Anonymous strikes again ~ Cherry blossom girl

Well, as they announced, despite the fact that the president of the Missouri Sheriff's Association said the hackers have more information then they claim, Anonymous delivered today over 10GB of private police information. In their own style, they called this day ShootSheriffSaturday #SSS. You can read the whole announcement by Anonymous here.

What makes this release interesting is that they published emails of police officers who had inappropriate pictures of female teenagers, naming the file PedoSheriff. Check it out here. Besides the stolen emails, passwords, social security numbers etc., they stole a couple of credit card information too, and made an involuntary donations, like this one here.

For your convenience, Anonymous made a little search engine too. Yes, you can search though the stolen emails from the police officers. Anonymous suggests you search for: PayPal, Facebook, vpn, password, confidential. On one hand, I really wouldn’t want my email to be hacked and the whole world to be able to check out my inbox, but on the other hand, especially as a police officer, I would never connect my work email with my Facebook account.

While there is a huge debate going on weather their acts are justified, although they are not legal, the show The Stream on Al Jazeera English made an excellent insiders look on what Anonymous is and how they work. What I didn’t know before, is that this group of people helped the uprising in Tunisia, once the government decided to shut down Facebook pages, deleted various accounts and so on. Check out the whole show below. They talk about why they are so successful until now, how anonymity helps prevail the cause without a possibility for personal glorification, how such horizontal hierarchy works without having a leader and why they are doing this. (You can skip the first 13 minutes, they are irrelevant)

And they are not stopping, believe me! A couple of their mates have been arrested so far, but they do not stop here. An operation #occupywallstreet has been announced for the 17th of September. It seems that New York is going to experience a Tahrir moment.

(photos taken from here)

But, the most interesting is yet to come! And that’s November the 5th – Operation Facebook. Claiming that Facebook has been selling personal information to government agencies and information security firms so that they can spy on you, they say that the communication media we all so adore will be destroyed. Yes! They claim they will shut Facebook down!

Not that I have anything to hide or stuff, but I’m going to do a backup of all my contacts, photos, notes and so on, just in case. I have regained contact with people after 13 years of not hearing about each other thanks to Facebook, and as much as FB is going on my nerves lately, I am eternally grateful to them because of this! And I wouldn’t want to lose those contacts and pictures. So people I advise you, start downloading to your hard drive everything you think is worth prevailing on Facebook, because in 3 months, it may all be gone.