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UK Police Charge Suspected Anonymous Spokesman
An anonymous reader writes "Scotland Yard has tonight charged 18-year-old Jake Davis, who was arrested in the Shetland Islands last week, with five offenses including unauthorized computer access and conspiracy to carry out a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack against the SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency) website. When announcing his arrest on Wednesday, police said that they believed Davis used the online nickname 'Topiary' and acted as the spokesperson for the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups. Topiary's final twitter message said 'You can't arrest an idea' just before his arrest."
Back in the day we had fun stealing cars for joy rides and doing jewlery store heists. These days kids have fun attacking computers, much more victim less crime.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
You may not be able to arrest an idea, but it seems you can arrest the person.
Today's lesson: You aren't V. Neither the British or US government is an evil fascist state which brutally subjugates the populace. This isn't to say that they are perfect. Far from it. But the basic point is clear. Moreover, if either of the governments were so bad as to deserve fighting back then the method to respond would not involve hacking every single website you can most of whom are corporations which have nothing to do with anything. Sure it is probably fun to convince yourself that you are doing good, but your just a bunch of script kiddies who aren't being helpful while real activists spend their time and sometimes lives improving the governments and saving lives.
Funny that, but prison rape isn't so much of a problem in the UK as it is in the great old US of A, where it seems to actually be encouraged as part of the punishment.
You really have to work on shortening your revolutionary slogan. Try something catchy like "Corruption Shmorruption!!" or "Stupid Government, We Hate You!"
Maybe the logic is that he knows *something* about the group, whatever it is, and the best way to get it out of him is haul him far from home and trump up a bunch of charges. He's only 19 after all.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=22280
Evidence such as previously leaked information, IRC logs, and the age, identity and location of the suspect arrested suggest that they caught the wrong person.
So, we're talking Britain here. There's still splinter groups out there from the IRA who also have spokespersons. There's people who blow up subway cars who have spokespersons. The idea here is to use a route that still protects the real core of damage causers, meaning your spokesperson doesn't really know all that much. Maybe one or more of those meatspace groups won't bother to call in and take 'responsibility' for the next atrocity and the British government will be left wondering just which group did it. A government that goes after spokespersons better have reason to think they can provide important, even vital data, or there's a big downside. Going after one for possibly knowing 'something' is simultaneously saying the group you are after isn't a real threat and you're confident your actions won't provoke them more than the info the spokesperson gives you is worth. Do you see any reason why the British government can make such a claim to its citizens?
Who is John Cabal?
Tor will successfully hide your IP from every node except your entry point. However, by inspecting the actual data, you can sometimes learn something about the origin of the packet. Just because an envelope has no return address, that doesn't mean you can't figure out who sent it by reading the actual letter.
Prison rape is played up in the states. Of all the people I've talked to in and out of prison, you almost never see that kind of thing unless its consensual. They always play it as rape though because getting caught having sex with another inmate will get you a pretty hefty punishment, and definitely doesn't sit well with a lot of the other inmates.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Played up or not, it is a problem.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This post is exactly an example of someone who has become a parrot for the latest political memes, without doing research to find out how the world actually is.
Note the example he picks of an 'evil' oil company: BP. Of course everyone knows why, and before that the political meme was Exxon. But why do you ignore the full-on corruption, crime, and murder, of oil companies that are truly evil, like Gazprom? It's because you only have a shallow understanding of the subject.
Likewise, it is easy to get mad at Murdoch (since no one likes him anyway), but are you aware that many UK newspapers were doing the same kind of thing? The story there isn't about Murdoch, it's about a corrupt political/police system in the UK.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Of all the people I've talked to in and out of prison
I guess you are American, and that means you know quite a few former prisoners because of this, but as the meme goes, the plural of Anecdote is not "statistic". Prison rape tends to happen to more normal / weaker prisoners in violent prisons. It is more common in state prisons than federal. It's also very area specific. The target group is unlikely to be a main group of friends of the average Slashdot reader. It's completely likely that it's happening and that the people that you know don't know about it.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Well firstly - there's no danger of Lulzsec not calling it in, they love publicity.
Secondly, no, I don't consider them a 'real' threat. They're not threatening lives.
Just like the last several times, another will take his place. I neither condone or condemn the actions of these groups, but I would like to point out the facts as they've unfolded.
Remember that movie a few years back, "Zoro" with Antonio Banderas? (If not, it's probably up on Netflix Instant Play or a torrent someplace)
The movie was all about the "passing of the guard" - a new, younger man taking the role of "Zoro", the anonymous masked crime fighter of the previous generation. It's a good movie, so I recommend it highly. But it also does a passable job of showing the difference between an identity and an idea.
I'm guessing that there are, in fact, a half dozen or more actual people who have had the identity of "Topiary". They may have shared the pseudo-identity concurrently, so, who did what?
I'm getting out the popcorn and getting ready to watch the show!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
No, but you can declare that corporations are people and their wealth is free speech and drown that idea in an ocean of propaganda...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Lately it seems that most of the hackers getting caught are not even 20 years old, many of them still juveniles. Is this because it's juvenile behaviour and there are less adults out there doing the same type of thing or are the older (more experienced?) hackers just a lot more careful to not get caught?
This is completely crazy. They guy was in Shetland, in Scotland, and the Met Police flew up from London in a light aircraft, landed, raided his house and flew him out on the same aircraft to London, England. He was arrested in one legal jurisdiction and is being held in another. This is like the FBI flying from Washington DC to Oregon, arresting someone, and flying them straight out to Washington again. It's not legal. Add to that that in Scotland he can only be held for 24 hours without charge but in England he can be held, it seems, indefinitely with court approval and you have an extraordinary rendition. The human rights court is going to have a nightmare with this one, and the UK is alreadytearing itself apart due to the incompatibilities of one sovereign state having two seperate 'sovereign' legal systems.
Anyway, I asked for an answer from the Scottish First Minister. He's already fighting with the 'federal' UK government over this.
Free @Topiary!
SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency)
Is this really an organization? In other words, are they srs?
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
The modus operandi of government in the UK is "we must be seen to act, so do something, anything".
This applies as much to the police as with politicians, since in the last 10 or 15 years the police has progressivelly been politicised (with any high-level manager that didn't dance to the tune being sidelined) and they're usually called upon to be the tool that does the some kind of action for the cameras.
The outcome is that they cannot be trusted: have they got the right man? Have they got the wrong man? Who knows.
They got somebody and the media reported they're doing something, so the real objective of the operation has already been achived. Probably in 2 or 3 months time when this guy finally faces a court (the only part of the system that actually cares about finding out the truth, rather than convicting somebody) it's quite possible that he's found innocent (or maybe all they manage to pin on him is something minor) and they will quietly release him, since by then the media would have moved on.
As the recent News of The World debacle has shown, in the UK the press has a huge amount of influence and both the politicians and high-level management inside the police have been trained to quickly find somebody to sacrifice whenever the press demands blood.
Thats the idea!
How the fuck did you get modded up?
Look, I realise that you people generally dropped out of your education aged 14 convinced that you were twenty times as intelligent as everyone else in your class and that you know everything already, but there's a few things your mighty intellects don't quite understand. I'll try and put it in simple bullet points.
* We live in a society with particular laws
* Like them or not, we abide by those laws, or we run foul of them
* DDoS is a crime in both the States and the UK, as is unauthorised access of a computer
* In the UK, these crimes carry a hefty fine, a year's imprisonment, or both
* Whether or not this guy from the Shetlands actually is Topiary and therefore ran the Twitter feed or not is irrelevant. If they're charging him then they believe they have enough evidence that he is guilty of crimes as laid out in the Computer Misuse Act. For that purpose, if he's Topiary he's implicated in a large number of attacks on sensitive computers. In this case, SOCA is particularly irritating the authorities
* The same goes for Ryan Cleary, who wasn't arrested for hosting an IRC channel but for offenses as defined in the Computer Misuse Act
If he's guilty of the charges he has absolutely no defence unless he can prove that he was just the spokesman. Since that's extremely unlikely (and the chatlogs that have leaked suggest that Topiary was rather more involved than merely as a mouthpiece, although chatlogs are trivial to spoof) he's done for.
Studies have shown the problem is, in fact, very limited
And then link to a page that says:
The two-year study, commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department for $939,233, has come under withering attack from other experts. The department has not endorsed the study, saying Fleisher has yet to turn over his data for closer examination.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The two-year study, commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department for $939,233, has come under withering attack from other experts. The department has not endorsed the study, saying Fleisher has yet to turn over his data for closer examination.
Cindy Struckman-Johnson, professor of psychology at the University of South Dakota and one of nine commission members, said Fleisher's 155-page study is not in scientific form. She said there is no literature review, no raw data, and no in-depth explanation of his subjects or research methods.
So, when the Department of Justice gives you a million dollars, obviously you're supposed to lie and tell them what they want to hear, but this guy went so far overboard with it (essentially, nobody in prison is ever raped and anyone who claims they are is lying), even the sponsor will say "hold on a sec..."
"only 19"
Which means he's old enough to have sex (by three years in the UK), have children, marry, have a house, a mortgage, a credit card, a car, drink alcohol (18 in the UK), enter pubs, represent himself in court, sign legally-binding contracts (18), get loans, gamble, smoke and (most importantly) understand the standard police caution which states he's doesn't have to say anything and is entitled to access to a lawyer (even a free one appointed by the government if necessary).
This *MAN* isn't a kid. He's legally responsible and has been for quite a while. And I doubt the police would go to such public and extraordinary lengths if they couldn't pin a convictable offence on him already - especially when it involves the co-operation of many different police sections across country borders and legal systems (England/Scotland have different legal systems - the Shetlands are in Scotland).
My guess would be that he was caught either encouraging others to DDoS or as a major part of the DDoS itself and now they have charges they can squeeze him for names /identities of others involved (I would guess they have reasonable expectation that he knows or organised others, thus he was more of a "ringleader" than his mother would like to make out). Also, they probably want to seize his computer because he's more likely to have information about his own sources and contacts which could lead to others in the group (a private message / email from someone else discussing the attacks could be evidence enough to convict them upon, for instance).
People in England don't quite have the same obsession with male anal sex as Americans seem to. I doubt anybody would get ass-raped in an English prison, and pretty much zero chance for somebody in a low security prison. Interesting Reddit article on coping in prison here.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
FREE TOPIARY???
Sounds like they just don't want to pay for their sculpted shrubbery. The plants just want to be free.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Well seeing as how I've been in prison myself and did quite a bit of research on it, and spent a lot of time on forums where former and soon-to-be inmates post on topics just like this, I'll take my research over your assertions. And I'm not saying there is never any prison rape, I'm just saying it is exaggerated. A very low percentage of people in prison are raped, the impression a lot of people have is that it is almost inevitable. That's just not true, and from what you're saying we agree on this, so I don't know why you felt the need to act like I was wrong for saying it is played up, then going on to say it happens to very specific groups in very specific places. So, uh, how is that not played up when everybody always immediately jumps to "Ohhhh! Butt rape!" when they hear "prison"?
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.