FBI Executes 40 Search Warrants For 'Anonymous'

CWmike writes "Police agencies worldwide are turning up the heat on a loosely organized group of WikiLeaks activists. After yesterday's news that UK police arrested five people, US authorities announced that more than 40 search warrants have been executed in the US in connection with last month's Web-based attacks against companies that had severed ties with WikiLeaks. Investigations are also ongoing in the Netherlands, Germany and France, the FBI said Thursday. Acting on information from German authorities, the FBI raided Dallas ISP Tailor Made Services last month, looking for evidence relating to one of the chat servers used by Anonymous. Another server was traced to Fremont, California's Hurricane Electric. On Thursday, a Web page used by Anonymous to coordinate this latest round of DDoS attacks was offline, and the group's Twitter and Blogspot pages were silent." Reader Ajehals contributes a link to the UK Pirate Party's explanation of how the law applies to DDoS attacks.

Re:When will they learn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they do realize but don't care? Their goal here is not to "take down anonymous" it's to prosecute the specific people who broke the law by organizing the DDoS attacks. Whether that means arresting all of anonymous or 1/10000 of it is irrelevant. Note that their warrant did not come from some generic anonymous IRC channel, but the logs of the actual coordination of the attacks.

Re:When will they learn?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Do they not realize the dynamic structure of anonymous? That an activist involved in one campaign might not be involved, or indeed care about, the next?

The hint is in the article: "loosely organized".

This isn't about punishment, it's about deterrence. Remove the sense of anonymous invulnerability and some will think twice about engaging in the activity, even if they got away with it before. It moves from a mindset of "there can't be consequences" to a mindset of "there could be consequences". It's the same tactic the RIAA uses.

FBI

[damicatz]

It's nice to know that when corporate interests are threatened, the US Government is more than willing to come to the rescue and do their bidding. Of course, when Goldman Sachs lies, cheats, and defrauds the American people, the US government looks the other way.

Re:Anonymous cannot be destroyed

[girlintraining]

Of course, if they got pinched, it begs the question of how they were "anonymous" to begin with.

Nobody has seen this yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open letter from Anonymous to the UK Government [current.com]

How about the DDoS against Wikileaks?

[thue]

I am sure that the US is pursuing those who DDoSed WikiLeaks [msn.com] with equal energy.

Re:FBI

[Anonymous Coward]

Err...they didn't look the other way. They were willing to do whatever it takes to rescue Goldman Sachs too.

The lesson here?

[Beelzebud]

Don't be a useful idiot. Don't take your marching orders from people on the interet who don't give a fuck about you. A DDOS attack like the one 4-chan (let's call them what they are) did, could have actually been anonymous had the morons actually been hackers. This is what it looks like when one pseudo-hacker can write a DDOS program, and a bunch of tech-illiterate morons run it on their network without actually knowing what it's doing, or how to mask their identity.

Re:How about the DDoS against Wikileaks?

[jayme0227]

If I remember correctly, wasn't the DDoS of WikiLeaks done with a traditional malware controlled botnet, while the Anonymous DDoS's were done with an opt-in botnet? To me, it seems like that would make it easier to track down the members of Anonymous who participated than it would be to track down those who were controlling the anti-Wikileaks botnet.

A great use of time

[McTickles]

A great use of time and resources. What has humanity come to? Aren't there more pressing matters to attend to but prosecute random people because they may or may not have scared huge corporations ?

Also on the pirateparty UK site I have to rage at vagueness of the laws quoted here:

1. A person is guilty of an offence if-
a. he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer;

Define "unauthorised" ? (and obviously this doesn't apply to women...)

1. This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act-
a. to impair the operation of any computer;

So this applies to ISPs doing some filtering since they are crippling my computer's capabilties?

b. to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer;

You mean people cannot "hinder" access to their data by using passwords and such ? so root accounts should have no password ?