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.
There are questions among the hacktivist collective Anonymous whether today's planned attack against the New York Stock Exchange's website in support of Occupy Wall Street is an elaborate trick to entrap participants or smear the movement. Whatever! It's still apparently kicking off less than two hours from now.
Hopefully no one plans to leave downtown San Francisco this evening, because the whole area is set to be consumed in an angry four-way rage fest over the BART subway system, a fest that now includes a counterprotest in support of a BART official whose nude photo was leaked by protesters.
One week ago, for the duration of rush hour, officials shut down all four downtown San Francisco BART stations — the heart of the commuter subway system — in response to a small protest by Anonymous. Today, the hacktivists are back. Whether the chaos returns is up to BART.
Anonymous isn't done with San Francisco's BART yet. After a leak of BART passenger data and a real-life protest in retaliation for BART cutting cell service in their stations to squelch protest, Anonymous has leaked what it claims are the email addresses, passwords, and addresses of 102 BART officers. [Photo via Getty]
It's been a busy weekend for the hacking collective known as Anonymous. Their Operation Fullerton may not have panned out, but Project BARTway was a rousing success. (If you measure success in Thousands of Civilians' Personal Information Being Compromised in the Name of Free Speech.) As they had warned, Anonymous has infiltrated Bay Area Rapid Transit System on Sunday, unfurling their pirate flag logo on the homepage of myBART.com — a promotional website — and, more disconcertingly, releasing the personal information of thousands of myBART.com users.
It's not just the London police and Middle East dictators who try to curb unrest by clamping down on communications networks. According to reports, police in San Francisco are jamming cell phones to head off protesters.
The internet is quaking with the news that the hacktivist collective Anonymous plans to "destroy" Facebook on November 5th. We spoke to the Anonymous member who was there at the start of "Operation Facebook," and he told us the whole thing is a misunderstanding that's spiraled crazily out of control.
Hackers have reportedly broken into Norway shooter Anders Behring Breivik's email account and turned the contents over to police in an effort to help their investigation. See, hackers aren't all amoral cybermonsters.
