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Anonymous declares religious war on Westboro Baptist Church

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:17:04 +0000

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]

How Anonymous broke its own rules to break free

Cole Stryker — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:00:16 +0000

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.

Up until that point, the lack of a protagonist, or even an official spokesperson, made it difficult for the media to explain even what Anonymous is to an audience that wants to hear of criminal organizations with Al Capone–like masterminds. It also ramps up the risk of embarrassment, since anyone claiming to be Anonymous can say whatever he or she wants about the group's character and motives. If the press runs with it, and it turns out to be a troll, the reporters look infinitely foolish.

With LulzSec members broadcasting a daily salvo of tweets, growing cockier as their list of victims expanded, the media finally found its foothold. These guys on Twitter, some of whom may not have had too much to do with actual hacking operations, gave the press a verifiable source. They could throw a caveat up on every story, saying, "We're not sure if this guy's the real deal, but he's the best we've got," and issue the occasional redaction if their source turned out to be a goof.

Eventually, even my Luddite parents had heard about the group on the nightly news.

In the fall of 2011, Anonymous announced an unofficial partnership with several like-minded organizations, most notably Adbusters magazine, who'd launched a protest called Occupy Wall Street. The call to action was simple, as presented in one YouTube video:

On September 17th, Anonymous will flood into Lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices: We want freedom. This is a nonviolent protest. We do not encourage violence in any way. The abuse and corruption of corporations, banks, and government ends here. Join us. We are anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Wall Street, expect us.

In Lower Manhattan that morning, more than a hundred policemen barricaded off Wall Street's bronze bull. Several hundred people gathered at a nearby square, the heart of the protest. Protestors passed around a megaphone and bellowed progressive talking points—everything from animal rights to immigration reform to an audit of the Federal Reserve.

To my surprise, I saw only a half dozen Guy Fawkes masks, the calling card of Anonymous. But as I walked through the crowds I noticed that a wide semicircle of cameras, microphones, and tired cameramen surrounded each person wearing a mask. Meanwhile, the mass of the protesters were ignored by the media.

Why?

The narrative of Anonymous as mysterious band of elite cyber-terrorists, modern-day Robin Hoods bringing down multinational corporations, plays well on TV. The press has reinforced this perception among the public. Even WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange once sported the mask while demonstrating outside of London's St. Paul's Cathedral. Anonymous' greatest hack is of the press itself, manipulating the media cycle by performing outrageous stunts.

But this doesn't explain why the Anonymous story resonates so strongly with the average news viewer. The rise of Anonymous represents a strange new presence on the world stage. Unshackled by technology, Anonymous seems omnipresent, striking with precision, sometimes to make a political statement, sometimes just for fun. The government and corporate America eyes them with the same fear, disdain and derision that the '60s counterculture received. Just when we think we've figured them out, they morph into something else.

The rise of Anonymous signifies a progression in activism brought about by technology, wherein leaders are not needed and egotists are despised—at least on paper. Members of Anon take pains to avoid the emergence of recognizable figureheads, and, as a result, it has managed to stay alive. Members can wear the mask (real or figurative) today and take it off tomorrow, and they can use it to protest economic disparities in New York or criminal drug cartels in Mexico.

For many, the very idea of anonymity evokes fears of online harassment and identity theft. We know people are entitled to say nasty things about us, but we shake our heads anxiously when, say, a friend's bank accounts is looted by someone who simply got access to her e-mail. We know it could happen to us. If Anon can bring down the CIA's website, what can we possibly do to protect ourselves?

We are experiencing an evolution of human social behavior, but it remains to be seen if the Age of Anonymous will be recollected as an awkward technological adolescence or as the inevitable birth of world where people are free to try on new identities wherever they go. Anonymous is just one manifestation of anonymity, but it represents a global recognition of its value; and a growing unease with the erosion of personal identity ownership.

Anonymous can be whatever you want it to be, and the social power of your idea of "true Anonymous" lies in that idea's viral potential. In fact, the "idea" of Anonymous as a social activist group is just one particularly powerful iteration of this mysterious, ever-changing collective. Before 2007, they weren't in it to achieve social reform—they were in it for the lulz.

Life Ruiners

The term "Trolling" comes from the lexicon of fishing. It refers to dragging a baited hook or lure from a moving boat in order to entice gullible fish. Sometimes anonymous online trolling is harmless, such as when it gleefully manipulates the press into broadcasting phallic imagery (as in a notorious Oprah episode). Other times it tends toward the malicious—one favorite pastime deals with seeking out relatives of deceased teenagers and harassing them via social media.

But trolling has a social purpose: it's a way for members of internet forums to lightheartedly embarrass noobs who'd behave foolishly, bringing them into line. It's a way to defuse flaming—hostile communications; clever trolls remind impassioned users that it's best not to take things too seriously. It's just the Internet, after all.

In 1994, John Seabrook gave an account of his first experience with flaming in the New Yorker:

No one had ever said something like this to me before, and no one could have said this to me before: in any other medium, these words would be, literally, unspeakable. The guy couldn't have said this to me on the phone, because I would have hung up and not answered if the phone rang again, and he couldn't have said it to my face, because I wouldn't have let him finish. If this had happened to me in the street, I could have used my status as a physically large male to threaten the person, but in the on-line world my size didn't matter. ... My flame marked the end of my honeymoon with on-line communication. It made me see clearly that the lack of social barriers is also what is appalling about the net. The same anonymity that allows the twelve-year-old access to the professor allows a pedophile access to the twelve-year-old. The same lack of inhibitions that allows a woman to speak up in on-line meetings allows a man to ask the woman whether she's wearing any underwear. The same safe distance that allows you to unburden yourself of your true feelings allowed this guy to call me a toadying dipshit scumbag. A toadying dipshit scumbag!

 Seabrook's breathless reaction to a random insult is now hilariously quaint, a relic of the time when the Internet was only used by university professors, military researchers and students. The discourse was usually intelligent and congenial. This changed with each passing year: especially the "Eternal September" of '93, when America Online first gave its users free access to Usenet.

Soon, the social corners of the Internet became populated by people outside of traditionally geeky circles. Kids are on the Internet, and so are their moms, tut-tutting at the puerile discourse found there. Some network natives felt that they'd lost something special.

But not everyone was willing to let the web lose its fun, frontier-like character.

A decade after Seabrook's essay, Chris 'moot' Poole--then 15 years old--created 4chan. An image board where users could discuss and share their favorite bits of Japanese pop culture, its /b/ board became a clearinghouse for stomach-turning imagery. Adding to the attraction was 4chan's default anonymity and ephemerality, which encourages users to post content that they might not were even pseudonyms attached. Because 4chan's default name field was "anonymous," the community's users began referring to each other as "Anon." When 4chan trolls would reach out beyond their insular subculture, they began to call themselves "Anonymous," collectively.

Naturally, those with mischievous inclinations found it a fitting home, and it became a game to see how hard one could work over others and outdo one anothers' work.

Anonymous's first known trolls took place in the world of online gaming, where they would bring grief to self-serious players. For instance, on Habbo Hotel, a global social networking site for teenagers, an early iteration of Anonymous called the Patriotic Nigras staged a mock suicide cult. In 2006, the Great Habbo Raid saw hundreds of Anons create an identical avatar that they would use to block entrances, disrupt conversations, and flood chat rooms with nonsense.

Early anons shocked gamers in persistent virtual world Second Life by building an entire town populated by the mutilated corpses of furry avatars. Cries of indignation and complaints to moderators delighted the trolls and only encouraged further shenanigans. Journalist Julian Dibbell quoted a mischievous EVE Online player who crystallized the modus operandi of the modern troll: "The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don't come back."

By 2006, anons wrought havoc off-line as well, using 4chan's boards to mobilize the troops for their raids. A few even called in bomb threats and were subsequently arrested. How-to guides on harassment methods were crafted, drawing from the rich but dubious literary heritage of The Anarchist Cookbook; the "Ruin Life Tactics" doc details some of the most common Web-based pranks, from pizza to personal ads.

A dead simple example:

Report the guy to the police as an anonymous tip for suspicion of selling drugs. Result:
Police harassment
???
Epic win

Usually such calls to action are ignored, but every so often an effort picks up steam.

Such was the case with Parry Aftab, a self-described Internet safety expert and lawyer who was routinely trotted out on Good Morning America and similar morning shows every time a case of cyber-bullying caught the attention of TV producers. In July 2011, her home was swarmed by a SWAT team responding to a call they thought had come from inside her home. The caller told the police he was armed and had two hostages inside Aftab's home. When the police arrived, they shot tear gas inside Aftab's windows, only to find her cat. The prankster had used VoIP technology to mask his identity and remains unknown.

I found myself on the receiving end of some low-level trolling after publishing a portrayal of the group. Though my book was rather kind, the first two Rules of the Internet are (1) Don't talk about /b/, and (2) Don't talk about /b/. By explaining Anonymous to a mainstream audience, I had broken these cherished laws.

The result: thirty pizzas in one night, including a $90 pie with extra of every available topping, and a flood of unwanted magazine subscriptions. Most hilariously, my middle-aged aunt received a rather saucy message from one "Cole Stryker", asking her to meet me for an illicit midnight rendezvous. Vague death threats trickled in.

For the most part I was unfazed: extreme trolls rely heavily on the fear and ignorance of their victims. It's not very fun to antagonize someone who's already aware of the usual tricks, has prepared his friends and family in advance, and has taken measures to shore up his data security. But it's still unsettling that a faceless psychopath was able to obtain my home address within minutes.

"For Great Justice!"

Some Anons, however, use their collective power for good, applying a unique brand of vigilante justice to evildoers. They've used their collaborative sleuthing to expose animal abusers and to identify child pornographers to authorities. Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator segment featured tech-savvy detectives luring pedophiles by posing as children online; Anonymous uses the same tactics, leading to arrests.

In October 2011, Anonymous became aware of a massive child porn ring made up of more than forty websites. They soon launched Operation Darknet to bring expose its operators, 100GB of child porn and the details of 1,569 customers. But that wasn't enough. Tired of waiting around for the police to act on the leak, enterprising Anons created a honeypot to collect data on users—a common trick used by researchers, law enforcement and spammers alike.

In this case, the honeypot was disguised as an update to Tor, the software system that allows internet users to remain anonymous—and therefore popular among those with an eye for illegal material. The product of a twenty-four-hour coding marathon, the ingenious ploy was devised after Anons, hanging out in a chat room used by Tor developers, caught wind of a legitimate Tor update being prepared for release.

Typically, Tor users' traffic is routed through a series of nodes, making it virtually impossible to trace the source of the traffic. But Anonymous's trap sent users through the honeypot, enabling them to log the IP addresses of 190 visitors to the network. Leaked publicly, the addresses led social media profiles and even real names.

The collective had realized it had the power to make lasting social change, something to be proud of rather than random pranks. But even after graduating from indiscriminate attacks against innocent bystanders to acts of Internet vigilantism aimed at abusers and criminals, Anon remained under the radar.

It was only when Anon went political and transcended the boundaries of the Web—and broke its own rules—that the revolution was improvised.

An expanded version of this article can be found in Hacking the Future, Cole's forthcoming book about the nature of anonymity as a social construct

Where Anonymous actions come from

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 20:22:48 +0000

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

Effective and disorganized: a new thing upon this earth

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 18:12:01 +0000

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

Pirate Bay to Anonymous: DDoS is censorship, cut it out

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:36:49 +0000

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 /.)

Anonymosus-OS: the checksums that don't check out

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 20:51:43 +0000

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!)

Preliminary analysis of Anonymosus-OS: lame, but no obvious malware

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 06:01:11 +0000

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

FBI's LulzSec informant Sabu: "Party boy of the projects"

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:08:27 +0000

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.

Anonymous rocked by revelation that top LulzSec hacker was FBI snitch

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:48:37 +0000

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.

LulzSec frontman Sabu was FBI informant, fed Stratfor docs to Wikileaks from an FBI-owned computer

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:06:15 +0000

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.

Report: LulzSec members arrested

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:33:38 +0000

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.

Spain, South America arrest 25 in Anonymous crackdown, with Interpol assist

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 23:09:59 +0000

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.

Anonymous video threatens Canada's domestic spying minister with embarrassing disclosures

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:45:50 +0000

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

Alan Moore explains the Guy Fawkes mask, Occupy, Anonymous and anti-ACTA protests

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:52:29 +0000

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!)

Guy Fawkes mask stencil

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:34:24 +0000

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!)

Anonymous ready to dump 2.6GB of Haditha docs

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:36:55 +0000

A group of Anons are about to dump a torrent 2.6GB of email containing "detailed records, transcripts, testimony, trial evidence, and legal defense donation records" about the Haditha massacre, in which 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed by the USMC.

The announcement states that Anonymous stole 2.6 gigabytes of e-mail belonging to Puckett Faraj, a law firm that represents Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who is accused of leading the group of Marines in Haditha. The Web site of Puckett Faraj is not currently loading, and Gawker is reporting that the site was hacked.
A spokeswoman for Puckett Faraj confirmed that the Web site was down but said that she could not confirm or deny whether the site had been hacked.

Anonymous says it will leak giant cache of Iraq war e-mails

(Image: Guy Fawkes Anonymous face stencil, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from elias_daniel's photostream)

MegaUpload raided, founder arrested; Anonymous launches mass DDoS against entertainment companies and US law enforcement

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:24:17 +0000

New Zealand police, responding from a request from the US government, raided MegaUpload today, arresting founder and CEO Kim ”Dotcom” Schmitz and three "associates." The service, which allowed users to upload files that were too big to email, claimed 150 million users. The entertainment industry alleged that the service was primarily intended to facilitate copyright infringement, since people could use it to illegally share music and movies, but the company claimed that while some users might infringe copyright with MegaUpload, others simply used it to share files that belonged to them. For example, I use a comparable service, YouSendIt, to exchange large MP3 files of my podcast with John Taylor Williams, the sound engineer who masters them. At other times, companies that wanted me to review their movies and music have uploaded them to a file locker and supplied me with the link and password to get them.

In response, a large denial-of-service attack ("OpMegaupload") has been launched against the US Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music and other entertainment and law-enforcement sites, by activists operating under the Anonymous banner.

MegaUpload has been waging an online campaign against Universal Music and US law enforcement and trade representatives, first releasing a video featuring famous artists singing an anthem in praise of MegaUpload, then suing Universal Music over false copyright claims that had the video removed from YouTube.

The Swedish Pirate Party strongly condemns raid against MegaUpload

Conclusion to "Existential Dread" - a history of Anonymous's activities in 2011

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:05:34 +0000

Quinn Norton has completed her triumphant history of Anonymous's actions in 2011 for Wired and this installment is amazing, containing real insight into how the world sees Anon, how Anon sees itself, and how those two mix. I was really taken with the following section, which reminds me a lot of Clay Shirky's idea that the pre-Internet world was one of "select, then publish" but that now we live in the world of "publish, then select":

The Freedom Ops are useful in explaining how Anonymous ops work. At any time on IRC there were ops for any number of countries, not just Middle Eastern ones. There were channels for Britain, Italy, Ireland, the USA, Venezuela, Brazil, and many more, as well as Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and most of the rest of the Middle East. Most of the ops had few participants, so those who were there linked to a press release or video about problems in that country with a bold call to action, but, for long stretches, nothing would happen.
That was OK; that is how Anonymous proposes ideas to itself. This reverses the order that the media was used to. In most of the world, the bold proclamation comes after the decision to act. In Anonymous, hyperbolic manifestos and calls to apocalyptic action show you want to talk about an issue. For many people reporting on Anonymous, it often looked like Anonymous was all bluster and no action.
But that’s the wrong way to look at it. For the lulzy hive mind, bluster can be the point itself. Other times, quieter, less dramatic actions would spring up and fill the channel, only for it to go quiet again when anons had moved on to another action. For the Freedom Ops, lying fallow was no shame, and dormant ops often sparked up in response to news events from the relevant region.

Quinn notes that this installment is "longer than the first two parts [part 1, part 2] put together, and only covers 2011-- a doozy of a year! ...I think 2012 may be an even crazier year with the hive mind."

2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread (Thanks, Quinn!)

(Photo: Quinn Norton)

When Anonymous met politics

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:24:54 +0000

Quinn Norton continues her excellent history of Anonymous for Wired, this time visiting the shift in the movement from pure transgression to political activism, and the way that this played out among Anons themselves:

Anonymous fundamentally produces two things: spectacle and infrastructure hacking. They create scenes the media often can’t resist, but they also tend to be ones that the media isn’t very good at understanding. The rest of the time they create or destroy online infrastructure, much of which never directly gets noticed. Op Payback & Assange combined the two, but were mainly spectacle. None of the attacks disrupted the function of the targeted entities for long, if at all, but that was missed by much of the media, who instead confused people into believing that they wouldn’t be able to use their Visa or MasterCards to buy gas or groceries, thanks to Anonymous.

Anonymous 101 Part Deux: Morals Triumph Over Lulz

Stratfor hacked; clients and credit card numbers exposed

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:47:38 +0000

Intelligence and security research group Stratfor was hacked Saturday, and a a list of clients, personal information and credit card numbers purloined from its servers.

Having exposed the group's customers, the hackers apparently used the card numbers to make donations to the Red Cross and other charities.

The New York Times' Nicole Perlroth writes that the attack was also likely intended to embarrass Stratfor. She ends with a curious quote from Jerry Irvine, a member of the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity task force:

“The scary thing is that no matter what you do, every system has some level of vulnerability,” says Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force. “The more you do from an advanced technical standpoint, the more common things go unnoticed. Getting into a system is really not that difficult.”

Sure, if it's a web server, exposed to the public by design.

But Stratfor didn't just expose a website to the public. It also, apparently, put all this other stuff online, in the clear, for the taking.

It's true that websites are like storefronts, and that it's more or less impossible to stop determined people from blocking or defacing them now and again.

Here, however, it looks like Stratfor left private files in the window display, waiting to be grabbed by the first guy to put a brick through the glass.

Now, I'm not a member of the national IT security planning task force. But I'm pretty sure that putting unencrypted lists of credit card numbers and client details on public-exposed servers isn't quite explained by "no matter what you do, every system has some level of vulnerability."

UPDATE: One Anon claims that the hack was not the work of Anonymous. However, the usual caveats apply: no structure, no official channels, no formal leaders or spokespersons.

Alan Moore talks V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 21:00:45 +0000

The Guardian catches up with Alan Moore, writer of V for Vendetta and noted grumpy, uncompromising debullshitificator, and asks how he feels about the Guy Fawkes mask from his comic becoming a symbol of Anonymous and Occupy protests.

"I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It's peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction..."
Moore first noticed the masks being worn by members of the Anonymous group, "bothering Scientologists halfway down Tottenham Court Road" in 2008. It was a demonstration by the online collective against alleged attempts to censor a YouTube video. "I could see the sense of wearing a mask when you were going up against a notoriously litigious outfit like the Church of Scientology."
But with the mask's growing popularity, Moore has come to see its appeal as about something more than identity-shielding. "It turns protests into performances. The mask is very operatic; it creates a sense of romance and drama. I mean, protesting, protest marches, they can be very demanding, very gruelling. They can be quite dismal. They're things that have to be done, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're tremendously enjoyable – whereas actually, they should be..."
"I find it comical, watching Time Warner try to walk this precarious tightrope." Through contacts in the comics industry, he explains, he has heard that boosted sales of the masks have become a troubling issue for the company. "It's a bit embarrassing to be a corporation that seems to be profiting from an anti-corporate protest. It's not really anything that they want to be associated with. And yet they really don't like turning down money – it goes against all of their instincts." Moore chuckles. "I find it more funny than irksome."

Alan Moore – meet the man behind the protest mask

(Image: Anonymous at Scientology in Los Angeles, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from sklathill's photostream)

Anonymous Finland: 10% of Finnish email accounts nationwide compromised

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:23:20 +0000

"Anonymous Finland" claims it has compromised the email logins and passwords of 500,000 Finns -- about ten percent of the country's population.

Among the hacked emails are allegedly accounts belonging to journalists at Finland's mainstream daily Helsingin Sanomat, members of the Finnish parliament, police officials, Helsinki city councillors and students and faculties at several of the country's universities.
The hackers said they had taken advantage of security loopholes in company computer systems storing email addresses and passwords.
Anonymous Finland has also launched a campaign against the rightwing extremist Finnish Resistance Movement, leaking a list of its membership applications on October 31.
And on Monday, the group announced it was launching a series of cyber attacks against Finnish mining company Talvivaara, alleging its mining activities in Sotkamo in eastern Finland are conducted to "the detriment of the local natural environment and people of the communities".

Finland facing large-scale hacking attacks: police

Guy Fawkes OWS bandanas

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:31:28 +0000

Matthew Borgatti is taking pre-orders for this saucy OWS Guy Fawkes bandanna, which has many useful features:

Fold this bandana in half to transform into the famous fawksy provocateur from the comic pages. It's perfect for protecting yourself from sudden dust storms and outbreaks of authoritarianism. Keep your neck warm during those cold sit-ins. Use it as an impromptu rucksack to cart your gear from Zuccotti Park when the cleaners come. Cut eye holes to wear as a full face mask for added anonymity. Flag Fawkes. This is the hanky code for revolution.
*For every bandana ordered one will be sent to one of the Occupy branches worldwide. Double your effect and increase the anonymity!*

OWS Bandanna (via JWZ)

Anonymous vs. Zetas: is #OpCartel a flop, hoax, or honeypot?

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:28:13 +0000

[Video Link] Over the last few days, word has spread of a purported #antisec operation by Anonymous against the most brutal of all Mexican drug cartels, Los Zetas. One element in the story is this video, above. Weeks after it came out, George Friedman's Austin Texas-based consulting firm Stratfor issued this report, and media gobbled it up. A story was born: "Anonymous is taking on the most feared drug cartel in the world, for great justice."

What was unusual about the way this story spread was the speed at which it was amplified by credulous reports from larger media outlets, despite a dearth of confirmable facts. This op got lots of press, fast. Faster, in fact, than it got support from Anons.

Geraldine Juarez and Renata Avila were two of the earlier voices I read expressing doubt about the prevailing storyline—a report by Juarez is here. Some I spoke to within Mexico wondered if the Mexican government (no bastion of purity) might be involved.

Over at Wired News, a must-read piece by Quinn Norton that cinches the deal for me (and in it, she references the aforementioned Global Voices item). Quinn's been covering Anonymous extensively for some time, and I trust her spidey sense on this one.

"Everyone, Anonymous and not, seems to agree that going after the Zetas, who are known for hanging people by their own intestines, would be a new level of ambitious, and might even be the point where Anonymous would bite off more than they could chew," Quinn writes. "But there’s some nagging problems with the video that proposes the op."

Read the rest at Wired.

Charles Arthur at the Guardian covers the story here, asking smart questions.

Is it possible that the kidnapping was a hoax? And was the video a hoax? It doesn't feel consistent with previous, legitimate "Anonymous" videos to me. White balancing? Good lighting? An all-white backdrop? Looks like a hired actor in a quasi-pro production. What other forces could stand to benefit from this sort of thing, if it were staged? State? Private contractor?

As Damien Cave replied to this post just now, "Boing Boing is right to doubt #opcartel, but remember the Mexican context of fear. If it doesn't happen, it may not be a hoax. It may be that people have been scared off."

And that's the one thing Anonymous and the cartels have in common: the truth about their activities can be really hard to figure out.

Nuanced view of the once and future Anonymous

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:00:21 +0000

Biella Coleman and Michael Ralph write a long, nuanced rebuttal of Joseph Menn's recent FT article on Anonymous. Coleman, an academic who has done some fabulous work studying hackers, Anonymous and other 21st century anthropological phenomena, is the person I trust most to produce clear accounts of Anon, 4chan, and related subjects.

These hacks may also, as Menn notes, have unintended and far reaching consequences for all of us. As Menn notes, "Even some supporters worry that if the group continues on its current path, it could trigger a legislative backlash that would bring heightened monitoring at the expense of the privacy that Anonymous prizes." Still, it is crucial that we consider the broader historical perspective. This sort of "legislative backlash" has been in the works at least since 2001, with the Patriot Act, spurred by the terrorist attacks against the Twin Towers. And since that time, there have been many attempts to legislate acts that curtail privacy in the stipulated attempt to make the nation more secure. These legal developments have clearly not simply been instituted in the last year in response to hacks. No doubt, the hacking actions of Anonymous can be used to move legislative proposals into law more rapidly, but portrayals of nefarious hacker criminals also inflames fears about privacy that are long on emotion and short on substance.
Anon hackers are "criminals" in so far as any hacker has inevitably broken a host of laws; some individuals involved may also have a criminal history. And yet most hackers either implicitly or explicitly have critiques of the laws they are willing to transgress. Thus, the analyst must provide some account of the way that a given law can be conceived as either fulfilling or failing to fulfill the dual investment in freedom and security that defines life in the US polity at any given juncture and why hackers seek to trouble this distinction.
To make matters even more complicated, the work of some of the hackers in Anonymous includes modes of duplicity that some Anons self-consciously deploy; in transgressive hacker circles, these tactics include social engineering: the practice of duping humans for the purposes of gaining information or for spreading misinformation. Used by Anons, to various degrees, offensively and defensively, these forms of subterfuge raise a host of important questions about how to research, represent, and grapple with the significance of the politics of hacking, especially where a clandestine operation like Anonymous is concerned.

(Thanks, Biella!)

(Image: Anonymous Declaration of IndepenDance. Wallpaper (3923x4656), a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from thinkanonymous's photostream)

Is it a Crime? The Transgressive Politics of Hacking in Anonymous [socialtextjournal.org]

Mandatory "agreement" for Playstation Network users waives your right to class actions over future hacks

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:26:40 +0000

The next time you log into your Sony Playstation Network account, the company is going to ask you to click through a EULA whereby you promise not to sue them in a class action if they get hacked again, even if they're negligent, and even if you get screwed over as a result. If you don't agree, no more PSN for you. (Thanks, @sickkid1972!)

Court orders Non-anonymous possible Anonymous to stop using real name

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 21:03:24 +0000

It's the headline of the zeitgeisty moment: "A guy accused of being Anonymous, but who used his real name online, can now no longer use his real name... because he may have been a part of Anonymous." The law, she is a strange and capricious mistress. (Thanks, Sulka!)

Syrian ministry hacked

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:12:54 +0000

The website of Syria's Ministry of Defense, now down, briefly displayed this message today:

To the Syrian people: The world stands with you against the brutal regime of Bashar Al-Assad. Know that time and history are on your side – tyrants use violence because they have nothing else, and the more violent they are, the more fragile they become. We salute your determination to be non-violent in the face of the regime’s brutality, and admire your willingness to pursue justice, not mere revenge. All tyrants will fall, and thanks to your bravery Bashar Al-Assad is next.
To the Syrian military: You are responsible for protecting the Syrian people, and anyone who orders you to kill women, children, and the elderly deserves to be tried for treason. No outside enemy could do as much damage to Syria as Bashar Al-Assad has done. Defend your country – rise up against the regime! – Anonymous