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How the FBI raided Anonymous
- sliverstorm 16y agoTWO %REAL% GUNS POINTED AT ME I love this part. It's obvious that, for the first time in the lives of these Anons, sh%t actually got real. (I don't mind any downvotes you see fit to give me, I have always found it laughable when Anons expect to break the law and suffer no consequences. Whether or not it is a good law has no bearing, that's not how civil disobedience works.)
- mahmud 16y agoI think you got downvotted my MS-DOS fans. You turned a shell variable into your own regex glob :-/
- AndrewMoffat 16y agoI thought it was funny that he needed to emphasize or even say "real." You either have a gun pointed at you or you don't. Does the FBI sometimes burst in with water pistols?
- sesqu 16y agoTazers might be called fake guns.
- sesqu 16y agoI'm not a fan. These are guns we are talking about, not paperwork. Paperwork is the shit that's real, guns are just there to make you feel helpless. And also to kill you.
- sliverstorm 16y agoOh, I'm not sure I think it was the best plan. I merely enjoy mirth at the expense of Anonymous.
- sukuriant 16y agoBut the kids would have laughed at paperwork until it was all over, and then possibly still laugh at it. With the guns, they just experienced the severity of their action that a whole armed FBI-team had to come in to deal with the situation.
- sesqu 16y agoYeah, I don't agree with that. If it's a paper in the mail that says "we know it's you", I'd be pretty scared. If it's a policeman at the door saying "come in for questioning", I'd be shitting my pants. If it's three policemen saying "we've come to take all your PCs", I'd be confused and seriously contemplating future involvement with the group. If it's a bunch of thugs breaking the door, grabbing my pcs, iphone, xboxes, lady gaga cd's and threatening to kill me if I object, I'd start looking into getting more involved with political activism. At least, that's how I think I would react, before dealing with the paperwork.
- roel_v 16y agoEntering with an armed team is SOP, mostly to protect policemen. These are just guys doing a job, in the vast majority of cases a good and just job, who want to go home to their wives and children in the evening. Some (most) raids could theoretically be done by just knocking on the door; but sometimes some crazy man will start shooting back, or running away, or try to destroy evidence. Rush-entry raids with flashbangs etc. are designed to cause maximum confusion so that the people in the house are disoriented for a short time, hopefully long enough to be cuffed. Anyway like I said sometimes these could be done by one guy with a briefcase, but how are you going to decide when to raid and when to knock on the door? And who is going to decide? When somebody makes a wrong call and a policeman gets killed, there's going to be a ruckus (police union, other policemen feeling unsafe causing worse performance, etc.) So the safe thing to do is to err on the side of caution. Sucks for those being raided when it wasn't really necessary, and even worse for those being raided in error, but as always it's a trade off. That's how it came to be. IMO perfectly reasonable. One can disagree with specific cases, I do too; but try to put yourself in the shoes of someone designing or managing a law enforcement organization or system. If you have a solution that mitigates the problems yet addresses all the points and many more I brought up above, many many people would love to hear about it.
- nanonymous 16y agoI find it laughable that the cops felt the need to use real guns against a "Low Orbit Ion Cannon". Guns against unarmed kids (criminal or not) - that's not how jurisdiction should work.
- inafewwords 16y agoIt's like the war on drugs. It's the small fish that get fried. But it tends to be the small fry that make up the bulk "opposition"
- starpilot 16y agoI love the first quote: I'm not retarded ... Yes, I'm fking dumb.
- tomelders 16y agoIt won't be long before someone get's shot over all this, and it'll be the "powers that be" that drive the escalation. Petty, fearful little people.
- jrockway 16y agoIt's funny that Mastercard can't defend against an attack that my home router is capable of defending against. (A big limit on connections per /24 per minute should solve this problem. So will using a smart webserver or frontend proxy that doesn't care how many idle connections there are. Then all you have to worry about is bandwidth saturation rather than your servers crashing.) But the lesson here is, when you visit a web page, a line in a log that identifies you is generated. Generate too many of these lines, and, one line of Perl later, the cops are going to be asking you some questions. Don't participate in a DDoS attack unless you're absolutely sure that nobody is logging your traffic. And that is something that's impossible to be sure of these days.
- magamiako 16y agoNo, your router can't defend against a DDOS. Like you noted at the end, it was data saturation that was the issue. I'm not really sure how the LOIC works (I've never checked out this program), but my suspicion is that it simply floods a connection with ICMP. It's kind of like...one person is only so strong, thousands are much stronger.
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoCome on, quite a few home routers can't even handle an aggressive Bittorrent client. Yes, DDoS can be defended against, and the fact that the LOIC is pretty primitive helps, but it's not that trivial.
- aphyr 16y agoIt seems like it would be trivial to get someone's door busted down by running LOIC aggressively on their computer. I wonder--at what point can the FBI's enthusiastic enforcement be directed, in some sense, as a weapon? Edit: I've watched Anonymous (insert typical disclaimer about the membership of a heterogenous group of net users) attack more than one of my boxes. DDOS's have been traditionally been the regime of surreptitious botnets, not voluntary ones. I'll bet you some unsuspecting soccer mom (or someone who pisses off Anon) gets nabbed at some point.
- forensic 16y ago
- borism 16y agoLet me get this straight. All this fanfare, and all they got was a bunch of teenagers (who most likely are not even legally liable) + their moms?
- epochwolf 16y agoI would be willing to bet the teenagers are either most of anonymous or anonymous's cannon fodder. I'm leaning towards the second because it's so much cooler. :)
- tptacek 16y agoWhat does being a teenager have to do with being liable? If they're criminally liable, they'll be tried by a juvenile court. If they're civilly liable, their parents will face civil suits.
- borism 16y agooh, hello our friendly neighborhood cybercrime legal expert. If I have written: teenagers who most likely are not liable to the same extent as adults would it have satisfied your pedantry, or would you still argue to the contrary?
- zacharycohn 16y agoYou should say what you mean. "Not legally liable" is pretty clear and does not imply "to the same extent as adults."
- borism 16y agounlike others I don't pretend to be a legal expert, that's why I've written "most likely not even legally liable" in the first place. I think I've made it pretty clear with that sentence that I'm not sure, but I see it as highly unlikely that persons mentioned in the article will face any serious legal liability over their alleged actions. But let's wait for the court session (if there will be any), shall we?
- 16y ago
- f1gm3nt 16y ago"...and the first FBI agent in the door could be heard yelling 'FIRST'!..."
- kotrin 16y ago"We have noted that similar attacks have also been carried out against Wikileaks itself, yet so far, nobody has been arrested in connection with these attacks, nor are there even any signs of an investigation into this issue at all," I think that is one of the most important points of this article.
- ZachPruckowski 16y agoFor a law enforcement agency to investigate the Wikileaks would require Wikileaks to turn over their server access logs, including every visitor to the site for the period of time in question. They would be basically finished in terms of getting dissidents to visit the site or hand over information if they're seen as turning over any sort of visitor-identifying info to any sort of law enforcement agency.
- jacquesm 16y agoSomehow I don't think the protection of Wikileaks' servers figured very high on the priority lists.
- ghurlman 16y agoWhere were Wikileaks' servers hosted at the time? The US cops are going to go after the crimes against US businesses on US soil first.
- tptacek 16y agoThose are in fact the only crimes they are likely to have jurisdiction over.
- _delirium 16y agoIf neither the perpetrator nor the servers are in the U.S., theres not likely to be any jurisdiction, but it's not actually necessary for the targeted servers to be in the U.S.; it's sufficient for jurisdiction for the (alleged) perpetrator to be operating from the U.S.
- 16y ago
- monochromatic 16y agoWhat's the justification for no-knock raids here?
- tptacek 16y agoThe immense likelihood of attempts to quickly destroy evidence.
- kevingadd 16y agoThey're DDOSing websites run by big corporations, so they're obviously terrorists, which means you need to arrest them at gunpoint early in the morning so that you can be sure they won't have time to detonate a suitcase nuke before you can cuff them and get them into the back of the cop car.
- gojomo 16y agoOnly one of the reports suggests a door 'busted down'; is that nym known to give reliable, non-embellished testimony? (I can believe that some of the searches might be unnecessarily done that way, but also that there could be exaggeration in pseudonymous reports.)
- forensic 16y agono-knocks pretty much don't need justification anymore The laws are so vague and the precedents are so sweeping when it comes to no-knock raids.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoYup. Sadly no-knock raids have become routine rather than extremely exceptional. It shouldn't be the case, and the fact that it is should be a screaming siren that we need to fix things.
- cagenut 16y agoWhole drive encryption. I've seen docu-drama's where they actually break in when they know the suspect has gotten up to go the the bathroom/kitchen so that he can't reboot the computer. Then, like all things with a shred of reasonableness too them, they become an awesome "check this box every single time" way of doing business for the guys who get their thrills kicking in doors.
- jtchang 16y agoMy tax dollars are going to this. I feel robbed.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ergo98 16y agoDDOS attacks are attacks on the very fabric of the internet. If you believe in the internet, you will not support those sorts of activities. This has a very real ramification for much of the subject matter of HN: The investment community needs to know that any iCompany can't be destroyed by some teenagers with a downloaded tool. Recall that the last freedom exercise was to try to suppress Gene Simmons' right to free speech (however stupid his opinions might be) by a DDOS on his servers, with all of the collateral damage that entails.
- x09 16y agoNo, your tax dollars go the lender of funny monies. Your "budget" -- aka more funny monies borrowed from the lender -- is what pays for this. Robbed, we are.
- fleitz 16y agoThats why taxes like robbery is done by threat of force. Otherwise no one would hand their money over to be wasted.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- lukeschlather 16y ago>The FBI yesterday reminded the public that "facilitating or conducting a DDoS attack is illegal, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil liability." What exactly is the relevant statute? As the other Ars article on the subject states, it's the digital equivalent of a sit-in.
- skymt 16y agoWikipedia suggests 18 U.S.C. § 1030, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[0]. Here's the relevant part: > Whoever ... knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer ... shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section. > As used in this section ... the term “protected computer” means a computer ... which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication... By my (not a lawyer) reading, the only real question is whether being overwhelmed with traffic can be called "damage". [0]: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html
- InclinedPlane 16y agoIt's silly to pretend that a DDoS attack is the same as a sit-in, such a contention is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Moreover, sit-ins are not legal either. If you choose to attempt to disrupt a place of business and you refuse to leave private property when asked to do so you can be arrested.
- anonymoushn 16y agoWhat differentiates a DDoS from a sit-in? Of course you can be arrested for a sit-in, but you won't go to gaol for ten years.
- lukeschlather 16y agoWell, if we're going to insist on an ironclad analogy, I would say it's something like opening up a fire hydrant and splitting the stream into a bunch of smaller streams, pointing them at a building, and walking away. Except it's more like everyone's garden hoses somehow reach the building with no loss in PSI, and it's a few dozen people each with their own paltry residential water supply. Now, this does have the potential to cause some damage, but not really anything a heavy rain wouldn't cause. Likewise, a DDoS has the potential to overheat some servers and make some sysadmins lose some sleep, but it's nothing a day of heavy traffic couldn't cause. It's clearly illegal. But I don't think anyone there has done anything such that 10 years in prison is an even remotely reasonable punishment. I would say it's a misdemeanor at worst, and it should carry something between community service and six months in jail. And really, the sit-in analogy is probably better than that nonsense I just wrote.
- toephu 16y agothe surprise here is that one of them has a gf that lives w/ him!
- a904guy 16y agoReminds me a moment from the movie Hackers. "You hacked a bank across state lines from your house?" "...Stupid..."
- Jach 16y agoI'm concerned about the knock-down approach by the FBI. Say I live in a state which allows one to kill home intruders on sight, could I not legally set up an alarm system that sprays some bullets in the direction of the door if it's opened without being disabled? By knocking I can disable it and let them in instead of having a few dead FBI agents on my doorstep.
- dpatru 16y agoOne of the first cases in a law school tort class is Katko v Briney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney). Briney was a farmer fed up with a break-ins of an abandoned house that he owned. He set up a shotgun to shoot at an intruder's knees if and when the intruder forced the door. Katko, a trespasser, broke in and was shot and injured, sued and won. The quote I remember is (I had to look it up): ‘The value of human life and limb, not only to the individual concerned but also to society, so outweights the interest of a possessor of land in excluding from it those whom he is not willing to admit thereto that a possessor of land has . . . no privilege to use force intended or likely to cause death or serious harm against another whom the possessor sees about to enter his premises or meddle with his chattel, unless the intrusion threatens death or serious bodily harm to the occupiers or users of the premises.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoNo, you cannot legally create lethal booby traps, in any state in the US.
- Jach 16y agoGood to know. How about non-lethal? (Say, something that might break a few bones but you'll recover.)
- rdouble 16y agoAnything that can maim is legally "lethal force." There are legally defensible reasons for breaking into someone else's property. For example, if someone thinks there is someone incapacitated inside, or if someone is running from danger and needs to hide. Finally, it's not really a booby trap if you're inside deciding which visitors get blasted.