Weiner has been pushing hard for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself on any decisions involving The Healthcare Reform Act.

And so breitbart figures he can hack into Weiner’s account and distract us from what Weiner is actually saying.

And yet these knuckleheads harass PBS and Frontline.

With all these large corporations wanting control of the internet it only seems to benefit them that they are being hacked so much lately and that it is being covered much more now. It kind of feels like they are getting an excuse to be able to take to the people and government to say “look at how dangerous this is we need control to make it a safe place for us, our customers, and average users.” It makes me feel crazy considering this idea but I can’t ignore it.

“ooo, ooo, they are a non-profit, they can’t possibly deserve it!” yeah right.

UMADBRO?

Thank you for the mention! However, the correct spelling is “Piñeiro” :)

And.. for the journalism experts on the thread, the hacker group is engaged in a campaign of harassment [a time-tested guerrilla tactic applied to this information war] against an organization that certainly identifies itself as “public tv” but all this accomplishes is trivializing what a public organization should be.

PBS is a shameful disgrace. This came up earlier; here’s a link that can serve as a primer for what’s evil about PBS – http://j.mp/ii5g0H

JamesMason

Why is BOING BOING giving them the attention they crave?

Good point…but check the original BB post and look at the number of comments. Sheepishly I must admit that I’m guilty of posting a couple. This is a hot topic. There are many analogies being tossed around in these discussions, but they all have a new spin when you’re applying them to electronic actions that are completely unique to the digital era. I for one am getting a lot to ponder from these threads. Although deep down, I kinda agree with you.

you got something so great to say, learn unix + get busy.

the point is not to spend 8 hours writing the perfect essay to deface the PBS website with. the point is to damage their credibility as an organization (done), do it in a way so as to call attention to the wikileaks story (done) and get people/blogs talking about it (done).

what’s your contribution besides whining on forums?

Frontline:

Frontline had the power to abuse the built up reputation and do a hatchet job on Wikileaks, Assange and Brad Manning. Nothing can stop them from betraying their commitment to their viewers and the previous trustees of Frontlines good name to provide an investigation that is honest, has integrity in favor of doing something less worthy. (Who knows why? More funding? Reporters trying personally to score a gig at the NYTimes, WashPost or the WSJournal or similar? Belief in it being their patriotic duty to lie to the US Public? Why is only of secondary interest.)

Frontline did use this power to betray their stakeholders and did do a hatchet job. A pretty nasty one too.

(This isn’t opinion, this is pretty well established. There are at least a dozen clear bias errors, but you can’t “explain away” them all in one broadcast and pretend the broadcast is trying to be fair. eg. Only wikileaks critics interviewed, no supporters. No analysis of what the correct thing to do is if your govt. asks you to keep crimes, such as murders, secret. Focus on irrelevant sex lives and personalities of those they wish to attack, no focus on sex lives of those doing the attacking. No analysis of the strength or lack of the evidence on which Mr Manning has been imprisoned and tortured for over a year. No analysis of Mr Lamo’s private life, honesty and integrity at all. No analysis of how many and which private contractors had access to the information published by wikileaks and could use it as blackmail material. No analysis of the probability that all the USA’s enemies already had all the information. No analysis of US security procedure. No analysis of the many accusations against wikileaks that have been totally discredited (eg wikileaks murdered US informers in Afghanastan – lies). The list goes on and on – it was only an hour long doco…)

Hackers:

These lulzsec hactivists had the power to make fun of Frontline and treat them like silly internet trolls.

They did this. And it was funny and largely harmless to anyone but frontline’s reputation.

They also had the power to lay waste to the PBS website and do real vandalism to their network and systems and open the users of those systems to multiple abuses. They did not do this.
They just drew a lot of attention to how bad the frontline report was. Nothing more.
All alterations they made to the website are completely obvious. That’s the point. Nobody has been censored.

Frontline abused their power, abused their trustee ship of a formerly good name in US journalism, ignored any morality and did an utter hatchet job.

Hactivists drew attention to the above by making jokes using Hijacked frontline infrastructure.

The custodians of frontline have hijacked it’s good name. The hackers hijacked the infrastructure and pointed this out with the minimum of fuss and impact. Nobody censored. Just a good old smear.

Unlike frontline the hactivists aren’t pretending to be intellectual and moral, while paradoxically actually being more so than frontline.

And I love the frontline producer calling this chilling. Really? Is it so scary out there for you parroting the pro establishment line and getting your website defaced for it? Maybe he should try broadcasting honest content critical of the establishment so he can find out what chilling is really like.

hehe…cockles.

Also, I love Frontline and think that it’s a great program. Who’s side am I on? Meh.