Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the FBI raided Anonymous

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 168 posts

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#81

Post by mquander »

burgerbrain wrote: post #61
mquander wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you couldn't legally set that up, are you insane? On what planet would that be justifiable? Even in Texas, you need to demonstrate a reasonable belief that you were in imminent danger of being robbed or attacked before you are permitted to use deadly force on an intruder in your home.

Somebody bursting down your door in the middle of the night isn't "reasonable belief that you were in imminent danger of being robbed or attacked"? What world do you live in? Ignore the silly mechanism described, and imagine you're sleeping in bed with your wife at 3am, and are a completely law abiding citizen as far as you are concerned. Why would you possibly have any reason to believe that the people violently bre…

The grandparent post wasn't asking what would happen if you woke up at 3 AM and shot a policeman mistakenly. He was asking whether it would be legal to rig a booby trap to do it! Those are extremely different situations, to say the least! You're arguing with a straw man.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#82

Post by wmf »

steveklabnik wrote: post #71
wmf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is whether Anonymous's legion of teenage trolls understands what civil disobedience means (i.e. that you are supposed to get arrested).

They do. EDIT: Anonymous has demonstrated an increasing political savvy and awareness, first via the protests against Scientology, but also with some smaller things that were tried that didn't spark such media coverage, like Operation CNTroll, for example. Characterizing all of Anonymous as being ignorant children is just wrong. Not all of them are doing things for political reasons, but the leadership most certainly…

I agree that the Anonymous leadership is politically savvy (so they're probably not LOICing from their home computers), but I can't escape the feeling that they view their followers as clueless cannon fodder to be exploited and then discarded.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#83

Post by [deleted] »

steveklabnik wrote: post #71
wmf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is whether Anonymous's legion of teenage trolls understands what civil disobedience means (i.e. that you are supposed to get arrested).

They do. EDIT: Anonymous has demonstrated an increasing political savvy and awareness, first via the protests against Scientology, but also with some smaller things that were tried that didn't spark such media coverage, like Operation CNTroll, for example. Characterizing all of Anonymous as being ignorant children is just wrong. Not all of them are doing things for political reasons, but the leadership most certainly…

[deleted]

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#84

Post by steveklabnik »

wmf wrote: post #82
steveklabnik wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. EDIT: Anonymous has demonstrated an increasing political savvy and awareness, first via the protests against Scientology, but also with some smaller things that were tried that didn't spark such media coverage, like Operation CNTroll, for example. Characterizing all of Anonymous as being ignorant children is just wrong. Not all of them are doing things for political reasons, but the leadership most certainly…

I agree that the Anonymous leadership is politically savvy (so they're probably not LOICing from their home computers), but I can't escape the feeling that they view their followers as clueless cannon fodder to be exploited and then discarded.

Do you think that every single person in the streets in Egypt is politically motivated? If not, does that lessen their message?

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#85

Post by gojomo »

steveklabnik wrote: post #80
gojomo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, the best way to change a law is to break it. Very few sit-ins are protesting the same law (trespass) they're breaking. Protesting censorship-via-government-pressure with censorship-via-DDoS is similarly nonsensical, a tantrum more than a statement. Build censorship-resistant systems instead of more censoring weapons.

Please see my response to tptacek, it's not about censoring them, it's about dollars. Your point about protesting the same law is a good one, it's the coverage that's really valuable. However, sit-ins are only one form of civil disobedience, and many of them are actually doing the thing that's illegal.

Vote with your own dollars, sure. Boycott Mastercard, sure. But interfering with others' legal expression and commerce is just repeating the same injustice that was done to Wikileaks, and damaging innocent bystanders. Leave their dollars alone.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#86

Post by eli »

kotrin wrote: post #7

"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.

Oh, please. What exactly are you suggesting? Do you think Wikileaks reported any crimes or turned over firewall logs to the FBI?

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#87

Post by dpatru »

Jach wrote: post #44

I'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.

One of the first cases in a law school tort class is 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.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#88

Post by cagenut »

w1ntermute wrote: post #62
cagenut wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whole 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.

> 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. Any specific examples? I'm interested in watching them.

sorry no, all I can say is watch a lot of msnbc/cnbc/discovery-channel at terrible odd hours or weekends, but thats just about the worst advice ever

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#89

Post by cft »

maqr wrote: post #30
abstractbill wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just pop in a hidden iframe with a million tags in the source. Mostly agree, but thought it worth pointing out that no browser will respond to this by parallelizing the million requests - most browsers don't ever open more than a dozen or so concurrent connections to one site. So this wouldn't do as much as you might think, unless you could get lots of users to stay on your page for a long time.

How about Flash? I'm pretty sure you can have as many open connections as you want that way.

not only that, in Flash you can write a for {} loop that will bombard the target with requests, as long as the movie is running. The ultimate example would be compromising Youtube's SWF player, and using it as a DDOS bot.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#90

Post by lukeschlather »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #78
lukeschlather wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, 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 pot…

Are you being deliberately disingenuous? It's a distributed Denial of Service which by definition means someone who wants that service can't have it and by extension means that the merchant performing that service expecting revenue from it is denied that revenue. A single denied credit card transaction can easily exceed the $500 misdemeanor limit. And try telling a business that's operating on razor-thin margins that…

The same would be true if a bunch of people sat-in on a supermarket chain to protest that chains' actions. Yes, there are costs involved, but there's a difference between stopping someone from making a sale today and destroying $500 worth of property.
Post reply on HN