For more than a week Brazilian workers have taken to the streets. Yesterday, the country witnessed its biggest demonstrations since the fall of the dictatorship. But the situation on the ground has confounded many international commentators.

Interviewing for Jacobin, Mark Bergfeld sheds light on new developments with Miguel Borba de Sa — a university lecturer at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of Bolívia – Passos das revoluções and has written extensively on indigenous struggles in Latin America.

Mark Bergfeld is a socialist activist in London. He was a leading participant of the UK student movement in 2010.

Mark Bergfeld: How could a twenty-cent increase in bus fares spark protests in more than 100 towns and cities across Brazil?

Miguel Borba de Sa: In his book, The Road To Serfdom the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote that there are two areas that one cannot leave to the competitive principle: transport and the environment. Brazil’s bourgeoisie consistently fails to understand this.

Continue Reading...

Many of the hacks perpetrated by Anonymous are pretty straight-forward. Whether you agree with the hacktivist group’s methods or not, they are at least comprehensible. The latest “op” however really is baffling.

LulzSec Albania, a group of Albanian hackers associated with the LulzSec group of Anonymous allies, have hacked the Swiss Chamber of Commerce in Canada. Nope. You didn’t just have a stroke.

The website of the Swiss Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which was developed using PHP, had a vulnerability to a confirmed SQL injection flaw, which is how the hackers struck.

They stole a database containing names and login information, which the group released on Pastebin.

What was the motivation? The hackers themselves say “for the lulz.”—but what lulz?

Continue Reading...

As noted here earlier this month, three young hackers in Britain convicted of similar charges relating to the Stratfor hack received sentences that pale in comparison to what Hammond faces and highlight the U.S.' overreach when it comes to cybercrime prosecutions. The longest sentence handed down in the U.K. cases carried a maximum of 15 months jail time. Meanwhile, as Hammond expressed in a statement Tuesday, he could have faced 30 years in prison were he to have been found guilty at trial. His supporters and legal team are now asking his presiding judge to hand down a sentence far less harsh than the possible 10 years his plea agreement can carry.

Continue Reading...

The hacker collective urged Assistant State Attorney Brian Workman to drop the charges and threatened to massive protests, according to a letter released by #OpJustice4Kaitlyn:

This letter is addressed to the Indian River County State Attorney's Office:

You are currently pursuing 2 felony charges against an 18-year-old girl by the name of Kaitlyn Hunt... She was a student at Sebastian River High School before they expelled her...

While in the course of performing your duties we feel that you've lost perspective. Tsk, tsk. The truth is, Kaitlyn Hunt is a bright young girl who was involved in a consensual, same-sex relationship while both she and her partner were minors. She has a big future ahead of her and there are people, thousands of people in fact, that have no intention of allowing you to ruin it with your rotten selective enforcement...

We hope you'll keep all of this in mind because the next petition [for resignation] we put 200,000 signatures on will have your name on it (maybe you Brian Workman), or your bosses name on it, and we will be calling for a resignation.

Continue Reading...

As activist publicity organization Sparrow Media pointed out Thursday, "three English co-defendants who plead guilty to being members of the Lulzsec hacktivist group were today sentenced by a UK court. Ryan Acroyd, the most technically experienced of the three, received the longest sentence – he will spend 15 months in prison."

Via Sparrow Media:

Continue Reading...

As Josh Harkinson reports for Mother Jones, after calling journalists and applying pressure to the local high school with a blogger friend, McKee came across Anonymous' #OpAntiBully, an anti-bullying subgroup, and something clicked: "People from Anonymous came and kicked [cyberbully] ass," she told Harkinson. "And I'm thinking, this is what [the rape victim] needs," she said.

So McKee reached out to the group, uncertain of how they would react to her request to get involved; their interest was immediately sparked, as Harkinson reports:

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

According to the government's indictment, Keys provided Anonymous hackers with information including usernames and passwords to access Tribune Co. sites in late 2010, after he was fired from his job at a Tribune-owned station in Sacramento, Calif. Keys has rejected a plea bargain and, if found guilty, could face up to 25 years in prison and a fine of up to $750,000. His attorneys argue that although Keys had communicated with Anons via online chat rooms, it was someone posing as the journalist who provided the Tribune Co. access to information.

"There's an incongruity to all of this that we're hoping to get to the bottom of in the next couple months," Keys' attorney Jay Leiderman told HuffPo.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

In place of Westboro's standard issue rainbow-colored "God hates fags" signs, the Facebook page featured quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama, cute pictures of animals captioned in LOL speak and nerd culture ephemera, like a "Star Trek" meme that caught the attention of Hikaru Sulu himself.

Continue Reading...

As the Daily Beast reports, Anonymous has confirmed the identities of two of the four alleged suspects in the Canada rape case, but has no plans to move forward until they can verify their information:

Continue Reading...

Parsons' suicide, which her mother argues was the result of harassment following her daughter's alleged rape by four teenaged schoolmates, gained national attention this week amid claims that the Canadian justice system failed to properly investigate the incident.

Nova Scotia’s Justice Department announced Tuesday that they plan to review Parsons' case.

Anonymous' statement in full:

Continue Reading...

Last week, Israeli airstrikes once again hit targets in Gaza, officially breaking a ceasefire established last November (although cross-border clashes have informally breached the ceasefire in recent months, leaving four Palestinians dead). In retaliation, Anonymous relaunched #OpIsrael this weekend, and according to an Anonymous spokesperson offering a partial damage report, 60,000 websites, 40,000 Facebook pages, 5,000 twitter accounts and 30,000 Israeli bank accounts got hacked, causing an estimated $3-plus billion damage, the hacker collective claim. "Not bad for 24 hours," Anonymous noted.

Continue Reading...

To rally greater awareness and express anger at the CFAA and the proposed HR 11 bill, Anonymous Wednesday are leading a so-called "Twitter storm" -- an online protest in which Twitter users are invited to use hashtags and themed tweets in unison. The cyber-demonstration, scheduled for 5 p.m. EST, asks Twitter users to post messages decrying the CFAA with the hastag #ReformCFAA (which protest participators aim to get trending). In a Pastebin post announcing the Twitter storm, Anonymous stated, "Beginning Wednesday April 3rd we will attempt to influence the decision makers on the House Judicial Committee the strengthening the provisions of the CFAA is not what we the people want."

Anonymous also posted a number of sample Tweets that users can repost, including:

Continue Reading...

The Anonymous action, carried out in support of public sector unions fighting to save collective bargaining rights against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting efforts, was not a hack. Rather, the hacker collective orchestrated a denial-of-service attack, or a DDOS,  encouraging users to repeatedly access the website until it's too overwhelmed to function. The Koch sites were successfully but only temporarily brought down. Rosol is the first and only defendant charged in the attack. Via Pearce:

Continue Reading...

The week started with the arrests of two Steubenville girls after the guilty verdicts in the rape case against two local teenage football players. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer explained, "The 16-year-old is charged with one misdemeanor count of aggravated menacing for threatening the life of the victim on Twitter. The 15-year-old is charged with one misdemeanor count of menacing for threatening bodily harm to the victim on Facebook." The threats against the victim were merely the latest ugly attacks in a case that was, from its beginning, about the devastating power of online community's hostility toward girls and women.

Continue Reading...

Original post: Matthew Keys, a deputy social media editor for Reuters, could face up to 25 years in prison. According to a Justice Department announcement Keys has been indicted for allegedly providing members of Anonymous with log-in credentials for a computer server belonging to the Tribune Company (where Keys formerly worked), according to the DoJ's press release.

Via the DoJ:

Continue Reading...

In a Wednesday press release, Par:AnoIA stated that the data "shows that Bank of America and others are contracting other companies to spy and collect information on private citizens." The release also notes, however, that the "overall quality of the research is poor and potentially false."

The data was not obtained through any hack, but was "stored on a misconfigured server and basically open for grabs."

Leaked documents reveal that TEKSystems assembled  reports on both Occupy  Wall Street online activity and hackers throughout 2012. But  the hackers group called such "intelligence" "sloppy, random and valueless":

Continue Reading...

The legal system is such that it was up to Preska herself to step down -- she opted against it, and Hammond will appear in court in April with the judge presiding. The same judge denied the activist bail (he has been held in a Manhattan federal prison for over a year, regularly placed in solitary confinement) and told the defendant that he could face life in jail for his alleged involvement in the hack.

On the same morning Judge Preska announced that she would not be stepping down from the case, Hammond released a statement of his own through his lawyers. The tract decries the criminal justice system's treatment of cyber activists, condemns government's persecution of dissent, and above all celebrates the work of the late Aaron Swartz.

Continue Reading...

No statements have been issued as of yet about the failed #OpSOTU, but a number of comments on Twitter asked whether Anons who would have otherwise contributed to the operation were distracted watching live footage of ex-LAPD cop Christopher Dorner's last stand in Big Bear while the president delivered his address.

Anonymous had vowed to block the webcast in protest of Obama's signing of the NDAA, his drone program, the proliferation of government warrantless wiretapping, the treatment of Bradley Manning and the introduction of cyber-security legislation in the House, which the hacker collective said would turn "private companies into government informants."

Continue Reading...