What’s the alternative? Let the group hack whatever they want and do nothing?

And there you have it kids.

Don’t try to play “hacker” if you don’t know what you are doing and who you are messing with.

Where is the “Sad but True” button?

You mean Congress?

“Law enforcement keeps claiming that these arrests will frighten off others, but that shows a typical lack of understanding of what’s going on. As counterproductive as these activities are, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t about criminal activity for the sake of criminal activity, but about dissatisfaction with what’s going on in the world — and, as such, the arrests are actually only likely to create more such activity, which is the exact opposite of what law enforcement should be seeking to do.”

That’s probably the most accurate statement I’ve read on Luiz, anony, and others – sorta like touting P2P created more people using it and it wasn’t about the money. It was about misunderstanding what consumers wanted and control of media. This is about control of the internet and unfortunatley that is what they least want to hear – so the end result is this amounts to advertising vs. deterant.

I suspect we’ll see an uptick in sophistication of attacks and targets. This movement is hardly mature, but has just begun. They do not represent my voice, or yours – but they do seem to represent the voice of a lot of internet kids just discovering their potentional.

In that way, it’s kind of exciting to watch this develop. More power to the masses and otherwise voiceless type thing.

Are you advocating that the FBI pick and choose which laws to enforce?

Of course they should: law enforcement agencies do exactly that all day, every day.

Personally, I think they should start with “murder”: rather than busting a bunch of boy hackers whose most serious offense was causing some embarrassment, they should track down the killers responsible for 6,000 unsolved murders per year in the US. That’s MUCH harder, of course, and it won’t readily generate flashy self-aggrandizing headlines, but it would be a vastly better use of taxpayer dollars. (Do recall that all FBI staff are public SERVANTS.)

I was thinking Chris Dodd myself.

The next group will not be so careless. They will organize themselves in a way not so susceptible to mass compromise. (Resistance fighters have long known these principles.) They’ll be more careful who they talk to. They’ll use different tools from different locations. And so on.

Process repeats.

There’s nothing new about this: spammers/phishers long ago separated into two groups: those dumb enough to get caught, and those sophisticated enough to evade multinational investigations for years. The latter are still doing quite well, while the former still turn up here and there. (And it wouldn’t surprise me if some of those cases weren’t inside jobs, e.g., attempts to give the wheel of law enforcement some grist to grind.)

It would have been better to recognize that the actions of LulzSec et.al. are not the problem. They’re just symptoms of the problem, and until the problem is directly addressed, the symptoms will continue.

Same difference.

Lulzsec is not anon. Everyone already knew lulzsec was a small group of people working together and not a flat collective like anon. Everyone but you apparently.

Yes they were a subset of anon, which proves the opposite of your point.

According to charging documents (p.9):

Stratfor maintained a website, http://www.stratfor.com,... As part of the registration process, Stratfor collected and stored on its computer systems in Austin, Texas information from each of its clients. This information included one or more of the following: … credit card number, and associated CVV[footnote 1] and credit card expiration date. Stratfor stored its clients’ passwords in an encrypted form called an “MD5 hash,” but stored other client information, including credit card numbers and associated data, in clear text.

[Footnote 1]A card verification value (“CVV”) is generally a three-digit code that typically appears on the reverse side of credit cards. An anti-fraud meausre, CVVs are often used for online transactions to verify that the credit card user is in poessession of a valid credit card at the time of the transaction.

(Emphasis added.)

Storing CVVs is a big no-no. Bad Stratfor. They ought to get their merchant account yanked over this.

What’s the alternative? Let the group hack whatever they want and do nothing?

Apparently here in apologist land that is precisely the answer.

Gitmo.

I believe that is what the NSA is for.

” but, by now you’re used to that, right?”

First Mike, didn’t your parents tell you that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all? If you want to be insulting, keep it for your dog.

” Don’t confuse Lulzsec with anonymous.”

Oh god, are you dense? Lulzsec is effectively a subset of the anonymous leaders, people who sort of branched out on their own in some cases, likely to take more credit for their own hacks rather than letting the kids getting all the credit. Sabu was clearly a key player in both groups, and the people getting arrested and getting the “knock on the door” today are from both.

There is no “confusion”. Subset. Perhaps you want to look that up in the dictionary.

Nah, it proves the point even more.

Anon is a “flat collective” like Cuba is a democracy. Yes, the people get to vote, but there is no real democracy.

Anon in reality is a bunch of different things, with a large main group that appears to be mostly run by a few poeple, and then various spliters, lone wolves, and people who feel empowered to call themselves anonymous as run pre-made scripts to break into out of date wordpress sites. All that so they can post a mindless “Tango Down” message on twitter, and usually the sites they hack are down less time than it takes them to type the message.

What these arrests (and some of the stuff coming out about them) suggests is that Anonymous “the main group” is actually fairly small, with tons and tons of kiddie soldiers willing to do their dirty work.

The biggest mistake you can make is confusing the kids acting like it’s a flat collective taking action with those who are actually trying to drive a movement from the top down.

Today, anonymous is in a state of confusion. Don’t be surprised if you see a bunch of “anonymous” attacks in the next little while, as the frustrated kids run their scripts and try to act big. But the key players, the real shot callers… they are the ones sitting in small rooms answering questions over and over again today – or hiding out and hoping like hell that they aren’t next.

“Aren’t these the same people who thought that killing Bin Laden would stop Al Qaeda? Hows that working for ya?”

Actually, it’s working out pretty well. AQ is now very disorganized, with various lower level players all trying to act like they are running the group, as not only was Bin Laden taken out, but so were many of his key underlings over the same 12 month period.

“This isn’t a crime ring, this doesn’t fit your precious precious model of how things are supposed to work.”

Yes, it’s a crime ring. They don’t have to be strictly organized and regimented to quality. It’s a group of people with the same goals, to perpetrate illegal acts, to hack systems, and to cause problems for companies that oppose their points of view.

It’s clear from every news story I am seeing today (and there are plenty) that anonymous was much more structured than anyone wants to admit, and a whole lot of the key players in the game are signed up for training on how not to drop the soap. 16 people so far today from what I can see, plus some at least 4 or 5 overseas nationals charged directly in the US and face extradition.

CNN even quotes “Barrett Brown, who identifies as an Anonymous spokesman” – again, why would a flat, loose group have a spokesman, or have anyone who feels they are a spokesman? That seems to be another indication of what is really going on.

“FBI stacks 124 yrs against someone living in public housing caring for 2 small children.”

You don’t want to do the time? Don’t do the crime. Plain and simple, when it came down to it, saving his ass was way more important than saving his “friends”. Stop making it look like this guy didn’t do anything wrong.

Exactly you can’t wage war on drugs. Its a war on citizens. Criminalize and institutionalise

“”AQ is now very disorganized,”
[CITATION NEEDED]

Because if this were true would we be having our private parts fondled by TSA workers to keep us “safe”?”

Sorry, you are making a logical leap which is not supported by the evidence.

That AQ is disorganized, with massive in-fighting between factions, with all sorts of people claiming leadership roles, and so on. However, that doesn’t make the individual players less dangerous. Most of what AQ has done in the last few years (since Bin Ladin became Been Hiding) has been lone wolf and small scale operations, mostly started and done at lower levels, and with little in the way of success. Where as there use to be a pretty clear top down command structure, it’s now an army of worker ants with no particular goals, and little in the way of leadership.

It doesn’t make them less dangerous, if anything it makes it more likely that a single person or small group may try something that the leadership would not have approved of in the past. During this time, it’s actually still very likely that we see more attacks.

The difference is time – over time, the power of AQ to recruit new members, to hold sway over the population is lost, and they become a less acceptable choice.

Nothing happens in a day, and that is why you can still enjoy having someone fondle your junk when you on a plane.