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How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

arstechnica.com

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Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#51

Post by pyre »

dekz wrote: post #30
pessimizer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[04:15] Penny: What i am saying is that someone residing on your network attacked one of my boxes [...] [04:16] OK how do I know who is on my comcast network? [04:16] lol [04:16] omg that is precious

Interesting replies [04:37] Hey I"m not sure how this whole Torrent thing works, I'm sure I"ll find out but I can tell you that if you want freedom of press and [04:37] documents, there is a better way than doing it this way. What you did was illegal and it will hurt you guys as wel ... [04:41] Can you take PHil out? ... [04:42] Perhaps I'll invest in you guys, but invest in me, please do not leak any of the emails f…

  > You want me to donate to bradley's fund
  > OK BUT what if it puts people in harms' way? What
  > if it cause bad ramifications for US citizens?
She's acting like there isn't going to be a trial of any sort. Sounds like she equates contributing to a defense fund with breaking someone out of prison.

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#53

Post by gaius »

fleitz wrote: post #45
bdclimber14 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard because corporate leaders have an incredibly difficult time organizing their own companies to achieve comparable feats to what Anonymous can do overnight.

You can actually use military techniques to analyze why this is. Anonymous operates inside the enemy ODA (Observe Decide Act) loop. The ODA loop for a typical corporation is at least 5 people. Eg. from when someone observes something (anon is ddosing us) to when that information reaches someone who can act on it (the CEO) anonymous has already completed it's complete loop which is (post on IRC, have people read it an…

I think you mean OODA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#54

Post by fleitz »

gaius wrote: post #53
fleitz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually use military techniques to analyze why this is. Anonymous operates inside the enemy ODA (Observe Decide Act) loop. The ODA loop for a typical corporation is at least 5 people. Eg. from when someone observes something (anon is ddosing us) to when that information reaches someone who can act on it (the CEO) anonymous has already completed it's complete loop which is (post on IRC, have people read it an…

I think you mean OODA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

Yes, grr... my bad :)

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#57

Post by cookiecaper »

SwellJoe wrote: post #13

I can't believe this guy has a job in a security company doing work for the federal government. I'm getting a strong vibe that he's schizophrenic. I've known an unmedicated schizophrenic, and this is the way they talked and acted. Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have "other ways of knowing" or extremely heightened intuitio…

IANAL but it doesn't sound like he did anything criminal to me. He's obviously misguided and silly, thinking he can draw statistical relevance from assumptions based on his personal reading of Facebook profiles, but there is nothing illegal about reading information that someone posts on the internet.

Cyberstalking, to the best of my non-lawyer knowledge, involves real, disruptive harassment, not just a guy who saw you were friends with some other guy and drew some wild conclusions from that.

Barr never dropped the names so any post-facto prosecution for cyberstalking that would have been primarily based on his use of electronic methods to "identify" Anonymous leaders is unlikely.

I don't think there's anything wrong with doing your own detective work, and you certainly don't need a warrant to follow Facebook or Twitter pages. Private investigators do this kind of stuff in the "real world" all the time (granted, they have licenses).

I agree that Barr is incompetent and/or a tinge off his rocker, but the idea that only law enforcement should be able to search publicly accessible data is silly. If I find the page of a guy I haven't seen in five years, should it be illegal if I spend some time reading his publications? What if I just want to find someone that I've heard a story about so I can ask them more information? Should that be illegal? Remember, the people publishing these things publish them by their own choice with the understanding that they are making the information publicly accessible.

Dropping a bunch of names and recklessly implicating individuals in a criminal investigation is at least a civil offense, but there's no crime in drawing wild conclusions about people while cruising Facebook -- at least as long as you use the conclusions judiciously.

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#58

Post by stcredzero »

Natsu wrote: post #38
cookiecaper wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no real leaders; they may break off into factions, like those that frequent a certain IRC room, but the group "Anonymous" is a non-entity by any meaningful definition. It's whoever happens to be on 4chan or other, mostly similar message boards, and out of those, whoever is enticed to join a chat room or download LOIC, and out of those, people that actually click the button to send a lot of requests to DDOS…

> The most accurate definition for Anonymous is "a subset of users of Xchan". That's not a very good definition, especially if you want to go around and pin DDOS and whatever else on individual people. I mentally replace "Anonymous" with "protesters" whenever they're protesting anything. It makes it a lot more clear and it's more accurate. We already have amorphous groups of people who protest various things, and thi…

I would guess that such groups are being manipulated by exceptionally smart people for specific ends, some significant fraction of the time.

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#59

Post by stcredzero »

radu_floricica wrote: post #48
DrStalker wrote: post #4

Isn't anonymous less an organized group with leaders and more a bunch of people who hang out and occasionally someone says "hey, it would be cool if we all did " and whoever is listening joins in?

Power law still applies. Most likely 90% of serious action is done by the same 0.1% contributors (same as it is on HN or reddit or anywhere else). It may be a real difference if the 0.1% can be easily replaced, Stand Alone Complex style. Say they're all arrested one day, and a month after something happens (Julian Assange is extradited, there's a revolution in Iran, whatever piques Anonymous' interest). There's a goo…

Implying that the 0.1% have never been caught?

Re: How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price

#60

Post by JonnieCache »

This guy is clearly a dangerous moron. This kinda makes me feel better for being so cold about this whole affair in the other thread.

The terrifying thing is that there are still people in government who believe sentences like "specific techniques that can be used to target, collect, and exploit targets with laser focus and with 100 percent success" through social media.

I mean, who claims one hundred percent success at anything?

EDIT: Also, that coder hopefully shouldn't be buying any drinks for a while.

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