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An international investigation into cyberactivists who attacked businesses hostile to WikiLeaks is likely to yield arrests of senior members of the group after they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic communications, it is claimed.
Key Anonymous figures are fretting that they will soon face charges, which can bring sentences as long as 10 years, it is claimed.
Officials last month said they had arrested five suspected UK members of Anonymous in the UK while 40 court-authorised searches in the US were carried out, with few details.
Over the weekend Aaron Barr, head of HBGary Federal, said he had discovered the names of its most senior figures.
The group retaliated overnight by breaking into the company's website and hijacking his Twitter account.
Anonymous claims that Barr was planning to give the names to the FBI, which has been helping investigate the group's recent attacks on financial companies.
Mr Barr's Twitter account was filled with a sequence of racial and sexual slurs, along with a string of personal details such as his mobile phone and social security numbers.
Mr Barr's Twitter account was filled with a sequence of racial and sexual slurs, along with a string of personal details such as his mobile phone and social security numbers.
I wonder why so much effort is going into investigating Anonymous, while none seems to be going into investigating the equally criminal DDOS attacks on Wikileaks.
I wonder why so much effort is going into investigating Anonymous, while none seems to be going into investigating the equally criminal DDOS attacks on Wikileaks.
6am, door busted down (NOT KIDDING), "FBI FBI FBI POLICE FBI GET YOUR ARMS UP AND DONT MOVE THEM. WALK DOWNSTAIRS RIGHT NOW. DO NOT MOVE YOUR HANDS." --- TWO *REAL* GUNS POINTED AT ME.
me in 1 cop car, gf in other car.
took 3.5 hrs, all electronic devices taken including 3 computers. said nearly nothing. finally left.
[edited by: frontpage at 1:43 pm (utc) on Feb 8, 2011]
But in Washington, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he has authorized "significant" actions related to a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks.
"National security of the United States has been put at risk," Holder said. "The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way. We are doing everything that we can."
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says the cables detailing private conversations and unflattering assessments of world leaders were stolen and the President is decidedly not pleased.
"It's a serious crime first and foremost," he said.
[edited by: frontpage at 1:33 pm (utc) on Feb 9, 2011]
Leaking information can be a crime, distributing that leaked information is not (or a good many journalists would be in jail).
They are legion. Arresting these kids will only fuel the fire. Who is / are the puppetmaster(s)?
The three firms, Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies, planned to "disrupt" Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald's support of WikiLeaks, create a disinformation campaign to discredit the secrets outlet, sow discord among WikiLeaks volunteers, and use cyber attacks to target the website's infrastructure.
[edited by: frontpage at 2:06 pm (utc) on Feb 10, 2011]
A grand jury will begin looking through mobile phones, computer hard drives, and other items seized by the FBI in connection with Anonymous, the cyber vigilantes accused of launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on companies that had severed ties to WikiLeaks.
According to various reports, the federal grand jury in San Jose, California will examine the evidence on Thursday, February 10.
The items were seized during an FBI raid on January 27, during which five men were arrested in connection with the DDoS attacks on sites that had publicly withdrawn support to WikiLeaks such as Visa, MasterCard, Amazon, and PayPal.
Among the evidence seized by the FBI during multistate raids on Jan. 27 was data taken from an individual who controls one of Anonymous’s primary servers, identified by the organization only by his cyber-handle ‘Owen,’ Brown said.
Agents served a grand jury subpoena on a California man who goes by the screen name ‘Trivette,’ ordering him to appear before the panel tomorrow. It demands all information he has on how the December attacks were organized, including instructions to activists on how to download software that can overwhelm websites by inundating them with thousands of service requests a second.
What is set forth in these proposals for Bank of America quite possibly constitutes serious crimes. Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud. Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion and, depending on the specific means to be used, constitutes other crimes as well. Attacking WikiLeaks' computer infrastructure in an attempt to compromise their sources undoubtedly violates numerous cyber laws.
Anonymous is bad. The other side is worse.
Anonymous committed a crime, but Anonymous is not Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is currently hosted by a Swedish ISP, PRQ, run by the founders of file-sharing search site The Pirate Bay
"The Pirate Party will under no circumstances give in to pressure," Troberg insisted. "If Wikileaks is attacked again, we will immediately offer them both server space and bandwidth."
February 15, 2011 - 6:39AM
The US government's legal hunt for Julian Assange will begin in a magistrates' court in Virginia today when its Attorney General seeks a disclosure order on Twitter to obtain the names, dates and locations of anyone using its services to communicate with WikiLeaks.
A court order was sent to Twitter on December 14 by the US Attorney's Office in Alexandria, Virginia, demanding details about the accounts of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and Private Bradley Manning, the army intelligence analyst suspected of supplying classified information.
The US is trying to build a conspiracy case that Mr Assange solicited leaks.
The other Twitter accounts known to have been targeted are those of the Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp, and the US programmer Jacob Appelbaum. All have worked with WikiLeaks.
Anonymous has leaked another set of emails from security firm HBGary, with revenge the chief motivation.
This time, the hacker group used Swedish website The Pirate Bay as its platform to leak the data in the form of a torrent archive. The 27,606 HBGary emails come from the total 71,802 that Anonymous had at its disposal.
Anonymous added that it will fight against those firms which work against the likes of WikiLeaks.
[edited by: lawman at 8:23 am (utc) on Feb 15, 2011]
Wikileak is hosted at Pirate Bay, Assange and the owners of Pirate Bay, Pirate Party, and Anonymous are all related.
Wikileaks was forced to be hosted by Pirate Bay in the end because of US pressure to other web hosts and their DOS attacks.
PRQ had worked with WikiLeaks since 2008, but always through a Swedish middleman instead of direct contacts.
