How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price 
I can't believe this guy has a job in a security company doing work for the federal government. I'm getting a strong vibe that he's schizophrenic. I've known an unmedicated schizophrenic, and this is the way they talked and acted. Self-aggrandizing, convinced they have comprehended great secrets based on little to no data (schizophrenics often believe that have "other ways of knowing" or extremely heightened intuition), and a belief that once they tell the whole story of the truths that have been revealed to them the world will take notice and be amazed.<p>The coder in this story is an hero (OK, just a reasonably nice guy, not afraid to tell the moronic "analyst" to go to hell), and obviously prevented a lot of damage by actively working against Barr's insane plans.<p>I feel the tiniest bit sorry for Leavy and the rootkit guy, as they clearly weren't encouraging this stuff, but really, they knew this guy was a whack-a-mole and they kept him on anyway, I guess because his crazy ego managed to close sales. It's really hard to take pity on someone that knows there's a crazy guy using company resources to go on a personal jihad against random kids on the Internet, and doesn't do anything to stop it.<p>The level of invasion of privacy this guy was taking part in, against children, is pretty much inexcusable. He's not law-enforcement, and should not be allowed to act as though he has a warrant for rifling through the personal lives of dozens or hundreds of children. All 50 states have laws that cover cyberstalking, cyberharassment, and cyberbullying; in a just world, this nutjob would end up in prison. Whether these kids have done anything wrong or not is irrelevant. Barr is a private citizen, and adult, and he ought to leave law enforcement activities to the police or FBI.<p>Edit: I should point out that I don't think anyone should be arrested for browsing facebook or twitter or whatever. I was a bit rambling in this comment, and the entirety of my thought processes are not exactly made clear by the text. The stuff that I think is probably illegal is the stuff he was doing outside of his actual research: Dropping hints and threats in mainstream media and in IRC about the data he was gathering, using his fake persona to stir up a shitstorm by leaking that a security company was gathering data on the people he was talking to, etc. I had to google cyberstalking to even know if there were laws about this stuff (and there are, and in all fifty states). While I don't know if those laws are reasonable or not, I'm pretty sure he crossed the line into breaking some of them, particularly in the case of his underage targets.