Anonymous posts over 4000 U.S. bank executive credentials
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
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.
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.
C'mon, at least RTFA before falling over yourself to support the anti-government position.
Consider the ".gov" URL that this was hosted at. If Anonymous had just found and exposed this, we'd have to accept a high likelihood that the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center (a state government agency that appears to have nothing to do with banking) not only has information from bank executives across the US, but that they hosted it on their website under the filename "oops-we-did-it-again.html."
I guess it depends on the intent of making something illegal. If the intent is to improve on the security of the internet, then making these kinds of acts illegal will not have any change on the actual security of the internet.
My feeling is that holding people responsible for an insecure system would be a better motivator for improving computer security: the opposite of what is happening now.
Perhaps there's some middle ground where if someone responsibly discloses the vulnerability to the owner, doesn't acquire any more data than necessary, destroys any data they do acquire, and doesn't attempt to profit from it (aside from collecting a legitimate bounty etc) they would be immune from prosecution.
I'm not sure what that law would look like or if it's even feasible.
I didn't mention rights. I am simply pointing out that if you want to remove the risk of someone entering your home because the door was unlocked, then it might be better to make someone responsible to lock the door in your house than going through some legal process to remove the person from your house.
In fact, if the act of the person accidentally walking into your house, though an unlocked door, resulted in extreme embarrassment to yourself, then you may also be inclined to use/extend/take advantage of the legal system to hide that embarrassment.
> 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?
A is the problem. If Congress expands that to economic crimes, then it's instant terrorist.
On the other hand, so is lobbying.
And I may have been right:
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?
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) 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.
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.
Edit: though I'd rather have neither.
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.
Vigilantes answer to the State. Secret police are the State, and the State answers to no one. (Except, maybe, vigilantes, who when successful always seem to become the State.)
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.
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.
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.