lulzsec

18 year old Jake Davis was charged with five offenses under the Computer Misuse Act, the Serious Crime Act and the Criminal Law Act. He was released on bail.

Davis' lawyer admitted that his client was linked to Anonymous, but said that there was no evidence he took part in hacks.

After the court hearing, @AnonymousIRC tweeted: "http://bit.ly/obmiaW | Stay strong, @atopiary. We will continue this, as your last tweet is truth. We, the people, silent no more. #AntiSec", identifying Davis as Topiary. Shortly after his arrest, @atopiary associate @AnonymouSabu had already confirmed Topiary's arrest by tweeting: "RIP Topiary Fuck the police And as for the "doxers" you proved how clueless you ALL were when you posted he was from Sweden over 9000 times."

According to the Guardian, Davis had been arrested at a residential address in Mid Yell, a tiny settlement on Yell, a part of the Shetland Islands, on Wednesday afternoon.

There are two different types of broadband on the Shetland Islands, a BT operated connection available to the residents, which appears to be inadequate, and a system called Pathfinder North that provides some key infrastructure with fast broadband access. In Mid Yell, the junior high school has such a connection. Its website does not mention any public access to these facilities.

UPDATE:

On Wednesday the 27th of July the Metropolitan Police issued a press release stating that an 18 year old man had been arrested at a residential address on the Shetland Islands. The reason for his arrest is described as follows:

"He is believed to be linked to a continuing international investigation into the criminal activity of the so-called "hacktivist" groups Anonymous and LulzSec, and allegedly uses the online nickname "Topiary" which is presented as the spokesperson for the groups."

The release was quickly picked up by the international press, and various news outlets questioned whether the arrested person was indeed Topiary. Some even linked to a webpage containing a photograph and personal details of another person, who had been identified as Topiary by a rival hacker group. [WLCentral is not going to link to this page as it might contain defamatory information.]

The arrest was confirmed by Twitter user AnonymouSabu, an associate of Topiary, a short time later.

At the time of publication, the arrested person has not been charged, and is apparently still kept in custody at a London police station. This unusually long period of detention without charge prompted us to look deeper into the details surrounding his arrest.

From what has been publicly known, the only circumstantial evidence that the arrested person is indeed Topiary is that the last Tweet on the Lulzsec account appeared around the time of the arrest.

The recent news of alleged LulzSec spokesperson Topiary's arrest took the media spotlight away from WikiLeaks supporters' demonstration against PayPal. But it also raises questions about how online laws are applied, and the credibility of those who enforce them.

While doubts remain over whether the police have arrested the right person, Topiary's twitter account has been reduced to a single tweet: "You cannot arrest an idea."

Topiary served as LulzSec's witty media front-man and his clever humour was tempered by a strong sense of justice.

"Laws are to be respected when they're fair, not obeyed without question," he said in a recent interview. "Revolution, to me, is bringing down the big guy while not forgetting to stand up for the little guy."

Topiary's arrest is just the latest in a string of arrests which are set to turn the spotlight back onto the US justice system. Many Anonymous supporters doubt the evidence being used against alleged juvenile hackers, while the WikiLeaks legal case against financial services like Visa, PayPal and Mastercard will generate even more public scrutiny.

A second wave of online protests has been launched againt PayPal, the Internet payment company whose December 2010 blocking of WikiLeaks donations provoked angry Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks on their site. The latest protest, code-named #OpPayPal, was launched by AntiSec hacktivists, headed by Anonymous and Lulzsec, in response to recent FBI arrests of people allegedly involved in the earlier protest.

Statements posted by LulzSec and Anonymous encouraged PayPal users to close their accounts and condemned "the FBI's willingness to arrest and threaten those who are involved in ethical, modern cyber operations." The arrested individuals included a minor whose name could not be released in court, and Mercedes Renee Haefer, a 20 year old journalism student who now faces up to 15 years in prison and a maximum $500K fine.

Haefer's lawyer, Stanley L. Cohen of New York, told the media: "In the 18th century, people stood on street corners handing out pamphlets saying, 'Beware the all-powerful military and big government'. Some people listened. Some people walked away. Today, pamphleteers use the Internet."

The international community was once again surprised by the action of @Lulzsec after the reporter Sean Hoare, the first person to blow the whistle on the News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who was linked to the paper's phone hacking scandal, was found dead in his home Watford, England on Monday. Hoare was an entertainment reporter for News of the World and The Sun media outlets.

Continuing their crusade for transparency and against corruption, The Lulz Boat crew hacked the page of The Sun newspaper, so that it displayed an article announcing the death of Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp, the massive media company that operates in the United States, the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, Australia, Asia and Latin America, and to which The Sun belongs to. Subsequently, the same newspaper page redirected the visitors to the Twitter feed @LulzSec, who gained tens of thousands of new followers in a few hours.

Murdoch, aged 80, has said to have ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning.

Another officer reveals that Murdoch was found slumped over a particulary large garden hedge fashioned into a galloping horse. "His favourite", a butler, Davidson, reports.

As any keen observer must have noticed, the world-wide social turmoil of the last year is closely linked with the availability of information, or in other words, the stark quest for transparency with which corrupt Governments and corporations around the globe have suddenly come face to face with. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently put it in a debate held in London with Julian Assange and Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman : “We may all know that the emperor is naked, but the moment somebody publicly says the emperor is naked: everything changes.

In this massive uncovering Wikileaks’ Cablegate has played a crucial role, not only providing an ongoing stream of secret information to the general public, but by showing that a better society, one working efficiently to reach its true idealistic goals, absolutely needs transparency. In an interview with Forbes Assange used a clear metaphor to illustrate the effects of transparency in a society by comparing them to those that would occur in a market situation: “To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information”, he also added that “WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical”. In other words if a Government is to work efficiently to achieve the goals it was elected for, citizens need clear and accurate reports on their leader’s actions; if they are failing to comply then they will be forced to do so by the general electorate. It is not to be implied, however, that Wikileaks and their sudden irruption in the scene have caused all the unrest directly: the emperor was already naked, they just called it out publicly and on a huge scale.

Following directions in a tweet from @LulzSec Twitter account, Wikileaks World connected to Anonymous IRC server and joined the public channel #AntiSec. The IRC, or Internet Chat Protocol, is the oldest chat protocol on the internet. It is also free. Once there, they recieved the automatic message for the channel's subject: “Got information/leaks?”. The text pointed us to several 'network operators' for the chat-room, marked with an “&” right before their screen-names. We talked with one of them.

After negotiating a moment when both he/she and we were not busy, we started the conversation below between an #AntiSec and WLCentral.

In a pastebin press release, @lulzsec says good bye, thank you, and carry on without us:

Friends around the globe,

We are Lulz Security, and this is our final release, as today marks something meaningful to us. 50 days ago, we set sail with our humble ship on an uneasy and brutal ocean: the Internet. The hate machine, the love machine, the machine powered by many machines. We are all part of it, helping it grow, and helping it grow on us.

For the past 50 days we've been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. All to selflessly entertain others - vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love. The raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy. It's what we all crave, even the seemingly lifeless politicians and emotionless, middle-aged self-titled failures. You are not failures. You have not blown away. You can get what you want and you are worth having it, believe in yourself.

While we are responsible for everything that The Lulz Boat is, we are not tied to this identity permanently. Behind this jolly visage of rainbows and top hats, we are people. People with a preference for music, a preference for food; we have varying taste in clothes and television, we are just like you. Even Hitler and Osama Bin Laden had these unique variations and style, and isn't that interesting to know? The mediocre painter turned supervillain liked cats more than we did.