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.
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