Operation Slingshot. “Fuck FBI Friday is still the best thing we ever came up with, right Preety?”
Over two years after the Summer of Lulz, FBI Director Robert Mueller remarks at the Fordham ICCS Conference this past Thursday, to the best of my knowledge, the first time he made mention of Lulz Security & their informant leader Sabu, better known as Hector Xavier Monsegur, Jr. It is quite curious, since apart from the arrests and proceedings themselves, the FBI leadership has more or less kept radio silence on the matter. As Director Mueller is preparing to exit the FBI, I must suppose he feels slightly more comfortable having to explain that mess. He claims that the investigation ‘began’ after a hack of a TV show database, in this case, Fox’s X-Factor.
Mueller goes on to confirm, as if nothing but an afterthought, the FBI approved to keep the online persona active as Monsegur agreed to cooperate and build cases. What Snowden has done so far is vital to exposing the depth of this criminality. The Strange Case of Barrett Brown Amid the outrage over the NSA's spying program, the jailing of journalist Barrett Brown points to a deeper and very troubling problem.
Peter Ludlow June 18, 2013 In November 2010, Hunton and Williams organized a number of private intelligence, technology development and security contractors—HBGary, plus Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and, according to Brown, a secretive corporation with the ominous name Endgame Systems—to form “Team Themis”—‘themis’ being a Greek word meaning “divine law.” Its main objective was to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, like Chamber Watch, using such tactics as creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that US Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”
By June 2011, the plot had thickened further. War on censorship continues with FTC latest victim - by Terry Cutler. How Antisec Died — Notes from a Strange World. First, an introduction: I write about hackers, and for the past few years that has meant I write about Anonymous.
At the time of the Stratfor hack I was working for Wired covering Anonymous — notably the antics of Antisec anons much of the time. I had missed the Lulzsec period, which I spent under federal investigation myself. From February to July of that year I stayed away from the hacker world, unsure if my computer would be seized and unwilling to draw my sources into a possible fishing expedition. By the winter of 2011, I was making up for lost time.
I’d become deeplyinvolved with the day to day lives of active anons working on all sortsof actions, from Occupy support to street protests. This was in part because I didn’t want my work to become involved in any court cases, but also because for the nature of my coverage, I didn’t believe, and still don’t, that the legal identity of individuals tells us much about the collective I was writing about. It never seemed quite right to me.