #ShutItDown and #ICantBreathe. (These hashtags show Anonymous has targeted these sites in retaliation against recent killings of black males in the United States).

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Anonymous Hacks New Zealand, Swedish Police Emails Against Seizure of Pirate Bay.

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Yesterday we reported how Anonymous with the help of Hagash Team hacked and leaked emails of government officials from Sweden, India, Israel, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.

What went unreported yesterday was another leak made by Anonymous in which emails addresses of New Zealand and Swedish police which were dumped online against the seizure of The Pirate Bay servers.

The leak was announced by Anonymous from their official Twitter handle about 14 hours ago. Here is the tweet showing the original Pastebin link of the leak conducted by Anonymous.

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'Hackers stalen vorig jaar al gigabytes aan data van Sony'

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De bronnen van Bloomberg stellen verder dat Sony niet helemaal volledig is geweest over de toedracht van de PSN-hack.

Hierbij werden de gegevens van tientallen miljoenen Playstation-gebruikers gestolen. Er zou echter ook bedrijfsinformatie zijn buitgemaakt die de illegale verkoop van Sony's games, films en muziek mogelijk maakte.

Bovendien zou de cyberaanval onterecht enkel aan de hackersgroepering Anonymous zijn toegeschreven. De bronnen spreken over minimaal drie groeperingen, waaronder een uit Rusland die al jaren games van Sony zou stelen.

Een woordvoerder van Sony zegt tegenover Bloomberg niet specifiek op geruchten in te gaan. Wel benadrukt ze dat er geen aanleiding is voor haar om aan te nemen dat de hack uit 2011 groter was in omvang en ernst dan eerder gecommuniceerd.

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Hackers leak Swedish government logins in response to Pirate Bay raid

A group of hackers leaked the log-in details of 38 government emails (who were mostly from Sweden) in retaliation for the Pirate Bay police raid last week.

The Anonymous hacktivist group also claims to have hacked into government email accounts of Israel, India, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.

According to Swedish news site The Local, the Swedish Internet company Telia also suffered because of the Pirate Bay raid. On 12 December they suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack, which affected their online services and user connections.

Pirate Bay, the illegal file sharing site, was taken down last week after a Swedish police raid but it was shortly brought back to life by file sharing competitors Isohunt.

“We, the Isohunt.to team, copied the base of the PirateBay in order to save it to the generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten.”

David Jacoby, Kaspersky Lab’s chief researcher, commented on the latest attacks:

“These attacks don’t come from nowhere. The Pirate Bay raid has provoked feelings in these groups”.

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Anonymous Announces Vengeance On North Korea For Sony Hack With #OpRIPNK

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The infamous hacker collective Anonymous has announced that they’ll be responding to North Korea for the Sony hack. The hackers known as #GOP, or Guardians of Peace, who are believed to be a North Korean group, have been compared to Anonymous, and Anon has expressed agreement with them on some matters. However, now that Sony has pulled The Interview from theaters in response to the hacking and threats, Anon has turned their eyes on North Korea in a less agreeable light.

Thursday evening into Friday morning, one of Anonymous’ many Twitter accounts offered responses to the Sony hack, and the decision to pull the movie, hinting that Anonymous would be offering the movie to the world themselves.

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Iggy Azalea Anonymous: Blackmailed with sex tape by hackers, comply or else post

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Is Iggy Azalea being blackmailed by Anonymous this week on Twitter? It appears the hackers activist group called Anonymous is threatening to leak the star’s sex tape if she does not “comply or else.” Billboard News reveals this Saturday, Dec. 20, 2014, that the hit rapper is being demanded to say sorry soon about her social actions or face dire consequences following a series of hostile media posts.

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"You are guilty of misappropriating black culture, insulting peaceful protesters, and making light of Eric Garner's death. @IGGYAZALEA," contended the faceless group this Friday evening via a Twitter post. The music star has been demanded to "release a statement apologizing to @AzealiaBanks and the protesters in NYC" by Anonymous as well."

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Brother?

Dear my "brother" Sabu.

Greetings from the real world. You know, where cause and consequence reign free and mighty. I'll send you a postcard sometime. Anyway... How is being a human bidet for the FBI treating you? The very people you taught the young and impressionable to hate. I heard you now have a job as a security consultant? That sounds fun. Life is looking pretty cosy for you currently. Hey, talking of cosy; It's Jeremy Hammonds birthday soon, January the 8th. I was considering sending him book or something because, from experience, jail isn't too cosy and he could do with things to do to pass the time. After all, 10 years is a hell of a stint for jail, paedophiles and rapists get less.

Do you remember Jeremy at all? He's one of the people you set up and sold out to save yourself. But enough about Jeremy, let's talk about you Hector. I can tell you love talking about good old Sabu lately after all.

I must admit that after the initial sting at the realisation of what you did over our time spent communicating, I haven't thought about you much. I feel a strong sense of injustice over what happened and the way things went, but as a general rule it's a case of 'out of sight, out of mind'. But then you started popping up on my time line - 'Sabu has attended VICE as a VIP.' ' Sabu is doing an interview for CBS news.' 'Sabu speaks about his days of hacking for CNET.' You get the point.

So I watch, and I have to be honest, even though you did what you did I was still kind of half expecting a show of remorse or even an acceptance for what you did. Something, anything. But it was like wishing from blood from a stone. You tried to rationalise what you did and you outright lied. You flaunt yourself on TV making yourself out to be some kind of modern day hero, asking who will guard the guards and various other bullshit. Let's not forget Hector, we had to endure your bullshit for a long time and we know exactly what you are.

Remember the time Jake and Mustafa wanted to walk away? You knew Jake was young as you had spoken to him numerous times via voice chat. It was too much and they didn't want to be a part of it any more. But Big-Bad Sabu came out and you raged at them in IRC. I asked you to back off them but you wouldn't, and so Jake and Mustafa stayed around longer than they wanted and got deeper than they had ever intended. You actively pulled children back into a world of crime to continue something they didn't even want to do. You are a bully and a criminal and the only person who was caught who hasn't paid a sufficient price for what you did. You were the worst of all of us. The knowledge you lacked in technical ability you made up for in manipulation and a big loud mouth with the ability to coax people into doing things. Using your online persona and charismatic ways to adjust peoples view on things to what you were trying to spin at the time. Pure peer pressure. Nobody, especially the children you dragged in, could say no to you or you would attempt to scare them.

You were caught but instead of taking responsibility, you bent over and let the FBI take turns at riding you out. "Mastermind" (I laugh every time.) you are not, but a manipulating conductor of targets and (admittedly) persuasive and entirely convincing social engineer you are.
Jeremy and I were mostly happy exploring and reporting exploits if you remember correctly. Sure, we had some lulz along the way, but who's idea was it to go for big targets for pure self gain? Credit cards, the dumping of personal information, ruining of lives. This was all on the Great Sabu. Is this what masterminding a group is? Just telling people to be bigger shits than they need to be on the Internet but doing non of it himself? Backing people into corners and claiming you had a hand in any of it other than setting people up to do your dirty work.
The only thing you masterminded was your own freedom by coercing and manipulating Jeremy and I into doing things you couldn't do. You manufactured these scenarios and targets to make us look like bigger threats than we ever were or would have been without your constant pushing. Yes, we were able to do these things, but we had no intention of doing so without you orchestrating a few targets and spinning some crap reasons of why. Constantly giving us speeches of why we should do these things and using our weakness of wanting to spread concerns about security against us. You wanted us to flex our abilities in front of you so you could log it and go crying back to the FBI in order for them to fear us more than they feared you; you turned what we were doing into something much more sinister so that they thought that apprehending us was more in their interests than putting you in jail. All so you could go back home and take selfies of yourself for the media.

If the authorities have anything to fear, it isn't our skills (although, people should fix their shit. Seriously. For every ones sake.) it's people like you who run their mouth and rile the impressionable up to a point of anger, using your charismatic way of exciting people into a false sense of revolution. Whilst all you care about is yourself and your ulterior motives. We were interested in the way things work and our want and our need to learn and penetrate so-called secure systems clouded our judgement of your real intentions. I take full responsibility for what I have done. I've served my time in jail, I was tagged, I'm on probation, I have restrictions that hinder my general progress towards a career but I have accepted the punishment - so if you think that this is me trying to offshoot any blame, then don't. I know what I've done. I actually feel most shame for some of the things I said to people along the way and lives I effected more than anything. But you have taken exactly ZERO responsibility for any of this.

So who are you Hector? 'Legendary hacker' ? 'leader of anonymous and Lulzsec' ? You would have functioned better as a cult leader. Pushing, pressuring and preying on younger and smarter people than yourself and running them into the ground. If all you did was relay information for the FBI and steal credit card details (which you didn't even do. You got us to do it for you.) then what is your purpose anyway? Since most of the words you spun us were under influence of the FBI you couldn't have meant any of it considering you were just trying to get us to do things to report. You don't care about movements or activism or rights, because you try sell out anybody who does. You know a few good tricks but as a general rule your hacking know-how is quite limited. So who are you Hector Xavier Monsegur and why are you on TV? Because I spent quite a while getting to know you, and all I see is a coward and a fraud.

"I would stay away from anonymous" says ANONYMOUSabu who riled up thousands to hate authorities and even tried to incite violence towards them.

"It was too much publicity" says the person whose main focus was to talk shit on twitter.

"They knew my weakness was my kids" says the man who I continuously warned to back away from all of this and never come back, for your kids sake. I tried to protect those kids way before you even tried to use them as a reason for saving yourself and betraying your friends. I wouldn't blame you for choosing your children over your friends if it saved them from going into the system, any sane person would - but I do blame you for putting crime before your children in the first place. It should have never come down to that decision to begin with and you know I told you this countless times. Spinning your kids as a reason for being a coward is idiotic and false and makes you look desperate to try rationalise what you did.

'helped intercept attacks and share them with the government' - attacks that YOU initially thought up, so you didn't prevent anything, you just suggested something and when we spoke about it you relayed what information we gathered and you put an end to it and avoided nearly 30 years in prison? Wow. You certainly are an American hero, a (what was it you said?) "inspiration" to people. I, for one, can't wait to teach my children to set my friends up and help the FBI entrap. A true role model to all.

"it wasn't a situation where I identified anybody. I didn't point my fingers at anybody." - I'll let the FBI handle this one:
"monsegur also provided crucial and detailed information about the formation, organisation, hierarchy and membership of these hacking groups, as well as specific information about their planning and execution of many major cyber attacks, including the specific roles of his co-conspirators in committing those crimes."
"Monsegur assists law enforcement in identifying and locating lulzsec members and affiliates. In addition to this crucial historical information, Monsegur proactively cooperated with ongoing Government investigations. Working sometimes literally around the clock, at the direction of the law enforcement. Monsegur engages his co-conspirators in online chats and were critical to confirming their identities and whereabouts."
So the FBI were wrong? In that case surely you can go join Jeremy in jail as because snitching on your 'brothers' is the only reason you're at home eating doughnuts right now.


I won't babble on any more because but I will ask you, respectfully, to stop talking so much shit and own up to something (preferably something that you actually did and not somebody else. Claiming responsibility to make yourself looked more skilled than you are is just strange Hector.) You're on TV giggling like a little school girl about how you used to hack free AOL Internet as a child as Jeremys talent rots away in jail by your hand.

Oh, before I forget and obviously completely unrelated - what is the legal age of sexual consent over there? 18? How old did you think I was? 16? You weren't the only one who kept logs Hector.
Be a decent human for once in your life and find that hole to crawl back into instead of rubbing what you did in peoples faces.

Yours respectfully,
Your "brother" Ryan.

(@APT1337)

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'Krant mocht in jaren tachtig niet over Engelse pedobende publiceren'

Een Britse krant die in de jaren tachtig wilde publiceren over een politieonderzoek in een huis waar pedofielen samenkwamen, heeft destijds een officiële waarschuwing gekregen om dat niet te doen.

De voormalige redacteur Hilton Tims van de lokale krant Surrey Comet heeft dat verklaard tijdens het onderzoek waarmee de Britse politie duidelijk wil krijgen of een pedobende op hoog niveau is beschermd in de jaren zeventig en tachtig.

Tims wilde berichten over een politieonderzoek in het Elm Guest House in Barnes, waar een groep beruchte pedofielen zou hebben geopereerd. De krant kreeg daarop een zogeheten D-notificatie, een formele waarschuwing geen informatie te publiceren die de nationale veiligheid in gevaar zou kunnen brengen, meldt de zondagskrant The Observer.

Het politieonderzoek richt zich op een groep prominente figuren, waarbij mogelijk ook parlementariërs, politieambtenaren, militairen en mensen met banden met het koningshuis waren betrokken. De groep heeft mogelijk ook kinderen gedood. De politie riep deze week slachtoffers op zich te melden.

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Theresa May scraps panel for inquiry into child sex abuse, report says

Panel members have angrily accused home secretary of ignoring the majority of abuse survivors with latest move, according to Exaro News

Theresa May is to scrap the panel for the independent inquiry into child sex abuse, it has been reported.

The home secretary wrote to each member of the panel to tell them she is considering turning it into a statutory inquiry, or setting up a fresh statutory inquiry or a Royal Commission, according to the Exaro News website.

The letter, which followed a meeting between May and panel members on Monday to discuss the future of the inquiry, added that any statutory inquiry panel would be newly appointed, and that existing panel members can apply for positions on the new panel.

She put this decision down to concerns raised about the panel by abuse survivors. May wrote: “As I said on Monday, I am currently considering these three options and I appreciate this has implications for the members of the panel.

“I should like to make clear that I appointed each and every one of you for your experience, your professionalism and your undoubted commitment.

“I know that it has not been easy, that you are working in an incredibly sensitive and difficult subject area and that some of you have faced significant personal criticism.”

Current panel members have accused May of listening to a vocal minority instead of the majority of abuse survivors, and urged the home secretary to convert the inquiry to statutory status and keep the current panel.

One panel member, Sharon Evans, chief executive of Dot Com Children’s Foundation, which promotes child safeguarding, and herself an abuse survivor, wrote in a response to May that she felt “devastated at the prospect of the independent inquiry being halted”. She said that it had been made clear to the panel “off the record” that the panel will be stood down in the New Year.

“As a person who suffered sexual abuse between the ages of three and seven, it was important that the experiences of victims and survivors were integral to the inquiry,” Evans wrote. “It was agreed by the panel that these experiences would form our line of questioning of institutions and ‘the experiences of victims and survivors would be at the heart of the inquiry’.”

The independent panel inquiry into child sexual abuse was set up to consider whether public bodies and other non-state institutions failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse in England and Wales.

Previously, the inquiry lost two chairs over accusations of conflicts of interest and survivors told May that they had also lost confidence in the rest of the panel.

Earlier this month it was revealed that two members of the panel had been accused of sending threatening or insulting emails to victims who had criticised the inquiry. Lawyers for one abuse survivor wrote to the home secretary to complain of a string of unsolicited communications, including an allegedly threatening email sent two days before an official meeting in November that both panellists and an abuse survivor were due to attend. The victim, who is on medication for post-traumatic stress disorder, was left too anxious to attend.

Evans noted, however, that the panel met with more than 70 representatives of victims and survivors of abuse, 90% of whom supported the independent panel. “There has been a small number of individuals and survivor groups engaging in personal attacks on panel members though social media and the press,” she wrote. “In the face of hostility by certain individuals, my concern is that the independent panel has been controlled to such a degree that it was unable to rebut or refute allegations.

“My second concern is that halting the inquiry at this point would send a very negative message to so many people we have already met and who have promised they can have confidence in us to do the right thing.”

It was also reported on Saturday that a former local newspaper executive who claimed that he was issued with an official warning against reporting on an exclusive paedophile ring, was interviewed by an officer working for Operation Fernbridge, the criminal investigation examining claims of sexual abuse and grooming of children by a VIP ring of paedophiles that included MPs, police officers and people with links to the royal family.

Hilton Tims, 81, had claimed that his paper, the Surrey Comet, was issued with a D notice – an official warning not to publish intelligence that might damage national security – when he sought to report on a police investigation into Elm Guest House in 1984.

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Five Westminster paedophile rings probed by Scotland Yard

Claims emerge of a complex web of child abuse at the heart of government, as leading MP in campaign for justice hands list of 22 names to police

Police are investigating claims that up to five paedophile rings operated at the heart of Westminster with the involvement of “highly influential” politicians.

A Labour MP who has handed a dossier of evidence to Scotland Yard said he now believed the complexity of child abuse networks at the heart of government in the Seventies and Eighties had been seriously underestimated.

John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw, said it was “inconceivable” that police would not now arrest and interview some of the politicians he has named in a list handed to detectives earlier this month.

Mr Mann, who has spent months sifting evidence from members of the public, met Scotland Yard and handed over evidence on 22 politicians, including three serving MPs and three members of the House of Lords.

Although some on the list are now dead, it also contains the names of other figures who are still alive but no longer active in the Westminster scene, Mr Mann said.

“There are at least five paedophile rings which involved MPs,” he said.

“Each of them involved at least one MP, some involved more, and these were groups of people who knew about the activities of one another.

“In some cases I believe they committed abuse together.”

Fourteen of the individuals identified by Mr Mann were Conservative politicians, five were Labour and three were from other parties.

Thirteen former ministers were among the list, Mr Mann said.

He insisted he would not be using parliamentary privilege to name the politicians who feature on the list because he believes they should be fully and properly investigated by the police.

“What the police are doing now is what should have taken place a long time ago,” he said.

“Three of these figures were highly influential.”

The MP, who has played an instrumental role in securing an inquiry into the alleged establishment paedophile rings, distilled the list of names from hundreds of pieces of information handed to him by members of the public.

“I think the 22 names are all worthy of investigation by the police," Mr Mann told The Telegraph.

“In my opinion the evidence against approximately half of them is very compelling.

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Don’t listen to Bullshit, Anonymous is NOT Leaking Iggy Azalea’s Sex Tape.

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A news went viral yesterday claiming online hacktivists Anonymous have threatened to leak sex tape of Australian model Iggy Azalea unless she apologizes to American rapper, singer, and songwriter Azealia Banks on some racial issue.

Well based on our personal investigation and conversation with some of the most reliable Anonymous handles on Twitter, we found out that Anonymous has not made any such threat.

The Twitter account @TheAnonMessage, who was making these threat (has been deleted by Twitter) is nothing but a troll and home to lies and fake Tweets. (Probably a wannabe and an attention seeker).

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Anonymous strikes back: Internet goes down for North Korea

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Tango down: Internet access in North Korea goes black after the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous promised revenge against North Korea for hacking Sony and forcing the withdrawal of the controversial film "The Interview."

A Dec. 23 report issued by CNN concerning the Internet outages that have plagued North Korea over the past 48 hours made a cryptic reference to the Anonymous collective being behind the attack, noting the party responsible could be “a 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask.”

Those familiar with Anonymous know that the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask is often associated with the hacktivist collective.

Matthew Prince, president of CloudFlare, a performance and security company, told CNN that the U.S. government is probably not behind the attack, but that it's well within the realm of possibility that a single individual could have been behind the interruption:

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Hackers Who Shut Down PSN and Xbox Live Now Attacking Tor

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Uh oh. Lizard Patrol, the hacking group claiming responsibility for the Christmas attacks on PlayStation and Xbox Live, has announced a new target: Tor, the anonymous internet service.

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The hacker group appears to be attempting to dominate Tor's relays to the point where it can comprise anonymity. Tor keeps you anonymous by bouncing your communications around a network of volunteer nodes. But if one group is controlling the majority of the nodes, it could be able to eavesdrop on a substantial number of vulnerable users. Which means Lizard Squad could gain the power to track Tor users if it infiltrates enough of the network.

So far, they have already established over 3000 relays, nearly half of the total number. That's very not good.

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Anonymous Leaked A Massive List Of Passwords And Credit Card Numbers

Following through on threats of a Christmas hack, a Twitter account claiming affiliation with Anonymous released a list of what it says are usernames and passwords for 13,000 accounts on Amazon, PlayStation, XBox Live, Hulu Plus, Walmart and other retail and entertainment services.

The hack additionally included credit card numbers, security codes and expiration dates.The trove was linked to in a Friday tweet.

In addition to providing account information for online retailer, gaming and video services, the cache also includes information for a variety of pornography sites. The Daily Dot has compiled a full list of affected companies.

And just to top it off, the group included a stolen download of “The Interview.” When Sony pulled the release of “The Interview,” Anonymous claimed on Twitter they would release the film themselves. It seems the company’s decision to distribute the film in certain theaters and online in the U.S. did not deter the hackers. (As TechCrunch noted earlier, “The Interview” was reportedly torrented 750,000 times in its first 20 hours)

The allegedly stolen account information for PlayStation and Xbox Live was posted just a day after another hacker group called Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for taking the two networks out on the likely the biggest gaming day of the year.

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LizardSquad explosed

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After joining lizardsquads IRC network (hosted by OVH) I noticed a flaw.
Even though their were 290 users in their channel, their were 4200 users on the network.
This prompted me to do a /who * (which would show users without usermode +i enabled)

I was promptly flooded off their IRC network with lines of text such as this.

[04:26:35] •›› Who: • HZWJJF H DGRDYMOM@221.212.155.104.bc.googleusercontent.com KSUUZF
[04:26:35] •›› Who: • JWJMVO H FMTIU@13.214.155.104.bc.googleusercontent.com UMKQTRQ
[04:26:35] •›› Who: • VQJAUBTT H XRHF@33.218.155.104.bc.googleusercontent.com ZKYJ
[04:26:35] •›› Who: • SSTHW H NKRCJBM@127.210.155.104.bc.googleusercontent.com LYIBCZ
[04:26:35] •›› Who: • LXIZQPLJ H WHXLFA@254.212.155.104.bc.googleusercontent.com QCPCE

With this being said and my extenstive research into botnet culture. I am able to identify several characteristics that leads me to believe said machines are infected with a linux bot known as Kaiten (detectable as Trojan.Tsunami.B in ClamAV).

1) Kaiten characteristic is that Kaiten generates the USER, IDENT and NICK with makestring.
2) Kaiten by default sends a MODE-xi (in IRC this would remove hostmasking, allowing you to view the REAL IP of the bots inside of the botnet. usermode -i disables invisible flag (allowing a /who * to show you)

This is an extreme exposure for LizardSquad as we now know this information

irc.darkode.com has address 198.100.144.122

This in the botnet world is known as a C&C (command and control) server.

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE3956-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Abuse
OrgAbusePhone: +1-855-684-5463
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@ovh.ca
OrgAbuseRef: http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/ABUSE3956-ARIN

for all of those wanting to have this C&C shut down.

As far was the google IPs, Due to the volume of infected machines and it being isolated to only google, I do not believe it is a widespread exploit. I believe this to be either a cause of 1 of 3 ways.
1) There was a hackforums post discussing the abuse of google clouds $500 free credit, allowing them to script something that would set up hundreds of VPSes.
2) Credit card fraud on google cloud services.
3) An exploit into google cloud services panel, allowing them to execute commands thus uploading and executing their kaitens. (highly unlikely, but plausible)

Listed below are a list of google IPs that have been infected with kaiten that LizardSquad is using for Denial of Services attacks.

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Many Faces behind the Mask

_{Gabriella Coleman and Michael Busch}

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There’s primarily two misconceptions I am trying to squash. The first is that Anonymous is a name that is still used today for trollish actions and second that Anonymous is random.

Since late 2011, the name has been primarily used for activist endeavors. And again, some of their tactics are controversial—including some which are trollish—but it has primarily been deployed for the purpose of political activity. The name, I am sure, can be used for hard core trolling but for whatever reason, for the last three years, the great bulk of activity under the Anonymous banner has been used for activist operations.

And while Anons are unpredictable, they aren’t random. By that I mean that it is very hard to forecast when they will show up and what the consequences of their actions may be—they don’t even know themselves—but there are identifiable logics at work. For instance, they are usually triggered into action by existing events. The exception is when they are hacking, for example, into government or corporation computers for the purpose of exposing shoddy security, sabotage, or finding information of corruption to leak.

But generally they are reacting to world events, or trying to expose corruption. There are stable teams that work together, as opposed to being an amorphous group that comes together out of the blue. So that’s the first set of misconceptions I wanted to target.

Another misconception has to do with who’s behind the mask. There’s a common but totally incorrect idea that everyone involved is white and middle-class. Some are and the diversity may not be radically deep (nor are most academic departments either, where I happen to work). There are fewer women, especially in the hacking crews, for example. But when it comes to age, ethnicity and class—especially class—it is a lot more diverse than people assume. Many of the PayPal 14—those charged with DdoSing PayPal in support of Wikileaks—are not able to easily pay their fine (of slightly over $5000 each) because many don't come from economically privileged backgrounds. Many participants are teenagers or in their early 20s but there is a sizable chunk of folks in their 30s and 40s.

Pseudoanonymity allows for strange gatherings of people who would never associate if it weren’t for the fact that they are cloaked. Take LulzSec, for instance, the breakaway group that went on a hacking spree for fifty days. Among the group you had a Puerto Rican living in a New York City housing project, a sixteen-year-old Iraqi immigrant in London, you had an ex-military participant, a white anti-capitalist anarchist, and two Irish chemistry students, one of whom had a lot of experience with radical politics due to the fact that his father had been a member of the Irish Republican Army—an interestingly diverse group, to say the least.

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Verdachte DDoS-aanval Xbox Live en Playstation Network opgepakt

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De Britse politie heeft een 22-jarige man opgepakt die onder meer verdacht wordt van de recente grote DDoS-aanval op Xbox Live en Playstation Network.

De arrestatie is zowel door Daily Dot als door hackerscollectief Lizard Squad gemeld.

De man zou bij dat collectief horen, dat rond de feestdagen in opspraak kwam toen het zowel Xbox Live en Playstation Network met een DDoS aanval onbereikbaar maakte. Woensdagavond maakte ook de Britse politie melding van de arrestatie.

Volgens Lizard Squad zijn er naast de Brit nog twee leden van het collectief opgepakt. De Brit is gearresteerd op verdenking van identiteitsfraude en het overtreden van de Computer Misuse Act.

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'Voormalig Britse minister betrokken bij pedofielengroep'

Een Britse minister uit het kabinet van Margaret Thatcher zou ruim dertig jaar geleden een jongen hebben verkracht. Scotland Yard heeft de minister, Peter Morrison, in bescherming genomen in plaats van hem te vervolgen. Die beschuldiging uit het slachtoffer zondag in de Britse krant The Telegraph.

Anonymous #op Charlie hebdo suite

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#OpCharlieHebdo

Anonymous #francophone // #OpCharlieHebdo 01/07/2015
Never attack the media

Message to the enemy of the freedom of speech.

January 7, 2015, freedom of speech has suffered an inhuman assault. Terrorists broke into the premises of the "Charlie Hebdo" newspaper and shot in cold blood several satirical cartoon artists, journalists and two policemen. The killers are still at large. Disgusted and also shocked, we can not fall to our knees. It is our responsibility to react.

First, we wish to express our condolences to the families of the victims of this cowardly and despicable act. We are all affected by the death of Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Wolinski, great artists that marked their talent throughout the history of the press and died for freedom. We do not forget the other victims killed and injured in the attack that were the targets of these murderers.

It is clear that some people do not want, in a free world, this inviolable and sacred right to express in any way one's opinions. Anonymous will never leave this right violated by obscurantism and mysticism. We will fight always and everywhere the enemies of freedom of speech. Charlie Hebdo, historical figure of satirical journalism has now been targeted. Anonymous must remind every citizen that the freedom of the press is a fundamental principle of democratic countries. Freedom of opinion, speech and to publish articles without any threat, and stress is a right "inalienable." Anonymous has always fought the slayers of these rights and will never allow a person to be shot down radically for publishing an article, a drawing, an opinion ...

Freedom of speech and opinion is a non-negotiable thing, to tackle it is to attack democracy. Expect a massive frontal reaction from us because the struggle for the defense of those freedoms is the foundation of our movement.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us!


IRC: irc.anonops.com Port: 6667 Port SSL: 6697 #francophone & #OpCharlieHebdo // https://webchat.anonops.com/
Twitter: @OpCharlieHebdo // #JeSuisCharlie

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‘Anonymous’ Hackers Declare Their First Victory In Operation Charlie Hebdo

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Anonymous appears to be taking baby steps in its war against the Charlie Hebdo attackers, temporarily taking down a jihadist website. The site went down for one or two hours, just enough time for Anonymous hacktivists to declare #TangoDown on Twitter. Still, there are a few additional developments.

As previously reported by the Inquisitr, shortly after the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, hackers from the activist group Anonymous declared war. The group opened a new Twitter account and hashtag, #OpCharlieHebdo, and made this ominous threat to the terrorists.

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Op dinsdag 13 januari 2015 08:43 schreef SicSicSics het volgende:
Wat vinden we (Papier?) van de hypocrisie van Anonymous over het sluiten/ aanvallen van Jihadwebsites 'vóór de vrijheid van meningsuiting'? Omdat er een boodschap op staat die anonymous niet welgevallig is?

En hoe is dat anders dan een krampachtige overheidsreactie om, in een poging tot 'bescherming', meer controle te willen hebben over wat er op internet staat?

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Behind Anonymous’s Operation to Reveal Britain’s Elite Child-Rape Syndicate

As last week's horrifying news from France dominated the European and global news cycles, much of the media's attention toward the growing allegations of British political elite being involved in a ring of child rape has notably subsided. Online, however, a group of activists—some associated with the hacktivist group Anonymous—have been pushing for more attention to be brought to this deeply unsettling issue percolating in the UK. Their efforts are being organized under the hashtag banner of #OpDeathEaters.

In December, Scotland Yard made the shocking admission that new allegations pertaining to the rape and murder of young boys by so-called VIPs in Britain's political world are true.

A man who goes only by the pseudonym Nick came out to the media and the authorities to allege that he was the victim of rape and abuse by high-profile political figures in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Kenny McDonald, the detective in charge of the investigation into Nick's claims, "Nick has been spoken to by experienced officers from the child abuse team and experienced officers from the murder investigation team. They and I believe what Nick is saying is credible and true."

Nick went on to tell the BBC that children who were swept up in this VIP ring were brutally abused, and would be attacked if they did not obey the men who were holding them hostage. He also describes what appears to have been a fairly brazen operation: "People who drove us around could come forward. Staff in some of the locations could come forward. There are so many people who must have had suspicions. We weren't smuggled in under a blanket through the back door. It was done openly and people must have questioned that and they need to come forward."

Just as Britain was processing the shocking news of child rape and murder by its political elite, in January, Prince Andrew was accused of having sex with a minor who alleges she was the "sex slave" of a billionaire. A lawsuit brought against the US Department of Justice by a woman named Virginia Roberts has alleged that Jeffrey Epstein—a disgraced financier and known friend of Prince Andrew who, in 2008, pleaded guilty to "felony solicitation and procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution"—had forced her to have sex with Prince Andrew.

Epstein himself is no stranger to allegations and lawsuits pertaining to sexual crimes involving children. Three 12-year-old girls were allegedly brought to Epstein from France as a "birthday gift." He has also been sued over a dozen times by girls who claim they were abused while underage, all of which were settled out of court. A former Palm Beach Police Chief whose department investigated Epstein in 2005, after complaints were brought to them by the parents of a 14-year-old girl, told the Daily Beast that Epstein's case was "minimized by the State Attorney's Office, then bargained down by the U.S. Department of Justice."

The core of Roberts's claim against the DOJ is that they should throw out the plea deal given to Epstein in 2007.

As for Prince Andrew, he and Buckingham Palace have categorically denied that Roberts's claims are true. He may even be immune to the lawsuit, as it was filed in American courts. Prime Minister David Cameron, however, has so far refused to defend Prince Andrew publicly.

A photograph of Prince Andrew, with his arm around a 17-year-old Virginia Roberts, has since appeared in various media outlets.

In her suit, Virginia Roberts claims she was used "for sexual purposes to many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister and other world leaders." Photographs have placed Stephen Hawking and Bill Clinton on Jeffrey Epstein's private island—which has been described as an "Island of Sin"—though no such allegations have been brought against either man.

VICE contacted Heather Marsh, author of Binding Chaos, who says she "set the objective [for #OpDeathEaters] and brought the initial research and story to the Internet where it has been taken up by Anonymous and others." Marsh does not identify as a member of Anonymous.

According to her, the central objective of #OpDeathEaters is to "establish independent, internationally linked, victim-led inquiries into high-level complicity, obstruction of justice, and cover-ups in the paedosadism and child-trafficking industries." Its targets are: "Those in positions of power who control or enable the industry, globally."

When asked about the media attention to this issue so far, Marsh rated it "ridiculously low," adding that this is "the biggest story to break in the UK in centuries."

She continued: "What media coverage there is from the more prominent outlets is a diversion instead of investigation. Media has consistently depicted the rape, torture, murder, abduction, and blackmail of children as 'child sex' or a 'sex scandal' and the child victims as 'prostitutes' or even 'rent boys.'"

The connection between Epstein and Prince Andrew, Marsh believes, "could potentially implicate members of the royal household and others in their circle in not just complicity in the crimes of child trafficking and rape but also in obstruction of justice and influence peddling in criminal networks."

To be clear, Prince Andrew is being accused of having sex with Roberts when she was a minor, who claims she was forced on him by Epstein as part of "an orgy with numerous other underaged girls." He's not being accused of child trafficking itself.

In critiquing the media coverage of the Prince Andrew allegations thus far, Marsh pointed out that it is often "presented as a 'salacious' story about 'Prince Andrew's personal life' instead of the matter of urgent public interest it is." She went on to say: "The equally urgent stories [about high-profile human trafficking rings] in other countries are also ignored in both their own and international media, and all of these stories are presented as isolated incidents instead of the interconnected global network of influence and potential blackmail they are part of."

While Marsh's claims of an "interconnected global network" of human trafficking by high-profile politicians and powerful figures are impossible to prove, it is true that much of the reporting on the Prince Andrew allegations fails to contextualize it against the Scotland Yard-approved claims of a British VIP child rape and murder syndicate, which, at the very least, is believed to have operated in the 1970s and 1980s.

Marsh told VICE that Britain's new #WeProtect internet filter, meant to keep child porn off the web, is also making research into this subject difficult for her counterparts in England. She also is very clear to distinguish the seriousness of the crimes of Epstein, the proven allegations against British VIPs in the 70s and 80s, and the potential wrongdoing of Prince Andrew, as different than just "lonely men in their basements," adding: "They were officials with drivers, security, an army of staff, secret services, courts and police covering for them and years of victims and they belonged to international networks."

When asked about the success of #OpDeathEaters thus far, Marsh told VICE: "My initial goals were to have a core group of researchers, journalists and activists accept the validity and scale of the story and begin looking further, to change the propaganda in the way the story was covered, and to have the momentum unstoppable by Christmas. I believe those things have been successful. Having this fairly unbelievable story widely accepted was the biggest hurdle, and one I had to bank all of my credibility on, but it is not questioned by anyone who has seen the data."

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Journalist Barrett Brown sentenced to 63 months in federal prison, must pay $890K in restitution

The intelligence and security journalist has already served more than two years in prison for charges related to his proximity to sources within the hacktivist entity known as Anonymous.

A court in Dallas has sentenced Barrett Brown to 63 months in federal prison, minus 28 months already served. For count one in the case, he receives 48 months. For count 2, he receives 12 months. And for count 3, he receives 3 months. He is also ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution.

The government's charges against the intelligence and security reporter stemmed from his relationship with sources close to the hacker group Anonymous, and the fact that Brown published a link to publicly-available copies of leaked Stratfor documents.

Brown read a statement to the court during the sentencing hearing, and you can read that statement in entirety here.

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Anonymous Infiltrates the Police, Cop Facing Discipline After Wearing Guy Fawkes Mask to Protest

Miami Beach, Florida – A North Miami Beach Police officer is facing disciplinary action from his police department for his involvement in “Anonymous” and his refusal to take off a mask at a recent protest that he organized and participated in.

According to officials at the North Miami Beach Police Department, Officer Ericson Harrell violated department policies when he was arrested in Plantation during a one man protest against Obamacare.

Commanders at the police department said that his actions were “unbecoming of an officer”and that he will be suspended without pay. However, since Harrell was suspended with pay immediately after his arrest, his pay will be docked 20 hours, according to police department spokeswoman Major Kathy Katerman.

Katerman also said that Harrell is an “above average officer” and that the department was “disappointed in this, absolutely. Any policy violation we take very seriously. We expect he’ll improve his behavior or face more discipline.”

Harrell was off duty at the time of his arrest on November 22, 2013 and has been dealing with harassment from the police department ever since. The results of his lengthy internal investigation were finally announced this week.

At the one man protest, he was wearing a black cape and a Guy Fawkes mask that is oftentimes worn by supporters of Anonymous. The officer was also reportedly holding a flagpole with an inverted U.S. flag. When he was approached by officers and told to take off his mask he refused, and was eventually arrested for obstructing traffic and violating a local ordinance against wearing masks in public. According to local defense attorneys, the law against masks and hoods was created in 1951 as a response to the Ku Klux Klan.

Although the charges against Harrell were soon dropped, he faces constant scrutiny at work because the police department now knows his political beliefs.

After his arrest in Plantation, investigators confiscated his police issued laptop and reprimanded him for spending time on “conspiracy theory-related websites” and other non-work material during work hours. However, it is likely that the sites in question were on personal time, and it is interesting that the department specifically mentioned “conspiracy theory-related websites” in their report.

At the outcome of an internal police department investigation, the North Miami police also specifically reprimanded him for “being part of an organization that could interfere with the agency.”

In addition to the official discipline received from the department, Harrell may lose access to government computer databases, which he uses for work. According to The Sun Sentinel, Harrell was warned that associating with Anonymous could put his computer access at risk and that he could lose his police certification.

Below is an interview with Harrell, when he first became an outspoken police officer.

VICTORY! Charges Dropped for Florida Cop Who Refused to Remove Guy Fawkes Mask

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Anonymous calls for activists to help expose international paedophile networks with 'Operation DeathEaters'

Hacktivist group Anonymous, which has made public attacks on extremists, corporations and religious and governmental bodies, is calling for help in its fight against international paedophile networks, or what it calls the “paedosadist industry”.

In a project named Operation DeathEaters, Anonymous says it is is planning on collating evidence against international paedophile rings and their severe abuse of children and find the links between different operations, and to bring them to justice.

Anonymous has issued a video instructing activists on how they can aid in the operation, which has appeared at a time of serious allegations of historic child sexual abuse levied against prominent UK figures, including claims that a VIP Westminster paedophile ring existed in the past.

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Recent allegations have led to the Met police’s investigation into three alleged murder cases of young boys dating back to the 1970s and 1980s that have been linked to claims that there existed a VIP Westminster paedophile ring allegedly involving high profile establishment figures.

“The Westminster paedophile ring is one of many cases where Operation DeathEaters has actively pursued and sought truth, in order to end the hideous crimes concealed behind the British elite,” Anonymous alleges in a statement.

“In fear of these investigations being bungled over time, the operation’s objectives are clear and simple: source public information before it disappears, push for independent enquiry, and offer support to witnesses and the victims where needed.”

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Op vrijdag 23 januari 2015 11:49 schreef SicSicSics het volgende:

[..]

Even een crosspost die ik ook in BNW zette. Hoeveel 'anons' zouden nu gaan zeuren over persvrijheid en een hetze tegen 'anonymous'?

Quotes dan maar los

Lekker ventje wel:

[..]

[..]

[..]

America is echt een intolerante fascistenstaat als je dat al niet eens meer mag zeggen

[..]

Heeft ie nog mazzel met zijn straf volgens mij!

http://crimeblog.dallasne(...)piracy-charges.html/

vrijdag 23 januari 2015 11:42

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Bad, Bad Barrett Brown

The sentencing of someone who couldn’t hack his way out of a paper bag is the latest sign that we’re in the middle of a nerd scare.

^{By Gabriella Coleman}

Among both American and British law-enforcement communities, the temptation runs strong to treat hackers and hacktivists in simplistic terms. The public was offered a rare glimpse of this reductive tendency by a published cache of leaked NSA and GCHQ documents. In a presentation slide evaluating various uses of the anonymizing tool Tor, hacktivists like Anonymous are slotted firmly and unambiguously into the “bad” category—immediately adjacent to both pedophiles and criminals.

. Anonymous and LulzSec are right up there with pedophiles and state-sponsored hackers, says GCHQ, with regards to Tor. pic.twitter.com/MjU3XKwlhP
— Andrew Blake (@apblake) December 29, 2014

On Thursday, this moral binary was once again rehashed in a Dallas courthouse, when Judge Samuel Lindsay handed down a stiff sentence to journalist and rabble-rousing activist Barrett Brown. Brown had originally faced 17 charges and was convicted of three crimes: making threats against an FBI agent, obstruction of a search warrant, and assisting the Anonymous hackers who infiltrated and gutted Austin, Texas–based intelligence company Stratfor. (It must be said that the threats, delivered as a video tirade, were hyperbolic and preposterous but illegal.) Brown, who has already been behind bars for more than two years, received an additional 35 months in jail and a fine of nearly $1 million to be paid to Stratfor. The judge ruled that Brown “more than merely reported the hackers’ activities”—he helped organize them.

With Thursday’s sentencing, the state confirmed a notable new trend: the willingness to single out and prosecute not only politically motivated hackers, but also geeks and journalists who work closely with them—like Brown. He wasn’t a hacker, nor was he officially charged with hacking crimes. (His prosecution did not rely on the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, responsible most recently for ensnaring Aaron Swartz, a well-respected hacktivist who committed suicide.) Far from it. As an anthropologist who was embedded in Anonymous’ Internet Relay Chat channels for more than two years, I watched Brown lend a helping hand during many political operations initiated by the faceless collective. But it remained a running joke in Anonymous that Barrett could not “hack” himself out of a paper bag.

And yet, Barrett Brown is nonetheless the latest victim of what advocate and lawyer Gráinne O’Neill has dubbed “the nerd scare”: Over the past couple of years, scores of hackers have been arrested in a single, unprecedented, cohesive swoop—and largely in direct retaliation to politically motivated hacks, such as those organized by the collective Anonymous. These hacks are not about getting rich—they are digital direct action intended to increase transparency and to protest censorship and corruption.

Brown’s role in Anonymous was as an avid strategist and organizer. The creator of an online think tank and crowdsourced wiki called Project PM, Brown was particularly committed to exposing the growth and corruption of private security and intelligence firms like Stratfor. What private military contractors like Blackwater are to the U.S. military, private intelligence firms are to institutions like the National Security Agency. Edward Snowden worked for one such contractor. And Brown aimed to uncover any evidence of malfeasance in this industry through the scraps of information provided by leakers and hackers.

Let me state again that Brown did not coordinate—much less partake in—the actual infiltration of Stratfor, which took place in December 2011. During the incursion, Anonymous hackers swiped credit card numbers, emails, and other information, then distributed the material online. Most notoriously, they used thousands of the stolen credit card numbers to donate money to nonprofit and charity organizations. (It’s entirely possible that the cards weren’t all used for such Robin Hood–esque purposes, of course, but evidence suggests that donations were made.)

Brown was mostly interested in the emails, but he did share a link to the credit card numbers that had been stolen by Anonymous hackers. At one point, he faced a charge for posting that link. Out of all of the 17 counts he originally faced, this one was the most controversial: He had not stolen or used the credit card information but was simply reposting a widely circulated link from one chat room to another. This charge was dropped in March 2014, but the judge nevertheless agreed with the prosecution’s arguments on Thursday that linking to the stolen data had aided the hackers.

Once the hack had been completed, Brown sought the emails to scour for evidence of abuse and corruption. Brown, operating unabashedly and under the mantel of his given name, was not the only one to believe the emails were vital to the public interest. WikiLeaks eventually published many of them, and their contents demonstrate Brown’s journalistic instincts. They describe Stratfor’s involvement in a range of disconcerting activity, including the criminal monitoring of activists. A 1984 explosion at a Union Carbide India Ltd. plant in Bhopal, India—widely considered the worst industrial disaster in world history—left thousands dead and more than 500,000 exposed to deadly chemicals. Stratfor was hired by Dow Chemical to keep tabs on activist groups like the Yes Men and Bhopal Medical Appeal—which were actively working to publicize the issue and assist the victims.

Soon after WikiLeaks posted the emails, Stratfor issued a terse statement saying that it was unwilling to verify the authenticity of the leaked emails: “Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic. We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them.”

According to journalist Steve Horn, who sifted through thousands of Stratfor emails and wrote a two-part series examining the tactics deployed by the firm and its predecessors, the majority of company emails show that “the most important service Stratfor provides is its sociological analysis in service to corporate power and capital, not the dirty on-the-ground work,” as he put it. Indeed, only a smattering of emails point to direct, though low-level, involvement in the monitoring of activists. Still, between emerging examples of abuse and the enormous difficulty in accessing corporate records, we should, at a minimum, be troubled by actions that punish journalistic attempts to bring such information into the public domain. Brown is certainly not a journalist in the strict traditional sense. But he (and his Project PM) contributed to a burgeoning “fifth estate”: the hackers, leakers, independent journalists, and bloggers increasingly working with “the fourth estate,” the mainstream news, to inform the public about wrongdoing.

Hacker arrests are nothing new, but never before have they been so intensely concentrated. Raids were more sporadic throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and usually took one of two distinct forms: Law enforcement would target lone, apolitical hackers like Kevin Mitnick and Gary McKinnon, or aim to cripple infrastructures used by whole groups of underground hackers—closing down the bulletin-board systems where they congregated and otherwise disrupting their often-illegal activities. The largest and most famous of these American raids was Operation Sundevil. Carried out across 14 U.S. cities on May 8, 1990, the operation resulted in 27 search warrants executed and four arrests made. Worldwide, hackers wielding their skills for political aims were largely ignored by law enforcement. (Of course, every rule has its exceptions, as demonstrated by the 30 counts of computer crimes brought against a young Julian Assange in 1991.)

This approach changed with the appearance of Anonymous. In 2011 and 2012, its successes spurred a multinational coordinated crackdown that delivered more than 100 arrests around the world. In the U.S., all those put behind bars as part of this “nerd scare” have been actual hackers—with the exception of Barrett Brown.

Had he simply had the fortune of being born and residing on the other side of the Atlantic, say in the United Kingdom or Ireland, where some Anonymous hackers have been tried, his punishment in all likelihood would have been less severe. Comparatively speaking, the Irish and British Anonymous cases were remarkably mild. Two Irish hackers who defaced a website received no jail time. In May 2013, after pleading guilty to one charge of hacking the Pentagon and conspiring to hack Sony, Britain’s National Health Service, and Rupert Murdoch’s News International, Ryan “Kayla” Ackroyd was sentenced to 30 months in British jail, of which he served 10; notably, he received no fine or fee. Brown’s restitution fee will virtually guarantee years of indentured servitude.

Like so many hackers, whistleblowers, journalists, and hacktivists who have recently dared to take a stand for press freedom, accountability, and increased transparency, Brown is now paying a steep price. But he wasn’t a hacker. In fact, in 2013 an American hacker, Jeremy Hammond, pleaded guilty to this crime and is currently serving a 10-year sentence for it. Yet Brown still has to pay close to $1 million to Stratfor as if he had been the one to do it. If Stratfor’s vice president of intelligence, Fred Burton, truly lives by the code, “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations”—as one email purports—then we can see the importance of the leaks and whistleblowing activities of Anonymous, and also the actions of those like Barrett Brown, who both assisted the collective, and utilized their work in the interest of the public.

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Op zaterdag 24 januari 2015 12:53 schreef SicSicSics het volgende:

[..]

Dat hebben ze dan aardig uit de juridische stukken weten te houden. En die tweets en youtubefilmpjes zijn natuurlijk gestaged en/ of uit hun verband getrokken? Of zijn die gewoon acceptabel?

Anonymous - #OpDeathEaters | February, Friday 13th

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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My Post Cyberpunk Indentured Servitude

^{Journalist Barrett Brown looks back in anger at the government’s trumped up charges against him as he starts a 63 month prison sentence.}


Not long ago I was a mild-mannered freelance journalist, activist, and satirist, contributing to outlets like the Guardian and Vanity Fair. But last Thursday I was sentenced to 63 months in federal prison in a case that Reporters Without Borders cited as a key factor in its reduction of America’s press freedom rankings from 33 to 46. As inconvenient as this is for me, the upside is that for the first time in the two and a half years since I was arrested, I am at last able to speak freely about what has been happening to me and why—and what it means for the press and the republic as a whole.

A portion of my sentence stems from an attempt I made to conceal from the government the identities of certain contacts of mine: pro-democracy activists living under Middle Eastern dictatorships such as Bahrain, with which the U.S. is known to share intelligence on such things. Another large chunk is due to an admittedly ill-conceived public threat I made—in the midst of opiate withdrawal and what court psychologists say was a manic state brought on by medication issues—to investigate and humiliate an F.B.I. agent, who had himself threatened to indict my mother in an attempt to get me to cooperate against individuals associated with the Anonymous movement (my mother was indeed charged). Though I clearly stated that my intent was not violent, the prosecution claimed that my “victim,” Dallas-based Special Agent Robert Smith, had reason to fear that I might physically harm him and even his children—in which case it is not immediately obvious why the prosecution felt the need to alter the end of the sentence in question when quoting it on the indictment. (My complete statement, (PDF) in which I make a point of noting that I was merely going to proceed along lines spelled out by the FBI-linked contractor C.E.O. Aaron Barr while he was investigating activists on behalf of his corporate clients, and that I was doing so perfunctorily, and merely in order to make a point about the F.B.I.’s traditional reluctance to investigate its allies, has been viewed on YouTube by well over 100,000 people, including the dozens of reporters who have covered the story; none of them seem to agree with the Department of Justice contention that a journalist’s threat to “look into” someone in an explicitly non-violent manner necessarily entails violence.) A separate declaration I made to the effect that I’d defend my family from any illegal armed raids by the government, while silly and bombastic, was not actually illegal under the threats statutes. To judge from similar comments made by Senator Joni Ernst, it would not even have necessarily precluded me from delivering the G.O.P.’s recent response to the State of the Union address.

But the charges that prompted the most international outrage were those alleging fraud. In late 2011, I copied and pasted a link to a publicly-available file, which chat transcripts introduced in court showed that I initially believed to contain the same leaked corporate emails I’d long been in the habit of reviewing for my Guardian articles. The file turned out to contain customer data, including credit card numbers. Although the government’s own forensics showed that I never opened the file, the D.O.J. contended (PDF) that I had thereby engaged in 11 counts of aggravated identity theft, punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence of 22 years in federal prison.

The feds were eventually forced to drop these precedent-setting charges, after which I agreed to plea to the spurious make-believe crimes described above, so as to avoid the perils of a Texas jury. (As the government itself warned in a 2013 public filing, (PDF) my status as an atheist would have seriously damaged my ability to get a fair trial here in Dallas—although one might wonder how a jury would know I’m an atheist unless the government made a point of bringing it up, as they did, say, in that 2013 public filing.)

I also had to plea to an Accessory After the Fact charge for having contacted the corporate espionage outfit Stratfor after some Anonymous-affiliated hackers stole several million of the firm’s emails and vowed to publish them online; I offered to arrange with the hackers to redact any of those communications that could potentially have endangered any foreign contacts if made public. For this, I will not only serve additional prison time, but have also been ordered to pay the company over $800,000—which is to say that I will spend the rest of my life in a strange state of post-cyberpunk indentured servitude to an amoral private intelligence firm that’s perhaps best known for having spied on Bhopal activists on behalf of Dow Chemical. That the prosecution did not quite manage to articulate how I did any damage to this particular company did not seem to dissuade U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay in this matter. Likewise, His Honor did not express any visible interest in the fact that the F.B.I. itself has acknowledged having actually overseen the hack on Stratfor via its confidential informant, Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, who recently appeared in a national television interview with Charlie Rose to discuss his role in these matters.

Quite understandably, most media coverage of last week’s sentencing hearing has focused on the exciting twist ending. Despite having dropped the notorious “linking” charges, the government still managed to convince Judge Lindsay to hold me responsible for the act of copying and pasting a link—a link that was already public, and which led to a file which was already itself public, and to which other journalists had also linked without being prosecuted for it—by way of a sentencing mechanism known as “relevant conduct.” In doing so, Judge Lindsay stated that this would not actually cause any concern among journalists—an exquisitely bizarre claim insomuch as countless journalists have been expressing concern over this very matter since the charges were first brought in 2012, with Wired’s Quinn Norton even having testified at a prior hearing that she herself would have been subject to such prosecution not only in the Stratfor affair, but throughout much of her career reporting on online security. In the wake of last week’s sentencing, Norton announced she could no longer report on security breaches and advised her colleagues to refrain as well.

I will leave it to Judge Lindsay to explain to the concerned members of the press that they are not actually concerned; based on the commentary that’s now coming out of outlets ranging from the U.S. News & World Report to The Intercept and the Columbia Journalism Review, His Honor has a big job ahead of him. Instead, I will merely point out the other major scandal inherent to this case, one which has so far gone largely unreported—that in addition to having lost the “right to link” journalists have also now lost the “right to quote.” In trying to make the case that I was a violent threat to Agent Smith, the prosecution attributed to me the following statement: “Dead men can’t leak stuff … illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” I will admit that this is clearly an outright call for murder, and thus would certainly seem to warrant an F.B.I. investigation. The problem is that it wasn’t I who uttered this, but rather Fox News commentator Bob Beckel, who said it on national television in the course of a no-doubt productive discussion about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. I had merely quoted the statement on my Twitter feed—in disapproval, of course, as I happen to admire Assange, and he, himself, has put out a statement expressing astonishment that the U.S. government would attribute to me a call for his murder made by someone else on a major cable news network. Now, it would be one thing if this had simply been a misunderstanding on the part of the D.O.J., which, in all fairness, was clearly in a rush to flesh out its fabricated case against me. But when my attorneys pointed this out in a motion to dismiss the charge, the prosecutor, Candina Heath, actually stuck to her guns, arguing that, by quoting this, I had “promoted” the idea. Among many other things, this leaves open the question of why Bob Beckel has not been indicted. The answer is that, unlike me, Beckel did not spend much of 2011 investigating the full extent of the Team Themis conspiracy, in which F.B.I.-linked contracting firms prepared a covert and criminal scheme by which to launch cyber-attacks in a campaign of intimidation against activists and journalists deemed supportive of Wikileaks—a conspiracy that, as the press and even some members of Congress noted at the time that it was foiled and made public by Anonymous, had been put in motion by none other than the D.O.J. itself.

The dozen or so Americans who still have faith in the essential decency of the D.O.J., despite the assorted scandals of the last 15 years, might find it hard to believe that the charges against me were actually prompted by my efforts to bring attention to the agency’s own wrong-doing. It’s a fine thing, then, that the late journalist Michael Hastings saw fit to publish a copy of the original search warrants in my case, which list Themis firms HBGary Federal and Endgame Systems as subjects to be searched among my files, along with echelon2.org, the website on which my colleagues and I posted our research on the matter. Stratfor, the firm I allegedly cost almost a million dollars via a single phone call, is left unmentioned.

But what should worry Americans most is not that the various frightening aspects of this case can fill a rather wordy article. What should worry them is that this is not even that article. The great bulk of the government’s demonstrable lies, contradictions, and instances of perjury are still sealed and thus unavailable to the public. Other matters are just now coming to light, such as the revelation, two days before my sentencing, that the D.O.J. had withheld from my defense team sealed chat transcripts from the Jeremy Hammond hacking case which contradicted its key claim that I was a co-conspirator in the Stratfor hack. And there are still other aspects of all this, such as the F.B.I.’s seizure of my copy of the Declaration of Independence as evidence of my criminal activity, that I blush to even commit to print, lest I not be believed, even despite the F.B.I. itself having now confirmed it.

Suffice to say that I shall produce a far more comprehensive account of this whole affair later this year, even if I have few illusions that it will make much difference; a state that had reason to fear the press would not have acted as openly as it has, for as long as it has, and to such ends as it has. If anyone needs me in the meantime, I’ll be in prison.

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The government's cyberterrorism 'concerns' are a pretext for their own hacking operations

^{Jeremy Hammond}

The US has always been the world leader of cyberwar, hacking damn near everyone without any repercussions. And, for years, US intelligence officials and private contractors have been milking hacks to secure billions in cyber security programs: all you need is an enemy, and they will sell you the cure.

Their blatant hypocrisy, threat inflation and militaristic rhetoric must be challenged if we are to have a free and equal internet.

That familiar formula is playing out again with the recent Sony hack. We are supposed to be shocked that these “cyber-terrorists” – purportedly from North Korea – would attack our critical infrastructure and, clearly swift retaliation is in order. But, despite the apocalyptic hype, the Sony hack was not fundamentally different from any other high-profile breach in recent years: personal information was stolen, embarrassing private emails were published and silly political rhetoric and threats were posted on Pastebin. In many ways, it’s similar to an Anonymous operation except that, this time, the FBI accused North Korea. That accusation was based on supposed forensic analysis which they have not publicly produced after refusing to participate in joint inquiries.
This official narrative is disputed by many renowned infosec figures. Any skilled hacker or well-financed nation-state practices anti-forensics measures like modifying logs and using proxies to make the attacks appear to originate elsewhere. And North Korea has already been falsely accused of several cyber-attacks – including attacks against US and South Korean targets in July 2009 and again in 2013. The inherent difficulty of identifying the true attackers should give us pause
before we rush to judgment.

It is, however, the perfect pretext for the US to launch their own hacking operations (not that they’ve ever needed any justification before).

Authorities are once again sounding the cyber-terrorist alarm, promoting a “Free Speech vs North Korea” showdown because the attackers were allegedly angry about The Interview, a comedy about a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un (which Sony reportedly consulted with the State Department and the right-wing RAND Corporation to produce). I am not able to see the movie from prison, so I can’t give you a proper critique; maybe it is amusing but, considering the CIA’s long and vicious history of assassinations, secret prisons, torture, extrajudicial executions-by-drone and overthrowing democratically-elected governments to install dictatorships, it is not at all surprising Sony would get hacked for making a movie gloating about that.

Sony, too, is an unusual poster child for free-speech advocates in light of their history of lawsuits in defense of their “intellectual property”. Years ago, my LulzSec comrades hacked Sony in retaliation for their prosecution of an individual who published information on how to jailbreak the Playstation 3. (Citing the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Sony sued not only the original publisher but attempted to go after everyone who even watched the instructional video on YouTube.) This time, Sony’s army of lawyers have threatened news organizations and individual Twitter accounts with lawsuits in an atrocious and ultimately ineffective attempt to prevent discussion of their now-public internal emails, demonstrating exactly how they feel about the First Amendment.
When I think about free speech, I am not crying over a multi-billion dollar tech and media empire staging the withdrawal of their movies from theaters to generate PR for a record online release a week later. I’m thinking about the Alien Registration Act, the Palmer raids, the red scares, the Haymarket Martyrs, COINTELPRO and the House of Unamerican Activities. I think about the harassment of whistleblowers and journalists like Chelsea Manning, Barrett Brown, Julian Assange, James Risen and others, the protesters driven out of public parks at Occupy Wall Street and those that continue to be beaten and arrested at anti-police brutality protests. For seeking the truth, voicing our dissent, and demanding justice, we are criminalized and treated like terrorists.

Invoking the threat of “terrorism” is the biggest smoke-and-mirrors mechanism used to deny citizens both due process and free speech in the 21st century. Law enforcement agents use that word to summon images of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and stoke public fear into justifying their mass surveillance dragnet – monitoring each and every communication, every internet transaction. The primary targets of these abuses have been Muslims and immigrants, but trumped-up federal terrorism charges have entrapped activists like the Cleveland Five and various earth and animal liberation warriors. Now the latest enemy is “cyber-terrorism”: the governments insist that our critical infrastructure is under attack, and we need draconian new measures to protect our “national security”.

Sensational Hollywood movies like “Live Free, Die Hard” and the new “Blackhat” propagate this false narrative with ridiculous and unfeasible “terrorist” hacker attacks on nuclear facilities and the power grid. No attacks like this have ever happened, but there is an active effort to recruit independent hackers to sell out and work for the man, purportedly to defend US networks and catch the bad guys.

But when the FBI did arrest a supposed “blackhat” – Hector Monsegur, aka Sabu – and turned him into an informant, they were more interested in hacking targets of their own choosing than preventing attacks on US targets. Despite live knowledge of our ongoing hacking operations through Sabu, they were unable (or unwilling) to stop me from following through with dozens of high profile hacks; some, like the Stratfor breach, they helped facilitate. Instead, Sabu asked me to hack hundreds of foreign government websites from a list he provided, which I regrettably did, unaware of his status as an informant.

And that’s what this hype of “cyber-terrorism” is all about: establishing pretexts for our ongoing offensive hacking operations. “...As we implement these responses, some will be seen, others may not be seen”, a State Department spokeswoman said as North Korea was hit with repeat cyber-attacks shutting down their internet while more economic sanctions are imposed (through which everyday North Koreans suffer). But for all the accusations against North Korea and China, there is no question that the US has always been the world leader in cyber-warfare. Amongst Snowden’s revelations was evidence of the US/Israeli STUXNET, FLAME and DuQu viruses, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers in dozens of countries. They hacked into corporations like Brazil’s Petrobas, news agencies like Al Jazeera, DDOS’d Anonymous chat servers, and even tapped the personal cellphones of world leaders. Our unparalleled efforts to assert military-style dominance over the internet is forcing other countries to develop their own hacking units, leading to a digital arms race which makes us all less safe.

If the US truly wanted to stop the proliferation of nation-state hacking, they would push for UN conferences to establish guidelines defining and prohibiting “cyber-warfare”. This would require coming clean and putting an end to their own operations, but if they won’t even abide by the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners of war and the use of torture, there’s no reason to expect they wouldn’t continue hacking in secret. Just as the US government want a monopoly on the use of military force – waging wars to “spread democracy” while condemning those who fight back as “terrorists” – they correspondingly seek a monopoly on the use of hacking. Congress enhances computer crime statutes and the FBI locks up “bad guy” hackers like myself, while recruiting others to work for the government to commit attacks against sovereign countries. Then everyone acts surprised when foreign countries start using the same tactics on us.

When those in power break their own laws then there is no law and no moral authority; there are just competing factions in an international power struggle to control resources like oil, land, drugs and information. Like all wars, only the rich ruling class benefits, and everyone else suffers.

A different kind of cyber-war is possible: not one between nation-states but between the people and their governments.The internet’s natural state is anarchy and any attempts to militarize or corporatize it will be owned, exposed and driven offline anyway. I shed no tears when I hear about Sony, CENTCOM or police departments being hacked. In prison, we love hearing about all the bigshots getting hacked by guys like us. So keep on, true-to-the-code blackhats for great justice: instead of selling out your skills to the industry competing for federal contracts supporting US empire, actively undermine it by contributing anti-state solutions by developing encryption, anti-censorship and anonymity infrastructure. We’re cheering for you.

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Anonymous Call UK Protest Against ‘Paedophiles in the Establishment’

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Infamous hacker group Anonymous have called for several demonstrations in the UK to protest against what they believe is a huge coverup of paedophile networks by “those who are meant to protect”.

Anonymous have recently turned their attention to international and institutional paedophiles, including those connected to the Westminster child sex abuse scandal currently unfolding in the UK. The group are now calling for people to ‘take to the streets’ next Friday in London’s Trafalgar Square, Glasgow and Essex.

Heather Marsh, speaking on behalf of the group, explained that “Operation Death Eaters”, as the project is referred to, is not only seeking to expose those responsible for the crimes, but also those who enabled the sexual abuse to continue.

Anonymous- #OpISIS Continues...

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-Link: http://bit.ly/1EQwYJc
-Link: http://pastebin.com/d8ND4rvV List update on Feb 9, 2015

twitter:

YourAnonCentral twitterde op donderdag 12-02-2015 om 06:56:29 Netherlands Feb 13 Event | Location Amsterdam: https://t.co/B6gsmn6MKB #OpDeathEaters reageer retweet

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US gas pump hacked with 'Anonymous' tagline

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Hacker from Anonymous says he was charged after refusing to help FBI

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A 28-year-old hacker currently serving a six-month prison sentence for computer crimes now says that authorities asked him to help the United States gather information on Mexican drug cartels, then charged him with dozens of counts after he refused.

Fidel Salinas of Texas started his half-year prison sentence last Friday, according to court documents obtained by RT, three months after he accepted a plea deal that saw him owning up to a single count of accessing without authorization the computer system of Hidalgo County in 2012. The activity was part of an operation that authorities say involved the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

This Wednesday, however, Wired reported that Salinas said ahead of surrendering to US Marshals last week that the agreement he reached with the Department of Justice was hardly the first time that the two had discussed a deal.

According to Wired, Salinas told journalist Andy Greenberg that agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation attempted to recruit him to assist with the FBI’s own intelligence gathering operations in 2013. After Salinas shot them down, he soon found himself being charged with dozens of counts through no fewer than four indictments filed in US District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

In May 2013, Greenberg wrote this week, the FBI interrogated Salinas for six hours, during which they allegedly asked him to harness his cyber skills in order to help federal authorities gather intelligence on Mexican drug cartels — a previous target of Anonymous.

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Domestic Terror: #Anonymous’ #OpDeathEaters Responds to Arrest of Daniel Rosen, State Department Counterterrorism Capo

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Anonymous, that group of masked “terrorists” who have taken on everything from ISIS to tiger hunters to high school bullies to the credit card industry has a new target this week. That would be Daniel Rosen, the US State Department’s Director of Counterterrorism Programs and Policy, and a natural enough target for payback from the hacktivists whom he has targeted, but business-as-usual hostility aside, there’s a whole new reason that the swashbuckling collective has this senior government official in its sights. His arrest Tuesday on charges of soliciting sex from a minor falls squarely within the scope of #OpDeathEaters, the enormous international operation to identify, expose, and remove pedophiles from positions of power in the elites of world governments.

A message from Anonymous to Chicago Police #OPGitmo2Chicago

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#Gitmo2Chicago: protests target police 'black site'

Homan Square abuse allegations encircle mayor Rahm Emanuel as Anonymous, Occupy and Black Lives Matter take to social media and streets beyond Chicago

The Chicago police facility Homan Square was becoming the focus of an organized protest movement this weekend, as the hacktivist collective Anonymous and organizers associated with the Black Lives Matter movement seized on allegations of unconstitutional abuse at the secretive warehouse.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former top adviser to Barack Obama suddenly facing a runoff for re-election, remained at the political fulcrum of a mounting campaign both on social media and the streets of Chicago, where demonstrations were planned for Saturday outside what coordinated campaigners described as mirroring a CIA “black site”.

Organizer Travis McDermott said Saturday’s “Shut Down Homan Square” protest was one of several being planned as far away as Los Angeles.

“Hopefully with the presence we expect to have, that will put a little bit of pressure to say, ‘Hey, look – this isn’t going to go away,’” he said.

On Friday night, campaigners associated with the Occupy and Anonymous collectives took to Twitter, Instagram and other social-media platforms with the hashtag #Gitmo2Chicago to decry allegations of what users alternatively labeled as a “secret prison” and “torture soon coming to a city near you”.

Six people and multiple Chicago attorneys came forward to the Guardian this week with detailed accounts of police holding suspects and witnesses for sustained periods of detention inside Homan Square, without public records, access to attorneys or being read their most basic rights – involving what they said included shackling, physical abuse and being “disappeared” from legal counsel and family. The Guardian’s recent investigation into Chicago police brutality began the week before, with a two-part account of the tactics of Detective Richard Zuley, who went from Chicago homicide investigator to Guantánamo Bay torturer.