Some of you may be aware of Operation Payback.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America), and analogous overseas institutions have been mounting anti-piracy campaigns recently. Supposedly one of the targets of the anti-piracy campaign is Piratebay, a well known torrent site.

Operation Payback was organized by Anonymous in retaliation. Supposedly they organized DDoS attacks against the RIAA and MPAA, but those are only temporary so who cares right?

Here's where it gets interesting.

Enter ACS:Law. ACS is a UK law firm specialising in intellectual property law. The main partner of the company is Andrew Crossley. ACS attracted the wrath of Anonymous because they had allegedly sent out tens of thousands of letters demanding cash-settlements from Internet subscribers for infringing copyright (piracy) violations. Some claim most of these people targeted were innocent.

So Anonymous again, organized a DDoS attack. Big deal. And then Andrew Crossley was harassed by anonymous phone calls at all hours of the night. Ok. More disturbing.

Then the webmanager of ACS royally screwed up and somehow the full email backup of the law firm was made public for a few hours on Friday.

These files are now on the internet. Among them include internal emails suggesting Andrew Crossley knew his operation was little more than an extortion game, documents of possibly dodgy legal practices and several rather sensitive emails to his ex-wife.

What is interesting to me is how this cyber tug-of war will resolve itself. Some of the emails suggest that the law firm specifically targeted older people, or married men who downloaded gay porn to try and get money from them. This is interesting, but does it warrent a single individual having all of his secrets and correspondence made public? Will this have a chilling effect on individuals the RIAA and related companies hire?

I find this phenomenon interesting because the hackers and sympathizers are clearly motivated by (in part) a sense of righteous indignation. What if that motivation was instead nationalism because two countries had gone to war? Could the politicians of the opposing countries rightly expect all their correspondences to be made public by enemy hackers? How would that impact the political reality of the funding for a military action (in a first world nation of course)?

Links below:

http://blog.systema.in/2010/09/acslaw-anti...-leaked-emails/
http://torrentfreak.com/4chan-to-ddos-riaa...-future-100919/
http://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-gay-porn-le...ied-men-100925/
http://torrentfreak.com/leaked-emails-reve...-scheme-100926/

Every time I see "Anonymous" written as if referring to a cohesive whole I think I get a little more jaded.

Clearly it was all done for the lulz, duh.

Ah yes.. More lulz.

Why? They're more cohesive than most things referred to as a whole. People refer to entire countries as cohesive demographics, or entire religions, ethnic groups, or any of a laundry list of other designations. Anonymous is as much an entity as any of those.

Very interesting thread - thank you.

I remember reading about this some time ago and then I lost track of the story. Crossley behaved very badly and landed himself in hot water with the UK's regulator.

But no one deserves threatening phone calls or cyber attack, and the publication of his email data, much of which will be legally privileged, will have ruined his practice and made him a lame duck for negligence suits.

Poor guy.

Actually, on further reading, scratch the 'poor guy'.

I can't even begin to say how much this made me laugh.

Ehh, not really. They are as cohesive as any other angry mob that wants to be "part" of something. A couple people throw out marching orders and let the kids with LOIC go nuts and pat themselves on the back for sticking it to the man. They're just some mob. They get their hands on data and usually do nothing with it.

Nothing but plaster all over the Internet, you mean?

Which isn't much in my honest opinion. At the least it doesn't show any cohesive goal. It has an effect, but a real organization would be doing something with the data. Either bringing it to different authorities or more malicious goals. Plastering it all over the internet is just modern public shaming, tar and feathering. They -hope- it gets picked up by the right people.

Well, it did? http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep/2...sharing-acs-law

The article directly says that law firm will only see a fine if the reveal of information on their website was through their own fault. If it was through hacking, though it seems like it isn't and the law firm screwed up, they wouldn't be fined and instead the hackers would be at fault. So Anonymous performed a DoS attack and got lucky because of a piss-poor web manager.

Anonymous either didn't do much, outside of being an angry internet mob, or someone involved did somehow get this info and displayed it on the website. That just means they shot themselves in the foot and you'll see less actions taken against the law firm because all of this data was illegally obtained.

I've never understood why some countries just ignore evidence if it is discovered it wasn't obtained lawfully... It doesn't change the fact that a crime has been committed, after all. Of course, if it is discovered that it was obtained through hacking the hackers should still face legal consequences, but should the other criminals really be left alone?

Evidence obtained illegally is automatically in question. If it can't be obtained in a legal manner by proper authorities that evidence was most likely then gained through a way that violates the rights of the defendant and is just questionable. You can't trust illegally obtained evidence.

Disclaimer: I don't know a thing of UK law and just what can and can't be accepted as evidence in court.

I don't know if this is actually the reason, but if I had to guess it would be that it has nothing to do with credibility, because illegal evidence can be perfectly credible: instead, the issue is that if you allow evidence that was obtained illegally you implicitly justify those methods by rewarding them with success. The idea of making it inadmissible is to deter people from doing it because then it won't help them as much, forcing them to use legal methods if they want to get justice achieved. You could argue that people should simply be allowed to take the knocks for their illegal methods and count the evidence anyway but that seems like a really risky way of going about things since then entities rich enough to afford the penalties could do all sorts of nasty like bugging their employees or whatever.

Fain might be able to give you more of the details though (or just tell me I'm completely wrong.)

P.S try extra hard not to turn this into a politics thread, should be fine for now though.

The alternative would be to make the penalties stiffer than fines, which seems like it'd have a far more chilling effect on law enforcement than simple inadmissibility. Would you ever search a car again without express written permission from the owner if you knew you could go to jail for an illegal but good faith search? Prison is not a safe place for a cop.

Look at it this way (this is mostly from information from TV series, which may or may not be accurate, so if I've got things wrong, do let me know): The cops have gotten a search warrant to look for weapons in an apartment. They don't find any weapons, but they do find a large-scale narcotics production. In this example, they'd be forced to turn their backs on it (and can't get a warrant based on what they saw during the search), instead of just going "Well what do we have here" and seize it all anyway, even though they have no official right to.

Of course, there are a multitude of other examples. For instance, blood tests for a DUI that wasn't performed by a doctor but rather by a lab technician (at least that's how the law looks over here), etc. Sure, there is the threat that people abuse it, but it also makes it impossible to get out of jail on such technicalities as those.

If they have a warrant to look for something, and they find something else in the process then it's perfectly admissable. The specification of what you're looking for is for the purposes of seizure, the specification of -where- you're searching is what matters in that situation.

http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd=x-347-566663

Of course, suing a law firm is a bit iffy on the chances there... but hey, if you're (mis)identifying and harassing them, you deserve all you can get.