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Posts tagged Anonymous
FBI launches probe into Anon’s Federal Reserve hack
03 months ago
Source: http://rt.com
US Federal Reserve Building in Washington, DC (AFP Photo / Karen Bleier)
The FBI has launched an investigation into a recent Anonymous hack of a Federal Reserve database in retaliation for the US harassment of Aaron Swartz, who recently committed suicide. The hackers reportedly obtained 4,000 personal records in the attack.
Jo David Cummins, president and CEO of Illinois’ Community First Bank, said the hack of the US Federal Reserve database, which gave hackers access to his personal information and that of 4,000 other people, “hasn’t been much of a hassle,” as quoted by Reuters. “The information that was on the contact system was the same thing that was on my business card, so it wasn’t like it was anything that could do any harm to me or the bank.”
But the FBI and the Fed, which is a common target of criticism from many affiliated with the hacker collective, aren’t so sure. “We are in the process of a comprehensive assessment to determine what information might have been obtained in this incident.We remain confident that this incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve,” said Fed spokesman Jim Strader.
Anonymous gained access to the Fed’s Emergency Communication System (ECS) in mid-January, circumnavigating password prompts and encryption roadblocks. The Fed had recommended the implementation of a monitoring system to keep tabs on the security of third-party systems, like the ECS, last year.
The attack came as part of Anonymous’ OpLastResort, the collective’s response to the death of Aaron Swartz, who took his own life in January after a long battle with depression. He was preparing to face criminal charges based on a laundry-list of so-called criminal activity the United States government alleged he engaged in. If convicted, Swartz stood to spend 35 years in prison.
Swartz was under investigation for his connection to a dump of data taken from JSTOR, a peer-reviewed article archive. His supporters argue that though much of JSTOR’s content costs money to access, academic research should be free to everyone.
U.S. government site hacked to avenge internet activist
13 months ago
Source: http://www.cbc.ca
The Associated Press
Revenge for prosecution of web activist
Aaron Swartz, seen here in 2008, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday. The Reddit co-founder was facing federal charges for allegedly stealing millions of scientific journals. (Noah Berger/Reuters)
The FBI has launched an investigation after hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an internet activist who committed suicide.
The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”
The hackers say they’ve infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.
Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors.
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, in the wake of the suicide, said she believed the case was conducted “reasonably” and “appropriately.”
Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.
The FBI’s Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, said in a statement that “we were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation. We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person’s or government agency’s network.”
Swartz’s supporters believe Ortiz’s office was overly aggressive in charging Swartz with 13 felonies for tapping into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download nearly five million articles from an online clearinghouse for academic journals.
Swartz’s lawyer, Elliot Peters, said prosecutors were insisting that any plea deal would involve Swartz pleading guilty to all 13 felony charges against him and serving four to six months in prison.
Ortiz has said her prosecutors did not demand that Swartz plead guilty.
© The Associated Press, 2013
###
Republished with permission
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Leaks from UN telecom conference show Orwellian proposals
05 months ago
Source: http://rt.com
Reuters/Vivek Prakash
Leaked documents from a recent International Telecommunications Union meeting have exposed several disturbing examples of potential usages of the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) standard, which was recently adopted by a UN conference in Dubai.
The leaked documents include a full draft recommendation on the ‘Y.2770’ standard for DPI. This technology is used to monitor, filter and manage Internet traffic. It could potentially be used by governments and international telecom companies to easily scan data sent on the Internet.
Though the recommendation specifies only the requirements for DPI in next-generation networks, it also suggests that such standards be applicable to the current generation.
The draft document does not cover the potential impact of the DPI, but recommends that implementers and users of the described capabilities “shall comply with all applicable national and regional laws, regulations and policies.”
DPI will provide functionality to control and inspect Internet traffic – including encrypted and compressed data – in a wide range of possible scenarios.
The paper mentions several such scenarios, including: forwarding copyright-protected audio content, detection of a specific transferred file from a particular user, identifying uploading BitTorrent users and detecting and blocking Peer-to-Peer VoIP telephony.
Critics are calling the DPI standard invasive, expressing concern of its approval, while the ITU itself has been accused of secrecy because it did not allow individual countries to publish their own proposals for changes in the standard.
The World Conference on International Telecommunications this week was held behind closed doors, with even representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter barred from attending.
The conference was briefly disrupted by a suspected hacker attack that forced the WCIT website offline for about two hours.
ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure accused the attackers of hypocrisy, saying that it was ironic that those who claim to be fighting for a free Internet disrupt online access to the event. “Do they believe in one rule for them and another for everybody else?” he said.
Israeli deputy PM’s Facebook, Twitter accounts hacked, filled with pro-Palestine messages
16 months ago
Source: http://rt.com
Silvan Shalom’s official youtube page hacked by ZHC group
The Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube accounts of Israeli Deputy Premier Silvan Shalom have been hacked and filled with pro-Palestine status updates. ZCompanyHackingCrew claimed responsibility for this latest act of cyber war against Israel.
The group also claims to have hacked Shalom’s email and extracted personal mail, contacts and documents. The hackers announced plans to release the documents shortly.
In Shalom’s hijacked Twitter feed, the hacker group posted calls for protest against “unjust war and occupation,” and asked, “Who can bare to see the horror, the deaths of children and innocent people trying to protect their occupied land?”
The full-scale cyber attack on the top Israeli official comes just days after prominent hacker group Anonymous leaked the personal information of 5,000 Israeli officials.
Anonymous also hacked over 700 Israeli websites, including the Bank of Jerusalem, the Israeli Defense Ministry, the IDF blog, the president’s official website and many others, with the majority of the pages still down.
Anonymous leaks personal information of 5,000 Israeli officials
0Source: http://rt.com
(AFP Photo / Hazem Bader)
Internet hacktivist group Anonymous has declared cyberwar on Israel, posting personal data of five thousand Israeli officials online.
The group used their Anonpaste.me site to address a message to the Israeli government before linking to the page with names, ID numbers and personal emails of 5,000 officials.
The message said: “It has come to our attention that the Israeli government has ignored repeated warnings about the abuse of human rights, shutting down the internet in Israel and mistreating its own citizens and those of its neighboring countries.”
(Screenshot from anonpaste.me)
The group also said “Israeli Gov. this is/will turn into a cyberwar.”
Earlier, the group hacked over 700 hundred Israeli websites, including the Bank of Jerusalem, the Israeli Defence Ministry, the IDF blog, the President’s official website and many others.
Most of the sites remain down.
The country’s finance minister has acknowledged the recent wave of attacks, saying the government is now waging a war on a “second front.”
Over the past four days, Israel has “deflected 44 million cyber-attacks on government websites,” Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told AP.
Philippines gags internet with ‘draconian’ cyber crime law
17 months ago
Source: http://rt.com
An office worker browses an on-line pharmacy in Manila.(AFP Photo / Jay Directo)
The Philippines has approved measures to prosecute users that post “defamatory” comments on social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook. They will be liable for a fine of 1 million pesos (US$24,000) or face up to 12 years in prison.
Websites that publish the material may also be shut down.
The cyber-law has been branded as ‘draconian’ and a serious violation of freedom of speech by rights groups.
“The cyber crime law needs to be repealed or replaced,” said Brad Adams, Asia director of the Human Rights Watch. “It violates Filipinos’ rights to free expression and it is wholly incompatible with the Philippine government’s obligations under international law.”
He stressed that while the bill was in action it will have a “chilling effect over the entire Philippines online community.”
The new legislation extends Philippines libel law, which has been previously contested by Human Rights Watch, into cyberspace.
Aside from prosecuting users who post material deemed offensive, the bill grants authorities the power to collate and retain information from people’s Facebook and Twitter profiles, as well as eavesdropping on conversations over Skype.
“Anybody using popular social networks or who publishes online is now at risk of a long prison term should a reader – including government officials – bring a libel charge,” Adams said. “Allegedly libelous speech, online or off-line, should be handled as a private civil matter, not as a crime.”
Trapwire: Big Brother Software Designed for Pre-Crime Surveillance
09 months ago
Source: http://occupycorporatism.com
By Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
The CIA-sponsored psy-op Wikileaks have released emails regarding Stratfor, the private intelligence firm that brought attention to Trapwire . With information provided by Anonymous, a CIA funded hacker group, this surveillance system has been installed across America.
Having been created by a group of American business men, in conjunction with the CIA, use of Trapwire has been justified because of 9/11 attacks, threats from al-Qaeda and further efforts in the war on terrorism. By sacrificing “sensitive or personally identifiable information” the US government has given itself permission to implement a super-spying control grid that encompasses all modes of surveillance in one centralized operational software technology.
We see the surveillance cameras in retail stores across the nation, never suspecting that those devices are being used to track our movements and records or behavior for the benefit of the burgeoning Big Brother control grid.
How Microsoft and Yahoo Are Selling Politicians Access to You
011 months ago
in Politics
Source: http://www.propublica.org
By Lois Beckett
Microsoft and Yahoo are selling political campaigns the ability to target voters online with tailored ads using names, Zip codes and other registration information that users provide when they sign up for free email and other services.
The Web giants provide users no notification that their information is being used for political targeting.
(File photo illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
In one sense, campaigns are doing a more sophisticated version of what they’ve always done through the post office — sending political fliers to selected households. But the Internet allows for more subtle targeting. It relies not on email but on advertisements that surfers may not realize have been customized for them.
Campaigns use voters records to assemble lists of people they’re trying to reach — for instance, “registered Republicans that have made a donation,” Yahoo’s director of sales Andy Cotten told ProPublica. Microsoft and Yahoo help campaigns find these people online and then send them tailored ads.
These messages don’t just pop up in Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. Because Microsoft and Yahoo operate huge networks that provide advertising on some of the most popular web destinations, targeted ads can appear when a voter visits a swath of different sites.
Microsoft and Yahoo said they safeguard the privacy of their users and do not share their users’ personal information directly with the campaigns. Both companies also said they do not see the campaigns’ political data, because the match of voter names and registration data is done by a third company. They say the matching is done to target groups of similar voters, and not named individuals.
According to Microsoft, President Obama’s re-election campaign has recently done this kind of targeting, and both national political parties have done so previously.
The marketing site ClickZ, the Wall Street Journal, Slate and others have previously noted the ability of campaigns to target online ads to specific groups of voters. But what has not been detailed is which companies are now making the targeting possible by providing users’ personal information — and which have decided it’s off-limits.
2012 Smoke Screen
0
Published on May 30, 2012 by Folkvar2012
Freedom informant network – FIN – http://www.freedominfonetwork.org
BROTHERS AND SISTERS UNITE!!!
***Visit channel for more videos***
A powerful production by Tim Watts, the co-host of The Freedom Link radio broadcast on The Orion Talk Radio Network.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
We are anonymous.
Government. Expect us
Why Obama Will Not Veto NDAA Military Detention of Americans: He Requested It.
01 year ago
Source: http://www.opednews.com
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) on Senate floor explaining it was Obama who requested the provision for indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial. Levin is a primary co-sponsor of the bill along with Sen. John McCain, and Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Diane Feinstein recently confirmed that she was unable to excise Section 1031 in an email:
Senator Feinstein Confirms President and Military Can Detain US Citizens Without a Trial
Like you, I oppose these provisions. Section 1031 is problematic because it authorizes the indefinite detention of American citizens without due process. In this democracy, due process is a fundamental right, and it protects us from being locked up by the government without charge. For this reason, I offered an amendment to prohibit the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial or charge. Unfortunately, on December 1, 2011, this amendment failed by a vote of 45-55.
I was, however, able to reach a compromise with the authors of the defense bill to state that no existing law or authorities to detain suspected terrorists are changed by this section of the bill. While I would have preferred to have restricted the government’s ability to detain U.S. citizens without charge, this compromise at least ensures that the bill does not expand the government’s authority in this area.
Senator Levin:
Anonymous’ Message to the American People
Transcript: Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes!
In a stunning move that has civil libertarians stuttering with disbelief, the U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America.
The National Defense Authorization Act is being called the most traitorous act ever witnessed in the Senate, and the language of the bill is cleverly designed to make you think it doesn’t apply to Americans, but toward the end of the bill, it essentially says it can apply to Americans “if we want it to…” FULL TRANSCRIPT AT YOUTUBE
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell
Take action — click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Stop Senate bill allowing military detention of American citizens!
This is a work in progess, a self learning tool and fun little project. Please excuse the slow development as it seems the needed proper time is always lacking. It is my hope that the combination of content and links to other sources of information in this simple blog may help awaken a few of the sleeping masses and encourage and inspire others to initiate their own research, ultimately for each person to be a light to help awaken others. Opinions expressed belong to me, myself and I. Also, a big thank you to all that take the time to visit, it is appreciated :)
