Tag: Anonymous

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

While we were all watching the Academy Awards, making predictions and ogling over fashion, the hacker group, Anonymous struck again, hacking into the Koch brother funded web site, Americans for Prosperity (sorry, no link, I won’t give them the honor of a page hit). The Koch brothers own the Georgia-Pacific paper manufacturing plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin and, obviously, have a vested interest in seeing the union right of collective bargaining ended.

The AFP site is back up. This is the entire message that was left by Anonymous:

Dear Citizens of the United States of America,

It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch–the billionaire owners of Koch Industries–have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.

Koch Industries, and oligarchs like them, have most recently started to manipulate the political agenda in Wisconsin. Governor Walker’s union-busting budget plan contains a clause that went nearly un-noticed. This clause would allow the sale of publicly owned utility plants in Wisconsin to private parties (specifically, Koch Industries) at any price, no matter how low, without a public bidding process. The Koch’s have helped to fuel the unrest in Wisconsin and the drive behind the bill to eliminate the collective bargaining power of unions in a bid to gain a monopoly over the state’s power supplies.

The Koch brothers have made a science of fabricating ‘grassroots’ organizations and advertising campaigns to support them in an attempt to sway voters based on their falsehoods. Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United are just a few of these organizations. In a world where corporate money has become the lifeblood of political influence, the labor unions are one of the few ways citizens have to fight against corporate greed. Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system. For these reasons, we feel that the Koch brothers threaten the United States democratic system and, by extension, all freedom-loving individuals everywhere. As such, we have no choice but to spread the word of the Koch brothers’ political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness.

Anonymous hears the voice of the downtrodden American people, whose rights and liberties are being systematically removed one by one, even when their own government refuses to listen or worse – is complicit in these attacks. We are actively seeking vulnerabilities, but in the mean time we are calling for all supporters of true Democracy, and Freedom of The People, to boycott all Koch Industries’ paper products. We welcome unions across the globe to join us in this boycott to show that you will not allow big business to dictate your freedom.

In case you want to boycott Georgia Pacific products here is a list: Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Brawny, Soft N’ Gentle, Brawny Industrial, Vanity Fair, Sparkle, Dixie and Mardi Gras.

To identify these brands, please look for the following logo anywhere on the packaging:

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive” Sir Walter Scott

The plot to undermine the Wikileaks attack on banks is certainly one of those tangled webs. The recent revelations the not only were Bank of America  and the Chamber of Commerce involved but the United States Air Force. They all had either hired or consulted a little known cyber-security firm HBgary to learn about and discredit their detractors. The plot was exposed by one of their targets, Anonymous, who hacked not just HBgary’s computers but hacked the private e-mail from its CEO,s i-phone and his Twitter account.

Another of HBgary’s targets, Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald, has been making rounds talking about the plans to discredit journalists. He has made appearances on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report and Democracy Now! discussing the implications of this plot. Mr. Greenwald also talked with Cenk Uygur specifically about this plan, the latest revelations of the use of psy-ops against American citizens, specifically, US Congress members to get them to support the Afghan war and the Obama administration’s vigorous crack down on whistle blowers.

“A revolution is coming – a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough – but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.” — Robert F. Kennedy

‘Anonymous’ topples, defaces Zimbabwe government websites

RawStory, December 31, 2010

The Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu-PF) website, Zimbabwean government website and Zimbabwean Finance Ministry website were the target of cyber attacks on Thursday by a loose-knit group of online hacktivists known as “Anonymous.”

The websites were hit with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks after Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s wife, Grace Mugabe, sued a newspaper for publishing a WikiLeaks cable that alleged she was connected with illicit diamond trade.

All three websites targeted by “Anonymous” were knocked offline and the Finance Ministry website was also defaced with messages saying “We are Anonymous” and “The world hates us, we kill our own people, we have no control of the economy, we repress free speech, we kill and rape for fun, we are Zanu-PF.”

The website AnonNews announced that the group was “targeting Mugabe and his regime in the ZanuPF who have outlawed the free press and threaten to sue anyone publishing Wikileaks.”

more….

Mastercard is down, the result of a massive guerrilla attack from thousands of online rebels. It turns out that there is no defense against a sufficiently large denial of service attack. Fittingly, the founders of the Internet wove the possibility of rebellion into its design. We are witnessing the first successful rebellion of an emerging global political movement against the authoritarian corpocracies.

This rebellion will probably be beaten down, but it will be noted as an historical watershed. For the first time in recent memory, abusers of power were punished directly by the people. Instead of paving stones and barricades, DDoS packets were the tools of rebellion. We have waited many years for a new politics to be born on the Internet. Something is being born.

It’s not a secret: the Internet was always going to radically change the world of information.  That’s nothing new.  What is new, is that the struggle over who controls and possesses information isn’t going to be fought solely in the courts or in the legislatures or the media.  It’s going to be fought out as well on the Internet itself and the weapons are going to be computers.

The present battle, fought between Wikileaks and its allies, on one side, and its well organized adversaries, including financial organizations and governments, on the other, may eventually bring information democracy, in the form of unprecedented and simple access to all kinds of information, even classified or secret information, to anyone with a modem.  Or at the other pole, it may eventually bring unprecedented censorship through even tighter control of information to the Internet and harsh penalties for publication of various kinds of information.

The New York Times reports from today’s digital battlefront:

LONDON – A broad campaign of cyberattacks appeared to be under way on Wednesday in support of the beleaguered antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, which has drawn governmental criticism from around the globe for its release of classified American documents and whose founder, Julian Assange, is being held in Britain on accusations of rape.

Attacks were reported on Mastercard.com, which stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks; on the lawyer representing the two Swedish women who have accused Mr. Assange of sexual improprieties; and on PostFinance, the Swiss postal system’s financial arm, which closed Mr. Assange’s account after saying he provided false information by saying that he resided in Switzerland.

At least some of the attacks involved distributed denials of service, in which a site is bombarded by requests from a network of computers until it reaches capacity and, effectively, shuts down.

It was unclear whether the various attacks were independently mounted, but suspicion was immediately focused on Anonymous, a leaderless group of activist hackers that had vowed to wreak revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks and that claimed responsibility for the Mastercard attack.

Anonymous, according to the Times, has expressed its philosophy in two manifestos released this past week, and is battling for nothing less than free information on a free Internet:

The group, which gained notoriety for their cyberattacks…  released two manifestos over the weekend vowing revenge against enemies of WikiLeaks.

“We fight for the same reasons,” said one. “We want transparency and we counter censorship.”

The manifestos singled out companies like PayPal and Amazon, who had cut off service to WikiLeaks after the organization’s recent release of classified diplomatic documents from a cache of 250,000 it had obtained.

In recent days, Gregg Housh, an activist who has worked on previous Anonymous campaigns, said that a core of 100 or so devout members of the group, supplemented by one or two extremely expert hackers, were likely to do most of the damage. Mr. Housh, who disavows any illegal activity himself, said the reason Anonymous had declared its campaign was amazingly simple. Anonymous believes that “information should be free, and the Internet should be free,” he said,

Information, as the law now stands, is anything but free. But the Internet for more than a decade and a half has eroded much of the traditional deference to ownership of information. Napster and its progeny have brought a generation of people who think music and film should all be free.  Readers of Blogs are never disturbed by what amounts to wholesale infringement of copyrighted photos and videos and text. Wikileaks has carried this a step further by publishing enormous amounts of material officially designated “secret”.  The trend on the Internet is toward free and unfettered access to all information.  But those who own the information have no intention whatsoever to allow it to flow without charge and without a fight.

Today’s attacks, I think, mark the Cyber Battle of Lexington and Concord.

——-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles

Wednesday, Sept 22, 2010  Headlines, we have headlines….

1. Rahm Emanuel Could Leave White House In October.

I’ve always wanted to type this, and now I can:

Anonymous White House Aide says Anonymous White House Aide might be leaving the White House.

If he chooses to go forward with the mayoral race, Emanuel intends to be sensitive to the fact that his dual role could create the appearance of using his government office to his personal advantage, say two people familiar with internal deliberations.

__

The aide says Emanuel will not make a decision about whether or not to run this week, but was otherwise vague about when the decision would be made – or exactly when he might step down.

2.  Larry Summers, Director of National Economic Council, to Leave White House After Election

Again, the 3 anonymous Horsemen of the Impending Electionypse were quoted:

…. according to three people familiar with the matter.

His departure would leave Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as the only member of President Barack Obama’s original top-tier economic team. Summers, 55, and the president have discussed his future plans, according to one person.

Administration officials are weighing whether to put a prominent corporate executive in the NEC director’s job to counter criticism that the administration is anti-business, one person familiar with White House discussions said. White House aides are also eager to name a woman to serve in a high-level position, two people said. They also are concerned about finding someone with Summers’ experience and stature, one person said.

Dear White House.  

About that token genderism thing.

We are not fooled by how the present is wrapped if we’re still finding it still doesn’t fit.  

So that’s Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, Larry Summers, and perhaps Rrrrahmbo Anonymous gone.  That leaves Timmy Geithner.  Who now has to look at Elizabeth Warren.  

“Hello, Scientology. We are Anonymous….Anonymous has…decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind–for the laughs–we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form…..If you want another name for your opponent, then call us Legion, for we are many.

Yet for all that we are not as monstrous as you are; still our methods are a parallel to your own. Doubtless you will use the Anon’s actions as an example of the persecution you have so long warned your followers would come; this is acceptable. In fact, it is encouraged.

We are your SPs.Yes, we are SPs.

But the sum of suppression we could ever muster is eclipsed by that of the RTC.

Knowledge is free.

We are Anonymous.

We are Legion.

We do not forgive.

WE DO NOT FORGET.

Nationwide below the fold……