Slashdot Mirror
FBI Executes 40 Search Warrants For 'Anonymous'
CWmike writes "Police agencies worldwide are turning up the heat on a loosely organized group of WikiLeaks activists. After yesterday's news that UK police arrested five people, US authorities announced that more than 40 search warrants have been executed in the US in connection with last month's Web-based attacks against companies that had severed ties with WikiLeaks. Investigations are also ongoing in the Netherlands, Germany and France, the FBI said Thursday. Acting on information from German authorities, the FBI raided Dallas ISP Tailor Made Services last month, looking for evidence relating to one of the chat servers used by Anonymous. Another server was traced to Fremont, California's Hurricane Electric. On Thursday, a Web page used by Anonymous to coordinate this latest round of DDoS attacks was offline, and the group's Twitter and Blogspot pages were silent."
Reader Ajehals contributes a link to the UK Pirate Party's explanation of how the law applies to DDoS attacks.
For the lulz, amiright?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
.. The internet is trembling in fear.
Your "7 proxies" is no match for the United States Government, or the corporations for which it stands.
Cue the many, many Party Van jokes.
Do they not realize the dynamic structure of anonymous? That an activist involved in one campaign might not be involved, or indeed care about, the next? The hint is in the article: "loosely organized".
I just hope the FBI can distinguish those dastardly members of Anonymous from my perfectly innocuous sometime nom-de-plume.
Please allow me to re-iterate this silly argument that I've heard before:
Anonymous cannot be destroyed by prosecuting its individual members. In order to charge someone, the prosecution must first de-anonymize that person, which immediately voids their membership in Anonymous.
Any news on those involved in the DDoS attacks against wikileaks? No arrest yet?
It's more of a "movement" than a "group" no?
It's nice to know that when corporate interests are threatened, the US Government is more than willing to come to the rescue and do their bidding. Of course, when Goldman Sachs lies, cheats, and defrauds the American people, the US government looks the other way.
Judging by the contents of some of their boards, plain view discovery might lead to somebody getting nailed by child pornography or depravity law. Anxiously awaiting the headlines.
Why, oh why, didn't I set up a /. account and log-in years ago???
- Excuse me, officer, you're mistaken. You are looking for A.Nonymous and my name is .......
Open letter from Anonymous to the UK Government
I am sure that the US is pursuing those who DDoSed WikiLeaks with equal energy.
I'm sure the subject line drew some rolled eyes or a wistful smile. You know why? Because we all know that any legal avenues to get what we want from the government are closed. And guess what kind of avenues people take when their legal ones are exhausted. The French Revolution was illegal as hell, too.
Because anonops.ru is up for me.
I was wondering when they'd start doing this one. Many of the attacks were done using a program called "low orbit ion cannon," essentially an opt-in botnet: run the program and it waits for a signal from a master node, then starts spamming requests at the specified target. Meaning that the participants in the attacks, far from the usual unknowing and unwilling infected, were in fact choosing specifically to join in the action. What's more, the nature of a DDoS makes proxy use counter-productive and ineffective (all attacks come from a small number of proxy IPs, being easily blockable, and you DDoS the proxy long before the target).
The end result? A list of unprotected ip addresses for a bunch of idiot thugs and 13-year old kids, not at all anonymous. Well done, geniuses.
I'm kind of interested in what's going to happen here. It was widely reported on every news affiliate that Anonymous was PROTESTING these companies. I heard several news casters compare the DDOS attack to a picket line outside a business. The picketers make it harder for customers to go to the business, just like a DDOS attack does.
I'd like to see what the supreme court makes of it. After all, the companies that were targeted certainly had the means to thwart the attack, Paypal and Amazon didn't even have a hiccup.
I'm Spartacus!
The problem with calling a DDOS "unauthorized access" is that the access is implicitly authorized by the server being on the internet. The real world analogy here is getting your hundred closest friends to visit WalMart and go through the checkout lines VERY VERY SLOWLY. You have the intent to negatively impact their business, and you are acting recklessly, but that is only 2/3 (well, more like 9/10) of the criteria for violating the laws in question here. You are not using their store without authorization (they have to TELL YOU TO LEAVE before they have any legal relief for your being there).
Don't be a useful idiot. Don't take your marching orders from people on the interet who don't give a fuck about you. A DDOS attack like the one 4-chan (let's call them what they are) did, could have actually been anonymous had the morons actually been hackers. This is what it looks like when one pseudo-hacker can write a DDOS program, and a bunch of tech-illiterate morons run it on their network without actually knowing what it's doing, or how to mask their identity.
Can't we just save the effort and convict 'Anonymous' in absentia? It'd be much more efficient.
It makes you wonder how effective it actually is in some cases. I hope it is able to continue its work against scientology.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Ain't no law against bein' stupid.
Or bein' a jackass.
Or being a stupid jackass.
hell, we give people their own teevee shows on MTv for that.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There for a minute I read the headline as "FBI Executes 40 Search Warrants For 'Anonymous Coward'", which is why I logged in to make this post.
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
A great use of time and resources. What has humanity come to? Aren't there more pressing matters to attend to but prosecute random people because they may or may not have scared huge corporations ?
Also on the pirateparty UK site I have to rage at vagueness of the laws quoted here:
1. A person is guilty of an offence if-
a. he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer;
Define "unauthorised" ? (and obviously this doesn't apply to women...)
1. This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act-
a. to impair the operation of any computer;
So this applies to ISPs doing some filtering since they are crippling my computer's capabilties?
b. to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer;
You mean people cannot "hinder" access to their data by using passwords and such ? so root accounts should have no password ?
but not being smart is a terrible reason to be repeatedly kicked in the face by the police.
hmmmm, I'm terribly conflicted about this...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's pretty hard to make your connections anonymous the whole time. Tor is mighty slow and blocked in many sites. I'm not sure which of the other options are very reliable. Open wifi is not always available. And if it's your neighbor's, well, that's pretty close to you.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Hacktivism has plenty merit in my book, but when up against a government it's quite a challenge. The uncensorable internet is extremely censorable. Copyrights, defamation, trademarks, lawsuits, arrests, and all kinds of stuff are each day more easily used to censor more and more. Egypt and a bunch of other nations, and wikileaks have been examples in the media, but there are lots of other ways everyone is just bottom line censored. There are legal and civil details and complexities of course, but bottom line, a lot of things just amount to censorship, in the end.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I think the point that law enforcement is trying to make is that finding you is easier than you think. Win-Win for both sides because the FBI gets to look savvy and Anonymous is required to step up their game.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
What did they really expect when they downloaded and used LOIC to DDOS? That somehow they would be protected because of the political nature of the attack, or that they'd be off the hook because someone else actually points that cannon? Talk about stupid.....
There's probably a bunch of people who installed the software on other people's computers, or maybe just ran it on other people's wifi nets. That is what is to be expected. Do we have to tell these people, so eager to don their Guy Fawkes masks and join Anonymous, that 'CAUTION: FILLING IS HOT'?
It's one thing if the search warrant is "search one specific individual's home looking for his PC and trying to get log information on it." It's quite another if the search warrant is "order Comcast to produce all the information they have on the following list of 45000 IP addresses." Sometimes the Feds tell you one kind of number, sometimes they tell you another. (For instance, the numbers of legal wiretaps they'll admit to are usually quite small, obfuscating the broad scope of some of those wiretaps, but sometimes they're giving you numbers of a quality similar to the "street value of the drug seizure" type to inflate how macho they are.)
Also, realistically, while "Anonymous" might be everybody who's read /b/ at one time or another, but the actual number of people who organized the DDOS attacks and asked for volunteers to run LOIC is probably fairly small, and if they didn't do a good enough job of anonymization, it's possible that they might really be punishing the key players and making clear that they know how to do it on future attacks. On the other hand, if they're just picking a random 40 easy targets who ran LOIC, charging them with conspiracy to commit [crimes defined in ways to make them felonies], and threatening to fine them each for the amount of damage that was done to Paypal et. al's business, that could discourage future participants.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As LOIC was hosted on Sourceforge, could the raids have anything to do with the Sourceforge outage earlier this week? Has anyone contacted Sourceforge?
It would be nice if someone in our Government sacked-up and started fixing the issues that Wikileaks pointed out. I'm beginning to believe our Government doesn't think it should be subject to the laws and policies it enforces.
These warrants could be people set up by "Anonymous".
repeat there names are robert polsun
in the form of new X-ray porn scanners to "make them more secure".
Factoid: 400+ porn scanners were paid for by Obama's "stimulus" bill. Prior to that US airports had 100 of those.
It's a classical tactic to intimidate syppathizers. Meet the political police any autocratic regime would be proud of.
Oh, western democracies. What has become of you?
Anonymous should have learned from Homer and named themselves 'No man'. They could have avoided the warrants. Or perhaps the more modern 'Who', 'What', and 'I Don't Know'.
[Insert pithy quote here]
it's really ridiculous W WikiLeaks!!