KnightSec, an arm of the hacker collective that specifically targets rapists, demanded a public apology be issued to the young woman and warned that it would release personal information of Big Red football players and staff who have defended the accused young men. No apology was issued by the hackers' deadline of Jan. 1. That day, a video was leaked of a teenage boy -- a former Steubenville High baseball team member -- captured cruelly joking about the sexual assault.

"She is so raped," he laughs, continuing an offensive tirade including the lines, "They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson!" and "they raped her more than the Duke lacrosse team!" grossly quipping that the unconscious girl was "deader than Trayvon Martin,"  even as other voices captured in the video interject, saying, "That's not cool, bro ... That's like rape. It is rape. They raped her." Other teens in the video laugh along.

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The comment, written by a teenage boy at Berkeley High School a few days after the Sandy Hook shootings, came in response to a Facebook post made by my own 15-year-old son.

My son was passing along the word that the hacker collective Anonymous had declared war against the Westboro Baptist Church, that clan of deranged religious fanatics who routinely seek to turn the misery of others into their own grandstanding opportunity.

Outraged at WBC's plans to protest at the funeral of Sandy Hook Elementary's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, on Dec. 19, in order "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment," Anonymous proceeded to expose the personal information of WBC members -- home and email addresses, phone numbers, etc. -- and started acting as a coordinating center for anti-WBC counter-protests. For teenage boys at Berkeley High, Anonymous' direct action was the epitome of cool.

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As Wired's Quinn Norton extensively detailed earlier this year, 2011 and early 2012 presented the sprawling hacker collective with challenges both practical and existential. Hector Xavier Monsegur -- best known as Sabu, a central member of LulzsSec, the arm of Anonymous responsible for the famed Stratfor hack -- was arrested last year and revealed as an FBI informant in March 2012. Dozens of "Anons" across the world were outed by Sabu and picked up by the FBI and Interpol. Sabu's flip to informant not only lost Anonymous some of their most talented hackers, but also eroded the idea of Anonymous as an unbreakable, unfathomable legion.  Other faces of Anonymous emerged alongside the cold, grinning Guy Fawkes mask; real, human, flesh-and-blood faces of young men -- like 27-year-old Jeremy Hammond, a social justice activist from Chicago who could face life in prison for his alleged involvement in the Stratfor hack.

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Last weekend, the website of the locally celebrated Steubenville High School Big Red football team was replaced with a note and a video from the hackers in typical Anonymous style -- a message from a Guy Fawkes mask and a computerized voice. KnightSec warned that it would release personal information including names and Social Security numbers of Big Red players and staff if an apology was not issued to the rape victim. The hackers also released "preliminary" information, which they called "a warning shot," publishing names, addresses, phone numbers, and names of parent of 13 players allegedly involved in the rape.

"The town of Steubenville has been good at keeping this quiet and their star football team protected," the KnightSec statement read.

Last week the New York Times reported on the disturbing assault in the small Ohio town. A 16-year-old girl was, according to prosecutors, gang raped and drag from party to party by a number of star football players while she was too drunk to consent. Via the Times:

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Of course, it’s impossible to say with certainty which actions "Anonymous" actually pulled off, since its membership is ill-defined and anyone can claim association, not to mention that sometimes Anonymous hacktivists act alone or as part of a subgroup.  Even when Anonymous has put out one of its quintessential videos claiming responsibility for a hack or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service—shutting down a website by flooding it with requests) attack, it hasn’t always turned out to be true.

Given that, below are Anonymous’ “Top 20” for 2012. With its widening arsenal and focus, one can only imagine what these Internet denizens have in store for 2013.

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Hacker collective Anonymous was swift to respond, releasing private information of  Westboro members including email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses. This video, decrying the church for spreading “seeds of hatred,” was also released. It warns, “We will destroy you. We are coming.”

An Anonymous source has said it intends to keep the website offline throughout the day, with plans to take it over completely and deface it.

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Hacker collective Anonymous was swift to respond, releasing private information of  Westboro members including email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses. This video, decrying the church for spreading "seeds of hatred" was also released. It warns, "We will destroy you. We are coming."

[h/t BetaBeat]

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Brown faces a host of charges, including a number relating to online threats made to an FBI agent unrelated to the Stratfor case. Within the newly announced grand jury indictment, however, Brown faces a charge for copying a link to a downloadable archive of compromised data -- specifically credit card information -- from one Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel and pasting it into another.

The indictment states:

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Fresh from a campaign of thousands of hacks last week against Israeli government-related websites in retaliation for the military assault on Gaza, the hacker collective put out a release late Thursday vowing to take down "web assets belonging to the Assad regime" and provide communication avenues for Syrians in the Internet blackout.

The release also claims to have investigated and concluded that the ongoing Internet and mobile connection cut-off was perpetrated by the government:

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Nov. 28th: Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was told last week by federal judge Loretta Preska that he was being denied bail and could face life in jail for his alleged involvement with the Anonymous/LulzSec hack into the computers of the private intelligence firm Stratfor.

Civil liberties advocates have decried the state's harsh treatment of the activist, who was reportedly held in solitary confinement for five days in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center and has so far been imprisoned for eight months without trial. Now, Hammond's supporters believe they have an extra and important string to their bow: a release from Anonymous reported that the federal judge who denied Hammond bail is married to a client of Stratfor and was personally affected by the infamous hack.

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A release claiming to be from hacker collective Anonymous alleges there was more behind Rove's freak-out than first met the eye. The group says that it foiled Rove's attempt to steal the election in Florida, Virginia and Ohio by using the GOP's ORCA system.

Two weeks prior to Election Night, a typical Anonymous video was released warning Rove against rigging the election. "We want you to know that we are watching you, waiting for you to make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election to your favor," Anonymous' ubiquitous Guy Fawkes character warned.

Then, following Obama's win and Rove's very public outburst, a group calling themselves "The Protectors," believed to be comprised of Anonymous hackers, sent a letter to election transparency non-profit, Velvet Revolution, claiming to have thwarted attempts by GOP strategists to flip votes and rig the election in three swing states.

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Salon's Alex Halperin wrote last week that the exposition of the current Gaza crisis over social media has been chilling. The IDF have used their Twitter account to send threats to Hamas and Gaza residents, while Hamas accounts have listed rocket attacks aimed at Israel.

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When it comes to cyber-warfare, however, the IDF's foes are legion. Diffuse hacker collective Anonymous on Thursday announced #OpIsrael via Twitter in response to Israel's threats. In a release posted on Pastebin, Anonymous wrote:

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A 16-year-old Dutch teenager's user information was released to iSight without even so much as a warrant. RT reported:

The youngster was suspected of being involved in Operation Payback, an Anonymous-endorsed initiative that targeted the servers of PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others after those companies blocked WikiLeaks from receiving online payment backs in December 2010. When hacktivists responded to the blockade by overflowing the servers of those sites with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, PayPal asked Dallas, Texas’ iSIGHT Partners Inc., a self-described“global cyber intelligence firm,” to investigate.

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The campaigning group Stop NDAA originally proposed the tweet jacking protest via their site, noting "both parties are colluding in denying you your First and Fifth amendment rights under the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, and both candidates refuse to discuss this bipartisan assault on civil liberties."

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In September, the British Columbia teenager Todd posted a chronicle of "My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm" on YouTube. In the nearly nine-minute video, Todd silently told, via handwritten notes, of first going on webcam as a seventh-grade student, and of the person who'd asked her to flash him. She did, and a year later, he found her on Facebook and demanded she "put on a show" or he'd send the topless photo of her to her friends and family. She refused, and he followed through on his threat, setting off a chain of grotesque events. As Todd battled depression and anxiety and drugs, she said the man created a Facebook page to broadcast the image. She changed schools and still endured "name calling" and being "judged," and friendlessness. "I can never get that photo back. It's out there forever," she wrote. She was teased and harassed, beaten up. She attempted suicide by drinking bleach. "Every day I think, why am I still here?" she wrote. Now, she isn't. Todd died last week, and a local school official told the Star she'd committed suicide. 

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On Wednesday, WikiLeaks began to leak a batch of documents relating to the presidential election. The organization invited supporters to browse the trove of emails provided to the secret-spilling site by Anonymous from its famed Statfor hack. In a move that Anonymous called a "betrayal," WikiLeaks put the documents behind a pay wall, which prompted readers for donations.

"This is a filthy and rotten, wholly unethical action - and Anonymous is enraged," stated a release from Anonymous Global. "We are aware that the donation pay wall can be circumvented by disabling Javascript. However, this is not the point. Neither is Anonymous concerned that WikiLeaks is asking for donations," the Anonymous release notes, explaining that most readers would not know how to avoid the pay wall.

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These GI Files releases will shed insight into key U.S. federal election players... Through this release WikiLeaks aims to inform the U.S. electorate in an unbiased way through the release of source documents from one of the most oddly influential companies in the U.S. today.

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The Twitter account, @YourAnonNews, often used to make announcements for the hacker collective, first publicly posted the phone number connected to the fascist group's Queens-based office and invited followers to "give them a warm welcome to the neighborhood."

A follow up tweet asserted, in characteristically playful parlance, that the hackers had disabled Golden Dawn's New York chapter website:

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Indeed, emails from Salon readers following up on our Monday story about the office's opening confirm that Golden Dawn's website was temporarily down. As of this writing, the site is once again running, but is missing much of the content available before the reported hack.

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However, on Sunday a group claiming Anonymous affiliation released 60 hours of TARU footage from the night of the Zuccotti Park eviction on Nov. 15. The footage is considered particularly relevant in fleshing out the NYPD versus Occupy narrative, since both mainstream and citizen journalists and videographers were forcibly kept away from the park as officers dismantled the encampment and rounded up protesters that night.

A release introducing the footage dump notes, "The NYPD denied freedom of the press the night of the Zuccotti raid by kicking out media and keeping them two blocks away … Much of the video being released is edited by the NYPD, and at times edits are quite blatant, probably trying to cover up their brutality."

The release urges that readers share the TARU footage and take note of any glitches or time stamp changes, which might suggest selective editing. "We ask for an unedited version of the tapes," it notes.

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