

In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters - d0ne
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/op_payback/

======
kkowalczyk
I'm not necessarily against feds going after DDOSers, but this is a shameful,
politically motivated retribution.

The "crime" here is not sending packets to DDOS PayPal but criticizing the
goverment. The goverment is in turn showing they're not afraid to destroy
lives of those who do.

DDOS attacks are pretty much an epidemic on the internet. I'm pretty sure
every major company like Google or Microsoft or Amazon has to deal them on a
regular basis (<http://mashable.com/2009/12/24/ddos-attack-amazon/> for just
one example of an attack that was actually successful and well publicized).

Huge botnets make it relatively easy to launch an attack.

This is not some new fact - existence of bots, DDOS attacks on many hosts,
that's been known for years and yet this is one of the few times where feds
lifted a finger to combat it and certainly the first time where it's done on
such a scale and based on such a flimsy evidence and small transgressions like
an individual running a DDOS tool (which, by itself, is not nearly enough to
bring a website down, it only works if many people are doing it at the same
time).

This is not a coincidence and not really that surprising - you fight the
goverment, the goverment will fight you.

~~~
darksaga
After reading the article, it appears as though Anon were lured into the
attack by PayPal. Then it sounds like the Feds already had all their stuff in
place to collect the data while the attacks were happening.

~~~
pyre

      > Then it sounds like the Feds already had all their
      > stuff in place to collect the data while the attacks
      > were happening.
    

[citation needed]

My read says that PayPal had some sort of network monitoring system in place
which allowed them to capture data during the attack. They then handed this
information over to the Feds.

~~~
astrec
Yes, one of Radware's ids/idp solutions. (Radware is an Israeli company who do
some nice kit - I've bought quite a few of their boxes).

------
tshtf
_The newly released affidavit was offered in support of a search warrant for
the home of an Arlington, Texas couple and their son, who were among the July
19 targets, and have not been charged. The house was the source of 3,678
packets in about two-and-a-half hours starting December 8._

So they're going to arrest a kid for sending an average on one packet every
two seconds, over the period of two-and-a-half hours?

~~~
andreyf
They probably won't arrest him. I'm a bit surprised that this was enough to
even get a search warrant...

~~~
melvinng
Considering that most DDOS attacks come from zombie bots installed on programs
when people Torrent, I'm suprised that there were arrest made based on IPs

~~~
wmf
Did you read the article? Paypal provided evidence that the DDoS was coming
from LOIC, a manually-operated non-botnet tool. Also, it sounds like Paypal's
evidence was only used to get search warrants, and evidence found in those
searches (like LIOC) would then be used to justify arrests.

~~~
astrec
Not necessarily manually-operated. See also: LOIC Hivemind.

------
trotsky
_The newly released affidavit was offered in support of a search warrant for
the home of an Arlington, Texas couple and their son, who were among the July
19 targets, and have not been charged. The house was the source of 3,678
packets in about two-and-a-half hours starting December 8._

Man, they executed a federal raid with FBI agents over something that amounted
to a few thousand "slowlaris"ed GET requests over a few hours?

How much does something like that cost? What, 2-4 agents, 4-8 hours, seizure,
paperwork, court filings, etc. Tens of thousands of dollars, right?

I want a tax refund.

------
eschulte
To echo a good question posed in the comments of the original article.

"what is the digital equivalent of civil disobedience and protest?"

~~~
9999
Here's the thing with Civil Disobedience: you take a certain amount of risk
when you do it. In fact, if there is no risk, there's little point in the
"disobedient" action at all. So when these guys go to jail for DoSing a
server, they've actually partially succeeded. Now when a majority of the
populace cares that they've been punished for their actions, and believes the
disobedience was a just action against an invalid law, then they'll have
actually succeeded.

Put another way (and translated into meatspace), environmental protesters
don't win when they chain themselves to a tree to stop it from being cut down.
They win when they are confronted by the authorities, hauled off to jail, and
covered by the media, making people aware of their protest. Simply blocking
access to the site and hoping there will be no repercussions is basically
pointless.

~~~
michaelchisari
_Simply blocking access to the site and hoping there will be no repercussions
is basically pointless._

Not necessarily. Some civil disobedience is symbolic, as you describe, some is
direct action. Some acts of civil disobedience have succeeded even though
there have been media blackouts, mostly because the cost of continually
arresting protestors who refuse to back down exceeds the downsides to
negotiation.

------
robryan
So I would assume they are going to be getting the most clueless kids here
that probably caused minimal harm. I assume the real organisers of this kind
of action wouldn't be DDOS'ing PayPal with easily identifiable packets from
their home IP addresses.

------
smokeyj
How exactly does one take an IP number and point a finger to the person who
caused that transmission? If a computer can be hijacked by an undetectable
virus from a Sony cd, can we really say for sure who caused any transmission
from a PC? What if you framed your neighbors unsecured wifi? Or target
someone's home? It's like a modern day witch hunt!

~~~
wmf
_How exactly does one take an IP number and point a finger to the person who
caused that transmission?_

Good thing that's not what the FBI is doing.

 _can we really say for sure who caused any transmission from a PC?_

If a computer is seized from a teenager's bedroom and it has LOIC installed
and it isn't malware-infested...

~~~
SwellJoe
_If a computer is seized from a teenager's bedroom and it has LOIC installed
and it isn't malware-infested..._

Are you not bothered by the notion of a warrant being issued for search of
your home and seizure of your computers based on nothing but an _IP address_?

I'm extremely bothered by that, personally, because I know enough about
networks to know how very shaky that "evidence" of identity is.

~~~
wmf
I'm more bothered by the idea that the architecture of the Internet would be
turned into a "get out of jail free" card. Unless your attacker is completely
incompetent, the only evidence you'll have is an IP address; if you can't use
that then you have nothing.

~~~
SwellJoe
I hate to parrot quotes as an argument, but I feel like this one is
appropriate here: "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one
innocent suffer" - William Blackstone (various others have said it over the
years with "ten" replaced by some other value, usually even higher than ten)

Given that having your computers and data seized is _already_ punishment for a
lot of people, possibly significant and life-altering punishment, I think
courts should be damned careful about allowing police to take that action.
I've known people who's businesses have been destroyed by computer seizure.
And I've known people who have only gotten their computers back _years later_
(which effectively is the same as "never", because computers have a relatively
short shelf life), despite no charges ever being brought against them. My
business probably wouldn't currently be destroyed by the loss of all of my
personal computers, but it would certainly be a very serious hardship, far
beyond what I feel would be just punishment without a trial. And, seizure of
all of my servers (including the ones where the backups are stored) probably
would very nearly destroy my business and cost me tens or hundreds of
thousands of dollars in lost sales and data.

A search is one thing, effective theft of my means of putting food on my table
is something altogether different, and I think police ought to have to have a
pretty damned good reason for taking away my livelihood for an indeterminate
period of time.

------
blauwbilgorgel
I find it a strange position for Wired to be in.

On the one side, they offer quality articles and have quality resources. They
seem to favor the hackers.

On the other side, this article was written by Kevin Poulsen, who had a part
in turning over a whistleblower and journalist source to the authorities.
Kevin Poulson has made himself too related to anonymous and WikiLeaks to be
regarded as objective on these matters.

I know that isn't reason to judge any article of his, but the extra care I'm
forced to take when Poulson is involved (consider his sources, morals and
agenda), leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth and an inability to enjoy
reading this article.

------
ljf
Would be interesting to see them putting the same resources in getting to the
bottom of who was DDoSing Wikileaks at the same time. But I have a feeling
they never will.

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phunehehe
The link is returning 404. Probably something readable can be found by
searching
[http://www.google.com/search?q=threatlevel%202011%2007%20op_...](http://www.google.com/search?q=threatlevel%202011%2007%20op_payback)

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bsiemon
Wouldn't most of these ip addresses be in a bot net?

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shareme
I do not think the FEDs main target was these arrests..

Why?

The FEDs targets would be the financial, administration of the botnets used in
the DDOs attacks..

The arrests are to put pressure on the alleged criminals to turn in the
others..

The FEDs are after who is controlling the botnets in the DDOS attacks in the
long term..

And you will not see the arrests of those for awhile as far as what appears in
the press a the FBI can lock that down for 90 days as far as anybody knowing
that you are being investigated..

~~~
dwilson718
if this is their tactic i can only laugh. for the most part, the members of
anonymous dont even know who the other members are.

------
rajpaul
I see a lot of anger directed at the FBI. Remember that ‘Anonymous’ gave these
tools to children and encouraged them to use them knowing exactly what the
consequences for the kids would be.

