13 #Anonymous Hackers Indicted for ‘Operation Payback’ DDOS Attacks

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The New York Times reports:

Thirteen members of a hacking collective that calls itself Anonymous were indicted on Thursday on charges that they conspired to coordinate attacks against prominent Web sites.
The 13 are accused of bringing down at least six Web sites, including those belonging to the Recording Industry Association of America, Visa and MasterCard.
The attacks caused “significant damage to the victims,” the indictment said.
The attacks, carried out from September 2010 to January 2011, were part of campaign called Operation Payback, which started as an effort to support file-sharing sites but later rallied around WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

You can read the whole thing, and the federal indictment is here.

On a hunch, I Googled “Neal Rauhauser + Operation Payback” and eventually found what Jennifer Emick wrote in August 2012:

HB Gary had been solicited by the law firm Hunton & Williams on behalf of two of the law firm’s clients — Bank of America and the US Chamber of Commerce — to develop a proposal for protecting these clients from hacking attempts and the intentional spread of information/disinformation that was aimed at causing financial and reputational harm to these clients (this was in the wake of “Operation Payback”).. Among those identified (whether by HBGary, Hunton & Williams, or the US Chamber and Bank of America, or all) as political activists causing such harm were Brett Kimberlin and his organization Velvet Revolution, and his Velvet Revolution business associates, Brad Friedman and Kevin Zeese — together the three run “StopTheChamber“. Another offending threat to the two clients was also Wikileaks, to which Kimberlin’s partner Kevin Zeese is directly connected as a founder (see “Wikileaks Is Democracy” and the “Bradley Manning Support Network“). It is suspected that Kimberlin and Friedman are also connected to Zeese’s Wikileaks support groups; however, this has not yet been confirmed. It should also be noted that Kevin Zeese is legal counsel to Anonymous in some capacity, and founded October2011.org, an Occupy movement affiliated group with prior political connections.

Is all this verified? And what does it mean? I am unsure, although I know that Rauhauser hates Jennifer Emick, and Neal’s association with Anonymous is something he boasted about. See, for example, his early intimations of familiarity in “Aspects Of Anonymous,” published under his “Stranded Wind” alias at Daily Kos in March 2011. As for this specific aspect of Anonymous, see Rauhauser’s May 2011 Daily Kos item, “Is Berico Sheltering Aaron Barr?”

Once you understand that it was the criminal “Operation Payback” hackings that led Hunton & Williams’s clients to seek the assistance of HB Gary Federal (of which Aaron Barr was CEO) to help protect their clients against such illegal activity, you see that both Brett Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution and Neal Rauhauser were on the side of these criminal hackers. If you want to understand why that matters, I urge you to read my June 2012 article, “‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection.”

Remember: Former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown melted down and was arrested for threatening an FBI agent after Rauhauser (behind the alias “Carlito2000”) provoked Brown with a conspiracy theory involving Jen Emick and other of Neal’s personal enemies.

If you ask around, you’ll find that a lot of people suspect that the FBI “protects” Neal Rauhauser because he is a confidential informant.

Just sayin’ . . .

 

37 comments

  5. Suspicions that Kimberlin is “protected” — and here, it is necessary to say, I repeat only speculation by various sources — tends more toward political affinity. Especially, there are those who mention JTMP’s association with the State Department as possibly indicating that Kimberlin has influential friends in high places. It has further been suggested by sources that the financial contributors to JTMP and VR are, in many cases, also major contributors to the Democrat Party. So, by the same partisan bias in high places that results in wrongful targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS, Kimberlin’s “charitable” activities may be shielded from official scrutiny.

    As I say, however, these are mere speculations by sources, and I have not been able to document any clear example of such “protection.”

  8. In other news, the NSA announced today they have formed a new group of thirteen electronic espionage experts to go after Tea Party terrorists, no matter where they may be.

  12. Ol’ Neal has been keeping an uncharacteristically low profile the last several months, going back about to when Barrett was busted for his rant.

    And here, we thought he was just ducking child support!

  14. The dog that didn’t bark?
    If the IRS can show up at Dr. Carson’s so soon after his comments about Obama at a breakfast, but it can’t show up at BK’s place of business after BK’s outing here on TOM?
    Circumstantial, yes. But the dog still hasn’t barked.

  17. “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

    Yeah, these internet thugs that attacked businesses in a way that maximize hurt of working class customers need to have the book thrown at them.

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