LulzSec Leader Sabu Unmasked, Arrested and Caught Collaborating 511
Velcroman1 writes "Law enforcement agents on two continents swooped in on top members of the infamous computer hacking group LulzSec early this morning, and acting largely on evidence gathered by the organization's brazen leader — who sources say has been secretly working for the government for months — arrested three and charged two more with conspiracy. Charges against four of the five were based on a conspiracy case filed in New York federal court, FoxNews.com has exclusively learned. An indictment charging the suspects, who include two men from Great Britain, two from Ireland and an American in Chicago is expected to be unsealed Tuesday morning in the Southern District of New York. 'This is devastating to the organization,' said an FBI official involved with the investigation. 'We're chopping off the head of LulzSec.'"
Sabu is unemployed - what a surprise (Score:1, Insightful)
Only people on the dole and school kids have time to do this shit, the rest of us have to earn an honest living.
Also I suspect he'll remain unemployed for a long time now whether he goes to jail or not. No sane employer will want him within a mile of their systems. There are plenty enough white hat hackers who can go on the payroll first.
Re:it's a mole! (Score:1, Insightful)
Or they're lying about having flipped the head. Consider the source.
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:2, Insightful)
Charges against four of the five were based on a conspiracy case filed in New York federal court
Hey, that's a double standard!
... we all know people with money and power are happy people with good feelings who'd never do that...
Whenever you have reason to think there are conspiracies within government, why you're paranoid and that's absurd, no I won't look at your evidence because that just can't be so, *plugs ears* nana nana nana I can't hear you
But when government says they found a conspiracy among private individuals, why that's just law enforcement.
Re:Stop the presses! (Score:2, Insightful)
reputable source [washingtonpost.com]
Mmm, delicious yellowcake.
Re:Stop the presses! (Score:4, Insightful)
Fox News editorials are bullshit, but their news reporting is no less accurate than WaPo. I can imagine a known conservative news outlet being able to establish deeper sources within law enforcement than their more liberal counterparts, hence their scoop on the exclusive info. I'm not a conservative btw, and posting anon for obvious reasons.
Re:Stop the presses! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's now in the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/03/06/business/AP-US-Hacking-Arrests.html
Re:it's a mole! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that any time you're involved with someone engaged in criminal enterprise, you should probably assume they're not exactly the most ethical person.
Learning from history (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if they'll have as much success as Hercules.
Re:Sabu is unemployed - what a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Only people on the dole and school kids have time to do this shit, the rest of us have to earn an honest living.
A little bitter and prejudiced are we? No, it's not just kids that do this kind of thing. All that malware leeching away your personal data was not designed by teenagers or unemployed people. Software like that is often designed and used by people who are well-educated, often have jobs, and are otherwise just like you except for one minor detail: They think your working class ethos means dick, and they want to actually get ahead in the world rather than working for The Man forever and ever for crap health insurance and a shot at that extra $0.30 raise at the end of the year after using up their "generous" 11 days of vacation for the year... which also counts as their sick days... which means the average person spends their "vacation" being sick, and then gets written up and denied that $0.30 raise for taking too many days off. You might have heard of the most successful malware currently in use: It's called Facebook, and it's a scam that's become so popular that it has been incorporated and now has its own laison with the government (you know how much they hate competition in these kinds of things...)
I know Slashdot is in love with the idea of some lone samurai learning to hack in some temple somewhere, then bravely venturing forth fully versed in the art of code-fu, but it's just as fictional as those samurai movies: The overwhelming majority of people these days learn their trade on the job, or in school, and then they do this kind of stuff on the side. You just hear about the unemployed and school kids a lot more because (a) they're more likely to have deficits in their understanding of how to do this without getting caught and (b) if caught they're not going to be able to put up money for any kind of a legal defense.
No sane employer will want him within a mile of their systems.
You do realize that by denying people access to employment after their jail term has ended, you're leaving them only one option: Criminal activity, correct? The world of crime is a lot more amiable to a meritocracy than the corporate one; They don't try to hold onto weird beliefs like thinking how a person dresses is an indicator of potential, for example. It's just food for thought... not that I expect much thinking from you... you seem to be very narrow minded and prejudiced against the disadvantaged in general, so why would you ever stop and consider that maybe the problem is as much how we're treating them as their lack of ethics? Remember: You can't eat ethics. A very small number of people will be dicks just to be dicks, but the vast majority of people engage in unethical behavior because it has a benefit to them. That benefit is usually pretty basic too: Food, shelter, clothing, sex, etc. Of course, once they've gotten into the criminal world, it's hard to turn back because it's so goddamned profitable. So people wind up sticking a toe in the water and wind up getting pulled in deep. That's how it usually goes... no tricks, no arguments, no politics... just people who had some hard times, reached for the closest life preserver, and got sucked in.
We create the criminals when we allow social injustice.
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He was arrested (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, well, well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, Can you say BANKSTERS now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that the world is safe from LulzSec, how about some cuffs for the real criminals and their official enablers who have free reign still to this day.
Banksters and officials who enabled them
Fast and Furious
Oath breakers of the US Constitution
Ought to be a full time job right there, no time to screw with medical cannabis, milk farmers, or guitar manufacturer's.,
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm.... I think I just came up with the internet conspiracy formula.... patent pending!!!
Re:He was arrested (Score:1, Insightful)
Investigative journalists could pull back the curtain early, before it is too late, but the government is crushing what few are left.
Re:He was arrested (Score:5, Insightful)
There will come a time before long when NO-ONE will be laughing, as the terror which has been wrought upon us by our government and the banks is revealed for what it really is.
They won't care as long as they're offered a 15% discount on their car insurance. You overestimate humanity's desire for freedom. Civil liberties are a historical anomaly. Invariably, cultures that have them are conquered by those that do not, usually because cultures that have them are affluent and wealthy and cultures that don't have a whole lot of bodies they can throw at the problem until said culture is overrun.
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
I am in no way defending LulzSec or anyone who commits crime for any reason. But if you honestly haven't learned yet that crime for corporate profit or expansion of government power is completely ignored while anyone who challenges the status quo is given life in Federal PMITA prison, you are naive and blissfully childish, and I only wish I could enjoy your blasé sense of morality.
Re:it's a plea deal (Score:4, Insightful)
Reading comprehension should be the next thing you learn about. They identified and arrested the guy and flipped him. The article even says that - he plead out and he became a confidential informant.
He turned his guys over to the feds in exchange for the lulz. No wait, not for the lulz, but for lesser punishment. As previously stated, anyone simply in it for the lulz is not to be trusted. We should expect them not to be trusted, and they should have expected themselves not to be trusted.
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
depending on which facts you choose to follow, the GP can be very correct. I wouldnt disparage someone for believing crazy ass conspiracies when we can watch bankers and wall street knowingly manipulate a system that causes massive harm, and the firms they work for get very minor punishments, while at the same time the FBI finds it enormously important to destroy a group because they embarrassed SONY.
Re:it's a mole! (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who knows the difference between legality and ethics is far more trustworthy than someone who doesn't.
Fox, huh? (Score:0, Insightful)
The most interesting and worrying thing about this story:
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
CNN has it's brain washed followers.
Truly free and open minded people have the ability to watch both (and admit it), put the various pieces together and come up with their own opinion.
I myself like and hate both Fox and CNN. You on the other hand, if I had to guess, you're in with the CNN followers, but that's just my guess.
Re:it's a mole! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be no surprise that he who pays the piper calls the tunes.
As long as we have the best government money can buy, we have to accept that they're bought and paid for. They are not corrupt as long as they stay bought.
Don't like it? Don't vote for a politician who is bought. Or buy your own politician.
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He was arrested (Score:5, Insightful)
Roman Historian Sallust: âFew people prefer liberty, most people would settle for a fair masterâ(TM)
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:0, Insightful)
Fox News has it's brain washed followers.
CNN has it's brain washed followers.
Truly free and open minded people have the ability to watch both (and admit it), put the various pieces together and come up with their own opinion.
I myself like and hate both Fox and CNN. You on the other hand, if I had to guess, you're in with the CNN followers, but that's just my guess.
Is this your coming out of the closet and declaring yourself a conservative?
Re:it's a mole! (Score:5, Insightful)
No victim = no crime
So, attempted murder should not be a crime? Say, you know, if you miss with the gun you use, and just hit the brick wall next to the person you were trying to kill? No victim! No crime.
... there's a victim, and thus a crime, right? But when you just aren't technically good enough to completely ruin them, but try your hardest to do so ... no crime?
So, deliberately setting out to destroy a business (say, by DDoSing a seasonally traffic-spikey web site during the one week a year when they make all of the cash they need to pay for the year's payroll and other's costs) and actually succeeding
What the fuck is this bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I am staring to think we need to bludgeon people with a copy of 1984 every time they make a stupid statement about something normal being "Orwellian."
This right here? How they do criminal investigations for criminal organizations. They locate someone involved, catch them committing a crime, arrest them, and then try to get them to turn state's evidence. They use that person to attempt to shut down the entire organization.
This is how they run mob cases and all that kind of shit. If you aren't aware of it, your ignorance is the problem. It is not "Orwellian".
Seriously I think some people on Slashdot are anarchists, they don't think the government should be allowed to enforce ANY laws. Of course then something will come up with a company doing something and they go all communist and demand that the government not so much enforce the law and just get extremely punitive on the company. To me that speaks of a very poor understanding of the concepts of justice and fairness.
Re:Stop the presses! (Score:3, Insightful)
I trusted those lying bastards in their coverage of Iraq--WMD
Which lying bastards, now? The BBC? CNN? NPR? The AP? The state departments of several nations? CBS? MSNBC? The Clinton administration? Nancy Pelosi? Reuters? The NYT? In what fevered, Fox-fetishist way are you imagining that only Fox reported what was being said by people from all sorts of governmental organizations? Are you saying that Saddam was allowing free inspections of the sites where he used to keep tons of VX gas (for example), but that Fox was saying otherwise?
The FBI is always cutting off the head of some criminal organization or another. After you've heard it for the nth time, it gets old . . .
So, something that law enforcement has to do regularly is boring to you, and thus when the fact they did so is reported by a news outlet you don't like, it obviously didn't happen? What a strange life you must lead. Enjoy it, but please don't do anything important like voting, OK?
Re:Sabu is unemployed - what a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that when opposition to jail-rape is discussed, an immediate accusation of wanting the accused to live a 'life of luxury' is made? I think we can prevent jail-rape without giving criminals daily massages and pedicures.
Re:He was arrested (Score:5, Insightful)
We do. Those of us reading this article.
We got to laugh as LulzSec went on a 50-day rampage through the Internet. And today, when the arrests come in, we get to laugh and say "Well-played, FBI". (Seriously - if the article is accurate, they played it by the book: find one person, flip them to their side, and use that compromised person to compromise the rest of the group. They hacked meat, not computers, but what they did to LulzSec is no different than what LulzSec did to the systems it attacked. They won fair and square.)
Good guys? Bad guys? What do good and bad have to do with any of this? It's entertainment!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that those people you want to see brutalized and tortured in prison regardless of what their crime was are eventually going to get out of prison and be back on the street. With you. Are you sure you want that? Think about it for a second. I already know you have no empathy, but how's your sense of self-preservation? A society of enthusiastic torturers is a society with some seriously bad karma.
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your comment is that you overlook important details.
Bankers have accountants and lawyers that provide cover for them in terms of actual criminal wrongdoing. That's why the bankers aren't being prosecuted yet, because it's hard to prove criminality rather than incompetence. It's not like people haven't been trying and the AG of NYS is still trying and will probably get them *for something* the same way we got Al Capone *for something* (, in his case, income tax evasion.
LULSEC is just outright breaking the law, no chaser. That's called "mooning the giant" in the business world. The giant is going to notice you and do something about you.
Do well connected companies do blackhat things for large contractors businesses and politicians? We all have the feeling that they do, but there has to be specific allegations and specific cases, not just a general feeling of corruption.
The child sex slavery incidents are usually a reference to Dyncorp, details on Wikipedia and here:
Cari Lynn titled The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors And One Woman's Fight For Justice.
In Bosnia, they had immunity from prosecution- itself a ridiculous notion but there it was.
In Afghanistan they were investigated but you have to pin crimes on individuals doing specific acts and this is not so easy.
But to your point, the greater reality seems to be this: not many companies do why Dyncorp and Xe do. When push comes to shove, the government feels it needs these companies to do things. Thus the immunity from prosecution clauses and thus the invigorous investigation (what no hidden cameras and months of undercover work???? ).
Don't like this state of affairs? Then do what I do and stop voting Republican. It was Rumsfeld under Bush who wanted to downsize the military to save costs (and upsize private contracting by a cost equal to , oh, ten times that amount or more) .
No one is starting a competitor to Xe or Dyncorp. For this reason alone, they should not exist- monopoly power on necessary services to the government on the government dime should never be permitted to exist. Government should perform the services that fit anything like that description.
You cry about the end results, but do you vote? Do you express anything like the concerns I expressed to your congresscritter? Once the gun is loaded and trigger is pulled, the bullet IS going to fly to its target. You have to stop the action before it gets to the point of inevitability. Permitting Xe and Dyncorp to exist in the capacity they do was ABSOLUTELY going to lead to just what we see here, along with the lackluster prosecution in the name of "the greater good" .
LULZSEC on the other hand were just a bunch of lawbreaking joyriders shoving their bare asses out their car window as they drove by the chief of police's house.
Just because there's an unsolved armed robbery in a town doesn't mean vandals aren't prosecuted anymore.
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe not Lulzsec, but Megaupload's Kim Dotcom was arrested in the conditions you described (helicopters and all) in the first half. As for the second half, look at what happens in Gitmo and other secret CIA prisons. Unless you're one of those people who think waterboarding is not torture.
Yes, one happend in Australia and the other in the States (Cuba technically). But Megaupload was done at the behest of the U.S. government and their industry cronies. Don't think that it couldn't happen here, in the land of the free and home of the brave.
Re:He was arrested (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well duh (Score:2, Insightful)
Its a good thing everyone in prison is guilty. Otherwise it might be immoral to grin and wink at the idea of prison rape. Oh wait...
Dipshit.
Re:Hey wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
Both are atheists. "Agnostic" was a term coined by a man who admitted that the term "atheist" applied to him but didn't want to be lumped in with other people the term also applied to.
[citation needed]
atheist - a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.
agnostic - a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"–had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took. - Huxley, Thomas. Collected Essays. pp. 237–239. ISBN 1-85506-922-9 (via Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]).