He's referring to the kids cracking anything and everything for the "lulz". There is no greater good and it's far from funny. If caught they will be behind bars for a very long time.
Catch LulzSec, in the beginning, I had nothing against them. Ok they where causing Sony harm, but they where making a good point about internet security.
Now that they are publishing all these peoples information, law enforcers, encouraging other people to do the some in other countries,.. they are going to far. That's not "lulz" anymore.
Sorry, they didn't "target" the AZDPS and there were no good intentions involved. They are vultures and I'm guessing one of them that lives nearby cracked an insecure wireless network and stole some shared docs.
Have you bothered to "think about" this? Police officers have a sworn duty to uphold the law. They don't write it. If you have a problem with the law your issue is with the Legislators not the cops.
(This is the very definition of "killing the messenger")
I'm guessing you've never been in a car when a cop plays the "I smell pot Joe. What do think?" game.
Police officers do have a sworn duty. But some of them do not uphold their oaths. Some of them even break the law outright. It's therefore quite possible to have an issue with law enforcement, separate from the laws themselves.
Some cops are crooked so screw them all? This happens in every profession, not just law enforcement.
Edit, to the poster below: There have been many cases where a man and women have sex and the woman later claims she was raped. Try to find a case of word vs. word (no other evidence) and the man was found not guilty. Now, try to find the opposite.
Not all cops are crooked - but the Blue Code of Silence puts the culpability for the crooked cops' crimes squarely on the police force as a whole. If the police forces of the US even showed some inclination of willingness to police the actions of their own, then we wouldn't have most of these problems.
Here in Seattle we've had an unprovoked shooting of a homeless man, to which the officer involved was allowed to resign gracefully, despite all parties agreeing that the was no provocation nor justification. Another officer body-slammed an innocent man (without warning, provocation, or identifying himself) into a wall so hard he is now in a vegetative state. This man remains on the force. Similarly, another officer was caught on store surveillance taking his rage out on a teenager in a convenience store, stomping on his face, after a failed drug bust next door. That officer remains on the force also.
Not all cops do these things, but they are all guilty of covering up these acts and ensuring that, even if they do get out to the public, that no real consequences occur for the officers involved.
I will have zero trust for any police force until they have proven their ability and willingness to police themselves.
> "Try to find a case of word vs. word (no other evidence) and the man was found not guilty. Now, try to find the opposite"
Huh, could've sworn I typed in "news.ycombinator.com" not "reddit.com/r/mensrights"
I don't live in the USA, but in my country normally when a cop is being abusive of the authority granted to him he has a few layers of command above him that tolerate, and sometimes even encourage, such behaviour. I believe this is usually the norm and not an exception particular to my hometown.
> Some cops are crooked so screw them all? Some cops are crooked so screw them all?
However if most of them are crooked, it is pretty safe to informally say "screw them all" (as opposed to linking to scientific studies and then proclaiming that "screw 59.45% of them" or something like that).
And btw, those that are engaged in cover-up of abuses of fellow cops are crooked just the ones engaging in abuse.
Couldn't agree more. Also, im sure there are undercover po and border patrol risking their lives to keep parts of AZ from ending up like the Mexican border towns. Giving up that kind of information and risking those lives is in-excusible. Also, names and adresses of family! are u serious? That makes you no better than the gang bangers. While I do believe the war on drugs is bs, as well as that bill AZ has, there are still a lot of persons down there that would kill you just because they were told to, or kidnap you for the money. And the police and border patrol are risking themselves to keep your dumbass safe.
I realize most of Arizona isn't that bad, but the police are still ther to serve and protect. can't we just send a bunch of taquitos and a bag of weed to whoever wrote up that bill or something?
I don't see how you can justify upholding laws with lethal force if you don't agree morally with the law. Just because you wear a badge on your chest doesn't mean that you aren't morally responsible for your actions as a human being. If some state passed a law which outlawed red hair, I would hope that the police would refuse to enforce it, rather than saying "take it up with your legislator." "I was just following orders" is never an excuse for your actions.
If you can't uphold the law as a cop you would lose your job. Laws don't just magically appear, right? By the time they pass as a law the cop is just doing their job. We didn't do our job as voters and the correct action now is to "take it up with your legislator".
> "If you can't uphold the law as a cop you would lose your job."
Your responsibility to humanity (particularly as an officer of the law) trumps your right to be fed.
Also, the world at large has upheld, many times over, that "following orders" is not a sufficient defense.
"But I have a mortgage" - the new and improved Nuremberg Defense (with apologies to Thank You For Smoking). Hell, the people who relied on the Nuremberg defense would've been shot for violating said orders. Being fired is peanuts in comparison.
You're wrong on this (or at very least looking at the issue without nuance). More often than not "just following orders" IS a sufficient defense. Only in the most heinous of acts is it considered insufficient (if that weren't the case there'd be no reason to define what is and is not a "war crime")
Deporting someone, even if you feel it's unjustified, is a far cry from a War Crime.
That's the cogent point. The danger in an officer choosing to enforce the law as he or she sees fit is so great that they aren't excused in doing so unless the act is an atrocity. Because once an officer is selectively enforcing the law they actually become the one making the law.
Since officers of the law aren't elected that's unacceptable.
This is a pretty interesting topic. I'm reminded of the famous trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel after WW2 and Hannah Arendt's book about the trial, "The Banality of Evil".
Eichmann was responsible for over-seeing the trains that sent Jews to concentration camps. He tried, to no avail, to employ the "just following orders" defense. If anyone is interested, definitely check out Hannah's book.
No, you are personally responsible for your actions even when they aren't "the most heinous of acts". Being sworn to uphold an unjust law means that you have no good alternatives available to you: you can break your word (and perhaps lose your income) or you can perpetrate injustice. In that situation you must choose which is the greater wrong.
But the unjust law doesn't need to rise to the level of genocide or war crime before it becomes a greater wrong than breaking your word. I think murdering a single innocent person is worse than breaking your word, for example. How many unjustified deportations does it take? I don't know.
It's actually kind of rare that cops lose their jobs for not upholding the law. Check out the front page of reddit.com/r/bad_cop_no_dounut, and you'll get a sampling of how cops regularly brutalize the law and the people they're meant to serve.
The reports of cops breaking the law for their own purposes, and getting away with it, vastly outnumber the reports of cops breaking the law for humane purposes or moral reasons. If reality is they are perfectly happy doing the first, arguing against the second as something they 'should not do' is ludicrous. As long as this is the way the balance tips, any cop that lets an illegal immigrant walk has my blessing.
There's nothing noble about lulzsec. If someone rampaged through a neighborhood lock picking or crowbaring doors open and dumping the contents on the street out of some misguided sense of raising awareness about security how would people view them? Why should we view lulzsec any different?
Well, if the victims were planning to ethnically cleanse said neighborhood that would in fact shade the issue differently
Noble isn't the word I would use by a longshot..in fact I think lulzsec is pretty stupid. but I'm also not going to go out of my way to defend a corrupt institution that happens to have the law on their side
The victims are planning nothing of the sort. The voters of Arizona and their elected representatives are the ones responsible for the laws that the officers in question have to enforce.
I absolutely agree that they hold more responsibility. However, my point was that this is one criminal organization targeting another morally corrupt organization. I don't find the analogy that InclinedPlane gave to be appropriate
I can't judge the whole thing (but it doesn't seem for the lulz), this action anyway has been certainly uncool, I guess they were lucky that their children weren't on file, otherwise they would have been probably involved too.
I don't know why they didn't just pass it over to WikiLeaks. They've been through that problem already, and have a process in place to delete that sort of stuff.
Lulzsec has had a history of defending WL (PBS hack for Bradley Manning), but I don't know if they are willing to give them this data as it might shine the spotlight away from Lulzsec.
Not a chance, on either count. Martyrs are not made simply by being attacked, and attacking wives and kids does nothing so romantic as "send a message". It tells the world you play dirty pool, and it makes you enemies- but not the steal-your-lunch-money kind.
Though I would never condone such a strategy (nor do I think getsat was stating his beliefs), there is some truth in it. A man is brought to think twice before engaging in any activity when they know that their family's safety is on the line. This has been (and continues to be) one of the means employed by tyrannical states to strike fear in the hearts of dissidents. You may be brave enough to sacrifice yourself, but you'll never revolt if you knew we'd go after your family.
That said, the statement, however, may not be completely relevant to this particular story.
You're correct, those aren't my beliefs. Merely an observation.
> one of the means employed by tyrannical states
On the other hand, we're starting to see the opposite happen. People in positions of power who abuse their authority (e.g., police) are starting to be targeted by regular people whose lives they interfere with.
Have a Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/MySpace/whatever account? Your personal information, friends, family, work history, etc. are available to the people you bully. Your actions have social consequences whether they're totally legal or not.
"I'm just doing my job" doesn't cut it when your job affects other people in a negative way.
Let's not forget though - "I'm just doing my job" absolutely applies here. DPS did not create the laws. They enforce them.
AZ is the state where a guy died doing his job in a photo radar vehicle. He was shot by a guy who felt the man in the vehicle was "the government". These families and homes are now targets.
My point is that "just doing your job" does not absolve you of social responsibility/repercussions. If a law were passed creating federal gangs that went around "borrowing" teenage girls from their families, you can bet fathers would kill to keep their daughters safe.
Just because something is legal does not make it ethical.
If the police are protected under a clause of "just following orders", then the home addresses shouldn't be shown. Neither should individual policemen be called out. Rather the system is at fault, and the law makers behind it.
If the police are morally at fault, then this extends past their work-life sphere. If you kill and abuse at work and that is considered immoral, you are not simply allowed to go home and claim sanctuary.
In the view of Lulzsec, there are two sides---we the people, and they the State. Revealing the information of the officers to the people is analogous to the FBI keeping records of the names and known addresses of who they consider criminals.
Probably the killing part. Though the police might perpetrate illegal deaths, either through neglect while in custody or 'over enthusiasm' during raids, I don't think that its a systemic abuse.
The documented racial profiling, however, is could be properly termed 'abusive'.
There's likely no policy of killing, but there is a policy of covering up inconvenient leaks, arresting photographers, etc, that gets used when there is a killing, or any other crime from drunk-driving to bribery.
The police code of never admitting an officer committed a crime is itself a crime, and one of the worst.
This may be the first time the public gets really riled up by hackers in (almost) the same way they do about murders and robberies. I can imagine a police appeal for information resulting in literally thousands of names of hacker-types being given over.
Racial profiling sucks! It's demeaning, belittling, and alienating. If the cops acted within the law, then what are they afraid of? More transparency = a more democratic state, right? (I don't think their family names should have been listed here though). You can't applaud Wiki leaks for igniting the overthrow of autocratic Middle Eastern governments, and hypocritically argue against similar actions when it's your own country in question.
The US is turning into a police state slowly. I recently saw on HN how a woman was arrested for taping them on her own property. Sounds less like the land of the free, and more like a place where the citizens serve the authorities (my country of birth, Pakistan, citizens, especially the innocent ones, pee their pants when they see cops - something very wrong about that).
I'm trying to figure out if you're being sarcastic.
"If the cops acted within the law, then what are they afraid of?"
That sounds like the exact same statements we usually say with regard to what the government would say to us when we want our emails to remain private, etc. "If you've got nothing to hide, why do you want it kept private?"
You cannot hold both positions here. You cannot. I'm sorry.
In this instance, what LulzSec has released stands in the way of privacy and of freedom, and it is unforgivable.
I'm not entirely sure that accepting "If the cops acted within the law, then what are they afraid of?" and fighting "If you've got nothing to hide, why do you want it kept private?" are mutually exclusive, for the same reason that many believes Wikileaks is in the right: these aren't private organizations, these are public workers on the people's dime. Secrecy in government and privacy for citizens are two completely different things.
That said, it seems to me (just from what I've read here, mind you) that there is people's private data in here, not just "police business data", for lack of a better term. Of course, that's to be expected with Lulzsec, considering their previous releases. If that's the case, then the line is certainly blurrier with respect to this data, but I don't believe that detracts from my point.
The police is to serve citizens not the other way around. It's okay for your employer to go through your company issued computer, but not of for the employee to go through the boss' machine. You seem to have lost perspective as to which group serves whom.
That is a fair statement, as is Daeken's. I think half of what I was thinking of when I wrote that was also related to those police officer's private data (name, address, phone number, wife's name...). These things need not be shared, and the person I responded to, and their tone, seemed to suggest that this information should be released.
You said family's names. I argue that their names, addresses and phone numbers shouldn't have been released. The fact that some of them have wives with name X is just another piece of personal info that shouldn't have been released, but it certainly isn't all of it.
No apostrophe on "family" sir (you change meaning by taking that liberty), though I should have placed a comma or a slash between family and names. Unless personally involved in any wrongdoing, I don't think it makes any meaningful difference to have the officer's names.
When I refer to collection of names assigned to a person that aren't given to them by their parents, I generally call that the last name. Apologies, 'family name' never struck me as a term for that word, so my mind automatically translated it. Yay being a United States-ian.
And having the officer's given names ~probably~ isn't meaningful, I suppose I can give you. Not dangerous, just creepy (perhaps part of the intended result?) ... though, also likely on public record. That said, I agree that even their "family name" shouldn't have been mentioned unless they were personally involved in wrongdoing. Technically, that's not LulzSec's job, but I wouldn't have counted a more noble vigilante quite as intensely in the wrong, here.
I don't think they've figured out what their job is. I tend to favor people over authorities because I've seen what happens when public servants become "we know what's good for you" rulers.
I can see where you are coming from (this release included some private information about ongoing cases and families), but in generally I would prefer to err on the side of transparency in government over privacy.
It's not entirely clear to me what exactly is in the contents of the leak (I'm didn't look at the leak myself) but it seems likely that the private information here is unlikely to be abused in any meaningful way; if that isn't the case then I really hope you can correct my misconception. On the other hand, the other information that has been leaked (not private information) seems to be fundamental information about the actions and decisions of our police force that is fundamental knowledge to anyone living in Arizona.
Again, I haven't looked at the document personally (I don't live anywhere near Arizona, so I don't have much say nor affected by their local politics) but it seems to me that if some of the documents that supposedly helped toppled middle eastern dictatorships included a few phone numbers or addresses that people wouldn't exactly be jumping on it as an immoral release.
In fact, all the passwords included seem pretty weak. As the group tweeted a few days ago, "I argue that the simplest hack embarrasses the target more and thus wins"
Good target to retaliate against. I'm sure they considered going after the people who drafted the legislation, or the voters who passed it, but passed on that because... this was the server they happened to find that was easy to get in to and they came up with their justification afterwards.
The problem is the Officers are actually the least guilty here. SB1070 actually requires officers check people's papers. Officers COULD do that before SB1070 but they weren't. So the legislature passed 1070 in part to force officers to do it more often.
The truth is Officers generally don't want to get involved in immigration cases because it requires interaction with the Federal Government. That is a local cop's least favorite activity.
Yes, there have been many articles and letters written against this law by Arizona police officers and their representatives. I don't understand why one would target the Arizona police of all people. Probably not worth analyzing LulzSec too deeply, though, there aren't any real answers or justifications besides maybe psychological ones.
There is an automatic hatred of the police shared by just about every lawbreaker. Just or not, I believe they basically see the police as their enemy, not the state.
Type "Joe Arpaio" into Google. You might be right about a given low-level cop, but the police leadership in that state is all-in on racial profiling and disliking mexicans for their mexicanness.
If they really wanted to nail someone over this they should have gone after the private prison lobby which drafted the law, bribed the politicians, and built the prisons in advance of the law passing.
While this law is all about exploiting racist tendencies in the electorate, at bottom it's a money-grab by the prison lobby.
Setting aside the release of this information, why was anyone able to get ahold of it? That's where the responsibility (and breach of public trust) starts.
Some of my friends work for Phoenix DPS. According to them, their "IT Department" (in quotes because according to them they don't really have an IT dept.) is...horrifyingly incompetent. Like really, really bad.
It might depend on your definition of negligent. Imagine building out a city, streets, alleyways, highways, etc. The imagine paying one guy to put up all the street signs, paint the lanes on the roads and highways, tow broken down cars, and handle street cleaning duties.
When a wreck happens because a particular intersection was missing stop signs, would you consider that one guy negligent?
That's my point -- a single reasonably competent sign poster couldn't be expected to handle the duties for an entire city. The responsibilities placed upon the sign poster in my example went way above and beyond anything reasonable.
I'm not trying to defend the IT folks who do a terrible job of security for municipal/state governments, but in my experience there's a lot more work to be done than resources provided to do it.
The smaller town where I live is the same way. Most government agencies like this are way behind in the tech world unless the city pours a lot of money into making it better. Otherwise, there really is no IT staff except the "county" staff that cover several departments. I could be wrong, but that's how it goes in smaller towns.
Called my local Sheriffs department about an sql injection in their prisoner look up system. He is actually an on duty police office who just does the work because others cannot. I feel sorry for them as the application in question is used by many departments across the nation.
They did take the site offline; hopefully for a fix.
Not just SharePoint. Crawling a machine for special files is pretty simple. Here is a little script I used for a while. Could be modified to look for file headers(more specific) but who is going to change a .doc to a .pdf for security reasons?
#!/usr/bin/python
import os,shutil
exts = [".txt",".doc",".docx",".xls",".xlsx",".ppt",".pptx"]
startpath = os.environ['HOMEDRIVE']
def find(none, directory, filenames):
for file in filenames:
for ext in exts:
if file.endswith(ext):
fullfile = os.path.join(directory,file)
try:
shutil.copy(fullfile,file)
except IOError:
pass # access denied
os.path.walk(startpath,find, None)
There's certainly a bunch of interesting stuff in there, like how officers are instructed to place iPhone in nickel or copper plated containers in order to prevent remote wipes and a ton of information about gangs and smuggling.
There's also other cool technical stuff in there, like how they gather digital evidence, information about hacker forums like ryan1918.com that have information on FBI honeypots and a book on how to "crack leetspeak".
Unlike the other releases by LulzSec, this looks like it actually is an useful, WikiLeaks-style release (except they haven't filtered out any private or irrelevant information like Wikileaks tries to do)
> like how officers are instructed to place iPhone in nickel or copper plated containers in order to prevent remote wipes
Idea: a self-destruct mode where if your phone can't call home to check for remote wipe and kick an internal watchdog, it will prompt for local self-destruct override. Failing that, automatic wipe.
>Idea: a self-destruct mode where if your phone can't call home to check for remote wipe and kick an internal watchdog, it will prompt for local self-destruct override. Failing that, automatic wipe.
Before this, mostly what they were doing was small time. DOSing a website, or leaking some emails is annoying, this could potentially get people killed.
This is max level from what I'm reading so far (others' reports, I'm not touching that torrent). Homeland security info, info on ongoing investigations, etc. etc.
This might actually make lulz more dangerous. They have nothing to lose now. Before this, I'm sure in the back of the heads of whoever was doing whatever, was the thought of getting caught, and that they might go to jail for a couple of years. It doesn't matter anymore, because nothing that they can do now can make things worse for them. If [when] they get caught, they're going to prison for the rest of their lives or worse.
The FBI probably already has their number and was waiting for something good to prosecute. They inject their filthy politics into their "lulz" and as far as I'm concerned they can go straight to damnation.
The press release wasn't written by them. [1] Also, "filthy politics"? Really? The best you can say of those who hold political views contrary to your own is that those views are "filthy"?
> (others' reports, I'm not touching that torrent)
This is ridiculous, thousands of people are downloading that right now and the details will be on the news anyway.
> If [when] they get caught, they're going to prison for the rest of their lives or worse.
Only if they're from the US. In most of western Europe, maximum is 20 to 30 years and only for murders or specific crimes. For that they'd probably just get a few years.
This is not the first time a torrent containing breached information has been released. No one has ever been sued for downloading the torrent, not even with the wikileaks cable. Parent's post reads a tad alarmist and dramatic in my opinion but maybe that's just me.
Bingo. Brinqs to mind Columbia University advising some of its students not to discuss the wikileaks cables since it could hurt their employment prospects.
That advice is entirely to do with the fact that the information was classified and the federal government doesn't want to hire people whose treatment of classified information is to post links to it on Facebook. It is a reasonable suggestion to people seeking employment in government.
And there's two ways to respond to something like that, you can go along to get along like a sheep, even though you know it's wrong, or you can go out of your way to discuss it since, if everyone's discussed it, then you can't discriminate against people for it.
Most of their targets have been US based websites, and they have probably not made a lot of good will with European leaders. I would be very surprised if there was a European country that would not extradite them.
"In 2007, two officers were charged with causing bodily harm with fatal consequences and with involuntary manslaughter, respectively, but were acquitted in December 2008 for want of evidence."
In Western Europe, the cops can still get away with killing you if they don't believe that the penal system will properly punish you. In the UK, they kill more than one person per month:
Those deaths in custody seem to be mostly suicides. The case of Oury Jalloh is truly horrific but it is only one case.
I cannot see any trend or evidence for systematic executions in the data you presented. There may well be a few cases, I don’t know, but to suggest that this is common seems absolutely laughable and ridiculous, given the data you presented.
They are recorded as suicides and the doctor and coroner are police appointed ones. There is a huge amount of corruption here in the UK but it's not often talked about because the people involved are very powerful (most of them are also Masons who serve others in their group rather than the public first).
I enjoy being critical of the government as much as the next man, but I think a comment like the one you just made really deserves a [citation needed]. I'm not saying I don't believe you (there is plenty of evidence of wrongdoing by UK security forces in the past, particularly abroad), just that I'd be interested to see your sources.
Most of the deaths are due to negligence on the part of the police. The concern is that this is intentional negligence which is never properly investigated. The IPCC rarely rule against the police however the legal system are less biased, if it gets that far.
I'm not doubting that the British police have a history of misconduct or that people die in prisons (and I'm not trying to justify it either - it's unequivocally wrong, in my opinion).
But your assertion that "they are recorded as suicides and the doctor and coroner are police appointed ones" suggests that there is a significant cover-up operation and that it heavily involves the Freemasons. I wasn't aware of the number of police who are masons (the article you linked to was interesting) but I don't see a verifiable connection between that and any alleged cover-ups.
I'm not saying that there definitely aren't a significant number of cover-ups involving masons, just that I'm not aware of any credible evidence that suggests that it is the case. If you have some, I'd be interested in seeing it.
I have personally known two masons and they have said on many an occasion that they are obliged under their oath to do what their seniors request regardless of the law and they will be protected from prosecution in the course (which they found morally objectional). If you read up on masonic laws and history, this is normal. They're almost like the scientologists without the religious crazy stuff.
The same applies to "people's networks" such as the Oxford and Eton alumni which is ingrained in politics and the legal system in the UK.
The outcome of this is intentionally botched inquests such as the David Kelly one.
If you check the record of doctors and legal professionals involved, some of them are Oxford grads at the same time Blair was and were chosen on government recommendation. The others are professionally related to the Oxford alumni.
An independent enquiry with properly referenced sources rather than a government puppet show would do well here.
While I agree that there won't be 1000s of people prosecuted, you might not be aware of how strong the extradition agreements between the USA and most of Europe are.
They already claimed to have taken down a CIA website in June among other pretty high profile targets. I'm pretty sure they would have already been doing at least 20 years if they got caught and actually charged with everything they did even before this.
I think that releasing actual documents rates higher than just taking down their website. Had they released internal CIA documents, you might have a point.
Your comment seems to imply that the police are responsible for causing the Mexican drug war, but I believe that if the Arizona police were to resign en masse and move to other states, it would probably make the situation worse, not better; the drug cartels would expand to fill the power vacuum, and they are less accountable than the police.
> Honestly, having the mexican drug violence spill over into the border states is probably the best thing that could ever happen to this country.
I understand your point, but would tend to disagree until AZ gets a new governor. I vainly hope that the international drug war is ended in the next decade.
If you left the laws in place and removed the police, that would be bad. If you reformed the laws and left the police in place, that would probably be less bad.
Speaking of adding energy to systems -- drug laws put energy... er money... into the illegal drug system. Clearly, simply making everything available from your supermarket impulse buying rack is going too far, but simply regulating drugs the way cigarettes and alcohol (including taxing them) seems like a happy medium. I know that folks smuggle cigarettes into New York to avoid taxes, but the prison system isn't overrun with them and they aren't overthrowing central-american governments.
As I have mentioned, cyber war is here - and the legislation is lacking in its awareness - but becuase we have incompetant douches in charge of tech legislation, we will have physical war used as a metaphor to cyber warfare and thus have draconian influences from physical imprisonment being applied to digital situations.
http://static.thepiratebay.org seems to be down for me too, thus eliminating all/most CSS, JS and images. I've got no clue whether it's an attack or not.
I never said the informants would be killed. If a gang reads that they've got an informant in their midst, they'll find someone and punish them – right or wrong. I'm not saying LulzSec is wrong to publish it; I'm just pointing out that it won't be lulz for those particular people who catch the short end of that particular stick.
I haven't seen the document yet, but unless they went any more specific than, "we have informants in xyz gangs" then there's no danger. The gangs know there's informants in them, and have been for years.
So, it's known that gangs structure things such that any one member knows only a subset of the plans, misinformation is spread to separate parts of the organization so that leaks can be identified, etc. But this seems like it'd make communication overhead pretty significant. Does anyone have any resources on how gangs are actually structured, how well their communication works, etc? This seems pretty interesting to me, as it may have applications for structuring legitimate organizations/groups.
Assange's objective with WikiLeaks was exactly to impose this communication overhead on organizations like the Arizona Department of Public Safety. It will be interesting to see what happens. Assange argued that this would be good for society as a whole. I hope he turns out to be right about that.
So we've got a situation where a) someone has joined a gang where the morals permit killing people, b) their leadership (rightly or wrongly) becomes paranoid for whatever reason, and c) they accidentally kill a one or more of their own gang members thinking they are informants.
So... that's clearly murder and those who committed it should be brought before the legal system... but it's not exactly the most tragic thing I can conceive of.
So... do you think it's possible LulzSec is based in China or Russia? That's the only way I can imagine them doing this that doesn't involve being clinically insane.
There's probably a couple countries that they would honestly probably be better off in another country besides those. The guys who made the ILOVEYOU virus got off scot free because there were no anti-malware laws in the Phillipines at the time.
Based on the type of documents released and the fact that they only released a few email accounts & passwords you can tell that this was not a very sophisticated attack. Probably a brute force attack against the mail server, or passwords gleaned from individual officers rooted home computers.
That only makes it worse; most organization would succumb to a sophisticated attack, but a police dept. should be resistant against simple attacks at least.
It's only a matter of time until the government starts reigning in the internet even more than they already have - and we have idiots like LulzSec to largely thank for it.
I don't know... I believe a government (or corporate) reigned-in internet was on its way already. LulzSec may be accelerating that process, but it's completely naive to think that it wasn't coming anyway.
No, we have people like you to thank. Standing on the sidelines bitching about the bad things that will happen in reaction to lulzsec instead of even attempting to prevent the gov't from doing them.
This one makes me think they are most likely a chinese or russian group, I do not think anyone that FBI has decent chance of getting would be this dumb
I wish you hadn't linked to a file containing passwords and other personal information - I was not expecting that and would not have opened it if I had known.
I think it's worthwhile remembering where direct attacks on the authorities led to last time around. It started World War I, ended economic globalization for decades, and delegitimized anarchism to the point where it was essentially exterminated worldwide. In the US, new "conspiracy" laws were enacted which allow you to be prosecuted for talking to someone about how you could hypothetically commit a crime if they later go off and execute one of the steps in your plan.
Did any of you happen to watch the 4-second-long video clip of what appears to be 4 men being gunned down by helicopter? Any theories on why it's there?
I agree. Same could be said about passing on pictures of over weight people at Wal-Mart or ugly people with memes typed on them. Different strokes for different folks.
While I understand what you're saying, I think the professional setting in which that material is being passed around warrants a discussion on whether or not it should be passed around at all.
I might be making a mountain out of a molehill, but I can't help the fact it irked me that a video clip that shows the death of 4 men - most likely passed around as something "cool" and something to be glorified - is being passed around by law enforcement.
Lots of cops are former Marines, soldiers, etc. Im guessing you've never hung around with guys like this? I was a Marine for ten years; stuff like this gets shared and no one's giggling about it. You are definitely making a mountain out of a molehill. I say that based on personal experience.
I could speculate on any number of reasons. A large number of my relatives work in defense contracting and you see the same videos passed around there as well. I admit that I feel slightly unnerved by the videos sometimes, but if you're an engineer working on gunships or a former soldier for whom this was a part of daily life for a while, I don't think there's anything really blameworthy in finding videos from the war interesting on some level.
It's just interesting, that's all. For me personally, seeing people killed on the battlefield isn't a good feeling, but it's not strange either. It's not outside the sphere of my experience. I know that people get killed in war and sometimes it's tragic but it's still interesting to watch firefights and gunships engaging targets.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadNow that they are publishing all these peoples information, law enforcers, encouraging other people to do the some in other countries,.. they are going to far. That's not "lulz" anymore.
(This is the very definition of "killing the messenger")
Ever been to court when it was your word against a police officer? Who would you imagine the court, jury or your peers will believe?
Police officers do have a sworn duty. But some of them do not uphold their oaths. Some of them even break the law outright. It's therefore quite possible to have an issue with law enforcement, separate from the laws themselves.
Edit, to the poster below: There have been many cases where a man and women have sex and the woman later claims she was raped. Try to find a case of word vs. word (no other evidence) and the man was found not guilty. Now, try to find the opposite.
Not all cops are crooked - but the Blue Code of Silence puts the culpability for the crooked cops' crimes squarely on the police force as a whole. If the police forces of the US even showed some inclination of willingness to police the actions of their own, then we wouldn't have most of these problems.
Here in Seattle we've had an unprovoked shooting of a homeless man, to which the officer involved was allowed to resign gracefully, despite all parties agreeing that the was no provocation nor justification. Another officer body-slammed an innocent man (without warning, provocation, or identifying himself) into a wall so hard he is now in a vegetative state. This man remains on the force. Similarly, another officer was caught on store surveillance taking his rage out on a teenager in a convenience store, stomping on his face, after a failed drug bust next door. That officer remains on the force also.
Not all cops do these things, but they are all guilty of covering up these acts and ensuring that, even if they do get out to the public, that no real consequences occur for the officers involved.
I will have zero trust for any police force until they have proven their ability and willingness to police themselves.
> "Try to find a case of word vs. word (no other evidence) and the man was found not guilty. Now, try to find the opposite"
Huh, could've sworn I typed in "news.ycombinator.com" not "reddit.com/r/mensrights"
However if most of them are crooked, it is pretty safe to informally say "screw them all" (as opposed to linking to scientific studies and then proclaiming that "screw 59.45% of them" or something like that).
And btw, those that are engaged in cover-up of abuses of fellow cops are crooked just the ones engaging in abuse.
I realize most of Arizona isn't that bad, but the police are still ther to serve and protect. can't we just send a bunch of taquitos and a bag of weed to whoever wrote up that bill or something?
Your responsibility to humanity (particularly as an officer of the law) trumps your right to be fed.
Also, the world at large has upheld, many times over, that "following orders" is not a sufficient defense.
"But I have a mortgage" - the new and improved Nuremberg Defense (with apologies to Thank You For Smoking). Hell, the people who relied on the Nuremberg defense would've been shot for violating said orders. Being fired is peanuts in comparison.
Deporting someone, even if you feel it's unjustified, is a far cry from a War Crime.
That's the cogent point. The danger in an officer choosing to enforce the law as he or she sees fit is so great that they aren't excused in doing so unless the act is an atrocity. Because once an officer is selectively enforcing the law they actually become the one making the law.
Since officers of the law aren't elected that's unacceptable.
If they cannot square their actions with their morals, then they are in the wrong job.
Eichmann was responsible for over-seeing the trains that sent Jews to concentration camps. He tried, to no avail, to employ the "just following orders" defense. If anyone is interested, definitely check out Hannah's book.
But the unjust law doesn't need to rise to the level of genocide or war crime before it becomes a greater wrong than breaking your word. I think murdering a single innocent person is worse than breaking your word, for example. How many unjustified deportations does it take? I don't know.
Speaking as a supporter of democracy in the Arizonan context.
Noble isn't the word I would use by a longshot..in fact I think lulzsec is pretty stupid. but I'm also not going to go out of my way to defend a corrupt institution that happens to have the law on their side
Separately, I personally would have redacted some of that data.
2) WL still isn't accepting submissions until DDB hands back their database.
That said, the statement, however, may not be completely relevant to this particular story.
> one of the means employed by tyrannical states
On the other hand, we're starting to see the opposite happen. People in positions of power who abuse their authority (e.g., police) are starting to be targeted by regular people whose lives they interfere with.
Have a Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/MySpace/whatever account? Your personal information, friends, family, work history, etc. are available to the people you bully. Your actions have social consequences whether they're totally legal or not.
"I'm just doing my job" doesn't cut it when your job affects other people in a negative way.
AZ is the state where a guy died doing his job in a photo radar vehicle. He was shot by a guy who felt the man in the vehicle was "the government". These families and homes are now targets.
Just because something is legal does not make it ethical.
If the police are protected under a clause of "just following orders", then the home addresses shouldn't be shown. Neither should individual policemen be called out. Rather the system is at fault, and the law makers behind it.
If the police are morally at fault, then this extends past their work-life sphere. If you kill and abuse at work and that is considered immoral, you are not simply allowed to go home and claim sanctuary.
In the view of Lulzsec, there are two sides---we the people, and they the State. Revealing the information of the officers to the people is analogous to the FBI keeping records of the names and known addresses of who they consider criminals.
The documented racial profiling, however, is could be properly termed 'abusive'.
The police code of never admitting an officer committed a crime is itself a crime, and one of the worst.
The US is turning into a police state slowly. I recently saw on HN how a woman was arrested for taping them on her own property. Sounds less like the land of the free, and more like a place where the citizens serve the authorities (my country of birth, Pakistan, citizens, especially the innocent ones, pee their pants when they see cops - something very wrong about that).
That sounds like the exact same statements we usually say with regard to what the government would say to us when we want our emails to remain private, etc. "If you've got nothing to hide, why do you want it kept private?"
You cannot hold both positions here. You cannot. I'm sorry.
In this instance, what LulzSec has released stands in the way of privacy and of freedom, and it is unforgivable.
That said, it seems to me (just from what I've read here, mind you) that there is people's private data in here, not just "police business data", for lack of a better term. Of course, that's to be expected with Lulzsec, considering their previous releases. If that's the case, then the line is certainly blurrier with respect to this data, but I don't believe that detracts from my point.
And having the officer's given names ~probably~ isn't meaningful, I suppose I can give you. Not dangerous, just creepy (perhaps part of the intended result?) ... though, also likely on public record. That said, I agree that even their "family name" shouldn't have been mentioned unless they were personally involved in wrongdoing. Technically, that's not LulzSec's job, but I wouldn't have counted a more noble vigilante quite as intensely in the wrong, here.
[edit: fixed some of my stupidity in response]
It's not entirely clear to me what exactly is in the contents of the leak (I'm didn't look at the leak myself) but it seems likely that the private information here is unlikely to be abused in any meaningful way; if that isn't the case then I really hope you can correct my misconception. On the other hand, the other information that has been leaked (not private information) seems to be fundamental information about the actions and decisions of our police force that is fundamental knowledge to anyone living in Arizona.
Again, I haven't looked at the document personally (I don't live anywhere near Arizona, so I don't have much say nor affected by their local politics) but it seems to me that if some of the documents that supposedly helped toppled middle eastern dictatorships included a few phone numbers or addresses that people wouldn't exactly be jumping on it as an immoral release.
I knew there'd be at least one.
The truth is Officers generally don't want to get involved in immigration cases because it requires interaction with the Federal Government. That is a local cop's least favorite activity.
In this case, they feel justified to 'shoot' the enemy soldiers even if they didn't individually start the war.
While this law is all about exploiting racist tendencies in the electorate, at bottom it's a money-grab by the prison lobby.
When a wreck happens because a particular intersection was missing stop signs, would you consider that one guy negligent?
Negligence is merely falling below the standard of the reasonably competent sign poster/programmer/doctor/ etc.
I'm not trying to defend the IT folks who do a terrible job of security for municipal/state governments, but in my experience there's a lot more work to be done than resources provided to do it.
They did take the site offline; hopefully for a fix.
Of course you can always py2exe this, write it in C/C++ (/C#). Hacking is easy, it just takes time and dedication.
That's exactly what I did! You can do the same through cmd, but most machines do not have permissions for that.
It would be like targeting hacker news because reddit made you mad.
There's also other cool technical stuff in there, like how they gather digital evidence, information about hacker forums like ryan1918.com that have information on FBI honeypots and a book on how to "crack leetspeak".
Unlike the other releases by LulzSec, this looks like it actually is an useful, WikiLeaks-style release (except they haven't filtered out any private or irrelevant information like Wikileaks tries to do)
Idea: a self-destruct mode where if your phone can't call home to check for remote wipe and kick an internal watchdog, it will prompt for local self-destruct override. Failing that, automatic wipe.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dead_man%27s_...
If you leave your phone on the other side of the house a lot, just leave your keys with it.
Before this, mostly what they were doing was small time. DOSing a website, or leaking some emails is annoying, this could potentially get people killed.
This is max level from what I'm reading so far (others' reports, I'm not touching that torrent). Homeland security info, info on ongoing investigations, etc. etc.
This might actually make lulz more dangerous. They have nothing to lose now. Before this, I'm sure in the back of the heads of whoever was doing whatever, was the thought of getting caught, and that they might go to jail for a couple of years. It doesn't matter anymore, because nothing that they can do now can make things worse for them. If [when] they get caught, they're going to prison for the rest of their lives or worse.
Basically: consequences will never be the same.
[1]http://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/84075440024719361
This is ridiculous, thousands of people are downloading that right now and the details will be on the news anyway.
> If [when] they get caught, they're going to prison for the rest of their lives or worse.
Only if they're from the US. In most of western Europe, maximum is 20 to 30 years and only for murders or specific crimes. For that they'd probably just get a few years.
You begrudge someone the desire to not accidentally get caught up in something they could land in prison for?
http://oudaily.com/news/2010/dec/06/our-view-dont-talk-about...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Oury_Jalloh
"In 2007, two officers were charged with causing bodily harm with fatal consequences and with involuntary manslaughter, respectively, but were acquitted in December 2008 for want of evidence."
In Western Europe, the cops can still get away with killing you if they don't believe that the penal system will properly punish you. In the UK, they kill more than one person per month:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Deaths_in_Custody
I cannot see any trend or evidence for systematic executions in the data you presented. There may well be a few cases, I don’t know, but to suggest that this is common seems absolutely laughable and ridiculous, given the data you presented.
30 seconds googling...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/may/18/ukcrime.prisonsandp...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/g20-police-assault-ian-tomlinso...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/police-def...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-13297812
Hmm... I could go on.
But your assertion that "they are recorded as suicides and the doctor and coroner are police appointed ones" suggests that there is a significant cover-up operation and that it heavily involves the Freemasons. I wasn't aware of the number of police who are masons (the article you linked to was interesting) but I don't see a verifiable connection between that and any alleged cover-ups.
I'm not saying that there definitely aren't a significant number of cover-ups involving masons, just that I'm not aware of any credible evidence that suggests that it is the case. If you have some, I'd be interested in seeing it.
The same applies to "people's networks" such as the Oxford and Eton alumni which is ingrained in politics and the legal system in the UK.
The outcome of this is intentionally botched inquests such as the David Kelly one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_%28weapons_expert%2...
If you check the record of doctors and legal professionals involved, some of them are Oxford grads at the same time Blair was and were chosen on government recommendation. The others are professionally related to the Oxford alumni.
An independent enquiry with properly referenced sources rather than a government puppet show would do well here.
If the hackers are in Europe and are caught, they'll end up in the US justice system, for example see Gary McKinnon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon
And if they get caught in western europe they may as well have been caught in the US because of the strong extradition treaties in place.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13787229
Because the 39,000+ people already killed due to the laws the Arizona police are enforcing don't count.
Your comment seems to imply that the police are responsible for causing the Mexican drug war, but I believe that if the Arizona police were to resign en masse and move to other states, it would probably make the situation worse, not better; the drug cartels would expand to fill the power vacuum, and they are less accountable than the police.
Honestly, having the mexican drug violence spill over into the border states is probably the best thing that could ever happen to this country.
I understand your point, but would tend to disagree until AZ gets a new governor. I vainly hope that the international drug war is ended in the next decade.
The insane margins are not due to the fact that drugs are expensive to make, but that the product is illegal.
Prohibitions should taught us something. What we have now is Al Capone, but on a global scale.
Speaking of adding energy to systems -- drug laws put energy... er money... into the illegal drug system. Clearly, simply making everything available from your supermarket impulse buying rack is going too far, but simply regulating drugs the way cigarettes and alcohol (including taxing them) seems like a happy medium. I know that folks smuggle cigarettes into New York to avoid taxes, but the prison system isn't overrun with them and they aren't overthrowing central-american governments.
This is NOT script kiddies going at it, this is bio-stux....
See the following:
Watch these in this order: http://vimeo.com/25118844 - brief overview great animation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS01Hmjv1pQ - ted talk on stux http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOwMW6agpTI&feature=youtu.... detailed analysis of stuxnet the last one is long and Bruce appears to be an arrogant prick, but it is clear - cyber war has been here for a while.
---
As I have mentioned, cyber war is here - and the legislation is lacking in its awareness - but becuase we have incompetant douches in charge of tech legislation, we will have physical war used as a metaphor to cyber warfare and thus have draconian influences from physical imprisonment being applied to digital situations.
Utterly broken.
1. No IT Security 2. No jobs for those who could fix it
Yer all embarrassing and stupid.
FWIW, this probably means some people are going to die.
So... that's clearly murder and those who committed it should be brought before the legal system... but it's not exactly the most tragic thing I can conceive of.
I wouldn't doubt that there is a certain amount of "Oh hi America you think you run the world - well you're no different than us, here's why.."
If it gives my opinion any justification, I am American and I do live in Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed#Timeline...
I hope the kind of violent rhetoric they're spewing doesn't end up provoking similar violence this time around.
Did any of you happen to watch the 4-second-long video clip of what appears to be 4 men being gunned down by helicopter? Any theories on why it's there?
I might be making a mountain out of a molehill, but I can't help the fact it irked me that a video clip that shows the death of 4 men - most likely passed around as something "cool" and something to be glorified - is being passed around by law enforcement.