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FBI Arrests LulzSec and Anonymous Hackers
Velcroman1 writes "The FBI arrested two alleged members of the hacking collectives LulzSec and Anonymous on Thursday morning in San Francisco and Phoenix. Search warrants were also being executed in New Jersey, Minnesota and Montana, an FBI official told FoxNews.com. A document purported to come from the FBI leaked online earlier this month called these hacker groups a national security threat. One individual was described as part of the LulzSec group, the other belongs to the group that calls itself Anonymous, the official said. The suspected hacker arrested in California is homeless and alleged to have been involved in the hacking of Santa Cruz County government websites."
Hi Dave!
Tonight we get to hear from our security expert why the FBI website has gone down. More at six.
There is nothing of greater threat to national security than a HOMELESS hacker. Though I guess it is good as any excuse to get such riff-raft off the curbs. Why just the other day I saw this homeless person and immediately thought; you know, that person is probably a real threat to my countries security and needs FBI involvement to justify their jailing.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
How they know the homeless guy did it, yes I know its not impossible for people to get on a computer, but unless the guy had a freaking home office in his box its probably going to be on shared computers
this will be interesting when there is more than a 1 paragraph blurb
It's a good thing the FBI is swatting at these gnats, diverting resources from investigating Chinese hacking, rampant industrial espionage, or the ubiquitous banking fraud. Fantastic work, G-men! You're making us proud.
He got caught because he REGISTERED his username on the internet. This breaks rule #1 of the internet, what's posted cannot be unposted.
I was reading the court indictment wondering if they were somehow able to trace a proxy after the fact of use, which with something like TOR is quite the feat, but no, dude signed up to hidemyass.com, used the SAME user name, and thus will now meet Bubba in prison. Ah, the world of hacking, a mistake, and its your ass.
Yeah, that's part of the hilarity with these lulsec/anonymous kids. They keep picking fights with ginormously powerful entities which would not think twice about tossing them into small cells at the bottom of a deep holes, yet they seem to feel these Death Star Agencies and Corporations will back off due to the punks' mad skillz with internet servers.
In Chicago, they call that "bringing a knife to a gun fight."
I'm not willing to claim they are all "activists." But there is certainly an activist component to what they do.
And at the same time, power hates being stood up to. Stand up to the MafiAA, stand up to the abusive assholes at Sony, stand up to abusive cops who don't like the idea of being caught on video shooting a handcuffed homeless guy in the back, caught beating up a special ed kid, or try to get a 75-year charge on someone for recording them.
So it's not surprising the FBI are engaged in what many will see as an overreaction. Especially when they need to be "seen to be doing something" to look good for their corrupt politician bosses.
These people always seem totally unaware of how law enforcement works - slowly and methodically. You didn't get away just because no-one kicked down your door right away, instead they're out there collecting evidence with which to nail you.
It's PR control by the law enforcement. Arrest a few people here and there and no one really makes a fuss... Arrest hundreds of people at one time and people start questioning what's happening...
If national security can be threatened by Anonymous or Lulz, it seems to me we don't have much in the way of national security.
Dave's not here man.
Or the first rounds of kids they picked up in the UK and US started rolling over on others. Which would be a bit... humorous. We know that many of the ones at the top know each others identities. And it wouldn't be entirely surprising, given that they nailed the important kids first. Ideologies can degrade quickly when you're being held by the authorities and looking at a prison term.
The important take-away here is, Anon is not some leaderless collective of political activists. There is a top, and the remaining bulk are just kids that are occasionally used as DDoS drones. Those few people steer the rest to engage in some truly dumb activities, while they attempt slightly more involved "hacks" in the background, figuring that if anyone is ever caught, it'll be the drones.
Authorities got some of the heads, and now they're taking everyone else down, bit-by-bit. Various pretenders will call themselves "Anon" in the future, but the ones you actually know from headlines are a small group of people, and they're being thoroughly routed. As was predicted.
I'm not happy or sad about it, really. I just think it's obvious that the pretentious image of a leaderless, rogue group of genuinely anonymous people acting to right social wrongs is mostly bogus. It just makes good copy.
No, thats not what homeless means. Homeless means you dont have a permenant residence-- you could be at a shelter, or moving from friend's house to friend's house, or you could be "on the streets", or any number of other possibilities.
Seeing as hackers tend to need internet access, Im guessing its one of the first two.
Probably the French.
Damn Frenchies. I need some Freedom Fries!
No, the point is it is funny. That is it. Anonymous is in it for the lulz. If some of the horde gets taken out nobody really cares.
Also "LulzSec" are actually pretty terrible at hacking. Most of it is really low rent exploits and social engineering which is why it is so amusing how much "damage" they have caused. The only thing that makes them a cut above a thousand other minor hackers is that they are publicising it, which is exactly the best way to piss the corporations off. They don't care that much about the intrusions, just that their customers are finding out how unsafe these "trusted" companies are.
P.S. The real dangerous hackers live in non-extradition countries and have thugs with guns at hand. They aren't scared of the FBI.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
It's PR control by the law enforcement. Arrest a few people here and there and no one really makes a fuss... Arrest hundreds of people at one time and people start questioning what's happening...
Bullshit. Arrest hundreds of people at one time and it's called a "crackdown." The Fibbies have done it before, and they'd do it again in a heartbeat if they knew enough.
And people would applaud it if they did. The Anonymous clowns have done a lousy job of drumming up sympathy for their supposed cause. What they call "protests" come across as stupid childish pranks and vandalism, because nobody took responsibility, nobody stood up for the "cause." (Real sit-ins have people lining up to be arrested and declining bail to fill the jails and make their point.)
Lets add the word 'corrupted' to that "Law Enforcement". Conspiracy charges are typically what is used when there is no real evidence that an individual has actually committed a crime but instead they are going for sounds like, looks like they might have charges. Also police, only police the laws, they absolutely do not enforce the laws (this is the delusion of ignorant crew cut jock thugs in uniform) the courts enforce the laws.
A lot of countries reject conspiracy laws because inevitable 'Law Enforcement' (again read power mad douches in uniform) types routinely conspire to twist evidence and testimony under threat of punishment, to create cases to suit promotions, rather than any real evidence.
Seriously, I mean really seriously, look at the people they have arrested and the pseudo charges used. This is what they call a 'NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT', it hard to tell whether to call it FBI ego bloating or just grovelling to corporate profits and power. Yeah, let's all panic because a few individuals used DDOs to temporarily disrupt access to an internet bill board, let's all pretend that a temporary IP address (used to monitor a minor billing account) is all the evidence you need and of course that testimony under threat of decades of imprisoment means anything (this from a country that legalised physical torture or at least pretended to and, where psychological torture is to be expected and even sickly enough demanded).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Like it or not they are criminals. Everything they have done they broke laws. Its not there jobs to get back at the man,and even in a couple of cases the man went to jail for what he did. They will do there time as well, as they should . Break the law pay the price man up.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Not only do two wrongs make a right, they're one of very few things that can, when the entity committing the initial wrong is not much less powerful than the initial wronged entity.
Stand up to the MafiAA, stand up to the abusive assholes at Sony, stand up to abusive cops who don't like the idea of being caught on video shooting a handcuffed homeless guy in the back, caught beating up a special ed kid, or try to get a 75-year charge on someone for recording them.
No sense of proportion, a culture of victimhood.
The MafiAA, as some like to call it, simply stands between the geek and his free movie fix and the ego boost that comes with sharing files with 15,000 of your closest friends on the P2P nets.
No, two wrongs do not make a right. However, it has been proven, with blackboards full of numbers with squiggly symbols and shit, that 2 wrongs squared, divided by the square root of 1 minus the universal gravitational constant, times the indefinite integral of fuck you, do.
The MafiAA, as some like to call it [...]
They call themselves that, troll: http://mafiaa.org/
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
They are charging him with "causing intentional damage to a protected computer." But since he did it in coordination with others, they can add the "conspiracy to" charge as well.
Conspiracy is also used when people are planning a crime, and there is clear evidence of such, but they haven't yet commited the crime. If you don't like this concept, maybe you'd rather the police sit back and let a group plotting to kill you do it so the prosecutor can get actual murder charges instead of just conspiracy to murder.
Those guys wanted to stick to to the man and buck the system. They knew what they were getting into, or at least they should have. It was well known even back in the 1990s that the Feds and corporate America had zero interest in actually securing their systems. The systems are wide open (more or less), but the punishment for accessing them without permission is draconian. There is a reason I got out of the "computer underground" when I turned 18. I had my mischievous fun when I was a minor and then I saw the writing on the wall when people I knew personally had to deal with the Feds. The Feds do not screw around when it comes to computer crime.
At the end of the day when all is said and done, LulzSec and Anonymous have not really stood up against the real oppressors. They have not taken down the Federal Reserve. They are not going after Wall Street and the various financial entities that really control "the system" that they are so against. Those are real hardened targets. They went after Sony. Really though, what is Sony doing to oppress the people of the world? They run a video game network that people use to decompress and chill out for a little bit. Does Sony have shady business practices? Sure. But the answer to that is to not buy their products. It's not like the Playstation 3 is really the core of SkyNet and PSN is the network that is enabling it to become sentient so that it can rule us all with a digitized iron fist.