The irony of hearing Bruce utter those words at the beginning of the call is that, no, they were not the only people listening in. Somehow, members of Anonymous managed to tap into the call, record it and then post it online for all to hear. The subject of the conversation? Tracking and arresting online activists and hackers, such as those who secretly associate with Anonymous.

It appears that whoever gained unauthorized access to the call was able to do so because they were privy to an email invitation containing the call-in details. Whether somebody forwarded it to the infiltrator or, more likely, they directly intercepted it themselves, that message was all they needed to join the call and quietly listen to the FBI and UK law enforcement discuss sensitive matters.

Nothing too groundbreaking is revealed in the call, but the mere existence of such a breach suggests that more sensitive information could be exposed, if it hasn't already been.

Not only this is embarrassing for law enforcement, but it ought to send a wake-up call to any other organizations that conduct business via conference call. With many services, all a competitor or other third party would need to get access to the call is a copy of the original email invite.

That triggered a series of denial-of-service attacks against Mexican government Web sites, probably because Sen. Döring and President Felipe Calderón belong to the same political party (the center-right-wing National Action Party, or PAN). But taking responsibility for these attacks is "Anonymous," the same group that just a few months earlier announced they were suspending online activities in Mexico after one of its members was kidnapped, allegedly by the Los Zetas drug cartel. That cartel later claimed responsibility for hanging two people from a bridge, identifying them as bloggers reporting on cartel activities from social media Web sites.

It is the latest fuel for the cauldron of Russia Today, the bilingual news service that has carefully been portraying the Anonymous group as a modern gang of Robin Hoods, the heroes of the oppressed, downtrodden and media-forlorn. RT had already built up a theme around Anonymous' global activities, the latest episode centering around an evidently successful hack of Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor.

A cache of private e-mails, RT reports, showed state law enforcement authorities having consulted with Stratfor in probable surveillance operations against individuals connected with the Occupy protest movement.

From RT's perspective, last November 5 was the date when Americans everywhere transferred their savings out of major banks and into small, private lending institutions (which assumes we located some small, private lending institutions). This apparently in a nationwide show of support against a global conspiracy which, RT implies, links together the common interests of the Los Zetas cartel, prominent U.S. banks and Fox News. Add to that illustrious list the oil companies with which Stratfor does business, the movie industry, and now the Mexican Senate and the resulting plot as reported by RT looks like a reunion of CHAOS for the next "Get Smart" movie.

The Döring bill (Ley Döring) along with SOPA, ACTA (which is actually a treaty, not a bill) and other measures would, in RT's words, "cripple the Internet, effectively killing all Web sites allowing user-uploaded content, endangering potential whistleblowers and severely damaging online freedom of speech."

Mexico

Meanwhile, the Earth-based news service El Economista quotes Sen. Döring as placing himself firmly in the anti-SOPA camp. He sees his bill as a response to measures worldwide, especially in the U.S., that would appear to support censorship as a means of combatting piracy. (The Google translation from Spanish inaccurately states the Döring bill was passed; in fact, it was merely introduced.)

The bill would amend existing Mexican law to establish a method for notifying individuals when it appears they've pirated content. There's no indication yet as to how that evidence would be collected, though conceivably ISPs might be involved in the collection of that evidence. Worldwide, including in the U.S. and Europe, ISPs have signaled their disapproval of any law that would compel them to police their own users.

But in a provision of the bill that Sen. Döring characterized as "friendly," abusers would not be criminalized or jailed. Instead, the law would institute a garnishing of their wages, which would be capped at the minimum wage per hour, and spread out between 30 and 20,000 hours (about ten years) of work.

Spain

The blog digest All About Internet (Todo sobre Internet, English-language translation here) quotes Sen. Döring in a radio interview saying the notification service he proposes would not involve the collection of personal information, even going so far as to say it would not retain the e-mail address of the suspect. The implication is that the ISP would enable the notification to be sent to the IP address, which would then be seen by whoever used the computer.

That doesn't exactly explain how the holder of the ISP address would get his wages garnished.

The post by Geraldine Juárez goes on to cite a curious "piracy" incident involving Döring himself, in which he was publicly accused of having used a copyrighted photograph of a polar bear as his own Twitter avatar. The senator was then apparently called out for the inadvertent photo swipe by the original photographer. Under the intellectual property regime Döring would put in place, Juárez suggests, he himself would be notified of violations and be subject to getting his wages garnished.

One clear suggestion there is that almost anyone could find themselves owing levies to the government for inadvertent "piracy" compensation. Another is that such levies would affect certain people less than others.

Colombia

One side-effect of Anonymous' attacks on government Web sites is the public perception worldwide that it is Anonymous which has had an impact on anti-piracy legislation, including the indefinite tabling of SOPA in the U.S., instead of public protests. That is why, when I was asked by Colombia's NTN24 news this morning whether Anonymous could have the same impact in Mexico, Poland, and elsewhere as it did in the U.S., I felt the need to set the record straight.

Anonymous, I said, has been relatively successful in garnering public support, as the champion of the oppressed. At some point, I added, all terrorist organizations find themselves seeking a media relations specialist, in order to tie themselves to a populist cause. Anonymous may be doing this, I said, on a very low level. Having found itself in very hot water going up against the Mexican drug cartels, it may have decided to pull back somewhat, speaking up instead on behalf of causes with a broad base of public support (like anti-censorship) but that won't get its members killed.

In some kind of conflation of Facebook with the government, a puppet representing Anonymous threatened Facebook with an attack in retaliation for SOPA/PIPA (though other Anonymous sources denied involvement). That was scheduled for three days from now. The organization has declared war against Facebook in the past, but Facebook is no ordinary target. It's the cream of the crop. It's practically never down. Has Anonymous finally cracked it?

cough cough, uh, looks like facebook.com is having a slight accessibility problem. #Anonymous

Well, no. Facebook is still working right now, but not reliably. It has completely failed to load in a few of our tests. Thomas Knoll posted a screenshot of the outage on Google+ at 5:17 p.m.. (Update 7:10 p.m.: We've confirmed with Facebook that the site issues this afternoon were caused by a code push. That's all it was.)

Just two days ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) drafted a new readiness plan for dealing with attacks from the likes of Anonymous. Maybe President Obama's "cyber threats" from last night's State of the Union address are real, after all.

UPDATE 5:45 p.m.: The @YourAnonNews account claims to have called off the attack (again indirectly).

You are now free to play Farmville and Mobwars.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 26, 2012

UPDATE 6:37 p.m.: One "official" Anonymous outlet denies responsibility outright.

#Facebook.com is NOT under denial of service attack. STOP LYING.

— AnonOps (@anonops) January 26, 2012

Now the first one says it trolled us. And it did. But I ask you: Who are the real trolls here? The ones who make stuff up, or the ones who report their made-up stuff as dubious, probably made-up stuff?

Facebook down? goo.gl/lZo9n -- Bwahaha, trolled! #Anonymous ^_^

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 26, 2012

See also: How Could Anonymous "Destroy" Facebook?

The group has launched a WikiLeaks-style website, Nazi-Leaks, to support the operation. They are publishing materials hacked from Germany's extreme right-wing party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or National Democratic Party of Germany (NDP).

"The website currently features lists of alleged donors to the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), internal NPD emails, a contacts list from the right-wing weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit and customer data from neo-Nazi online stores, among other information"

Germany's The Local says the group claims to have shut down 15 Nazi-loving websites so far. Although work on the campaign seems to have been going on for several months, it came to the public's attention on Monday.

The identities of alleged fascist party members and customers include at least one well-known journalist, said the publication.

"People listed on the portal as having written for the Junge Freiheit newspaper included Peter Scholl-Latour, according to the Frankfurter Rundschau. He is a respected journalist and Afghanistan expert who has written for, among other publications, the Stern magazines."

Although fascist nutjobs are a perennial problem in Germany, and a frequent target of that country's hackers, their profiles have been raised by the recent discovery of a seven-year murder spree and the arrest of its perpetrators. From 2000 to 2006, a trio of neo-Nazi killers, the so-called Zwickau Cell, killed 8 Turks and one Greek, most of whom owned or worked in food stands.

The op seems to follow on a similar anti-Nazi attack, OpValkomaa, against Finnish fascists late last year.

The hack was perpetrated by a groups of malicious hackers loosely affiliated with anti-security group Anonymous. It is hard to tell what hackers are actually part of Anonymous these days as with each successive scheme, one group will claim it is working under the Anonymous banner while another will disavow the action. At this point, Stratfor does not really care what the hackers call themselves.

The hackers claim that the credit card data in Stratfor's database was unencrypted. It is then ripe for the picking. Even though most Anonymous hacks are not designed for outright theft, this wing of the group used the credit card information and started making payments to charities such as the American Red Cross, CARE, Save The Children and Africa Child Foundation. Approximately 17,000 cards were compromised in the hack (though not all had payments to charitable organizations).

While this might seem noble and altruistic, especially the day before Christmas, security blog F-Secure.com points out that the charities involved will have to refund the money when people realize that there are unauthorized transactions on their cards. The charities will need to return the money and may face fees and penalties. There will also be the inevitable cost of human capital to sort the whole mess out.

The Stratfor hack was apparently done by a group of Anonymous associated with a hacker named Sabu. After Sabu and others posted the Stratfor information online, the main Anonymous group moved quickly to say that they had no part in the breach of the company. In a "press release" on Pastebin, an Anonymous member said that the hack was not done by group and that, "Hackers claiming to be Anonymous have distorted this truth in order to further their hidden agenda, and some Anons have taken the bait."

The Anonymous member goes on to say:

"Stratfor has been purposefully misrepresented by these so-called Anons and portrayed in false light as a company which engages in activity similar to HBGary. Sabu and his crew are nothing more than opportunistic attention whores who are possibly agent provocateurs. As a media source, Stratfor's work is protected by the freedom of press, a principle which Anonymous values greatly."

The mention of HBGary is in reference to a series of hacks that the main Anonymous group did claim responsibility for in July 2011. HBGary and consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton were targeted in a raid that released 90,000 emails related to the U.S. Department of Defense and actions taken by those two firms that Anonymous believed to be violating the rights of online citizens. The data collection and dissemination by Stratfor apparently does not fall under the same category of the supposed grievances against Booz Allen Hamilton and HBGary.

The Stratfor website is currently offline as of Monday, Dec. 26 at 12:35 p.m. EST.

What do you think of this supposed Robin Hood move by Sabu and his cohorts? Is this the type of activities that so-called "hacktivists" should be engaging in? Let us know in the comments.

Representatives of the Nuevo Laredo En Vivo forum denied the person was one of their moderators. One of the previous victims was a moderator there.

Popular Egyptian blogger's appeal denied, two 15-day detentions. After denying Alaa Abdel Fattah his freedom, and his demand to be tried in civilian court, the Egyptian military decreed two back-to-back detentions of 15 days each. He remains incarcerated on charges of inciting violence of the military. His mother has started a hunger strike to protest his detainment.

Brazil's "cybercrime" bill will inhibit free expression. This bill, currently in the country's House of Representatives, could make it possible for the courts to "apply criminal penalties to activities like file sharing, peer-to-peer communications, and the fair use of copyrighted works."

Anonymous uses DDoS against El Salvador. The Salvadoran government took its Justice Department website offline in response to an attack by the hacker collective Anonymous

DARPA requests hacker help. The government research agency has issued a call for American hackers to help shore up its cyber-security defenses.

FBI shuts down botnet. With "Operation Ghost Click," the FBI has shut down Esthost, the largest botnet in existence, operating out of Estonia.

Facebook to settle with FTC. The social network is nearing an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission over its misleading shift in privacy settings.

Israeli Knesset bills threaten free speech. The bills defund and otherwise limit the operations of non-governmental organizations in the country, including those that are critical of the government.

Use of Twitter by elite frees foreign reporter in Kyrgizstan. American photographer Nic Tanner was released from detention in Kyrgizstan through a combination of friends, friends of friends and Twitter.

"This is not a story of Twitter's ability to galvanize grassroots protests and marshal ordinary citizens to defend just causes. Kyrgyzstan is a place where high-tech social networks meet old-fashioned patronage networks. All those who got in touch were people we knew personally, and people with some clout. "

U.S. government seizes Twitter info without warrant. Adding to its previous warrantless seizure of Google information on Anonymous volunteer Jacob Appelbaum and others, its latest action did the same to Twitter information.

Salman Rushdie vs. Facebook. Facebook buckled in the face of a high-profile campaign by the Anglo-Indian writer to be allowed to use the name by which he is commonly known on his own Facebook account.

Delhi policy seek preemptive online taps. India, a standout in the crowd of democracies not terribly fond of hearing their own people speak, have come slightly closer to making certain they don't have to. They have proposed setting up a spy agency to eavesdrop on people's Internet and mobile traffic. You know. In case they commit a crime. That should shut 'em up.

U.S. House Judiciary Committee reviews SOPA. The legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is often called the Stop Online Privacy Act by its detractors. A Hollywood-pushed bill, it will make it possible to block whole websites for accidentally hosting copyrighted material. In short, it gives an excess of power to government and law enforcement, which would result in rampant over-reaction and wind up limiting how Americans use the Internet - quite apart from copyright issues. It would also defy precedent and make everyone from ISPs to forum moderators responsible for copyright infringement.

Occupy Wall Street news shared via Storify. Early on in Monday night's raids to shut down the Occupy camp in New York, mainstream media outlets began reporting that the police were barring their reporters from entering the park. Social media, Storify in particular, picked up where the professional media left off.

The use of social media by Syrian protesters. Syria's is among the most violent of the Arab Spring uprisings, the government intractable and the political culture controlled. Syrians are using social media to skirt the suppression of the free flow of information, including mobile.

Overpass photo by Elliot Brown, Colombo photo by Bri

In case I haven't made this case lately: These people are you, nerds.

Egypt throws another blogger in the clink - and the revolution in the toilet. Prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah has been arrested by the Egyptian military. He was summoned for questioning on Sunday. His last tweet says starkly, "Going in." He has since been remanded for further questioning for 15 days. During his initial appearance he refused to answer questions, declaring the military court that held him, and sentenced fellow blogger Maikel Nabil to three years in prison, was illegitimate.

Kuwait arrests five Twitter users in six months. Kuwait has been arresting Twitterers based on a law - all too common - that makes it a crime to criticize the country's leaders. On the positive side, Kuwaitis in general and opposition politicians in particular, have been calling bullshit on the arrests at the top of their lungs.

Hacktivist group Anonymous threatens drug cartel. Anonymous has targeted a Mexican drug cartel after that group, Los Zetas, allegedly kidnapped one of its members in Veracruz. In a video released on October 6, the group "claimed that they would release the names of journalists, taxi drivers and others who have worked with Los Zetas in the past" according to Foreign Policy. They also threatened to include the addresses of the collaborators on November 5.

According to the Mexican newspaper Milenio (via Talking Points Memo), some alleged members of Anonymous, including Skill3r and Glyniss Paroubek, are disavowing this operation. Others, including @AnonymouSabu, insist it is still on. We'll find out tomorrow.

Google hands over Wikileaks volunteer's info to U.S. government. Google handed over the contacts list and IP address data of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor, without a warrant. The government requested the information via a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

The Guardian posted a translated version of the Spanish-language video. (See the original embedded after the jump.)

Updated below the fold.

The idea that social media independents are not journalists is an idea the criminal cartels do not share. Nor for that matter do the people of Mexico, who have turned to Twitter to get information on cartel violence, information the traditional press rarely reports any more for well-founded fear of retaliation.

In September, cartel goons killed and hung a man and woman from a bridge. The two had used social media to report on gang violence in the city of Nuevo Laredo on the border with Texas. A sign hung with the mutilated bodies said, "This is going to happen to all the Internet snitches (Frontera al Rojo Vivo, Blog Del Narco, or Denuncia Ciudadano). Be warned, we've got our eye on you. Signed, Z." Another said, "Nuevo Laredo en Vivo and social networking sites. I'm The Laredo Girl, and I'm here because of my reports, and yours."

Que Dios los bendiga, los bloggers de México.

Update: According to the Mexican newspaper Milenio (via Talking Points Memo), some alleged members of Anonymous, including Skill3r and Glyniss Paroubek, are disavowing this operation. Others, including @AnonymouSabu, insist it is still on.

The WikiLeaks story has yet to end, despite the fact that some have theorized it soon will. So here is a second part to the timeline, covering all the stories from December 30 of last year down to the present.

"Last week a U.S. Justice Department court order was made public that directed Twitter to provide information on several of its users. The subpoena was made in conjunction with an investigation the U.S. Attorney General is making into the actions of the whistle-blower site Wikileaks and its leader, Julian Assange."

Wikileaks Calls for Sarah Palin's Arrest January 10, 2011

"The official Twitter account for Wikileaks has posted a press release this evening drawing a comparison between the controversial rhetoric from public figures that some believe contributed to the attempted assassination on Saturday of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the even more explicit calls from public officials for violence against Wikileaks spokesperson Julien Assange and others. The organization called for public figures making such calls to violence to be arrested and charged with crimes."

Evidence Stuxnet May Be an American-Israeli Collaboration January 18, 2011

"Among additional evidence that this was a U.S.-Israel attack...US succeeded in stopping an April 2009 delivery of Siemens controllers to Iran, according to several Wikileaks-released cables."

Police Arrest 5 Men Over "Anonymous" DDoS Attacks January 27, 2011

"British police have arrested five people for their alleged participation in some of the highly publicized DDoS attacks last month... The five are being held on suspicion of being involved in Anonymous, the loose affiliation of so-called hacktivists who have targeted a number of websites, including MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, with distributed denial of service attacks. These attacks followed WikiLeaks' release of U.S. diplomatic cables in late November, and were aimed to punish companies who'd shut down WikiLeaks' access to financial resources."

Wikileaks Competitor OpenLeaks Opens Doors January 27, 2011

"In September, a number of Wikileaks' partners quit that organization, complaining that its leader, Julian Assange, was too tyrannical and careless. In November, they announced they were creating a competing leaks service, called OpenLeaks. In December, it was supposed to go live. Now, in January, it has."

WikiLeaks Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize February 2, 2011

"WikiLeaks has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Norwegian politician behind the proposal. The nomination of WikiLeaks was put forward by parliamentarian Snorre Valen, saying that the site was "one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency.'"

Leaked Security Firm Documents Show Plans to Discredit WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald February 10, 2011

"(T)he loose collective of online vigilantes - Anonymous - responded to a story in the The Financial Times and the actions of HBGary's CEO Aaron Barr by hacking into the company's systems and releasing tens of thousands of its emails and documents. Among those documents, an outline of plans to systematically discredit WikiLeaks, along with Salon journalist (and WikiLeaks supporter) Glenn Greenwald."

PayPal Freezes Donations to Bradley Manning Defense Fund [Updated] February 24, 2011

"Update: PayPal has just posted a press statement to its blog, stating that 'we have decided to lift the temporary restriction placed on their account because we have sufficient information to meet our statutory 'Know Your Customer' obligations.'"

British Court Orders WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Extradited to Sweden February 24, 2011

"A British court has agreed to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden to face rape charges. His attorneys have said they will appeal the decision."

Alleged Wikileaks Leaker Faces Death Penalty March 2, 2011

"Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who allegedly passed classified documents to the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, has just been charged with 22 additional counts, according to his attorney, Lieutenant Colonel David Coombs. Among these are 'aiding the enemy,' a capital offense."

First Academic Paper on WikiLeaks March 31, 2011

"Mark Fenster, Research Foundation Professor at the Frederic Levin School of Law at the University of Florida, has become the first academic to publish a paper on the implications of Wikileaks. The paper is titled 'Disclosure's Effects: WikiLeaks and Transparency.'"

WikiLeaks Makes Volunteers Sign Non-Disclosure with $20 Million Penalty May 12, 2011

"Calling all of the material leaked to the organization, the 'property' of Wikileaks, the agreement repeatedly treats the material as commercial product."

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Water... Sony Pictures Hacked June 2, 2011

"On the heels of a Memorial Day weekend hack of the PBS website - an act of retribution for an unflattering Frontline report on Wikileaks, the prankster-hackers LulzSec have found their next target. And it's a target that's just recovering from another security breach, namely Sony."

Adrian Lamo Speaks About His Wikileaks Role June 4, 2011

"A central figure in the famous Wikileaks/Manning "cablegate" case from last year is Adrian Lamo, the "homeless hacker" who snitched on Manning to the feds and led to the latter's imprisonment. I first met Lamo about ten years ago, when he surprisingly took me up on an offer to spend the night in my New York apartment and come in to talk to a high school networking class I was teaching at the time."

Wikileaks Loses Control Over Diplo Cables, Exposes Sources [UPDATED] August 29, 2011

"Unedited versions of the United States diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released over the last year have gone public, exposing sources around the world to possible recriminations. According to German news magazine, Der Spiegel, based on an original report in Der Freitag, a convergence of screw-ups involving the group's former German spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg and an external contact of Wikileaks leader Julian Assange wound up throwing the doors open to the full, unedited materials."

WikiLeaks May Be Petering Out September 8, 2011

"Peter Dorling, of the Sydney Morning Herald, who has followed the news surrounding Wikileaks and its Australian founder from the beginning, has published a fascinating, fair-minded story that theorizes an end to Wikileaks. After accidentally allowing the publication of their remaining diplomatic cables - which, along with the publication of the password to those cables in a book by two Guardian reporters made them public - Dorling believes there is not much left for WikiLeaks to do. Their leak-submission function has not in fact functioned for a year and there does not seem to be another Bradley Manning hidden in the wings."

His supporters have started a Facebook page to publicize his situation. A blog, Free Anas, has also been started, as well as a hashtag, #freeanas. Get on it, nerdlingers.

Libyan Internet starts to fail. Renesys reported that, after a long, stable summer of nothing much to report, Libya's Internet has now started to fail, probably as a result of infrastructure degradation due to war and neglect. The effects of this failure will be largely negative for the government, as they are the only ones who currently have access.

Egyptian blogger arrested for "defaming the military." In what looks like a frantic race back to the bottom, the Egyptian military, the erstwhile saviors of the people during the revolution, have added another notch to their billyclub with the arrest and probable prosecution in a military court of 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz. Admittedly, a statement on one of her social media accounts muddies the waters.

"If the judiciary doesn't give us our rights, nobody should be surprised if militant groups appear and conduct a series of assassinations because there is no law and there is no judiciary."

Egypt seems to have moved on from the confident non-violence of the Arab Spring.

Iranian blogger freed. After a hunger strike that lasted 25 days, the Iranian government released Dr. Mehdi Khazali. He was released on bail. Khazali, son of a conservative cleric, has been arrested three times.

Al Jazeera journalist arrested in Israel. Last week, Samer Allawi, a Palestinian and the Kabul bureau chief for the Qatari news agency, was arrested while journeying from the West Bank to Jordan. He was brought before an Israeli military court Tuesday and charged with belonging to the outlawed terrorist group Hamas. Allawi denies he is a member of the group.

Tunisia upholds filtering decision. According to Reporters Without Borders, "A Tunis appeal court yesterday upheld a 27 May court decision requiring the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) to block access to pornographic websites. ATI said it would refer the case to the country's highest appeal court because it did not have the 'financial and technical resources' to create the filtering and censorship system needed to implement the ruling."

Filtering regimes start, with few exceptions, with the "protection" of innocent eyes against the scourge of pornography. It never, ever stops there. (There is, after all, so much to protect you from.)

Iranian blogger beaten in prison. Hossein Maleki Ronaghi was beaten by a guard "after writing a letter to Iran's judicary authorities." He required hospitalization afterward. He is serving a 15-year sentence.

International investigation panel closes up shop in Bahrain. The international Bahrain Commission of Inquiry, an international group investigating the violence during Bahrain's protests, has shuttered its offices and hit the road "after angry crowds scuffled with staff members following reports that government officials would be cleared of committing abuses against protesters seeking greater rights."

Argentina blocks websites. The country's judiciary blocked leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com, sites which "linked to allegedly leaked emails from members of the Argentine government." The effect was to inspire the creation of myriad mirror sites to distribute the material.

Anonymous, Telecomix take on Syrian Cyber Army. Declaring an #OpSyria, the groups are targeting the official pro-government computer hackers as well as the suppliers of censorship equipment to the country's violent ruling clique.

Attention has also been focused on Blackberry's private messaging service, known as BBM. London tech and media specialist Jonathan Akwue wrote a post on his blog outlining the case for Blackberry as the messaging vector of choice for the rioters.

Two Scottish teenagers are due to appear in court over messages posted to their Facebook accounts allegedly encouraging rioting.

Our community manager Robyn Tippins has posted the first in a series called "The Big Question." She asked, "What effect does social media on the Web have on social unrest in the real world?" And you answered.

Blackberry hacked for allegedly cooperating with London police. Research in Motion's Inside Blackberry blog was hacked on Tuesday by a group calling itself TeaMp0isoN_. They left a message behind, saying, in part, "You Will _NOT_ assist the UK Police because if u do innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a blackberry will get charged for no reason at all."

Anonymous vs. Facebook. Claiming that "Facebook has been selling information to governments agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms," the hacktivist collective has threatened to "destroy Facebook" on November 5th. So, there's that. As Dan Rowinski points out in his article, that's easier said than done. The Syrian Ministry of Defense is one thing, but Facebook quite another entirely.

Turkey backs away from online censorship plans. "A plan to require Turkish Internet users to choose one of four state-mandated browsing filters starting this month has been scrapped," according to the Wall Street Journal. Instead, the government will offer two filters (Child and Family) on an opt-in basis. Otherwise, the Internet is to remain free. A cause for celebration.

Anonymous hacks the Syrian Defense Ministry Website. The Ministry of Defense, which oversees many of the personnel who have contributed to 1,700 civilian deaths during Syria's five month-long Arab Spring protests, was hacked. Anonymous left behind their logo and a note. The note said, among other things, "The world stands with you against the brutal regime of Bashar Al-Assad. Know that time and history are on your side - tyrants use violence because they have nothing else, and the more violent they are, the more fragile they become."

7% of Arab bloggers arrested. Berkman Center and Global Voices released a study asserting that 7% of Arab bloggers have been detained by police and security forces within the last year and 30% threatened. The sample was admittedly small, however, consisting of the approximately 100 Arab bloggers aggregated by Global Voices, 80% of whom blog in English.

Moroccan activist blog attacked. Mamfakinch was the victim of a DDoS attack. It appears back up at this point. Mamfakinch's co-founder, Lbadikho, contributed to our status report on the Arab Spring.

Hungary passes religious-based censorship law. Hungary has passed a law that is a kind of de facto ban on many religious denominations. Under the law, only 14 of the nearly 400 formerly-recognized religious groups retain official status. The rest must apply for reinstatement. Budgetary funds for charitable work are now withheld from those groups.

Trial of Zimbabwean Facebook user delayed. Vikas Mavhudzi was arrested arrested in March for commenting on opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's Facebook page, saying Egypt, in revolt at the time, was "sending shockwaves to dictators around the world." One of those dictators, the tinhorn president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabi, made Mavhudzi the first Facebook user to be arrested in the southern African country.

His trial, which was supposed to begin last Friday, was delayed until August 25th, when it was discovered that "the State failed to access the message after it apparently appeared Mavhudzi's Internet account expired after the cellphone was confiscated by police in February. Jamela and Chanayiwa also notified the State that their client would not help the State in any way to access the message arguing it would be tantamount to Mavhudzi incriminating himself."

Clapham photo by George Rex, Esna photo by Ed Yourdon

See the video after the jump for a full explanation on why Anonymous might want to destroy Facebook. Yet, the first thing to know about the alleged destruction of Facebook, is that it is not wholly supported by the Anonymous collective. Various Anonymous-based Twitter accounts have said something along the lines of "no one can speak for the whole of Anonymous. There are some anons who support #opFacebook whilst others do not." Yet, what if the entire group was motivated to cause chaos and disruption? Are there any tactical advantages that Anonymous has that Facebook could not easily thwart?

In reality, it is not likely that Anonymous has the chops to really hurt Facebook. In its history, the favorite weapon of Anonymous and LulzSec has been the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). A DDoS launches a bomb of requests at a target server (or servers) so that the server becomes overwhelmed and the website goes down. There are tricks that can be implemented into a DDoS attack, such as hidden lines of code within the packet bombs being sent that can worm their way into sensitive areas while the server is busy, but companies know to look for this and it can be turned away.

A DDoS attack would not work on Facebook. It is too large, too sophisticated and handles so much data already that there is little that a DDoS would accomplish. Maybe the service would be slow for a couple hours. Yet, even if Facebook did go down for a while from a DDoS, that is certainly not the "destruction" of the platform. Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are so big and handle so much data that they are almost immune from DDoS attacks.

"Destruction isn't a DDoS attack anyway. Destruction means dead, kaput, sayanora, forever," Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos told ReadWriteWeb. "A DDoS attack would be more Anonymous's style - but how likely it would be to succeed is very questionable, as Facebook has a strong infrastructure behind it. In the past we've seen Facebook manage to withstand heavy DDoS attacks when other social networks like Twitter have crumbled (see: Twitter DDoS). Although Facebook stumbled a little, it didn't go down."

Publicly Shame Facebook & Make Users Lose Trust

Cluley thinks that the way to destroy Facebook would be if it "permanently and devastatingly loses the trust of its user base." Yet, how can this be accomplished? If Anonymous (or anybody) does not possess the tools to destroy Facebook's infrastructure, what is the back door that would make users lose faith in Facebook?

This is where other Anonymous tactics come in. For instance, look at Booz Allen Hamilton. Its corporate infrastructure was attacked and it leaked 90,000 emails concerning the Department of Defense. If Anonymous really wanted to attack Facebook, digging up dirt in its own corporate communications would be the way to go.

"If hackers could find a backdoor into Facebook's corporate network and if they managed to gain high enough access rights, then they might be able to search emails and logs to hunt for evidence of Facebook selling information to governments if it were taking place," Cluley said. "But there's a lot of 'if's' there."

Spear Phish the Corporate Back Door

The best way for a hacker to gain access to Facebook's corporate communications would be a very well-targeted spear phishing attempt where a message is sent to a high-level executive with a Trojan that would enable the hacker to take control of that computer and then access the corporate network.

"And I would imagine, like most other businesses of such a size, Facebook would have layered defenses in place to reduce the chances of hackers breaking into their systems, and have locked down their most sensitive information with access control and encryption," Cluley said.

Overall, we are talking about theories. Maybe a portion of Anonymous will attack Facebook on November 5th, maybe they will not. Maybe they will be successful, though they probably will not be. Anonymous considers itself a movement, and as with any movement, there are going to be disagreements on which way it should go. Facebook, while maybe not always the most forthright company about its privacy policies, is hardly a secretive government or evil corporation bent on making war across the world for the sake of profit.

For all we know, this "threat" could be made by a 17-year-old kid who reads too much news. As Paul Ducklin of Sophos wrote on the company's Naked Security blog "someone with a computer, an Internet connection, a basic video editor and a voice synthesiser - has decided that Facebook should die."

The Ministry of Defense oversees many of the personnel who have contributed to 1,700 civilian deaths during Syria's five month-long Arab Spring protests. NPR has a rundown of the types of pressure currently being exerted against the Assad family regime.

The note reads:

"To the Syrian people: The world stands with you against the brutal regime of Bashar Al-Assad. Know that time and history are on your side - tyrants use violence because they have nothing else, and the more violent they are, the more fragile they become. We salute your determination to be non-violent in the face of the regime's brutality, and admire your willingness to pursue justice, not mere revenge. All tyrants will fall, and thanks to your bravery Bashar Al-Assad is next.

"To the Syrian military: You are responsible for protecting the Syrian people, and anyone who orders you to kill women, children, and the elderly deserves to be tried for treason. No outside enemy could do as much damage to Syria as Bashar Al-Assad has done. Defend your country - rise up against the regime! - Anonymous."

Of all the regimes to see an Arab Spring movement bloom in its midst, Syria is probably the most murderous. The current strongman's father killed tens of thousands of civilians in the first Hama Massacre.

Syrian poet and exiled thinker Ammar Abdulhamid previously told me that he doubted the current Assad would be able to match his father, atrocity for atrocity. He believes the immediacy and reach of current communications technologies make massacres more politically costly. That certainly seems to be the case, as both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have recalled their ambassadors - and a prominent web news site is writing about it.

Those arrested have been charged with conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and with intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Anonymous leads PayPal boycott. The group, which is owning this week's hacking news, has launched "Operation PayPal," a boycott action against the online payment company. PayPal was a prior target of an Anonymous DDoS attack due to its refusal to handle payments to Wikileaks. (Remember them?)

Anonymous and LulzSec lead Pwnie nominations. They go head to head in competition for "Most Epic FAIL" and "Epic 0wnage." The Pwnies - pronounced "ponies" and whose award is a golden My Little Pony statuette - "is an annual awards ceremony celebrating the achievements and failures of security researchers and the security community." This summer's ceremony, the fifth annual, will take place on August 3 at the Black Hat Technical Security Conference at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

4.8 million documents stolen from JSTOR, 18K academic papers uploaded to Pirate BayT. An archive containing over 18,000 scientific papers, downloaded from the academic journal database JSTOR, has been uploaded to The Pirate Bay, where they're now available as a torrent.

The papers were uploaded by a user named Greg Maxwell who says that his decision to make the large quantity of scientific papers available was a response to the indictment earlier this week of early Reddit-er and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz. Swartz has been charged with felony hacking and computer fraud for downloading some 4.8 million papers from JSTOR and faces 35 years in prison.

Chinese journalist attacked by hackers. Zhao Hejuan, a reporter for the Beijing-based Caixin Media, saw her Gmail account hacked. Hejuan was sent a Gmail security alert by Google on July 21, according to a statement by her company. She was in the midst of a story on child trafficking for Caixin Magazine. The attack originated from the same region where Zhao was reporting, Longhui county in Hunan Province. Subsequent investigation showed she had been hacked every day since July 19.

Webcam photo by Cory Doctorow

In June, Figuiera became the first blogger to be assassinated. Figueira, who was also a newspaper editor and the president of the local branch of the Workers Party, used his blog to discuss drug-related corruption in his home state of Rio Grande do Norte.

Iranian actress and blogger missing. Iranian actress and blogger Pegah Ahangarani, who was scheduled to travel to the Women's World Cup in Germany on July 4, is missing. Many are concerned that she was arrested in Iran prior to her departure. She had a contract to blog about the championship for the German news organization, Deutsche Welle. According to a friend, she was summoned to the Iranian intelligence ministry the day before she was scheduled to leave and told that she would be arrested if she showed up at the airport.

Iranian blogger and publisher arrested. Iran cannot arrest too many bloggers. Mehdi Khazali was a publisher and the son of a prominent leading cleric, Ayatollah Khazali.

Egyptian military cements rule. The military in Egypt was considered a friend of the people during the protests. After Mubarak stepped down, however, the Egyptian military took over a harsher role, imprisoning a blogger, among others, and inspiring a movement against its continued role. The movement, which uses the hashtag #noscaf. Now, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is setting up rules that will influence any new constitution to allow an outsized role for the military.

Nothing good will come of this.

CrowdVoice launches with new design, more content. CrowdVoice, a user-generated platform for reporting on, and dialoguing about, freedom and civil society, has relaunched. Users now have the ability not just to add content (photos, posts, videos) to an existing page, but to add new pages, or "voices," themselves.

New pages include Malaysia and Malawi, where there have been protests, the Gaza flotilla and a page for gay American issues. The service is still blocked by the government of Bahrain, where it is located.

Like most of Mideast Youth's undertakings, CrowdVoice is well-built, attractive and easy to use. It's easy already to see the effect the freer approach will have on the platform's reach; it will be interesting to see how that freedom will affect the overall quality.

Alleged members of Anonymous arrested. In December of last year, three Dutch teenagers were arrested; in January of this year, British police arrested five alleged members of the hacking collective; another British teen was arrested in June; and now, in the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested 16 people across the country and served 35 search warrants in the course of a series of raids.

Those arrested have been charged with conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and with intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Egypt army photo by Al Jazeera