LulzSec leader Sabu was working for us, says FBI

[White Haven]

Your brother sounds like he's off his meds, and is in turn listening to other people who are off their meds. Anon is hardly a shining paragon, but neither are they HYDRA in disguise.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Trust me...I know...

And this thread has helped me figure out what they are really like. A bunch of trolls...but not a bunch of cultists who want to rule America. Probably doesn't help that my brother views Umbrella (fictional or not) as paragons of civilization...

(PS...to see the true extent of his craziness I direct you to my first post in the OT forum...)

EDIT: And what's hilarious about it is that he acts like he was dropped on his head at some point...when I actually was and I am the most normal person in my family...

[Thanas]

I really do not pay attention to stated ideal goals like "tear down the Government". More important is their focus on privacy rights and protecting privacy.

Are they trollish? Probably yes, or at least some of them are. Then again, trolling companies like Mastercard is probably the only way to get them to do anything or be noticed in a country where the media itself is bought and financed by corporations and independent journalism only exists on the internet.

[thejester]

Thought this was the more interesting perspective on the story, to be honest:

Federal Bureau of Facilitation — what was the FBI doing with Stratfor and WikiLeaks?

In the past five years, the FBI has developed an outstanding record of thwarting terror attacks the agency itself has created, providing Islamic extremists and young men with mental illness with accomplices, real or fake weapons and logistical support to develop often ridiculous plots, such as flying a model plane into the Capitol in Washington.

In that context, the FBI’s remarkable behaviour in relation to the Lulzsec hacker Hector Monsegur, AKA Sabu, begins to make more sense.

...

What is unusual is the extent of the FBI’s complicity in Monsegur’s subsequent activities, all done using an FBI-supplied computer and carefully monitored. Monsegur, as Sabu, continued to use his Twitter account to encourage attacks on authorities — indeed was doing so as late as this week. Sabu assisted in the recording of the famous hacked FBI-Scotland Yard phone hook-up earlier this year, apparently the result of poor security by an Irish police officer (an Irish hacker was one of the five arrested this week).

And then there’s the Stratfor crack late in 2011, which is where it gets interesting. The FBI was not only aware of the crack of the posturing private intelligence firm’s internal system — indeed, may have been aware of it before it happened — but provided server space to store the cracked Stratfor material before it was released. To use an analog comparison, the FBI was happy to provide storage space for stolen goods before they were distributed.

Given the sneering attitude towards official agencies of Stratfor executives revealed in their emails, the FBI might have been only too happy to see Strafor humiliated, but in doing so it actively facilitated the release of the material. That includes, by the way, the credit card details of every Stratfor subscriber, including Australian subscribers such as Malcolm Turnbull. The FBI could have prevented that breach of privacy, but chose not to.

Further, the Stratfor material eventually made its way to WikiLeaks and was released in late February. What part did the FBI play in brokering the handover between Anonymous and WikiLeaks?

The Guardian, whose senior journalists have pursued a smear campaign against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, quickly seized on the link. “If through Sabu or information he had gleaned from other Anons the US could glean any evidence to tie Julian Assange to hacking attacks on US soil, such as Stratfor, the case for extradition would be substantially strengthened,” former WikiLeaks member-turned-critic James Ball wrote.

It's a worrying trend that just follows on from the documented cases involving both alleged Islamic terrorists and right-wing militia...surely this stuff would be dubious in a court of law?

[weemadando]

The FBI has been kinda laughable at times with its depth of commitment to "entrapment" in the past decade.

I wouldn't be surprised if dumber was yet to come.

[Nephtys]

Seriously people, does no-one here actually know what Anon is? It's not a movement. It's not a shadowy organization. It's not hackers or anarchists or anything like that.

It's just an incredibly loose internet community, based on one picture-based forum where people post about things ranging from Dungeons and Dragons, to fixing up cars, to knitting, to taking photographs, to engineering problems, to video games, to gay anime porn, to what's going to happen in the next season of Game of Thrones. It's just an amalgam of internet subcultures and where most memes come from.

Anyone who says otherwise sure as hell doesn't understand internet cultures. Any 'movement' from anon are just handfuls of people who go to one or two of the 4chan forums and say they're going to make trouble, blah blah blah. It's like saying SDN is the organized command center for hating on Rick Berman.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Seriously people, does no-one here actually know what Anon is? It's not a movement. It's not a shadowy organization. It's not hackers or anarchists or anything like that.

It's just an incredibly loose internet community, based on one picture-based forum where people post about things ranging from Dungeons and Dragons, to fixing up cars, to knitting, to taking photographs, to engineering problems, to video games, to gay anime porn, to what's going to happen in the next season of Game of Thrones. It's just an amalgam of internet subcultures and where most memes come from.

Anyone who says otherwise sure as hell doesn't understand internet cultures. Any 'movement' from anon are just handfuls of people who go to one or two of the 4chan forums and say they're going to make trouble, blah blah blah. It's like saying SDN is the organized command center for hating on Rick Berman.

I think most people here understand this.

The fact is, in a lot of cases it is hackers or members of the Anonymous community that insist on classifying themselves as a coherent organization or movement. It's not that everyone arbitrarily decided that's what they were, they seem to do everything in their power to give people that notion.