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Anonymous posts over 4000 U.S. bank executive credentials
- trg2 14y agoChrome gives a malware warning when you visit this site - watch out!
- sigzero 14y agoAnother story about the Anon criminals.
- hack_edu 14y agoAnother thread of broken-record HN comments!
- youngerdryas 14y agoWell who is stupid enough to upvote these stories. Apparently there are a lot of confused people on this site.
- hack_edu 14y agoI upvote them, because I find the entire Anonymous drama to be incredibly fascinating and highly topical to the HN demographic. What I do tire of is the 'damn buncha hoodlums' comment cacophony that offers no contribution to the discussion.
- youngerdryas 14y agoWell the drama maybe fascinating but it is not productive or helpful to any cause other than giving hackers a bad name, a fact I think many miss.
- hack_edu 14y agoI don't know about that. These acts highlight that the inarguably-real criminals can humiliate the government and not be stopped while public information activists get thrown away. One can say that they're Bad and/or criminals, and might be right, but to assume that the actions of Anonymous are in a vacuum apart from Aaron or Manning is short-sighted. Are their actions and reckless? Probably. So? The means-ends relationship is complicated, but Anonymous acts within their virtues and their intents are from the right place. And come on, this shit's hilarious! And, this whole 'giving hackers a bad name' thing. Give me a break. Yes, 'hacker' is a dirty word to some. Most likely those that don't understand, nor matter to the greater interests of either types of who self-identify with the word. It will continue to be, regardless of however many Facebook/Google/Instragram/whatevers there are.
- csense 14y agoWhat's a "record"?
- tlrobinson 14y agoI don't get it, they're demanding computer crime law reform by doing something that obviously is and should be illegal? EDIT: Now it's unclear to me whether Anonymous placed the spreadsheet on the .gov server, or they simply found it and exposed it. If it's the latter then it makes more sense, but I suspect it's the former.
- meddlepal 14y agoThey are going to get exactly what they do not want by continuing this kind of reckless behavior.
- onemorepassword 14y agoWe've already got what they do not want. I'm not arguing that this is an effective strategy, but the standard argument against radical action simply doesn't hold water. Even terrorism (or what was labelled as such) has more often then not had the long term effect of putting reforms on the agenda.
- nickff 14y agoIt seems they are just being petulant.
- john_b 14y agoWhen all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
- CountHackulus 14y agoShould it be illegal? They shared a public link to a spreadsheet exposed on a .gov address. If anything, it's the owner of that .gov address that needs to get in trouble for placing sensitive documents in a publicly accessible location.
- tibbon 14y agoPointing out that the emperor is naked is often frowned on by the government.
- deleted_account 14y ago/facepalm Anonymous is really embarrassing themselves. Trying to connect the dots from doxxing "management at community banks" back to Aaron Swartz is so cringe worthy I can only shrug and assume they're doing it for the lulz. row row fight the powah, I guess.
- sageikosa 14y agoI'll take the secret police over secret vigilantes, if for no other reason that the policy of maintaining a secret police force can be debated as a matter of public policy, whereas vigilantes answer to no one. Edit: though I'd rather have neither.
- deleted_account 14y agoHm. That's a weird trade-off, but whatever. The thing is though: these guys aren't secret vigilantes. 25 years ago they'd be war-dialing every number in their city prefix ('cause Mom and Dad would get pissed if there were long distance charges on the bill) or moping around 2600 meet-ups trying to show off their homemade redbox. Now a days they're running LOIC, or WordPress-backdoor-du-jour, or (if they're l33t) `wget --mirror` on some herp derp county website looking for dox. Lists like this are bound to get stumbled upon. When they do, they become currency on irc, redeemable for a modicum of street cred. Eventually, it falls into the hands of whoever managed to register today's Anonymous twitter account and it gets shoehorned into the political agenda of some teenager who stole "Essential Bakunin" from the library, but hasn't gotten around to reading it.
- CapitalistCartr 14y agoSecret police are used to stifle dissent; they aren't subject to it. The whole point of a "secret police force" is that they are an incredibly powerful tool not subject to public oversight, public debate, or even public approval.
- criley 14y agoRight? If the public knew about it and debated it, it's not a "secret".
- krrrh 14y agoI was just discussing this with a lawyer friend who is concerned that it is only a matter of time before anonymous gets classified as a domestic terrorist group. The PATRIOT act defines domestic terrorism as: > activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state, that (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S. Condition C is met, condition B(ii) is pretty much declared. How much of a stretch would it be for a federal prosecutor to argue that condition A is satisfied because exposing personal information of powerful people is dangerous to their lives?
- drivingmenuts 14y agoI'd say they've got B.i and B.ii down pretty thoroughly and C wouldn't be difficult since the end result of the act occurred in the US. A is the problem. If Congress expands that to economic crimes, then it's instant terrorist.
- youngerdryas 14y agoAnonymous is worse than useless.
- nextparadigms 14y agoThe moment I saw this news I thought false flag! And I may have been right: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/17v9zy/anonymous_posts_over_4000_us_bank_executive/c899cdo http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/17v9zy/anonymous... The feds have been investigating the bankers, and I'm sure they had access to all that information. The feds are having their own terrorist plots (that then they "uncover" themselves). Is it really that far fetched for this to have happened, too?
- weareconvo 14y agoYes, except, the feds can join Anonymous if they wish. That's half of the point of Anonymous - it's not a distinct group of people. It's just a banner.
- GHFigs 14y agoIt's much more likely that you're witnessing the confluence of confirmation bias and the inherent ambiguity created by many different sets of people operating under the same name. We have, in fact, been through this before with "Anonymous", because anybody can claim to be "Anonymous". (The post on reddit is hilariously out of touch with this fundamental reality.) You, personally, have been making claims of false flag attacks for years with a similar lack of evidence. (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2659640 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2659640) You might just be seeing what you want to see, instead of drawing the most accurate conclusions you can make based on the available evidence.
- ihsw 14y agoAnother false-flag operation by the US Government, same as the ussc.gov fiasco. Escalating seems to be very effective at discrediting Anonymous based on the comments here and on reddit.
- youngerdryas 14y agoI think you give the US government too much credit.
- ihsw 14y agoI think you don't give it enough credit. Israel has a history of disinformation and misinformation campaigns and I think the Obama administration will take a page from their book. This strategy may be at the forefront of Obama's domestic policy strategy for this term -- just look at how they're discrediting the pro-Republican anti-Democrat media and they're very successful so far.
- oconnore 14y agoThat's sort of the whole point, isn't it? Anonymous, by definition, is anyone (including employees of the US Government) acting on any motivation (including discrediting itself or other groups within itself), so long as they don't sign their name at the end. It would be interesting to see how many factions exist within the cloud of self important people that capitalize the letter 'A' when they withhold their name.