FBI Moves on Anonymous in New York and California
July 19, 2011 at 12:32 pm PT
FBI agents in New York have searched homes in Brooklyn and in two communities on Long Island, and agents in California have made an as yet unspecified number of arrests as part of an ongoing investigation into the activities of the amorphous hacking group Anonymous.
I've spoken with contacts at three FBI field offices — one here in New York, one in Los Angeles and another in San Francisco. I'm told that in New York search warrants were executed on homes in Brooklyn and in the towns of Baldwin and Merrick on Long Island. A source familiar with the investigation says that IP addresses that have come under scrutiny in the course of the investigation have led agents to search those addresses, but that no arrests have yet been made in New York.
Agents in California have made arrests, though the number and the names of those arrested have not yet been released. Additionally, Fox News is reporting that the FBI made arrests related to the investigation this morning in Florida and New Jersey, and that as many as a dozen people have been arrested in the operation nationwide. Obviously more information will be forthcoming as the situation develops.
The investigation is related specifically to the distributed denial-of-service attacks that were carried out last year and early this year against several companies in the U.S. The attacks were in sympathy with Wikileaks, which had just started disclosing its cache of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. Visa, the credit card company, was one of its victims.
The group has grown recently as it absorbed another group of hackers calling itself LulzSec, which had harassed Sony in response to its lawsuits against a person who reverse engineered the security on the Playstation gaming console.
Arrests of Anonymous members have previously been reported in the U.K. , in Turkey and in Spain.
Fox has some raw video from the scene where one of the search warrants was executed on Long Island today. It's below.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
[Image and video via Fox News]
Tagged with: Anonymous, FBI, hackers, LulzSec, MasterCard, security, visa, WikiLeaks
Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism's ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It's especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.
— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one's work