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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.
Maybe they do realize but don't care? Their goal here is not to "take down anonymous" it's to prosecute the specific people who broke the law by organizing the DDoS attacks. Whether that means arresting all of anonymous or 1/10000 of it is irrelevant. Note that their warrant did not come from some generic anonymous IRC channel, but the logs of the actual coordination of the attacks.
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".
This isn't about punishment, it's about deterrence. Remove the sense of anonymous invulnerability and some will think twice about engaging in the activity, even if they got away with it before. It moves from a mindset of "there can't be consequences" to a mindset of "there could be consequences". It's the same tactic the RIAA uses.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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.
I am sure that the US is pursuing those who DDoSed WikiLeaks with equal energy.
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.
Well, I can only speak for me and friends, but for us it's convenience.
After Steam, we never bother pirating games any more. The act of searching, finding a good version, hassling with cracks and all that.. Not worth it. Buy on Steam. Get instant high-speed download, install on multiple computers, automatic updates, easy to reinstall if computer borks... Pirating games? Feh, too much work (while still being much less than buying in store and mucking about with CD's and such).
Music? After Spotify, we never bother to download. Too much hassle. Spotify have almost all avaliable, streaming, easy sharing, sync to my android.. Downloading, waiting, finding the one single actually good rip? Feh, screw that.
So, the only thing left is movies and tv shows. Here in Norway the only alternative we got is Voddler, which is lower quality and less convenient (forced commercials? feh) than downloading. And DVD? "You have to see all these trailers of years-old movies and silly anti pirate ads first! Muahahaha" - Seriously.. Even when I buy DVD's, the first thing I do is to rip them to remove the crap and the reliance on the physical disk. Get a good streaming service (with MINIMUM youtube 720p quality and either own bought movies (no silly renting please) or reasonable monthly fee), and I'll stop pirating that too.
It's simple. Video content industry is getting their ass handed to them on both quality and convenience. Get something that is at least equal in those to what the pirates offer, and you'll see an uptake.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
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.
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