LulzSec Teams With Anonymous, In Operation AntiSec

c0lo writes "After a brief spat where the notorious Anonymous hacking collective sniped at Lulzsec, the 'upstart' hacking collective, for crowing about low-rent Denial of Service attacks on the CIA and 4chan websites, the two groups have apparently teamed up in operation Anti-Sec. The operation's 'top priority is to steal and leak any classified government information, including email spools and documentation. Prime targets are banks and other high-ranking establishments. If they try to censor our progress, we will obliterate the censor with cannonfire anointed with lizard blood.' We can only predict that the following will be unpredictable: store canned food and flash batteries, change your eBanking password daily."

Comments

Re:Focus, please

[ElectricTurtle]

All they have to do is get the raw data and dump it to the internet. Crowdsourcing will do the analysis, just as has been done with all previous email and doc dropping leaks. If you drop it they will come, bored or curious persons of all skillsets.

Re:Focus, please

[artor3]

Because the Goldman Sachs bailout came over a month after Lehman Brothers crashed! TARP was in many ways a response to that crash. It wasn't even three years ago! How have you already forgotten?

Stop lying. Stop spreading conspiracy theories. Just stop.

Re:Focus, please

[pla]

Because the Goldman Sachs bailout came over a month after Lehman Brothers crashed! TARP was in many ways a response to that crash. It wasn't even three years ago! How have you already forgotten?

Well, one of us seems to have already forgotten, anyway...

For example, which of us remembers the 50 billion in TAF approved six months before Lehman collapsed, with hundreds of billions more in near-weekly expansions to that program?

Or that the the first big-money bailout happened at the end of July 2008 (two months prior to Lehman), with the US government starting its buyout of Fanny and Freddy thanks to 300 billion from the HERA and a guarantee of unlimited credit?

Or that quite a few smaller banks had gone belly-up in the two months after HERA and prior to Lehman?

Or the fact that congress hauled Bernanke's butt in, before the end of that week to justify his decision (it didn't "just happen", we let it happen) not to bail out Lehman?

Or most telling of all, that the Federal Reserve did bail out AIG the same goddamned day Lehman's value dropped by 2/3rds?


Stop lying. Stop spreading conspiracy theories. Just stop.

I have no interest in revisionism, but We The People got fucked, and hard. So, which financial institution do you work for?

Re:These groups could be useful

[geoskd]

Groups like Anonymous and LulSec could probably do a lot more good for a lot of people if instead of pontificating about leaking government information actually did something useful like erase consumer debts instead of just posting passwords to porn sites online...

Although I agree that eliminating individual debt would be a worthwhile goal, it is very unlikely to succeed in this day of nearly permanent data. There are so many backups that permanently destroying data is damned difficult. You can make the information harder to retrieve, but an attack on the financial system on that scale would galvanize nearly everyone against them. Economic collapse is too easy to cause by messing with banks, and the specter of a new depression terrifies most people old enough to have heard the stories. Even young people who can't get a job because of the current recession will fully understand the implications of economic collapse.

To put in simple terms, a cash economy can only be so big because cash moves around very slowly, and requires large deposits of cash (savings) to allow open spending. Credit accelerates the economy by allowing much more efficient processing of funds. Our current cash economy is roughly 2% of the world economy. If you wipe out the credit economy, the world product drops by 98%, and people start starving by the hundreds of millions. Only the truly crazy, or exceptionally ignorant want to see that. So, we're stuck with the bad side of credit, like it or not, because the alternative is a nightmare.

The basic underpinning of how credit accelerates the economy, is how any large company processes their payroll. Back in the 19th century, a large company would maintain a large cash reserve for paying its employees. That way when employees cashed their checks each month, they would not bounce. This meant that companies had to have earnings *in advance* of their payroll needs. Today, large companies have payroll credit accounts which allow them to pay their employees from an account similar to a Home Equity Line of Credit. They pay a small interest rate on this debt, but it frees up their entire payroll for investment, so instead of having to tie up their entire payroll, they can invest that money in growth, with little or no penalty in financial terms. The entire concept is called leverage, and it is so powerful it has allowed our economy to grow to many tens of times the size it would be without it.

Pull that rug out from under everyone, and companies will not be able to pay their employees, who then will not be able to pay for anything, which will cause every companies revenues to drop which will exacerbate the problem. It s a nasty downward spiral which would make Black Tuesday look like a ticker tape parade. If the banks closed all of the payroll credit lines today, almost no one would get paid for many months. The ensuing run on the banks would collapse all of the banks, which would then default on all payments, preventing credit card payments from being paid out, preventing companies from paying their employees at all and causing the weaker governments to default on their payments. When they collapsed, it would take down the IMF and the world bank, and the snow-ball effect would take down the U.S., China, Germany, and the rest of the worlds "strong" governments withing a few months. If we were lucky, we would not end up in the middle of a global civil war. Food riots would commence in every medium sized and larger city in then world. People would exit the cities in mass and descend on the rural countryside, devastating crops. A very large percentage (50%+) of the population of the world would starve during the first winter, with most of those remaining starving in the next few years. It would be a return to a farm economy, and anything you didn't make with your own hands would be a rare luxury.

the U.S. TARP measures weren't the result of congress people not understanding a problem and responding wrongly, it was a matter of avert