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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."
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.
Back in the day we had fun stealing cars for joy rides and doing jewlery store heists. These These days kids have fun attacking computers, much more victim less crime.
I think that Sony would disagree with you there. I doubt that the total value of your stolen cars and jewellery would add up to anywhere near what Sony has lost due to its recent hacks.
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.
I guess there isn't really much to do in the Shetland Islands!
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?
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."
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!
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!
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..."
"It was estimated by internet security expert Dan Kaminsky that XCP was in use on more than 500,000 networks". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal