Anonymous releases 10,365 e-mails from the Iranian government

I'm not entirely sure about the provenance. I've often wondered if western governments use anon as a deniable vector for track II diplomacy. Either way, interesting.

Did you ever read Stephenson's Snow Crash? You just described what the CIA becomes in that novel: crowd-sourced intel uploaded to a central site.

"2a. Suggestions on how to proceed I know that there is an urge to "run and gun" this, perhaps go on a mad defacing spree, or start dropping anonymous based UI icons into the site's buttons, guy fakes banners, etc. We must resist this urge. I think there is a tremendous opportunity if we get even 3 moderately popular anti-green sites. Let's look at sites A,B, and C. What we should consider, is the ability to plant stories inside A, link to them from B, and then plant stories in B, and link to A and B's stories from C - the site with the most traffic. The stories should be posted, if possible, two days ago, or yesterday, assuming a blog-like ability to set times and dates when you post. Anyway, do what suits, thiswas just a thought. We may not have the luxury of time, in which case raw vandalization may do it - just put green party banners on the home page, and "anonymous" in text at the copyright on the bottom - that is just so they don't blame the green party for the exploit."

Interesting. It seems to indicate that perhaps some of Anonymous' actors have matured, or at least were able to use the petty vandalism phase of the group as a learning process.

I can't help but feel like with Anonymous talking about planting fake news, the whole government/HBGary thing about planting fake news, etc. that in the near future there may be some (albeit minor) crisis on the internet about finding news you can trust. Until the internet figures out how to route around the damage, of course.

I don't want to know how often embassy employees actually open such .exe files.