

Three of the top Anonymous leaders allegedly captured in Spain - bry
http://www.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/06/10/spain.hackers/index.html

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redstripe
"The suspects encoded their communications and penetrated nearby secure Wifi
networks, since two of the suspects did not even have an Internet connection
at home, the police said."

Spain probably has a pretty rigorous internet/telephony monitoring aparatus as
a result of it's internal terrorism problems, but I'm curious how they were
tracked down after the wifi network was located. Did the police just search
all nearby properties? Is there hardware that can locate the source of
individual wifi broadcasts?

~~~
ceejayoz
Any law enforcement authority is likely to have hardware for triangulating
radio signals.

------
Typhon
Anonymous has no leaders. Anonymous is not a hacker network. It may be that
some people who belong to hacker networks use Anonymous as their name, but
that doesn't involve Anonymous as a whole.

The reason Anonymous is called Anonymous, what makes it different from another
human group is that anyone can be part of it, anyone can claim to represent
it.

~~~
bry
That's the theory, but in reality there are likely members that are more
influential than others. Not official leaders perhaps, but a form of leader
nonetheless.

~~~
scythe
There are!

But Anonymous is kind of disjoint. It's feudal. You'll realize this if you try
to hop on to one of the IRC networks -- there are a million different little
channels each representing its own fiefdom. They mostly have some common
beliefs, and they all fly the same banner -- but when one group rises to
prominence they will often start doing things under their own name. Some
recent examples include LulzSec and Goatse Security. There are also the people
who run the websites and the IRC channels and who make the DDoS tools and
similar skiddie stuff; these guys are by any measure the _real_ "leaders" of
the operation, but they prefer to sit on the sidelines and don't usually get
their hands dirty. The argument could be made, for example, that Julian
Assange is an unwitting leader of Anonymous.

It's an emergent structure, not an intentional one. This is key to its
resilience.

I used to post regularly on /i/ a few years ago; it grew into the "Anonymous"
of today after the website owner shut it down. There was a Fox News report
about the "Anonymous" threat way back in 2007; the "informant" mentioned in
the report is Alex Wuori, a self-proclaimed "defector", and I'm not exactly
breaking his privacy because literally everyone knows who he is and what he
did. The Fox News report centered on the /i/ board of the time.

The other thing about Anonymous is that it is, as you may have noticed, rather
old, in Internet terms. The first true Anonymous raid was YTMND vs. Ebaums
back in 2006, in which 4chan and 7chan ran DDoS attacks against
ebaumsworld.com in retaliation for stolen content.

I don't do any of that anymore, in case anyone's wondering. Being 17 only
lasts one year.

------
escanda
They've already been released with charges. One of them hosted the IRC server
in his own house.

They were not involved in the Playstation network attack but on national
Spanish attacks to the Minister of Culture and some other local websites.

He, at least these last two weeks between the cucumbers crisis, and now this
misunderstanding on the PSN, the focus is diverted from bonds speculation :)

------
getsat
> a computer server that was used to coordinate and execute the attacks

lol, they arrested a kid with a laptop running LOIC. Nothing to see here, move
along.

------
click170
I'm waiting for their response (Anonymous), it's usually comical and
entertaining.

------
voidr
You can't just arrest the leaders of Anonymous, because it has no leaders,
this is the whole point of it.

These goverment people fight back the only way they know: propaganda.

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velutinous
I think the term "leaders" is used very loosely here since last I checked they
weren't an organisation with "leaders"

I think they're trying to put the blame on anonymous. They found this and
thought, we'll blame it on them:

"police found a large quantity of software programs specifically designed to
infect third-party computers. The suspects encoded their communications and
penetrated nearby secure Wifi networks, since two of the suspects did not even
have an Internet connection at home, the police said."

------
tomelders
Lol. They think they know what Anonymous is. Lawfags can't even triforce, etc
etc....

~~~
tomelders
Minus points for satire? It's a good job HN doesn't run a country.

~~~
alnayyir
>Minus points for satire?

Yep. Be useful or move on.

~~~
tomelders
Satire isn't useful? Are you for real? How useful can someone's opinion on the
Internet be exactly? Is there a scale of usefulness on which satire ranks near
the bottom? I doubt it. You move on, the world need less of you. Pedants.

~~~
alnayyir
Substantive exchange of knowledge especially that which is based on experience
is the most favored kind of post here.

Satire, at least of the internet variety, rarely has anything to contribute
except in the form of noise.

I'm not a pedant, I'm helping you understand the people here. Your ungrateful
and angry attitude only proves my point.

I've been here for nearly three years now, I'm not going anywhere and neither
is the rest of community which has the values I've just described.

You might enjoy reddit.com/r/programming more, they seem to value humor more.

