WAS ANTI-SEC AN FBI FRONT ALL ALONG?
By Sam Biddle

Cops. Defense contractors. The FTC. Military attorneys. FBI conference calls. Some of the most striking hack-attacks of the past year were executed under the middle finger banner of #AntiSec. But what if this “movement” was a gigantic trap all along?

We know Sabu was a snitch. We know the Puerto Rican projects mastermind behind the most popular, prolific internet destruction streak of modern memory was a traitor. He sold he fellow elites out to save his own ass.

But what if it went further than that—a lot further? There’s good reason to believe Sabu not only sold out the top of the top, but swept potentially thousands of Anonymous groupies under the direction of the FBI—that Sabu wasn’t just a stoolpigeon—but a soldier. His former (vengeful) buddies have presented a pretty compelling case that Hector “Sabu” Monsegur not only informed the feds, but actively encouraged people to break the law in order to get them in trouble? That’s treachery of a whole other magnitude—and it might just be true.

YourAnonNews, the largest quasi-official Twitter entity (and group mouthpiece) for Anonymous, recently pieced together a timeline they say makes the case: “#AntiSec [was] Created and Operated Under FBI Supervision,” with Sabu acting as internet agent provocateur. His long con, they say, was to rally the riffraff who worshipped him; herd them into chatrooms monitored by the feds, and encourage self-incrimination—he was a hacker working from an FBI office on an FBI computer to do its bidding.

The sequence of events is simple. A couple weeks after his arrest in early June, Sabu returns from a long Twitter hiatus—to announce the formation of AntiSec: “The biggest, unified operation amongst hackers in history. All factions welcome. We are one”—along with a manifesto:

Welcome to Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec) – we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word “AntiSec” on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art. We encourage you to spread the word of AntiSec far and wide, for it will be remembered. To increase efforts, we are now teaming up with the Anonymous collective and all affiliated battleships.

Top priority is to steal and leak any classified government information, including email spools and documentation. Prime targets are banks and other high-ranking establishments.
(Emphasis added)

Two months later, Sabu entered a plea bargain, reducing his sentence to a maximum of over 100 years (!) in exchange for his full cooperation with police, as well as—get this—the promise to “commit no further crimes whatsoever.”

What, then, accounts for the next half a year he spent ostensibly committing and encouraging crimes? The timeline shows it all:

22 August 2011 – ANTISEC releases 1GB of personal data fromVanguard Defense Industries, a Texas-based aerospace and defense firm

26 October 2011 – SABU calls on ANTISEC and other hackers worldwide to respond to police…and to visit the #ANTISEC channel in Anonops IRC

18 November 2011 – To protest police brutality at Occupy, ANTISEC (1) hacks and dumps International Association of Chiefs of Police and (2) defaces Boston, Massachusets Police website

24-26 December 2011 – As part of LulzXmas festivities, ANTISEC claim hack of USglobal thinktank Stratfor. 860,000 e-mail addresses, 75,000 unencrypted credit card numbers stolen and later released publicly

3 February 2012 – ANTISEC defaces site of Puckett and Faraj law firmto protest Haditha massacre verdict. Law firm mail is leaked

3 February 2012 – ANTISEC releases an intercepted FBI conference call on Anonymous investigation

17 February 2012 – ANTISEC hacks and pwns FTC websites
All of these acts Sabu either directly participated in or was cheerleading online, ferrying his followers into FBI surveillance, setting up thousands of Anonymous devotees for attacks he—and the government—knew about before their victims. We know that during this time, on these exact days, he was not only cooperating with the FBI, he was following their orders.

He was also grinning to me about his presumably criminal exploits during the occasional chat:

October 11th, 2011

February 12th, 2012
The inference here isn’t much of a grab. If Sabu adhered to the conditions of his bargain with the feds—and committed no crimes whatsoever—his calls to action were pure trickery. The attacks he planned and promoted were a ploy to pull more people down with him, to ingratiate himself with his FBI handlers, and a deception across the interent as a whole—not just the five other compatriots cuffed this month.

So was it entrapment? Probably not. Alexander Reiner, professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law says entrapment is massively hard to prove—particularly in a case like this. Anyone swept up in Sabu’s FBI front would have to prove they had no disposition to commit the crime in question—no easy task for self-proclaimed members of a hacker collective.
This is typical FBI business for terrorists, mafiosos, and, now, hackers. Sabu, therefore, wasn’t just an informant, nor was he just a criminal—he was a criminal who wanted to incriminate others, and to perpetrate of one of the biggest, grandest lies in the history of the internet.

Original photo: Peter Kim

http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/03/was-the-antisec-hacking-spree-an-fbi-front-all-along/

2 months ago  /  3 notes

Photography and photomanipulation by Antisectarian

THE FARCE OF BRADLEY MANNING’S PERSECUTION
By Andrew McInnes

At long last, Bradley Manning has been charged. It has only taken almost two years, and was more likely resulting from the military’s inability to ‘break’ him by torture into becoming a star ‘witness’ against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The death penalty is probably still on the table, despite comments to the contrary, if merely as the next step in attempting to manipulate Mr Manning.

There are clearly very few limits to the lengths which the US Federal Government is willing to go, in order to build a legalistically plausible show trial for Mr Assange. Law and legality are themselves utterly meaningless; if President Obama considers Mr Manning unquestionably guilty without the need for a trial, one must wonder how Mr Assange rates on the Obama Guilty-Before-Trial-O-Meter.

It should go without saying that the notion behind Mr Manning’s persecution is to, ultimately, put the fear of death in both potential leakers, as well as the Assanges and Daniel Ellsbergs of the world. Make a chilling example of one leaker, as well as his primary publisher, and the likelihood of such problems in the future will be nicely curtailed.

At least that is the theory. In practice, Mr Ellsberg is alive and well, whilst the case against Mr Assange required a secret tribunal to conceal, not the process of a kangaroo court, but rather the embarrassing and flimsily ridiculous nature of what the court is attempting to call ‘evidence’.

Allow me to bring up a little-regarded point: There is no evidence that Mr Manning is anything other than utterly innocent. Supporters of Mr Manning who object to this would be wise to remember that ‘innocence before proven guilty in a court of law’ goes both ways. Mr Manning can be best supported by not tacitly agreeing he is guilty without a trial, vis a vis insisting ‘he is a hero for what he did’. This stance does nothing to get Mr Manning a fair trial. Rather, it accepts an unjust trial but defends the action of which Mr Manning has been baselessly accused, by an paid informant in the employ of the FBI, as well as unverifiable ‘chat logs’ of dubious authenticity.

Personally, I see Mr Manning as being innocent. There is quite literally zero evidence which I can accept as being valid that he is otherwise. So, as far as I am concerned, Mr Manning was essentially chosen at random to be the person to call guilty. This is in keeping with how the FBI is known to operate; there is no reason to think the rest of the Federal Government operates in a different manner.

Here is the central failure of the persecution of Bradley Manning: Anyone who is thinking about leaking information will not be given pause by Mr Manning’s treatment. Quite the opposite. They will be both emboldened, and forewarned about the legalistic techniques which could be brought to bear by the Federal Government. The failure of the Government to appear anything other than lying, arbitrary, and incompetent in its monomaniacal pursuit of an innocent sends a clear message that a real leaker stands a very good chance of avoiding any fallout whatsoever from their leaks.

In fact, an innocent Bradley Manning will further the cause of government transparency far more than a guilty Bradley Manning. The assumption of innocence which his is owed by supporters and detractors alike, proven true (or unfairly ‘false’) in a court of law, will show the Federal Government to be as ruthless as it is ineffective. There is, I expect, a veritable army of disaffected Federal employees and agents who are watching the Manning trial very closely. If and when they are convinced of their safety, they will leak.

The gallows humour of the situation is that the Federal Government actually believes its own claptrap, as President Obama made abundantly clear. The chilling incompetence of this cannot be overemphasised. It means the Federal Government is so blindly ruthless, it is able to pick out a person at random and know they are guilty. This is in the same vein as that famous scene in Eric Blair’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where O’Brien says that, when he holds up three fingers, but declares they are four, Winston must literally see four fingers where there are actually only three.

This level of institutional delusional psychopathy has very grim implications. It does, however, have an upside. It precludes any ability of the Federal Government to be truly Machiavellian. ‘The prince’ of Machiavelli’s design is many things, but delusionally psychopathic is not one of them. To dominate effectively, ‘the prince’ has to see things as they really are, and not as he wants them to be. He must be popular and widely loved in order to stay in power. The Federal Government has this precisely backward.

Because of this, the Federal Government must pick out innocents which it truly knows are guilty. This obviously precludes the need for anything other than show trials. The Government is literally incapable, institutionally speaking, of picking out innocents it knows to be innocent, and calling them guilty regardless. That would not pass the O’Brien finger test.

This, very fortunately, precludes the truly Machiavellian solution to stopping leaks from untraceable sources. A ‘prince’ would select, say, ten people at random who had access to leaked information and throw them in prison – or simply kill them – as an intimidation tactic. The idea being to create a direct human cost to leaking: Every leak means another ten people permanently imprisoned, or dead. This plays off of the quite reasonable assumption that a leaker would leak for altruistic notions, which the Federal Government clearly cannot understand. Mr Manning and Mr Assange are guilty of ‘aiding the enemy,’ ‘espionage’, et cetera, ad nausam.

http://timeoutcorner.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/the-farce-of-bradley-mannings-persecution/

2 months ago  /  6 notes

Photography by Antisectarian
Toronto, Canada

INJURIED QUEBEC STUDENT FIGHTS TO SAVE

MONTREAL — Student demonstrators symbolically covered their right eyes Thursday as they marched through Montreal to recognize a peer who feared losing sight in one eye.

The demonstration was the latest in a series of protests against Quebec’s plans for tuition-fee hikes. It unfolded in an atmosphere of heightened tensions, one day after a fellow demonstrator suffered a partially detached retina following a violent fracas with riot police.

Student groups say Francis Grenier, 20, was wounded after the explosion of a police stun grenade Wednesday in Montreal.

On Thursday, hundreds of protesters, some wearing eyepatches and others covering an eye in reference to Grenier, flooded city streets and jammed rush-hour traffic.

Riot police clutched batons and kept careful watch as protesters walked past. The officers were greeted with chants and a variety of hand gestures, ranging from two-fingered peace signs to one-fingered salutes.

“Police is everywhere, justice is nowhere,” some shouted during a march with a third theme: International Women’s Day.

The fist-pumping demonstrators gathered in front of a public building near the Jacques Cartier Bridge and shouted their condemnation of the tuition-fee increases.

One by one, dozens of protesters each dropped a long-stemmed red rose into a pile at the feet of armoured riot police guarding the front door. Many held a hand over their right eye as they knelt to place the flowers.

A day earlier, seven people were arrested during a pair of Montreal protests — the latest in a string of demonstrations by students who believe Quebec’s rock-bottom tuition rates are a basic right.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/canada/71595-injured-quebec-student-fights-save-eye

2 months ago  /  5 notes

Photography by Antisectarian
Toronto, Canada

ANGER AND TEARS AT INTERNATIONAL ANTI-POLICE BRUTALITY MARCH

Mia Laberge and Naomie Décarie could hardly withhold their angry tears after Montreal police charged toward demonstrators Thursday and, seemingly unprovoked, fired tear gas into the crowd.

“They are operating on a strategy of fear,” said Laberge, a law student at the Université du Québec a Montréal. “We have the right to demonstrate, but as a woman, I felt threatened by them.

“These are the people who are supposed to protect us, but we’re not safe at all.”

Read live updates from our reporters as the demonstration unfolded

A joint demonstration by students protesting rising tuition fees and people against police brutality began at about rush hour at Berri and Ste Catherine Sts. About 2,000 protesters headed north, then west along Sherbrooke St., but no police were visible along the route, although they were positioned on adjacent streets and in the métro.

When about six officers did appear, a few protesters started throwing rocks at them. At Aylmer and Sherbrooke Sts., police fired off two loud sound grenades, sending a panic through the crowd. Protesters ran in all directions, but riot police formed a line, and banging on their shields with their batons, marched forward, shoving demonstrators north.

Montreal police spokesman Ian Lafrenière said police had to stop the march for the safety of motorists on Sherbrooke.

“(Demonstrators) have rights but so do others,” he said, adding that police hadn’t been informed of the march’s route.

One man, trying to stop some young men from throwing rocks, was hit in the forehead with a tear-gas canister and it exploded.

Scott Weinstein, a nurse in the crowd who was providing first aid when needed, poured water over the man’s eyes, as the man screamed in anger.

“If he hadn’t been wearing ski goggles, he could have been blinded,” Weinstein said. “His hair was singed and his goggles covered in chemicals.

“I’ve never been in a demonstration ever where police threw explosives into the crowd,” said Weinstein, who says he’s been in dozens of demos. “It’s a terrible path to take because these people will lose their eyes.”

The man, who said he had a 20-month-old child, sat on the steps of an apartment building and tried to comprehend what had just happened.

“I was being peaceful and this is what they do to me?” he yelled.

The crowd then broke up into different groups, with some demonstrators, like Décarie and Laberge, deciding to leave the march.

“I feel totally traumatized by this,” Décarie said. “They’re treating us like terrorists and no one is even armed.”

Police reported more than 150 arrests, two injured police officers and a few vandalized store fronts. One police car was flipped over and smashed. Police said a second one was damaged as well.

They also reported looting at Future Shop.

On Ste. Catherine St., Tina Tsimiklis, in town from Halifax for her children’s March break, was taking photos of her sons in front of a smashed store window.

“This is pretty fricking awesome,” said 16-year-old Dimitri Tsimiklis. “Nothing ever happens like this in Halifax.”

Tina Tsimiklis said they saw protesters and police in riot gear coming along the street and, not knowing what was going on, they convinced a reluctant security guard at the Eaton’s Centre to let them in.

A young woman, who didn’t want to give her name, held a bag of ice to her right eye after a police officer whacked her with his baton.

“(Riot police) were coming towards us and my friend dropped his cellphone so I bent down to pick it up with my arms raised in the air, so one hit me in the face and my back,” she said.

Lafrenière defended the police force’s tactics, saying they had warned people ahead of time that pepper spray and tear gas would be used if necessary.

Police made the majority of the evening’s arrests in front of the Bibliothèque Nationale, on Berri St.

Weinstein said those arrested were just standing still, arms locked, in front of the library chanting.

“They were the least provocative of the whole march,” he said. “They were catchable.”

Lafrenière claimed the demonstrators “wanted to put on a show.”

“They were chasing us all night long because they wanted to get arrested,” he said.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/touch/news/story.html?id=6309863

BY SUE MONTGOMERY, GAZETTE JUSTICE REPORTER MARCH 16, 2012
smontgomery@montrealgazette.com

2 months ago  /  7 notes

brittanysaysrelax:

alloverpasadena:

I posted a little while ago about these utility boxes on Colorado; here’s another one making a statement.

Quotes around Pasadena that make sense.

(via m-a-y-hem)

2 months ago  /  182 notes  /  Source: alloverpasadena

youranonnews:

ANONYMITY SUGGESTIONS

Foreword:


Anonymity isn’t just using TOR or a VPN and choosing a nickname-it means literally having no name, no identity. This means you DO NOT deface websites mentioning your nickname (or that of your team, I’m looking at YOU, CharrieWong), or in any way associate the name you are using with yourself (watch your identities).

You should credit Anonymous (or give no credit) for your actions, as soon as a name is attached to you, a single slip-up is enough to get you caught. Once the Feds know there’s a group, any form of infiltration (IE having an informant) in your group will be devastating. All of your work, data, rooted boxes, infrastructure, and scraps of personal data will be going directly to the feds. This brings us to some critical suggestions that we pulled together after perusing the criminal Complaints from the alleged LulzSec / Internet Feds / Anonymous arrests.

Please read, reflect and remember them next time you feel the keen need to share a personal detail from your life with your new bff in IRC.

CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER PEOPLE - 
NEVER…

• mention any political affiliations directly (don’t say I’m a registered Independent, just talk about your political views)

• mention any arrests (of you, or people you know) (WE LOVE YOU JEREMY HAMMOND!)

• mention any forms of IRL activism that you have participated in

• tell people what you are doing at any given time, or give out specific schedule information (IE, I’m always out of the house between 5 and 7 pm)

• mention your age, any previous work (citing your abilities is okay if you don’t provide much proof), height, ethnicity, or medical conditions

• mention where you are, if you happen to be on vacation

• inform people outside of your trusted group of any changes in IRC nicknames

• mention the manufacturer of your computer (or NIC, more specifically) without changing the MAC address! (WE LOVE YOU JEREMY HAMMOND!)



**Quick note from observing Sabu: if someone disappears without prior notice for an extended period of time, and then upon coming back tries to gain access to several more groups, and attempts to build a trust-based relationship with you, said person *might* be an informant.



ADVICE FOR WOULD-BE HACKERS:


• don’t attack any organisations you are in any way affiliated with (don’t DDOS your school, dumbshit! Again, looking at you CharrieWong)

• don’t dump any information to a server that you didn’t witness the pwnage of. (Stratfor’s data was copied over to an FBI server)

• ALWAYS use TOR/a VPN while haxing! An easy way to run pretty much anything through TOR on linux is by using proxychains or torify (‘cept nmap!)

• NEVER listen for reverse shells on your own box (derp)

• NEVER connect to anything even remotely related to your target using any IP addresses that are affiliated with you or a small group of people

You can read the full criminal complaints from the alleged LulzSec / Internet Feds / Anonymous arrests HERE

(via yellittothemasses)

2 months ago  /  215 notes  /  Source: youranonnews

@m4yH3mKITTEH Remind ‘yourselves’ that some kid named #Manning survived 11 months of #torture (innocent till proven guilty, not b/c President #OBAMA declared he was) & that @anonymouSabu #snitched almost instantly!

Stencil by @ApplesRBlue from Twitter

2 months ago  /  2 notes