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How the FBI raided Anonymous

arstechnica.com

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Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#91

Post by steveklabnik »

gojomo wrote: post #85
steveklabnik wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Getting innocent bystanders involved is literally the point.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#92

Post by burgerbrain »

mquander wrote: post #81
burgerbrain wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I interpreted it, the grandparent post foolishly tried to express his more general question by coming up with a silly hypothetical^ device. The purpose of the device was to injure a police officer as a result of the home-owner not being aware of what was going on.

I've taken the hypothetical device out of the question by pointing out that there are real-life situations where no-knock raids have causes unnecessary loss of life. I'm not arguing with a strawman, but rather restating the grandparents original point/question in a less absurd and tangential fashion.

^I sure as hell hope it was hypothetical anyway...

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#93

Post by magamiako »

tptacek wrote: post #75
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…

This is absolutely absurd logic. DDoS attacks can and do cause measurable hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. You had to have known that. You just choose to overlook the potential damage here because you support the cause.

What damage does a DDOS cause other than loaded normal traffic any other day?

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#94

Post by magamiako »

jrockway wrote: post #2

It's funny that Mastercard can't defend against an attack that my home router is capable of defending against. (A big limit on connections per /24 per minute should solve this problem. So will using a smart webserver or frontend proxy that doesn't care how many idle connections there are. Then all you have to worry about is bandwidth saturation rather than your servers crashing.) But the lesson here is, when you visi…

No, your router can't defend against a DDOS. Like you noted at the end, it was data saturation that was the issue.

I'm not really sure how the LOIC works (I've never checked out this program), but my suspicion is that it simply floods a connection with ICMP.

It's kind of like...one person is only so strong, thousands are much stronger.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#95

Post by jbooth »

damoncali wrote: post #15
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.

Does the FBI even investigate this sort of thing internationally? Does anyone?

A bunch of people in the UK were arrested today as well.

So, yes. Apparently.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#96

Post by piguy314 »

damoncali wrote: post #15
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.

Does the FBI even investigate this sort of thing internationally? Does anyone?

I've been reading a great book on this very subject: http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-System-Error-Bringing-Internet/d...

My general impressions are that nobody likes working with the FBI because they don't share information, but the secret service and postal service fraud unit both work extensively with people overseas. Countries which are members of either the EU or NATO tend to cooperate extensively with cybercrime investigations however those outside of that group do not. Many cybercriminals reside in the eastern bloc (Eastern Europe, Russia, China) and are protected by entrenched political and organized crime interests (usually by both at the same time).

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#97

Post by evgen »

steveklabnik wrote: post #84
wmf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you actually trying to make some moral equivalence between people who participated in a DDoS of a credit card processor because they disagreed with that company's policies and the people risking their lives protesting in Egypt? Seriously?

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#98

Post by steveklabnik »

evgen wrote: post #97
steveklabnik wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you actually trying to make some moral equivalence between people who participated in a DDoS of a credit card processor because they disagreed with that company's policies and the people risking their lives protesting in Egypt? Seriously?

Struggle is struggle. Wikileaks is just as important of a world issue as Egypt is.

I'm watching Food, Inc. right now. Is the battle over food less or more important than Egypt? What about Tunesia? Different people value different causes differently. A healthy Wikileaks will probably affect my life more positively than a new Egyptian government will, but that doesn't make me less happy for them.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#99

Post by dspeyer »

tptacek wrote: post #75
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…

This is absolutely absurd logic. DDoS attacks can and do cause measurable hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. You had to have known that. You just choose to overlook the potential damage here because you support the cause.

Damage? What are you talking about? The routers don't literally catch fire.

It disrupts services while the attack is active. A sit in is the correct metaphor.

Re: How the FBI raided Anonymous

#100

Post by nhangen »

steveklabnik wrote: post #91
gojomo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Getting innocent bystanders involved is literally the point.

I disagree. I think the point is to grandstand and to pretend to be Neo for a day.

Reading the commentary, it seems that these guys were far from familiar with the game they were playing.

Furthermore, unless you were involved in the attack, how could you claim to know the point in the first place?

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