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Dutch police arrest suspected pro-WikiLeaks hacker

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XForce!

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Dutch authorities said today that they have arrested a 16-year-old hacker involved in the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on the Web sites of MasterCard and PayPal. The Dutch National Prosecutors Office said that the teen, who was not named, was arrested by a high-tech crime team last night.

The arrest comes after a group known as Anonymous--a label that's been adopted before by activists who have electronically assaulted the Church of Scientology and the Australian government--organized attacks on Web sites of companies that have distanced themselves from WikiLeaks.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks enlist thousands of computers, all making simultaneous connections, in hopes of overwhelming a target. Visa.com was taken offline briefly yesterday afternoon, though the company told CNET that no payments or transactions were affected.

MasterCard.com was unreachable yesterday morning. A Web site for the Swedish prosecution agency, which is trying to extradite WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange on sexual assault allegations, has been targeted too. Amazon.com was attacked today, but unlike Anonymous' other victims, it has a massive server infrastructure that can bring additional capacity online instantly. That famously robust system proved able to fend off what's being called Operation Payback.

"We have changed our target--the Hive isn't big enough to attack Amazon," AnonOpsNet announced through Twitter. The new target: PayPal's Web-based system for processing payments. It's unclear how successful those efforts were.

A third-party monitoring service operated by WatchMouse.com reports that PayPal was experiencing significant problems in Japan, South Africa, and Germany, but not in the United States or most of Western Europe.

The api.paypal.com Web site, however, was inaccessible from CNET's newsroom this afternoon.
Click to expand...

Also today:
• Attorney General Eric Holder says the Feds are investigating the pro-WikiLeaks attacks. "We are aware of the incidents," Holder said in Washington today, Bloomberg reports. "We are looking into them." No word on whether the U.S. Department of Justice is looking into the attacks on WikiLeaks itself.

• An article in WalesOnline.co.uk says that alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, the former Welsh schoolboy who's now facing criminal charges, was barred from receiving visitors. "His family, including his mum Susan who suffers ill health after a series of strokes, is understood to have flown out from Wales to the U.S. to visit him. However, despite their trip, it is understood the request to visit the 23-year-old soldier, who is being held in solitary confinement, was turned down."

• In a very democratic fashion, Anonymous appears to be holding a poll to determine who should be attacked now. The U.S. Senate--that is, senate.gov--is currently in the lead.

• Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin is taking up the cause of WikiLeaks and Assange. "Why was Mr. Assange hidden in jail? Is that democracy? As we say in the village: the pot is calling the kettle black," Putin said.

• Edge.org has a solid collection of essays addressing these questions: "When does my right to privacy trump your need for security? Should a democratic government be allowed to practice secret diplomacy? Would we rather live in a world with guaranteed privacy or a world in which there are no secrets? If the answer is somewhere in between, how do we draw the line?"

• One reason why Anonymous' attack on Amazon.com didn't fare so well: The online retailer's "European datacenter, which formerly hosted the WikiLeaks Web site, accounts for more than a third of all Internet-facing Web servers in Ireland." That's from Netcraft.

• The American Conservative magazine published an article making the conservative case for WikiLeaks. Excerpt: "Conservatives should prefer an explosion of whistle-blower groups like WikiLeaks to a federal government powerful enough to take them down."

Source : CNET
 
16 comments
This is all Obama's fault. If he wouldn't have started the domain bullshit operation payback wouldn't have commenced therefore IMPEACH HIS ASS.
 
IRC press release

Here's the IRC channel press release:

Dear OM [Dutch Prosecution Office],

The remarkably swift arrest of Jeroenz0r, a 16 year old Dutch student, has been all over the international media since the event took place. While the Kremlin takes a dig at the U.S. over Assange’s arrest, while Facebook and Twitter delete the accounts of cyber activists, while over 9,000 ‘hacktivists’ are believed to be behind electronic onslaught, the Dutch authorities arrest a 16-year-old boy

suspected of involvement with Operation Payback.

The whole world reports about WikiLeaks and Operation Payback. How could an underage boy be held responsible for making the world wide news? How could the Dutch authorities hold a 16 year old boy responsible for the world being in a state of digital war?

Is it in the haste of getting something done, that the Dutch government labeled him as a scapegoat and a terrorist, just so they could say: “We have done our part about the cyber terrorists”? Is the detention and possible conviction of Jeroenz0r an act by law,

or is it –as we suspect– a political statement? Is Jeroenz0r being used to scare the

hell out of everybody who would think that they could do something about censorship and the forces our governments (ab)use?

If this would be a fair trial, what evidence would there be? He may have been a user, or even host for an IRC server, still, this may hopefully not be the primary reason? Even if he had an active role in coordinating the attacks on MasterCard and Visa, which is still improbable, Anonymous is not a personal army and will not be commanded like one. How then, would that incriminate him if everybody is responsible for his/her own deeds? One student would never be powerful enough to take down corporations like MasterCard, Visa or Paypal.

Could we accept that in todays’ society, big corporations are using children as a means of manipulating people for their own gain and benefit? What could have happened if the government had decided to stick out for freedom of expression and free speech, and refused to bend under the demands of MasterCard and Visa? It could have turned out to be a turning point in the war between big corporations and the people who get caught in the gears of the system and have no means of making their way out from the mess.

Eventually, even the government will have to decide, either to be the puppet in the hands of global corporations, or be the one who paved way for rebellion against oppressive corporations and corruption of our society.

We would like Jeroenz0r to know that Anonymous will not be giving up on him. One for all, all for one. Divided by zero.

Signed:
10.12.2010
Failship IRC team
Anonboots, Bnon, (Jeroenz0r), Kris, Paws, Zeekill

Closer to the truth you won't get...
 
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