Zhiwei (Jack) Chen's belongings were seized at a Georgia Institute of Technology dorm on Thursday Jan 27 on the basis of an FBI search warrant also issued to dozens of other individuals who remain unnamed. The FBI stated that these warrants were issued in connection with an ongoing investigation into cyber-attacks on "major companies and organizations." Wikileaks was not named but the elusive 'Anonymous group' was. The FBI writes in its press release:
A group calling itself “Anonymous” has claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they conducted them in protest of the companies’ and organizations’ actions.
Chen is likely thought to be associated in some way with this 'group' of activists because he operated a chat room in which "Payback" topics were discussed. Tragically, however, the legal relevance of holding an online chat with an individual who claims to be "a member of" Anonymous has yet to be articulated. Here are some crucial considerations that must be addressed in any context in which "membership" in the "group" is alleged, for purposes of legal action.
Now that Mubarak is trying to pull the plug on the Internet in Egypt, the hacker activist group Anonymous is going Old-School, dusting off the old fax machines and using them to agitate for change in Egypt.
According to the website Fast Company:
Members of the group are organizing to fax copies of the Egypt-related cables that WikiLeaks released today to schools in Egypt. The hope apparently is that if they can get the faxes into the hands of students, students will distribute them to other protesters. A source told Forbes the goal was to warn them that the police could not be trusted. The WikiLeaks cables, which describe human rights abuses and political arrests, "are just more proof of that," the source said.
In another trip down memory lane in the area of communications technology, some activists in Egypt are digging their modems out of storage as Anonymous plans how to spread the word about a French ISP that is setting up free dial-up Internet access for people in Egypt.
Anonymous has started Operation Egypt, issued this statement and setup this Facebook page.
The FBI announced on Thursday that it has executed over 40 search warrants in the United States today against individuals who are thought to have participated in cyber attacks against "major companies and organizations" who cut off sources of funding to WikiLeaks. The FBI states in its press release:
A group calling itself “Anonymous” has claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they conducted them in protest of the companies’ and organizations’ actions. The attacks were facilitated by the software tools the group makes available for free download on the Internet. The victims included major U.S. companies across several industries.
The press release coincides with events also unfolding in France and UK.
Paris police also announced on Thursday that a French teenager suspected of involvement in the DDoS attacks in the United States was taken into custody for a few hours last December.
On 27th of January 2011 at 15:00, the Pirate Party UK issued a press release in regards to the recent five arrests of Anonymous members. Amongst other points made in the Press releasethis underlining point was made:
While the Party will never condone any illegal actions, it can understand the frustration felt by many who feel powerless in the face of multinational corporations and Governments unwilling to step in.
That normal, everyday people choose to take these sorts of actions shows the extent to which many people feel disenfranchised by mainstream politics and the Pirate Party aims to give such people a voice and a means to engage in these issues through lawful and political methods rather than resorting to 'hacktivism' and other actions that could be illegal.
Further, the Piratenpartei has filed a petition with the Deutscher Bundestag which, in part states:
Protection of whistle blowers. (Translated in Part)
Recently a Facebook friend featured an unfamiliar flag as his profile picture; a red crescent held in a vivid red background. Then, alternative news headlines emerged about major turmoil in the country of Tunisia. Next thing I knew, my friend was participating in the civil unrest that broke out there. Through the window opened by social media, I began to feel the outrage and intensity experienced by many people on the other side of the world. A quote from the film V for Vendetta came to me; “Remember, remember the fifth of November; the gunpowder, treason, and plot!” The surreal reports and rapidly changing scenery reported by my friend somewhat blurred the line between reality and fiction.
The Wachowski brothers’ 1999-2003 film series, The Matrix gained worldwide popularity and since its release has been very influential. It is not simply a film, but has become a cultural phenomenon. In past ages, it was philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Immanuel Kant that engaged youth with deep questions and the search for meaning in their lives. Yet Neo’s conundrum “What is real?” has become the question of our age.
In an odd turn of events, the Irish opposition party, Fine Gael, claims on its website that the site was hacked on the evening of January 9th by "a group calling itself the Anonymous group."
The statement goes on to link Anonymous to Wikileaks, in a move possibly betraying a lack of understanding of Anonymous. The statement follows.
From: Fine Gael Website
THE FINE GAEL WEBSITE WAS PROFESSIONALLY HACKED ON THE EVENING OF JANUARY 9TH BY AN ENTITY CALLING THEMSELVES THE ANONYMOUS GROUP.
THE ANONYMOUS GROUP HAS BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH THE WIKILEAKS INVESTIGATION AND ATTACKS ON COMPANIES SUCH AS VISA, MASTERCARD, AND AMAZON.
THE WEBSITE WILL BE OFFLINE WHILE WE FOLLOW-UP WITH THE APPROPRIATE AUTHORITIES TO RESOLVE THE MATTER.
WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT FOR FINE GAEL. IF YOU HAVE ANY FEEDBACK PLEASE TO SEND IT TO EMMA@FINEGAEL2011.COM
Why Fine Gael might have been targeted by Anonymous is as yet a mystery. Anonymous has reportedly been engaging in recent actions against government and private websites, but these actions are reported as having been DDOS attacks, which do not appropriately fall under the banner of "hacking." There is also little apparent reason in recent news why Anonymous would target an Irish political party.
A screengrab of the website is attached to this post.
Updates will be posted as they come.
Update 1
RTÉ News has posted a statement by Fine Gael elaborating on the above information.
Unless the sources of the DDoS attacks being carried out by Anonymous are identified and stopped, there seems to be no end in sight for their deluge of operations. These 'AnonOps' are presented as global outreach operations of sorts, aimed at assisting individuals and organizations subjected to persecution by governments and other institutions aiming to silence free expression and dissent.
The Tunisian people are perceived by Anonymous to be in need of global support and the same can be said of Wikileaks. In particular, the consensus seems to be that governments and other powerful bodies have chosen to pursue Julian Assange and his collaborators for having exposed crimes committed by those same institutions. As Assange has often pointed out himself, it is a disturbing fact about the current situation that upon learning about the horrendous crimes exposed through the leaks, the first impulse has not been to pursue the culprits, but instead to punish individuals who acted on conscience to make those crimes known.
Whether the Anonymous group can succeed in its attempts to raise awareness of these issues and to discourage censorship hangs on the question of whether its members can be stopped. How likely is it that Anonymous members will be identified prosecuted?
As of yesterday, the following 7 Tunisian sites appeared to be down. They remain nonoperational at this time.
The following 2 sites have been down for longer than 24 hours:
In addition to these, the following sites are also down today:
It is likely that the DDoS attacks are being continually carried out on sites that have managed to regain temporary functionality. To verify whether a site is only inaccessible in your own area or more generally, you may enter the site URL here.
If you thought the The Anonymous Group had hung their suits for the night, think again. The following is a list of additional Tunisian government and financial sites that have been rendered nonoperational; at the time of this publication, each is still down:
www.bmvt.com.tn - Tunisian Stock Exchange
www.sicad.gov.tn - Tunisian Foreign Relations
www.industrie.gov.tn - The Ministry of Industry
www.commerce.gov.tn - Tunisian Government Commerce
www.carthage.tn - The Carthage Palace: Presidency of The Republic of Tunisia
benali.tn - Presidential Elections Site
www.ministeres.tn - Tunisian government site listing various ministries
Expressed motivations for these attacks, as well as yesterday's DDoS attack updates, can be found here.
Anonymous hacktivists have been busy today carrying out attacks on the Tunisian government site located here (IP address: 193.95.68.223). The site is still down as of the publication of this update, and has been down for several hours.
According to IRC chats with various Anonymous members who appear to be well-informed regarding current events in Tunisia, the motivations for the attacks are numerous, ranging from Tunisia's general and long-standing affinity to Internet censorship, to recent riots in Sidi Bouzid and surrounding towns being covered by various media sources.
Another relatively recent act of censorship that seems to have served as the basis for the present call to arms is the Tunisian government's decision to censor online access to Wikileaks and other whistleblowing sites (like TuniLeaks) that make reference to Tunisia or contain certain keywords that might suggest reference to Tunisia.
The Anonymous group, while diverse, intractable and virtually indefinable in terms of a steady membership class, is nevertheless united in its ideals pertaining to freedom of expression and a collective distaste for censorship, inspiring this most recent declaration:
The Tunisian government wants to control the present with falsehoods and misinformation in order to impose the future by keeping the truth hidden from its citizens. We will not remain silent while this happens. - Anonymous
There have been rumors of possible imminent attacks on 3 further Tunisian sites but they do not appear to be in progress at this time.
Read more here and here. For those who are unable to access media sources due to censorship in their own area, this screenshot may be accessible as an alternative (c/o @AnonymousIRC via Twitter).
Update 2 :
The following sites have also been taken down: www.marchespublics.gov.tn and www.pm.gov.tn. As of 9:05 Eastern Standard Time, the former site displayed this message. This is the welcome page for Mohamed Ghannouchi, the Tunisian Prime Minister. A cached version of the page can be viewed here.
Go to the third update, containing a more exhaustive list of sites taken down.
Allegations and Investigation
On Dec. 16, the FBI raided a Texas server-hosting company in hopes of finding evidence to advance an investigation into the hactivist groups engaged in various attacks against Wikileaks-unfriendly institutions and individuals.
The investigation seems to have been set in motion as a direct result of PayPal's actions; PayPal is said to have supplied the FBI with various IP addresses hosting an IRC chat for current and prospective hacktivists. At least one hard drive was seized.
The rise of WikiLeaks and the heat of the response from the US political leadership brought worldwide attention to a little known underground population that calls themselves Anonymous. Some think of it as an organization with certain identifiable members but as Sam, a member of the #WikiLeaks Forums pointed out, this is misunderstanding the nature of this open source action group. In anticipation of the Bank of America DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that was planned by a section of Anonymous, some pundits were assuming that this was the same organization as Operation Payback, the Pay Pal/Amazon DDoS group.
Shortly after Bank of America decided to halt the processing of Wikileaks-related transactions, it became the newest target for the anonymous group who set into motion Operation Payback, a hacktivist movement aiming to "raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by ... companies to impair WikiLeaks' ability to function." (Press release in pdf format)
On Monday, Bank of America's web site suffered sporadic downtimes, apparently as a result of DDoS attacks--the same kind of attacks that also plagued Visa, Master Card and Paypal, each of which also recently halted its financial services to Wikileaks.
Raw Story was able to confirm, via two third party website verification services, [Bank of America's] site difficulties on Monday (with screenshots here and here).
Greg Mitchell, who pens The Nation's media blog, also noted sporadic outages on Bank of America's domain.
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