Exclusive: How the FBI investigates the hacktivities of Anonymous On September 19, 2008, hackers from the Anonymous collective attacked the website of Fox News host Bill O'Reilly. The hackers found and immediately posted e-mail addresses, passwords, and physical addresses of 205 O'Reilly site members paying $5 a month to hear Bill's wisdom. The next day, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack hit the site with 5,000 packets per second. That night, another attack flooded two O'Reilly servers with 1.5GB/s of data. The site member data was put to use by hackers immediately. The woman's AOL account was used to "send e-mail of three men performing oral," according to FBI interview notes, with the offending message purporting to come from "John McCain." By the time the fiasco was over, Billoreilly.com claimed $10,000 in losses after refunding site membership fees and offering affected users an extra year of service. Hard to find As Anonymous attacks go, the Bill O'Reilly episode was small-scale. But finding the offenders proved difficult.
Anonymous spies on FBI / UK Police hacking investigation conference call A recording of a confidential conference call between the FBI and UK law enforcement officers at the Metropolitan Police has been released by Anonymous on the internet. The inference has to be that hackers were able to secretly access the call because they have compromised a police investigator's email account. The 16 minute conversation, which has been posted to a number of sites including YouTube, discusses ongoing investigations into hackers associated with Anonymous, AntiSec and LulzSec. It appears that the spied-upon conference call took place on January 17th, as a confidential email giving the call-in details and passcode has also been published on the net. The email, entitled "Anon-Lulz International Coordination Call", was sent to over 40 law enforcement officers in the USA, UK, Ireland, Netherlands, France and Sweden, although only a small number of people are on the conference call. And don't make the mistake of thinking that a leak like this is in some way amusing.
New leaker disclosing US secrets, government concludes Your video will begin momentarily. FIRST ON CNN: New documents formed the basis of story on news site, InterceptThe site is run by Glenn Greenwald, who published leaks by Edward Snowden Article focuses on the growth of names on terror databases during the Obama administration (CNN) -- The federal government has concluded there's a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN. Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept, the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden's leaks. NSA leaker Edward Snowden asks to extend Russia asylum One year of Edward Snowden's revelations Snowden: 'I was trained as a spy' Jonathan Pollard is a divisive figure in U.S. Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers in 1971. Army Pvt. Big databases A year after Snowden
U.S. charges Snowden with espionage U.S. defense contractor Edward Snowden discusses his motivation behind the NSA leak and why he revealed himself as the whistleblower behind the major story. Courtesy of Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. (Courtesy of Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald) Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials. Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. Snowden, however, can fight the extradition effort in the courts in Hong Kong.
Text of the letter to Edward Snowden Here is the text of the open letter Lon Snowden, along with his attorney, Bruce Fein, wrote to NSA leaker Edward Snowden. The letter was provided to The Associated Press. July 2, 2013 Edward Joseph Snowden Moscow Dear Edward: I, Bruce Fein, am writing this letter in collaboration with your father in response to the Statement you issued yesterday in Moscow. Thomas Paine, the voice of the American Revolution, trumpeted that a patriot saves his country from his government. What you have done and are doing has awakened congressional oversight of the intelligence community from deep slumber; and, has already provoked the introduction of remedial legislation in Congress to curtail spying abuses under section 215 of the Patriot Act and section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In contrast to your actions, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper responded last March as follows to an unambiguous question raised by Senator Ron Wyden: Very truly yours, Bruce Fein Lon Snowden
I, spy: Edward Snowden in exile Fiction and films, the nearest most of us knowingly get to the world of espionage, give us a series of reliable stereotypes. British spies are hard-bitten, libidinous he-men. Russian agents are thickset, low-browed and facially scarred. And defectors end up as tragic old soaks in Moscow, scanning old copies of the Times for news of the Test match. But the Edward Snowden who materialises in our hotel room shortly after noon on the appointed day seems none of those things. Oliver Stone, who is working on a film about the man now standing in room 615 of the Golden Apple hotel on Moscow’s Malaya Dmitrovka, might struggle to make his subject live up to the canon of great movie spies. Since arriving in Moscow, Snowden has been keeping late and solitary hours – effectively living on US time, tapping away on one of his three computers (three to be safe; he uses encrypted chat, too). Loaded: 0% Progress: 0% He is guarded on the subject of his life in exile. He does get recognised.
Edward Snowden: The Untold Story | Threat Level The afternoon of our third meeting, about two weeks after our first, Snowden comes to my hotel room. I have changed locations and am now staying at the Hotel National, across the street from the Kremlin and Red Square. An icon like the Metropol, much of Russia’s history passed through its front doors at one time or another. Lenin once lived in Room 107, and the ghost of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared chief of the old Soviet secret police who also lived here, still haunts the hallways. But rather than the Russian secret police, it’s his old employers, the CIA and the NSA, that Snowden most fears. “If somebody’s really watching me, they’ve got a team of guys whose job is just to hack me,” he says. More than anything, Snowden fears a blunder that will destroy all the progress toward reforms for which he has sacrificed so much. Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Nor is he optimistic that the next election will bring any meaningful reform.
Ed Snowden Taught Me To Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger. Now I Teach You. Late on the evening of January 11, 2013, someone sent me an interesting email. It was encrypted, and sent from the sort of anonymous email service that smart people use when they want to hide their identity. Sitting at the kitchen table in the small cottage where I lived in Berkeley with my wife and two cats, I decrypted it. The anonymous emailer wanted to know if I could help him communicate securely with Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who had repeatedly cast a critical eye on American foreign policy. From: anon108@■■■■■■■■■ To: Micah Lee Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013Micah,I’m a friend. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just been contacted by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who was then preparing a momentous leak of government data. That was me. And as it turned out, several months later I was drawn more deeply into the whole thing, when Snowden got back in touch and asked me to work with him to launch an online anti-surveillance petition. Snowden’s Website