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...

What exactly Anonymous has in store for this evening is not detailed in the communiqué, nor is it clear whether hackers could indeed disrupt the feeds screening President Obama's speech online. However, the communiqué took the opportunity to decry the president for some of the worst civil liberties and privacy abuses perpetuated by his administration and to renew the hackers' tribute to the late Aaron Swartz.

The message reads:

Continue Reading...

"The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product," a Fed spokeswoman told Reuters, adding that individuals effected by the hack had been contacted and that "exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system," she said.

Continue Reading...

This week, Issa and top House Oversight Democrat Elijah Cummings, D-Md., sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder posing questions about Swartz's prosecution. The letter was explicit in asking whether political motivations influenced the decision to pursue felony charges against the open-data activist, while JSTOR -- the purported victim of his actions -- had no interest in pressing charges.

The letter asked, among more general questions about reasons behind the decision to prosecute, "Was Mr. Swartz's opposition to SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] or his association with any advocacy groups considered?"

Continue Reading...

Anonymous also claims to have distributed encrypted government files through the hacked website, threatening to release the decryption codes (revealing the as yet unknown information held on the stolen files) if the government fails to comply with demands to reform flawed cybercrime laws -- the laws under which Swartz was persecuted. The released files were named after Supreme Court justices. "A line has been crossed" with the zealous pursuit of charges against Swartz, the hackers' statement noted.

Continue Reading...

The idea, which has already been tested by local governments, is to hold local events for which public data and code is released to volunteering technologists who are invited to design programs and apps deemed useful for the wider community. In Philadelphia, for example, a public hackathon event led to the development of a smartphone app with a public transport schedule.

Continue Reading...

Two years before Swartz ended his life, he was arrested by police from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the City of Cambridge, Mass., police for breaking and entering into an MIT storage closet. In the closet, Swartz had stashed an Acer laptop  he had programmed to download in bulk millions of scholarly articles from JSTOR, a non-profit database that provides access to the articles for academic libraries. At the time, articles on JSTOR were locked behind a paywall for non-academics who wished to access them through their own computers. Swartz aimed to make them available, free of charge, to anyone who wanted to read them.

Continue Reading...

[embedtweet id="291209370002415617"]

An announcement about the next phase of #OpAngel is expected from Anonymous Wednesday.

Original post: Following the MIT hack this morning, Anonymous has extended its tribute to Aaron Swartz into #OpAngel. The operation, launched Monday just one day ahead of the gifted programmer and activist's funeral, has manifold intent.

First, Anonymous plans to thwart Westboro Baptist Church's announced plans to picket Swartz's open funeral in Chicago. "Twenty-four hours after the death of Aaron Swartz was announced to the world, a heartless cult announced their intention to picket his funeral. In response, Anonymous has launched Operation Angel," the hacker collective announced in a statement.

Continue Reading...