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Details Of FBI Surveillance In Lulzsec Takedown Emerge

Posted by Unknown on from the just-because-you're-paranoid dept.

uigrad_2000 writes "Yesterday, we learned that one of the top members of LulzSec (Sabu) had been an FBI informant for almost 6 months, and that this confidant of the LulzSec leader 'anarchaos' had given the feds what they needed to take him down. More details have come out now, completing a picture of how the sting took place from start to finish. It turns out that even the server space given from Sabu to anarchaos storing the details of 30,000 credit cards (from the Stratfor hack) had been funded by the FBI."

1 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Traitors by flyingsquid · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    The other issue is that you're not a whistleblower unless the information you reveal actually provides evidence of wrongdoing. Leaking the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, for instance, is clearly whistleblowing and should be protected. But when Manning released gun camera footage of an Apache helicopter gunship slaughtering Iraqi reporters, is that whistleblowing? If you watch that movie the whole way through, it's clear that the reporters were embedded with insurgents (an RPG is clearly visible on one of the men, which is not something a civilian would carry around) and it's a horrific case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time in an active battlefield. Maybe at some level releasing that stuff is good for the public, to give us an idea of the awful costs of war- the reporters and civilians killed, and the helicopter pilots who have to live for the rest of their lives knowing they did that- but it's not evidence of illegal or unethical activity. Much of the remaining stuff released by manning, for example the idea that some diplomats think that Medvedev is "Robin to Putin's Batman" is an interesting insight into the workings of our government, but not really necessary for us to evaluate our government. So how is that whistleblowing?

    I'm all in favor of whistleblowing, the issue I have is that releasing people's private communications, regardless of whether they reveal unethical behaviour or not, isn't really whistleblowing.