Anonymous hacker 'Sabu' was an FBI plant for months

There are going to need to update that chart

'There's a lot of hate being spewed': hacker 'Sabu' was an FBI plant for months

Sabu ...
hacking ringleader turned FBI informant.

Jeremy Hammond
one of five alleged
computer hackers
charged over
high-profile
cyberattacks.
Photo: AP

(Reuters via smh.com.au) Even as he urged tens of thousands of Twitter followers to rise up and attack government and law enforcement, the most wanted hacker on the planet was working for the FBI.

New Yorker Hector Xavier Monsegur, 28, was exposed on Tuesday as the person behind Sabu, the colourful leader of Lulz Security, a much-feared and talented offshoot of the cyber-activist group Anonymous.
Better known as LulzSec after its Twitter handle, the gang broke into computers at Sony, an FBI-affiliated non-profit agency in Atlanta, and a string of security companies with federal contracts. The group hacked the websites of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Fox broadcasting, battered Arab government websites in support of regional uprisings, and for a time took requests from the public for targets.
Many hackers were stunned when they learned that Sabu had been arrested, given his technological skills and role as Lulz' de facto chief of security.
But details from court filings revealed something far more spectacular - he had been cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation since June 7.
"Anyone who trusted Sabu is going to be in a panic right now," said Jennifer Emick, a former Anonymous activist who began working against it when it started attacking the US government. "Hard drives are being deleted."
Jake Davis, accused of being "Topiary", the most public face of Lulz, had been seized in late July, one of several arrests in Britain that followed Sabu's first encounter with the police.
Online chat rooms favoured by Anonymous filled on Tuesday with bile and worry about who would be next. One member warned that Monsegur had better have good FBI bodyguards.
"There's some paranoia. There's a lot of hate being spewed," said Gregg Housh, a leader of Anonymous in its less criminal days and a regular correspondent of Sabu's.
Secret hearing
Monsegur was born in New York, attended college and worked at various technology jobs. He displayed a rare combination of hacking talent, working-class sensibility and political conviction. In chats and internet posts that gave Lulz unprecedented reach and popularity, he often seemed angry while Topiary was funny and irreverent.
In an interview with New Scientist, he said his first hacking for a cause was more than a decade ago when he interfered with communications during controversial US Navy bombing exercises in Vieques, Puerto Rico.
He lived in a 14-story brick housing project overlooking the FDR Drive on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Neighbour Victor McCarty, 47, said Monsegur "never really came out of the building much. He always said he was busy on the computer".
On Tuesday, no one came to the apartment door, which was decorated with a faded sticker of the American flag.
Monsegur's anti-government hacking accelerated as federal investigators closed in. His tone became even more vitriolic after he was apprehended, possibly because the FBI wanted to flush out the most strident of his peers.
Monsegur was arrested in June on credit card fraud charges after Facebook was served with a warrant and turned over messages he had sent via the online social network.
He agreed to cooperate and secretly pleaded guilty on August 15 to some of the most serious Lulz crimes in exchange for the FBI seeking leniency for Monsegur at his sentencing, according to records unsealed on Tuesday.
Who's next?
US prosecutors and the FBI announced charges against five other men on Tuesday: one in Chicago, two in Britain and two in Ireland.
"What this case shows is that the FBI is getting very effective in going after these groups," said Jerry Dixon, a former head of the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division and director of analysis at Team Cymru, a cyber security research group.
"They are able to get members to turn in the others and peel back the onion and ferret out many more of the members."
So much hacking occurred with Sabu's encouragement after his arrest that the case has raised questions about what the government allowed in the interests of the investigation. An FBI spokeswoman declined to address the issue.
Monsegur's name had been circulating for months among security professionals and investigators.
Before his arrest, Sabu fretted in private chats that he would be tracked through a combination of his actions, nicknames and other digital crumbs he had left behind.
He urged colleagues to be careful and to wipe their computers and computers they hacked.
"There are many things hackers can do to hide their tracks, but they can rarely do everything," said Mark Rasch, a former cyber crimes prosecutor with the US Justice Department now with CSC.
Lulz officially disbanded last year, merging back into Anonymous and Antisec, a loose affiliation of hackers targeting law enforcement and "white hat" security companies.
Anonymous veterans said they did not believe that Sabu's arrest and betrayal of his fellow hackers would end Antisec's activities.
"This is going to prompt a major response," said Barrett Brown, a past Anonymous spokesman who knew Monsegur and was interviewed by the FBI during a search on Tuesday.
The response on the internet raged all day. "Last thing to say about Sabu, he's a traitor, a coward and a fiend," one tweet said. "And unless he shows regret I will not feel bad if anything happens to him."

Relevance? UNESCO vote today will keep Syria on human rights committee at View from Geneva

Despite bid by US & UK to expel Assad regime, UNESCO waters down draft resolution; Syria to keep seat on UNESCO board and rights panel

GENEVA, March 7 (UN WATCH) – Despite vigorous efforts led by the US and Britain, a resolution on Syria to be adopted today by the UN’s education, science and culture agency will keep the Assad regime on its human rights committee, revealed UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights monitoring organization, which exclusively obtained a copy of the draft. Click here for draft resolution.
“That UNESCO will keep President Bashar al-Assad on its human rights committee — at the same time as the regime mercilessly murders its own people — is a moral outrage,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights group.
“Today’s appalling decision calls into question the credibility of UNESCO as an agency dedicated to human rights, and casts a shadow upon the reputation of the UN as a whole.”
After UNESCO elected Syria to its human rights committee in November, UN Watch led a campaign of 55 parliamentarians, human rights and religious groups calling on the agency to reverse its decision. In response, the US and Britain initiated today’s debate at UNESCO.
“While today’s text rightly condemns Syria, the promised call to oust the regime from UNESCO’s human rights panel has been completely excised. We’re left with words, but no teeth. By maintaining Assad in a position of global influence on human rights, UNESCO today is sending absolutely the wrong message. It an unconscionable insult to the suffering people of Syria,” said Neuer.
Today’s vote is expected around 4:30 pm Paris time. The weakened resolution is expected to pass with numbers similar to last week’s vote, when Russia tried but failed to remove the Syria discussion from the agenda.(MORE)

uh... this is an issue? is anyone shocked?

Reporter for Iranian news agency arrested for India bombing

(EOZ) From NDTV: An Indian journalist who allegedly works for an Iranian news agency has been arrested in Delhi for last month's bomb attack on an Israeli diplomatic vehicle in New Delhi. Israel has accused Iran of orchestrating the attack.

Syed Mohammed Kazmi, who is 50, was brought to a Delhi court today. He was sent to 20-day police custody. He has admitted to being part of the conspiracy, says the police. The police say its investigations show he had been in touch with a man on a motorcycle who planted the bomb using a magnetic on the car.
The police say it searched Kazmi's house over the past two days to gather evidence of his link to the February 13 attack, which wounded the diplomat's wife, her driver and two other people in a nearby car. Police did not say what evidence they found.
The blast came the same day a bomb was discovered on an Israeli diplomat's car in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The next day, three Iranians accidentally blew up their house in Thailand, and Israeli authorities said the similarity between their explosives and the two earlier bombs linked Iran to all three incidents.
Israel has accused Iran of waging a covert campaign of state terror and has threatened military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

But if you read Al Jazeera, you know that it was a Zionist false flag operation. As it always is. (h/t Philtheman)

sigh...

Stratfor leaks: NATO commandos in illegal special ops in Syria

(Other) Stratfor leaks: NATO commandos in illegal special ops in Syria.(RT).Undercover NATO troops are already in Syria despite denials from their parent governments, according to a leaked brief from a highly-placed analyst.
The information comes from a hacked email from leading private US intelligence agency Stratfor, whose correspondence has been released by Wikileaks since February 27. The email appears to be written from the address of Reva Bhalla (bhalla@stratfor.com), the company’s director of analysis, for internal use, and details a confidential Pentagon meeting in December. The consultation is alleged to have been attended by senior analysts from the US Air Force, and representatives from its chief allies, France and the United Kingdom.
Western powers have categorically denied military involvement in Syria’s internal conflict, for which they have no international mandate. But if the information contained in the letter is reliable, a radically different picture of Western activity in Syria emerges.
The author of the letter claims that US officials “said without saying that SOF [special operation forces] teams (presumably from the US, UK, France, Jordan and Turkey) are already on the ground, focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” A little later the US army experts expand on the role of the undercover commandos: “the idea 'hypothetically' is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.”
Alawites are a minority Islamic sect, to which Syrian President Bashar Assad and his support base belong. For the past year he has battled an insurrection that has united a range of opponents, from pro-democracy activists to radical Sunni Muslims.There have been previous allegations of a Western presence on the side of the rebels and on Monday 13 French officers were reportedly captured by the loyalist forces.
Despite the commandos’ already wide remit, the email states that the US experts “stress that this is all being done as contingency planning, not as a move toward escalation.”
If confirmed, the information will give ammunition to Russia and China, who have accused Western powers of paving the way for an invasion of Syria. These fears have already been cited as the reason.

No Boom Boom?: Failed suicide bomber complains that Fatah isn't paying for her surgery

(EOZ) From ITIC: In the early morning hours of June 20, 2005, a 21-year-old Palestinian female suicide bomber arrived at the Erez crossing in the Gaza Strip, wearing (extra) stockings that contained approximately 20 lbs. of explosives. The female terrorist, who aroused the suspicion of the Israeli security forces, was taken to a security check during which the explosive stockings were uncovered. She att em pted several times to detonate herself at the crossing and, having been unsuccessful, was brought to questioning.

The arrested suicide bomber is Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Bass, a resident of the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, born in 1984. In her questioning, she admitted to being affiliated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah's operative wing). She also stated that she had been dispatched by the organization's infrastructure in the northern Gaza Strip to carry out a suicide bombing attack in an Israeli hospital, with the intention of killing Israeli civilians. In an interview granted to a Channel 10 reporter, Wafa al-Bass pointed out that ever since she was a little girl, her dream had been, and still was, to be a shahid (“martyr”) and die for Allah's sake (Israeli TV's Channel 10, June 20, 2005) She was being treated in Soroka Hospital for severe burns from a previous gas explosion accident. Last year she was released in the Shalit deal. Now, Wafa al-Bass is complaining to an Islamic Jihad newspaper that she injured herself while trying to explode herself in 2005, and she needs surgery that would cost 16,000 shekels - and Fatah isn't willing to pay for it! (As far as I know, there was no explosion, so it is unclear how injured she could have gotten while trying to detonate herself.) Not only that, but while other terror groups have been giving jobs to former prisoners, Fatah hasn't offered her anything. She says that she is being treated with negligence and neglect as she gave her blood and years of her life to the cause.

Maybe Fatah isn't paying because she is such a failure. After all, if she had managed to blow herself up in Erez, they wouldn't owe her a thing.

I'm smirking. that was the girl who was trying to kill her doctor.