If any of you have been getting Macintosh security advice from a person who goes by the name Hard_Mac, now would be a good time to cut ties. That person is actually Darren Thurston [1] [2], a known snitch from the green scare cases. Who needs good computer security when one of your friends will sell you down the river anyway? He also goes by Rad_Boy.

More references: Vancouver Anarchist Online Archive, crimethinc, Portland IMC

Rap News has created a hilarious but accurate rap video newscast about the government's attempt to create an "internet kill switch" and the importance of maintaining a free internet. Featuring guest speakers Julian Assange, a representative of the pentagon, and a tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorist. The video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3adw9oLBkBI

CNET is reporting that security researcher Jacob Appelbaum who works at the Tor Project and volunteers for Wikileaks was detained by federal officials upon re-entering the United States.

His phone was stolen by border guards and was detained by over three hours. Unlike some not-so-smart students at MIT, who talked to the feds , Jacob refused to answer any questions. Like many of us, Jake appears to understand that there is a line in the sand; that the government is not our friend.

As hackers, we have to stop tolerating people who speak to federal authorities and help in their persecution of hackers and organizations like Wikileaks. They should be expelled from our events, mailing lists, and community.

The FBI and the rest of the federal government is bringing down heat strong on the hacker movement due to the recent actions of Wikileaks. We must not budge, we must not talk, and we must let people know when we are targeted or harassed. Their greatest power is that of keeping us silent.

Wikileaks has posted a mysterious file in their Afghan War Diary leak. The file, called Insurance, is larger than any other part of the leak and is encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption. Cryptome and others have speculated that they posted this hoping it would get well-distributed and that in the event that they are attacked by the military, justice department, or other foes in retaliation for their recent leaks, they could release the passphrase. Presumably, this file contains something important.

Please download and seed the torrent for this file. We need to get this file as widely distributed as possible in the event that using this insurance becomes necessary for Wikileaks. For those who use magnet links (Gnutella and BitTorrent), the magnet link is:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:76a36f1d11c72eb5663eeb4cf31e351321efa3a3&dn=insurance.aes256&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.thepiratebay.org%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%2Fannounce

If you want to download it straight from a torrent site, the Pirate Bay has a torrent at:
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5723136/WikiLeaks_insurance

Its not exactly news that the government doesn't have much concern for citizen privacy. And it shouldn't be a surprise that government agencies are doing their best to disrupt and destroy radical communities by using various forms of violence. There was a bit of coverage of the infrastructure in place to enable large scale monitoring via deep packet inspection and calea support in issue 10 of HTZ, and now there is some legal news on the white house trying to extend the power of FBI requests for email usage (who mail is being sent to and when, aka envelope information) as well as url request history from service providers without aproval from a judge. More on this can be found on the Washington Post's coverage of this story here.

Tor can be downloaded from https://torproject.org. The HTTPS Everywhere Plugin (https://https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere) for Firefox enables HTTPS surfing on many websites such as Wikipedia, The New York Times, Facebook, and others.

As many of you know, Bradley Manning has been charged with releasing the classified video Collateral Murder that brought the war home to millions. He is also suspected in thousands of other leaks and needs our urgent assistance. As the hacker community, we have an obligation to defend those who have been accused of fighting for the freedom of information. You may write Bradley at the following address:

Inmate: Bradley Manning
TFCF (Theater Field Confinement Facility)
APO AE 09366
USA

Please note that ALL mail is read by guards and that ANY statement made by you, whether solicited or not, can hurt him. Be careful what you write and remember he is ALLEGED to have leaked the video. No staples, weapons, money, glitter pens, or anything else that will get him thrown further into the hole.

If you're sitting on a pile of cash, now is the time to donate.

Facebook has added an account delete option but it wasn't well publicized until around a day ago on Slashdot. Unlike the "de-activation" many users have been forced into when trying to close their account, the delete function actually deletes your account and all your personal information. If you're excited to hear the news, here's the link: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Hackbloc tabled with Aftershock Action Alliance at The Next Hope in downtown Manhattan, NYC. We were able to get out a good number of HTZ #9, #10, and #10.5. We helped out with a presentation on the last day titled Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology. Smokey discussed the history of government oppression during natural disasters and covered a brief history of technology in crises situations. Evoltech spoke about the tapatio project, specific challenges involved with developing and deploying comms tools for mobilizations, and our plans for future comms development. Ringo closed up the talk with discussion of social responsibility as it applies to the hacker ethic.

I am often critical of hacker culture in general as it tends to be leaden with patriarchy, homophobia, and an acceptance of snitch culture. This conference wasn't different, but it was refreshing to hear folk confronting these issues during different discussions. Johannes Grenzfurthner's of monochrom talk titled "Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself" and the presentation titled "Informants: Villains or Heroes?" were especially interesting to me. While I have zero tolerance for snitches in the communities that I associate with I know that this is not the case with the hacker community where Emmanuel Goldstein speculated that 1 in 4 hackers would end up turning on one of their friends. Specifically relevant to this discussion was the outing of Adrian Lamo as an informant who turned on Bradley Manning for the alleged leak of the Collateral Murder video. What I appreciated from the informant talk was that it provided a forum for dialogue about snitch culture and state oppression specifically as it relates to the individual lives of victims in the hacker community where otherwise I think this would have just gone ignored and would not be addressed publicly.

Ironically, we published an article proposing a stop snitching movement as it applies to hackers in issue 9, not knowing how timely and relevant it would quickly become. It was inspiring to hear the clapping and cheers every time we brought up expelling snitches from the movement both in our presentation and the one by Wikileaks.

Hackbloc is pleased to present you with the two most recent issues of Hack This Zine: 10.0 and 10.5. The reason for the two issues being released at the same time is because of the quantity of content we received. The separate 10.5 issue, 'How to make friends with volcanoes: Anarchy, hacking, and mental health', is dedicated to a discussion amongst HB folk on the relevance of technology in the anarchist struggle and is a more accessible read for non-tech folk. 10.0, is packed with technical analysis, a few howto's, a review of the xerobank vpn service, and an update on our accountability process with Jeremy Hammond.

If you are going to be at HOPE come by our table and get a printed copy of the zine!

 

from http://colorado.indymedia.org/node/7781

On Jun 17, Colorado Indymedia was contacted by Special Agent Adam Kowalski of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)/Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As part of an "ongoing investigation" by Federal Protective Services, they attempted to seize the Colorado Indymedia server, believing that we kept logs (such as IP address access logs) that could identity users on our site. Our servers are graciously hosted at Denver Open Media who was approached by Kowalski. Kowalski claimed he had a court order but refused to leave a copy at Denver Open Media. He was told to contact the system administrators in order to obtain the logs as Denver Open Media does not have the ability to consent to a seizure or search of our property.

As of this date, we do not have a copy of the court order if it even exists. It's likely that this was just a bluff as it's well-established that cops, the FBI, and other law enforcement can lie in order to illicit consent and lying about court orders is no exception.

We told the FBI that "Colorado Indymedia does not retain this [identifying] information because we strongly believe in the First Amendment right to free, anonymous speech. Frequently communities outside of our society's mainstream feel more comfortable expressing their views in an anonymous setting. Like all Independent Media Centers, Colorado Indymedia exists to serve these communities, and thus strives to maintain the anonymity of its users."

In particular, the FBI was looking for information that would identify a user(s) who had used the "spamsucks" account. This account's username and password are posted on the main page of our site for users who would like to post and remain anonymous. Given the time period of the logs they were seeking, we believe they are looking to identify the individual(s) who posted the two communiques that claimed responsibility for the recent attacks on Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) offices. (See "ICE Facility Attacked in Loveland" http://colorado.indymedia.org/node/7733 and "ICE Office Attacked"http://colorado.indymedia.org/node/7721).

This request is part of an investigation by Federal Protective Services, the agency which is tasked with protecting the security of Federal property (such as buildings). Communiques posted by the same account claiming direct action attacks against other places such as a Wells Fargo branch (http://colorado.indymedia.org/node/7664) have not attracted similar reactions from the agency. It appears as if the ICE attacks prompted additional attention and heat due to their status as Federal buildings even though the attack on the Wells Fargo branch seems related to their funding of private ICE prisons through the GEO Group.

While this may look to many as a run-of-the-mill investigation, there are several things that bring this into question. Firstly, it is a well known and widely publicized policy of Colorado Indymedia that we do notretain logs that can identify individual users. For instance, our privacy policy (http://colorado.indymedia.org/node/550), which is linked to twice from our main page, notes that we do not log such information.The FBI is well aware of this policy but still decided to ask us for logs they know we do not keep. This could be a simple "fill in the box" task that has to be completed, but then why not approach DOM's Internetservice provider, which almost certainly does retain logs of this nature (as all major Internet Service Providers and the NSA do)? Additionally, the FBI seemed intent on seizing our server when they came to DenverOpen Media, indicating their goal may have been the disruption of our service instead of simply identifying users.

Given this, it seems likely that the government is upset that we provide a venue for anonymous speech and is retaliating for this. We allow people who ordinarily cannot speak to tell their story to the worldincluding those who took credit for smashing up the ICE offices. In any democratic society, it's important that all members of society can have as much available information in order to make informed decisions,including decisions about whether to support the actions that these communiques discuss. If places like COIMC did not exist, it could be that nobody would have heard why this office was attacked and peoplewould be forced to make evaluations based on coverage from mainstream media outlets who act as a police mouthpiece. In retaliation for providing this service and working to give everybody a voice, we havebeen targeted.

This targeting is no surprise and something we expect from law enforcement. Police are a tool of those who are in power who use them to maintain that power through force. Behind every law is a charge, behind every badge is a gun, and behind every subpoena is the possibility of being kidnapped and held hostage for contempt. This type of targeting is done every day against those who assert their right to privacy, who donot have societal privilege, who lack the money to defend themselves in court or conform to society's norms, and who choose to defy and change those norms themselves or challenge the power structures that controlsociety. We are not treated differently than anybody else and the targeting of Colorado Indymedia is business as usual. If the Department of Justice had their way (based on their actions and lobbying efforts),the right to anonymous speech would completely disappear. The services that we provide are a critical part of fostering social change and democratic discourse in this region. For this reason and many others wewill not be intimidated into maintaining investigative records on our own users or shutting down our service. As far as we know, we are the only media outlet that has provided coverage on the attacks against ICEoffices.

It's important when things like this happen we not internalize this repression and that we let people know we are being bullied. The majority of a bully's power is derived from their ability to keep theirvictim's silent. This is true whether those bullies are police, rapists, the bully who steals your lunch money, or an abusive parent. This enforced silence keeps the victim feeling powerless and alone. When weare silent, we cannot find others who have faced the same treatment and speak out about it or fight back. Police are a tool of those in power which they use to enforce their rules, laws, social codes, andultimately maintain their place at the top of the hierarchy. They do not want to hear about people challenging their authority. Most of all, they want to make sure that nobody sees or hears about those actions andchooses to support those individuals or becomes inspired to challenge authority on their own.

You may view our privacy policy at http://colorado.indymedia.org/node/550 which contractually binds us to protect your information. We would like to thank Denver Open Media(http://denveropenmedia.org) for continuing to host our server and recognizing the importance of the service we provide. We continue to look for people who are willing to help with website/serveradministration, moderation, legal problems, and other things. Please see http://colorado.indymedia.org/node/13 for more information. The original letter from the FBI can be found below including our response (withminor formatting changes for your viewing pleasure).