Anonymous Breaches Another US Defense Contractor 167
JohnBert sends this excerpt from and IDG report:
"The politically oriented hacking group Anonymous has released 1GB of what it says are private e-mails and documents from an executive of a U.S. defense company that sells unmanned aerial vehicles to police and the U.S. military. The documents were publicized in a post on Pastebin, with links leading to the actual material on another website. The material purportedly belongs to Richard Garcia, a senior vice president at Vanguard who was a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent for 25 years. Anonymous took special delight in the breach, as Garcia is director of InfraGard, an organization that liaises between private sector companies and the FBI. A group affiliated with Anonymous called LulzSecurity, or LulzSec, breached and defaced one of InfraGard's websites belonging to its Atlanta chapter in June."
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the only way left so expect it to become "normal". Peaceful change won't happen so anyone wanting to fight must do so under less-traditional conditions using less-traditional methods.
When an opponent has overwhelming conventional forces, the only to negate that deterrence is to refuse to be deterred.
Food for thought:
This is the least expensive way to fight. The effort to PRESERVE ones troops can become a handicap.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
What anonymous doesn't have in common with those people is crippling poverty and religious conviction, that are given as the underlying cause. I don't understand the mentality involved here.
Actually, many of the suicide bombers don't have crippling poverty. They are more likely to be literate and have college degrees than the general populations from which they spring. One fact that might be particularly interesting to Slashdot is that there's a disproportionate number of terrorists who are engineers. See e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html [nytimes.com] and http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-are-terrorists-often-engineers [ieee.org]. There's an associated idea known as the Salem Hypothesis which is the observation that in the US, anti-evolution proponents with advanced degrees are disproportionately engineers - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis [rationalwiki.org]). Engineers in the United States are also more politically conservative and religious than scientists. There's something weird going on here. But regardless, attributing "crippling poverty" as a major part of why people engage in suicide bombing seems to be off.
Bigger story here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally we found evidence of a Merrill Lynch wealth management advisor giving private advance notice to Garcia about upcoming S&P US credit rating downgrades.
This could be big if S&P leaked their intention to downgrade US credit rating to other investment institutions in order to financially benefit from the news. I wonder if the mainstream press will follow up on this? Sure as hell won't expect Obama's SEC, or parent DOJ, to investigate.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Saying Anonymous are funded by a government or organization to attack servers is like saying hippies were funded by a government or terrorists to get together and smoke pot.
Anon is a culture. It's people who stand for some principles and who are willing to defend these principles. They don't necessarily ALL share the same principles, just like all hippies did not smoke pot, but in general they have a lot in common, hence why they get together.
Anyone can opt in and out of Anon at any time. You don't need much money to start hacking. You don't need to be an expert either. You can just hang around on websites where 'members' of Anon hang around too, get to know some of them, then plot an attack together.
There is no evidence to suggest Anon works for anyone, and moreover Anon has no need to be guided by a bigger group. They don't need money, they don't need help selecting targets. I'm not saying a government can't 'infiltrate' Anon (i.e. pretend to be just another average Anon guy) and suggest a few targets, hoping others will follow, but if such a group could select the majority of Anon's targets in this fashion, then that group would necessarily compose the majority off Anon. In essence, that group would be Anon.
The USA need to realize something: every government is not out to get them. And if these attacks were organized by one of the USA's enemies, like Iran, then they would not hack for e-mails, they'd go for information on how to build weapons. The USA also need to realize that they are now a tyranny, that they are comparable to Nazi Germany, and that this is necessarily going to piss people off and make them want to resist somehow. People have always resisted oppression, and this is no different.
It's also sad that when Americans see Arabs take arms against their own government, Americans immediately call it a revolution against tyranny. But when the same thing happens in the USA, except instead of an armed conflict it's an electronic one (i.e. it is much less violent), Americans call it terrorism or vigilantism.