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Spanish airline Iberia says a man stripped naked on a flight bound for Germany carrying 110 passengers, causing the pilot to turn back to Madrid airport minutes after takeoff.
“The flight took off around 7:45 p.m. Thursday and not long after a man took all his clothes off, became disruptive and then locked himself in a toilet,” Iberia spokesman Santiago de Juan said Saturday.
He declined to give the passenger’s nationality but said the incident caused considerable inconvenience to a “nearly full flight of passengers who reached their destination of Frankfurt late, after police had to come aboard to take the man off.”
De Juan said flight disruptions are mostly caused by drunken passengers, but this time alcohol hadn’t played a part.
Hacker turned provocateur Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeak’s secret has come out. He may have hundreds of hackers who align themselves with the open-government website, according to information in the wake of three hacker arrests in Spain.
Yet for all the United States official chagrin, it has taken a page out of the Assange notebook. The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet, according to the NY Times, who use WikiLeaks info.
Spanish police may be a diaz late and a Euro short in the arrest of the three hackers who were associated with the recent online attacks of Sony, MasterCard and others that stole millions of identity numbers.
The trio was associated with hacker group Anonymous, composed of hundreds of hackers and activists who have largely targeted companies deemed hostile to WikiLeaks.
It also helps explains Assange’s seemingly unending supply of secret government and financial documents from around the globe. He did it with an army of online pirates.
Some consider him a hero or a modern day swashbuckler after his details of government atrocities and excessive spending came to light. Millions of others who have had their identities compromised may feel differently. He is the subject of a CNN special tonight.
The recent arrests in Spain will have “little overall impact” in slowing the group’s activities because many of the accused hackers are minors and are widely dispersed geographically, said John D’Arcy, an assistant professor of information-technology management at the University of Notre Dame.
Anonymous, composed of hundreds of hackers and activists in several countries, gained attention in December when it targeted EBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, Visa Inc. (V) and other companies deemed hostile to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that published leaked U.S. military documents and diplomatic communications on its website.
Spanish police went after the group as Anonymous hacked the their own turf: websites of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA (BBVA), Spain’s second-biggest bank, and Enel SpA (ENEL), the Italian owner of Spanish power company Endesa, police said in a statement in Madrid today. The arrests follow similar actions against Anonymous in the U.S. and U.K. in December and January.
As part of Spain’s probe of the group, authorities had to overcome “complicated security measures taken by its members to protect its anonymity,” according to the police statement. Anonymous previously hacked the websites of the governments of Iran, Egypt, Libya and Algeria, police said.
“Historically, hackers have received very light sentences compared to other convicted felons, and oftentimes these cases get hung up in courts because there is little in terms of legal precedent,” D’Arcy said.
Spanish police since October have analyzed more than 2 million chat registration lines and Web pages used by the hacker group before reaching its leadership in Spain, according to the statement. The arrests were made in Barcelona, Valencia and Almeria, it said.
The hacking group in April said it would wage a cyber war against Tokyo-based Sony for trying to stop people from tinkering with the PlayStation 3. Sony Chairman Howard Stringer last month apologized to customers after more than 100 million user accounts were compromised and said Anonymous had attacked the websites of several Sony divisions.
A federal grand jury in California considered evidence collected by the FBI about Anonymous, including computers and mobile phones seized from suspected leaders as prosecutors probe the attacks. The FBI was later targeted by Anonymous.
Anonymous is made up of people from various countries organized into cells that share common goals, the police said, with activists operating anonymously but in a coordinated fashion.
One of the three “hacktivists,” a 31-year-old Spaniard, was detained in the southern city of Almería sometime after May 18, the police said. He had a computer server in his apartment in the northern port city of Gijón, from which the group attacked the Web sites of the Sony PlayStation online gaming store.
It was not immediately clear how much of a role they are alleged to have played in the recent attacks on Sony. About a dozen Sony Web sites and services around the world have been hacked; the biggest breaches forced the company, which is based in Tokyo, to shut down its popular PlayStation Network for a month beginning in April.
The Japanese company has acknowledged that hackers compromised the personal data of tens of millions of user accounts. Earlier this month, a separate hacker collective called Lulz Security, or LulzSec, said it had breached a Sony Pictures site and released vital source codes.
135 kilos of cocaine and 490,000 € in cash was recovered with dozens of mobile phones.
The police say that the group was acting between Madrid and Valencia on an international scale, and the group introduced, transported, stored and distributed the drugs across borders. A simultaneous search has been held in 14 homes in Madrid and Valencia.
The break for the police came in Parla, Madrid last December when a warehouse carrying 500 kilos of cocaine was found and where three initial arrests were made and several vehicles were impounded.
Secret compartments were found in some of the cars, and in some cases were only reached by dismantling the seats and other elements of the vehicle.
The Spanish cabinet on Friday approved the draft legislation to control the multi-ownership or timeshare industry in Spain.
The legislation adapts the Spanish regulations to European norms, and takes into account new holiday packages with the intention of better protecting the consumer.
It affects the contracts for tourism assets, the acquisition of long-term holiday products, and the resale and exchange of timeshare and other variants.
The new legislation regulates the time of exercising a right of withdrawal, extends a ban on advance payments and establishes a payment schedule for long-term contracts.
It recognises four types of contracts –
1 – For fixed assets such as buildings, ships, cruises and caravans when used as accommodation over a period of time with a duration of between one to three years.
2 – Long-term holiday products, including travel and vacation clubs, where the contract is over a year, and where the consumer obtains the right to a discount or other benefits in respect to accommodation and/or other services or travel.
3 – The resale contract, including when a resale agent is involved in exchange for brokerage or commission.
4 – The exchange contract for the rights of the timeshare property for tourist use when the consumer joins an exchange group.
The new legislation establishes that greater information is given to the consumer before any contract is signed, with the consumer required to complete a series of forms. The right to change your mind after signing is increased from ten to fourteen days, with special attention paid to any delays in meeting the obligations on the part of the seller, in which case the time period is extended.
The prohibition of any advance payment by the purchaser before the end of the withdrawal period extends to the provision of guarantees, and other items.
The new legislation remains at the draft stage, and goes now before the Consumers and Users Council, the Fiscal Council and the General Council for Judicial Power and the State Council for their considerations.
Following the news of the arrest of what are thought to be three of the top people in Spain from the ‘Anonymous’ hacking group, a series of cyber attacks have been launched against Spanish institutions this weekend.
A denial of service DDOS attack was launched against the National Police site, and comments on Twitter claimed that there was no formal structure of leaders of ‘Anonymous’ and that the attacks were not organised by a single person.
The webs of the employment offices INEM and the State Employment Service also came under attack, and both were not available on Sunday morning.
It follows the previous attacks on the webs of the copyright organisation SGAE and of the Ministry for Culture.
Anonymous in Spain has also threatened to publish sensitive data and classified information about members of the security forces and politicians in different web pages, including pro-ETA forums.
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A total of 15 men – all Romanians – were arrested for allegedly forcing young women to work in brothels.
In a series of raids – dubbed ‘Operation Damas’ – officers interviewed dozens of women apparently abused in this way.
Most of the young women had been enticed to Spain from Romania with the promise of well paid jobs.
However when they arrived in Spain they were quickly coerced into selling sex in a series of brothels and even on the streets.
Police in La Linea had been trailing the gang since December 2010 piecing together their modus operandi and trying to identify their victims.
The arrests come after one female victim filed a formal complaint before entering into a witness protection program.
The gang mainly operated in the Campo area – mainly San Roque and Sabanillas – as well as in Malaga province and Asturias in the north of Spain.
“Thanks to monitoring operations set up in and around the brothels, there is enough evidence to suggest that the gang was committing offences ranging from human trafficking to participation in a criminal organisation,” explained a police spokesman.
Spanish political party has gone as far as accusing the chief minister Peter Caruana of being 'an environmental terrorist,' which goes to show to what extent there are those on the other side prepared to attack Gibraltar's leaders.
In this case, it is the 'Partido Andalucista' which has made the accusation, because in their view Caruana goes about behaving in the 'Bay of Algeciras' without adhering to EU directives in matters of bunkering, of shipping and of maritime security.
The PA party has in fact raised a formal complaint before their courts against Caruana for allegedly putting at risk his own people and the whole of the bay by refusing help over the explosion and fire in the port of Gibraltar last week.
After Caruana made a statement about resources to handle such a fire, others in Spain have quickly highlighted that Gibraltar is admitting that it does not have the resources to handle incidents like the one that happened in the port.
Among other things, Caruana said that there is no prospect of the sullage plant being allowed to restart operations.
He also said: "We indicated to Spain almost immediately once the incident happened that we would call on their resources as soon as they were required. That is exactly what we did."
What next? That is the question being asked. It is one thing to have good relations and it is something else to fall into the trap of converting cooperation into Gibraltar losing control in its own operations.
Certainly, if we want to be a leading port we must ensure that we have the necessary equipment, materials and resources to handle any eventuality that may arise.
