After news coverage of a rape case in the small town of Maryville, Mo., exploded last weekend, the town's sheriff—strongly condemned by the family of 14-year-old Daisy Coleman, who says she was raped by the town's star football player—has come forward to deny allegations of a mishandled case.
Anonymous has joined the fray in the Maryville, Missouri, rape case, where 14-year-old Daisy Coleman alleged she was raped by a 17-year-old football player but charges were filed then dropped. They've launched #OpMaryville to bring attention to the case, and things look to be shaping up like the Steubenville story of last year.
Deric Lostutter, the 26-year-old Kentucky rapper who spearheaded Anonymous' campaign to bring attention to the Steubenville rape case, hasn't had an easy time since he was raided by the FBI and came out as the hacktivist KYAnonymous. His longtime girlfriend dumped him this summer, and he was fired from a job at Amazon after they learned of his Anonymous hacktivism. Now, he reveals he's been battling with alcoholism, entering rehab this weekend after a harrowing visit to the ER.
When brought together in real life, people who interact mostly online spend a lot of time glancing sideways, trying to recognize each other from blurry Twitter avatars and Instagram photos. About 80 of those people gathered on Monday night at a fundraiser in midtown Manhattan for Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond, two imprisoned Anonymous hacktivists, and I felt the gaze long before I got the tweet. "@adrianchen IRL… LOL," tweeted @an0nyc, an Anonymous twitter account with over 20,000 followers the proprietor of which, I assumed, was looking at me at that moment.
One night this past December, sitting at his laptop in his bedroom in Winchester, Kentucky, Deric Lostutter donned a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, recently purchased on eBay. He turned on the camera of his souped-up gaming laptop and cued a computerized voice to start speaking.
Lindsay Mills, the 28-year-old pole-dancing acrobat Edward Snowden left to become an internationally-renowned leaker, posted many self-portraits on her (now-shutdown) blog. One is her wearing the hacktivist collective Anonymous' trademark (well, technically, Time Warner's trademark) Guy Fawkes mask.
This past Sunday, a 17-year-old girl in Nova Scotia named Rehtaeh Parsons died after hanging herself two days earlier. Parsons' mother says her daughter committed suicide because she was raped—and subsequently bullied and ostracized—in 2011. No charges were ever brought against her rapists: The police said the case was a matter of "he said, she said," and the pictures taken did not qualify as child pornography.
North Korea's overseers are getting all huffy again, but like for real this time: longwindedly declaring war on South Korea (even though the first one never technically ended), moving missile launchers around, and warning, like an overeager college freshman in extremis: "The moment of explosion is approaching fast."
News that Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys had been indicted for allegedly conspiring with Anonymous shocked his colleagues in online media. Keys has always seemed like a normal guy who constantly tweets news links. But in the wake of his indictment, details about his online past have emerged that make his entanglement with Anonymous seem less out of character.
Beyonce and voodoo have been ruled out as potential culprits in the bizarre 33-minute blackout during last night's Super Bowl. But what about hackers? It took just a few minutes after the lights went out in the Superdome for hackers to begin hinting they had something to do with it. "#TangoDown Superbowl XLVII," tweeted the most popular Twitter account of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. It's an outlandish claim and almost certainly a troll. But it's possible, and here's how it might have happened.
The website belonging to the United States Sentencing Commission is down this morning, following a hack by Anonymous overnight. The site, which normally bears information about sentencing guidelines for federal crimes, instead showed a nearly 10 minute long YouTube video and the same message typed below it.
In 1992, the sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling published The Hacker Crackdown, a riveting nonfiction book about a string of high-profile hacker busts on the early "electronic frontier" of the late '80s and early '90s. The first hacker crackdown shook the early internet to its core and helped mobilize political geeks. Today, we're in the midst of a new crackdown. And with the death this weekend of the legally and emotionally troubled 26-year-old computer genius Aaron Swartz, this one has a body count.
A rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, involving some members of the city's beloved football team has drawn national attention. The Times said that it was a notable case because it was "a sexual assault accusation in the age of social media, when teenagers are capturing much of their lives on their camera phones ... and then posting it on the Web, like a graphic, public diary." There were some images of the crime uploaded to Twitter and Instagram that show the unconscious girl being carried around.
