Tag Archives | hacktivism

Did The Government Target Aaron Swartz Over His Role In Defeating SOPA?

By on January 28, 2013 in News 5

Did U.S. authorities hound Reddit co-founder and internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz to his death due to his role in the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act, and his possible connections to WikiLeaks? Russia Today writes:

Aaron Swartz became a political target, and that is what led to his tragic death, believes web tycoon Kim Dotcom, the founder of the now-defunct file-storage site Megaupload. “There is no reasonable cause behind going after a young genius like him in the fashion they did,” says Dotcom.

Swartz’s death in suicide on January 11 has resonated in the media across the world. It became known that in 2011, US federal prosecutors charged Swartz with a series of counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, crimes that could have sent him away to prison for upwards of 35 years if convicted…

… Read the rest

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Inside Par:AnoIA – the Anonymous Intelligence Agency

By on November 6, 2012 in News 1

The Daily Dot’s Lorraine Murphy takes a look at Par:AnoIA, an Anonymous-affiliated project created for the release of classified documents:

Par:AnoIA, short for Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency, is a website designed to collect leaks, allow project participants to work on them, and release them in a way that draws the attention of the public. The Releases section of the site, for example, currently features 1.9 gigs of information from American intel corporation Innodata.

The leaks site developed in part by necessity. WikiLeaks’ touted anonymous submission system has been offline for a year. OpenLeaks never materialized. And Cryptome is… Cryptome, meaning it neither edits nor markets its documents to the public at large.

Simply put, if WikiLeaks is a PR agency for documents and Cryptome is a leak dissemination site, Par:AnoIA aims to have the best of both…

What do you think? Legitimate resource? Federal honeypot? Read more.… Read the rest

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Captured Lulzsec Hacker On Life Without The Internet

By on September 13, 2012 in News 9

Scottish teenager Jake Davis, one of two Lulzsec-associates arrested over the hacking of websites including the CIA, Pentagon, News International, and Sony, may face decades in prison if he is extradited to the United States. Right now Davis is free on bail but forbidden to use the internet. Discussing the experience via the Guardian, he sounds like someone freed from shackles:

The last time I was allowed to access the internet was several moments before the police came through my door in the Shetland Isles, over a year ago. During the past 12 months I have pleaded guilty to computer misuse under the banners of “Internet Feds”, “Anonymous” and “LulzSec”.

I’m often asked: what is life like without the net? In a word, life is serene. I now find myself reading newspapers as though they weren’t ancient scrolls; entering real shops with real money in order to buy real products…Nothing needs to be captioned or made into an elaborate joke to impress a citizenry whose every emotion is represented by a sequence of keystrokes.

… Read the rest

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Interview with Telecomix Hacktivists Peter Fein and The Doctor

By on March 20, 2012 in News 4

In this video Technoccult TV speaks with Peter Fein and The Doctor of the digital activist group Telecomix, which worked to keep the Internet available in the middle east during the Arab Spring by providing dial-up Internet access and even using fax machines to send information into Libya. The Doctor also works on the wireless mesh darknet project Project Byzantium. In this interview we talk about what Telecomix does and why it matters.

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‘We Are Legion’ Explains Anonymous

By on March 12, 2012 in News 44

“Anonymous kind of was like the strong, buff kid who had low self esteem and then all of a sudden punched somebody in the face and was like, ‘Holy Shit, I’m really strong!’”

This was just one great quote from We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, which premiered last night at Austin’s South By South West festival in a jammed Vimeo Theater.

Brian Knappenberger’s documentary is a revealing look at the culture of 4Chan and Anonymous, showing the world just how much power this loose but large group really has. In addition to Knappenberger, Internet activist and sometime Anon Gregg Housh led a fascinating Q&A session following the movie, demonstrating how the filmmakers have been able to gain the trust of, and therefore access to, many of the individuals who “are” Anonymous. This movie is going to be huge and I’m hoping to see it released generally soon. Until then, here’s the trailer:

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