Cory Doctorow at 6:17 am • 
• 
Some people using the Anonymous banner have declared religious war on the Westboro Baptist Church, the real-life "God hates fags" trolls who have announced their intention to picket the funerals of the children shot in Sandy Hook. In addition to publishing a list of purported home addresses and phone numbers of alleged Westboro members, the Anons have released a videos that sets out chapter-and-verse citations of Biblical injunctions that Westboro is said to have violated, and promises to punish all of them.
In response to the WBC's plans early today, Anonymous tweeted, "It's so nice of #WBC to provide the internet with a list of their twitter handles..." Roughly one hour later, they revealed their plans for the WBC: "#WBC GodHatesFags Site Admin gets #DOX'd via: Anonymous." DOX, of course, refers to the work Anonymous did to find and publish a list of WBC members complete with e-mails, phone numbers, and even home addresses—all for the adoring public to access.
In addition to the DOXing, Anonymous has repeatedly promoted a whitehouse.org petition to have the WBC recognized legally as a hate-group. The petition was created on Friday and it has already doubled the required 25,000 signatures.
Anonymous sets sights on an old enemy—the Westboro Baptist Church [Nathan Mattise/Ars Technica]
Cole Stryker at 6:00 am • •
Your feelings mean nothing to us. … We have no culture, we have no laws, written or otherwise. … We do not sleep, we do not eat and we do not feel remorse. We will tear you apart from outside and in, we have all the time in the world.—Anonymous
Before the summer of 2011, Anonymous was an amorphous collective of hackers and pranksters born in a meme pool. Its operations were still largely unexpected and isolated; it was difficult for the media to wrap a narrative around them. There was no hero, not even an antihero.
By 2012, all of that had changed. Political aspirations, once mocked, came to represent a growing antiauthority, anticensorship, anti-surveillance sentiment. An Anonymous splinter group, LulzSec, captivated the media with a series of sometimes harmless but always high-profile attacks. And it wasn't the attacks that seemed to generate the most press attention; it was the swaggering Twitter feeds of LulzSec's members. Read the rest
Cory Doctorow at 1:22 pm • •
Quinn Norton reports in depth on Wired with a careful, important account of where Anonymous's actions come from -- how coordinated activity (political, lulzy, legal and illegal) can emerge from noise, randomness, bombast and joking. This is the best description of how decision-making works in decentralized movements, and has important implications for the future of activism, governance, politics, crime and security:
But it’s a mistake to identify Anonymous entirely with these arrestees, some of whom were blackhats and others who were guilty of just using the LOIC. The hacks draw their power from the support of the wider collective, not the other way around. The majority of Anonymous operations are conceived and planned in a chaotic and open fashion. At any given time, a few thousand people are congregating on the Anonymous IRC channels, figuring out for themselves what it means to be an anon. And together they embody whatever Anonymous is going to be that day.
Most of the time, in most of the channels, there’s little more than conversation; sometimes a whole channel will consist of lurkers, with no one contributing a thing. But when some offense to the net is detected, anons will converge on one or more of these “chans,” with hundreds or thousands arriving within hours—many of them new to Anonymous and yet all primed and eager to respond. What looks in one moment like a sad, empty chat room can quickly become the staging ground for a major multipronged assault.
Consider OpBART, which flared up in August 2011 and dealt with an unlikely issue for Anonymous: the messy offline world of race relations and police violence. Ever since 2009, when a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant, protests against abuse of authority by transit police had grown. On August 11, anti-BART activists were planning a rally at several of San Francisco’s underground transit stops to protest another shooting by a BART officer, this one of a homeless man named Charles Hill. It was an unremarkable story by the standards of the national media, but the response from BART to the planned protest did catch the interest of the local press: To thwart protesters from coordinating via mobile devices, BART cut cell service at its downtown stations.
How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down
Cory Doctorow at 11:12 am • •
My latest Guardian column is "Disorganised but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs," a piece about a new kind of group that has been enabled by the Internet -- a group with no formal structure that can still get stuff done, like Occupy and Anonymous.
The things that one person can do define what is "human". The things that transcend the limits of an individual – building a skyscraper, governing a nation, laying a telecommunications network, writing an operating system – are the realm of the super-human.
The most profound social revolutions in human history have arisen whenever a technology comes along that lowers transaction costs. Technologies that makes it cheaper to work together lower the tax on super-human powers.
Language (which allowed for explicit communication), writing (which allowed for record-keeping), literacy (which allowed for communication at a distance and through time) and all the way up to assembly lines, telegraphs, telephones, cryptography (which lowers transaction costs by reducing the amount of energy you have to expend to keep attackers out of your coordination efforts), computers, networks, mobile phones and beyond.
Decreasing transaction costs means that the powerful can do more. If you've already organised a state or criminal enterprise or church with you at the top, it means that you've figured out how to harvest and distribute resources effectively enough to maintain your institutional stability.
Disorganised but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs
Cory Doctorow at 9:36 am • •
A good-tempered rebuke from The Pirate Bay to the Anons who staged a raid on Virgin Media in protest of the ISP's participation in blocking The Pirate Bay for its customers:
Seems like some random Anonymous groups have run a DDOS campaign against Virgin media and some other sites.
We'd like to be clear about our view on this:
We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us.
So don't fight them using their ugly methods. DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.
If you want to help; start a tracker, arrange a manifestation, join or start a pirate party, teach your friends the art of bittorrent, set up a proxy, write your political representatives, develop a new p2p protocol, print some pro piracy posters and decorate your town with, support our promo bay artists or just be a nice person and give your mom a call to tell her you love her.
DDOS and blocks are both forms of censorship.
(via /.)
Cory Doctorow at 1:51 pm • •
Further to the ignoble saga of Anonymosus-OS, an Ubuntu variant targeted as people who want to participate in Anonymous actions: Sean Gallagher has done the legwork to compare the checksums of the packages included in the OS with their canonical versions and has found a long list of files that have been modified. Some of these ("usr/share/gnome/help/tomboy/eu/figures/tomboy-pinup.png: FAILED") are vanishingly unlikely to be malware, while others ("usr/share/ubiquity/apt-setup") are more alarming.
None of this is conclusive proof of malware in the OS, but it is further reason not to trust it -- if you're going to produce this kind of project and modify the packages so that they don't check, you really should document the alterations you've made.
all.md5 > /dev/shm/check.txt
md5sum: WARNING: 143 of 95805 computed checksums did NOT match
anonymous@anonymous:/$ grep -v ': OK$' /dev/shm/check.txt
usr/share/locale-langpack/en_AU/LC_MESSAGES/subversion.mo: FAILED
usr/share/locale-langpack/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/gbrainy.mo: FAILED
usr/share/applications/language-selector.desktop: FAILED
usr/share/locale-langpack/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/file-roller.mo: FAILED
usr/share/locale-langpack/en_CA/LC_MESSAGES/metacity.mo: FAILED
usr/share/locale-langpack/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/jockey.mo: FAILED
usr/share/locale-langpack/en_AU/LC_MESSAGES/lightdm.mo: FAILED
usr/share/doc/libxcb-render0/changelog.Debian.gz: FAILED...
The bad checksums in Anonymous-OS
(Thanks, Sean!)
Cory Doctorow at 11:01 pm • •
On Ars Technica, Sean Gallagher delves into the Anonymosus-OS, an Ubuntu Linux derivative I wrote about yesterday that billed itself as an OS for Anonymous, with a number of security/hacking tools pre-installed. Sean's conclusions is that, contrary to rumor, there's not any malware visible in the package, but there's plenty of dubious "security" tools like the Low Orbit Ion Cannon: "I don't know how much more booby-trapped a tool can get than pointing authorities right back at your IP address as LOIC does without being modified."
As far as I can tell, Sean hasn't compared the package checksums for Anonymosus-OS, which would be an important and easy (though tedious) step for anyone who was worried about the OS hiding malware to take.
Update: Sean's done the checksum comparison and found 143 files that don't match up with the published versions.
Some of the tools are of questionable value, and the attack tools might well be booby-trapped in some way. But I don't know how much more booby-trapped a tool can get than pointing authorities right back at your IP address as LOIC does without being modified.
Most of the stuff in the "Anonymous" menu here is widely available as open source or as Web-based tools—in fact, a number of the tools are just links to websites, such as the MD5 hash cracker MD5Crack Web. But it's clear there are a number of tools here that are in daily use by AnonOps and others, including the encryption tool they've taken to using for passing target information back and forth.
Lame hacker tool or trojan delivery device? Hands on with Anonymous-OS
The
New York Times has a colorful profile piece out on Hector Xavier Monsegur, who agreed to serve as an FBI informant in the LulzSec/Anonymous sting in hopes of reducing possible prison sentence of more than a hundred years.
— Xeni
•
Xeni Jardin at 8:48 am • •
Quinn Norton has an excellent piece over at Wired:Threat Level on the reactions within "Anonymous" to the news that LulzSec frontman "Sabu" (photo above) was collaborating with the FBI. Kim Zetter's take on the arrests and secret plea deals is here.
Xeni Jardin at 9:06 am • •
The Guardian has more on the big hacking news which Fox News broke yesterday (as noted in a post by Rob). "Sabu," the trash-talking, self-appointed leader of LulzSec, has been working for the FBI for the last six months. The FBI says he helped the US and various European governments identify and arrest five alleged LulzSec members charged with participating in defacement, DDOSing, and "doxing" against high-profile government and corporate targets. Sabu (above) is, in now identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur, a 28-year-old unemployed Puerto Rican guy living in New York, and a father of two. He was charged with 12 criminal counts of conspiracy to engage in "computer hacking and other crimes" last year, pled guilty in August, 2011, then "snitched" on his LulzSec friends.
Here's the FBI news release, which notably omits the names of any prosecutors (perhaps for fear of Anonymous attack).
Snip from Guardian story:
His online "hacker" activity continued until very recently, with a tweet sent by him in the last 24 hours saying: "The feds at this moment are scouring our lives without warrants. Without judges approval. This needs to change. Asap."
In a US court document, the FBI's informant – there described as CW – "acting under the direction of the FBI" helped facilitate the publication of what was thought to be an embarrassing leak of conference call between the FBI and the UK's Serious and Organised Crime Agency in February.
Officers from both sides of the Atlantic were heard discussing the progress of various hacking investigations in the call.
A second document shows that Monsegur – styled this time as CW-1 – provided an FBI-owned computer to facilitate the release of 5m emails taken from US security consultancy Stratfor and which are now being published by WikiLeaks. That suggests the FBI may have had an inside track on discussions between Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and Anonymous, another hacking group, about the leaking of thousands of confidential emails and documents.
The indictments mark the most significant strike by law enforcement officials against the amateur hacker groups that have sprung out of Anonymous. These groups, which include LulzSec, have cost businesses millions of pounds and exposed the credit card details and passwords of nearly 1 million people.
Read the rest
Fox News' Jana Winter reports that LulzSec's Sabu was caught and turned by the authorities last June and has been working with them since. Other members of the group were arrested today as a result, she writes; details will be unsealed today in district court. The name given, Hector Xavier Monsegur, would confirm earlier outings and doxings from the same period. Last June saw the group publicly suspend operations, if you'll recall, and suffer its earliest arrests.
— Rob
•
Xeni Jardin at 3:09 pm • •
With help from the international police organization Interpol, Spain and three South American countries today arrested 25 people who are suspected of being Anonymous activist/hacktivist/hackers. They are accused of defacing government and corporate websites.
Reuters:
Spanish police also accused one of four suspects picked up in the cities of Madrid and Malaga of releasing personal data about police officers and bodyguards protecting Spain's royal family and the prime minister.
Other arrests were in Argentina, Chile and Colombia, and 250 items of computer equipment and mobile phones were seized across 15 cities, Interpol said. Colombia's Ministry of Defence and presidential websites as well as Chile's Endesa electricity company were among the targets of the hackers, it said.
And not coincidentally, the Interpol website has been intermittently offline today.
Cory Doctorow at 10:45 am • •
In this YouTube video, someone in Anonymous garb has threatens a massive, embarrassing document dump for Vic Toews, the Canadian MP and Public Safety Minister whose domestic spying bill will require ISPs to log information on Canadians' Internet use and to turn that to police and appointed inspectors over without a warrant (and which immunizes ISPs from liability should they voluntarily turn over even more information, like the contents of email). The Anon demands that Toews retract his legislation.
Toews is a "family values" candidate who has consistently stood on a ticket that opposed gay marriage and espoused other supposedly conservative ideals, and he was publicly embarrassed when an anonymous Twitter user going by @Vikileaks30 tweeted choice quotes from the affidavits in Toews's messy divorce (which was precipitated by an affair with a much younger woman, whom Toews impregnated, and led to what his ex-wife described as an abandonment of his previous family). If there were further embarrassments of this nature in Toews's closet, it might alienate the voters who elected him on the basis of his "sanctity of the family" platform.
"All this legislation does is give your corrupted government more power to control its citizens," a synthesized voice says in one of the videos still posted to the site Monday.
"We know all about you, Mr. Toews, and during Operation White North we will release what we have unless you scrap this bill," it states.
The RCMP has been called in to investigate apparent death threats against Toews as controversy swirls around the legislation. Police said Monday they haven't yet decided whether a full investigation will be launched.
Hacker group Anonymous threatens Vic Toews
Cory Doctorow at 6:52 am • •
Alan Moore, writer of V for Vendetta and enigmatic wizard of comicology, describes the relationship between the Guy Fawkes mask and Anonymous, anti-ACTA protests, and the Occupy movement. Beginning with the Moore-ish phrase, "Without wishing to overstate my case, everything in the observable universe definitely has its origins in Northamptonshire, and the adoption of the V for Vendetta mask as a multipurpose icon by the emerging global protest movements is no exception," Moore goes on to semi-seriously condemn the ugly reality of post-capitalist winner-take-all economics and explain why V for Vendetta has found such fertile soil in this decade.
It also seems that our character's charismatic grin has provided a ready-made identity for these highly motivated protesters, one embodying resonances of anarchy, romance, and theatre that are clearly well-suited to contemporary activism, from Madrid's Indignados to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Neglect
Our present financial ethos no longer even resembles conventional capitalism, which at least implies a brutal Darwinian free-for-all, however one-sided and unfair. Instead, we have a situation where the banks seem to be an untouchable monarchy beyond the reach of governmental restraint, much like the profligate court of Charles I.
Then, a depraved neglect of the poor and the "squeezed middle" led inexorably to an unanticipated reaction in the horrific form of Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War which, as it happens, was bloodily concluded in Northamptonshire.
Today's response to similar oppressions seems to be one that is intelligent, constantly evolving and considerably more humane, and yet our character's borrowed Catholic revolutionary visage and his incongruously Puritan apparel are perhaps a reminder that unjust institutions may always be haunted by volatile 17th century spectres, even if today's uprisings are fuelled more by social networks than by gunpowder.
Viewpoint: V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous
(Thanks, Gawain Lavers!)
Cory Doctorow at 11:34 pm • •
Here's some handy, infringealicious clip art for the discriminating Anon who wants to make a statement without paying a royalty: a Guy Fawkes mask, suitable for urban art, dress-up, and silkscreening.
Guy Fawkes Mask clip art
(Thanks, @crisnoble!)
