A long­time FtR lis­tener, I was a bit miffed by this arti­cle when it quoted Anony­mous as say­ing:
“The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood started as a benev­o­lent group of peo­ple with fair and just inten­tions. How­ever, as decades went by, cor­rup­tion seized its mis­sion of good and turned it into a power-hungry orga­ni­za­tion bent on tak­ing over soverign arab states in its quest to seize power from them,” con­tin­ued the state­ment.
My per­cep­tion of them is that they came right out of the WWII Axis, as per Dave’s many good pro­grams on the sub­ject, and that their recent image of highly-sought Mod­er­ate Good­ness is but a charm offen­sive. Per­haps some FtR sides ought be sent out to the aspir­ing reporter.

ps. here is a hack­ers’ radio show which has run per­haps even longer than Mr. Emory’s, dis­cussing such top­ics as Anony­mous and Wik­ileaks and des­per­ately need­ing qual­ity callers such as Spit­firelist read­ers:
http://archive.wbai.org/AllShows.php (search down the page for Off the Hook (and while there, don’t miss Law and Dis­or­der along with Expert Wit­ness Radio!)) BTW, OtH also offers its entire his­tory of shows free in mp3 for­mat via http://www.2600.com

@dave
not see­ing it in the feeds
http://twitter.com/#!/anonops
http://anonops.blogspot.com/
http://youranonnews.tumblr.com/

This is totally unexpected.I used to think that these guys at Anony­mous were some­how part of the Under­ground Reich or of one of their pha­langes, or of the Extreme-Left or of another sim­i­lar group. Was I wrong or they just made a 180 degree turn in the other direc­tion? That’s both incred­i­ble and spec­tac­u­lar. Any­way, I guess that we will take all the help we can get. I am eager to see the devel­op­ments of this. Con­sid­er­ing the con­sid­er­able dam­age that the Broth­er­hood can do to west­ern civ­i­liza­tion and lib­eral democ­racy through their P-Tech firm and other stuff, it’s def­i­nitely some­thing that hap­pens at the right time. What do you think Dave? Is the Broth­er­hood begin­ning to faint in the eyes of the power elite? Have the Broth­er­hood gone way beyond what they were asked and per­mit­ted to do?

Is this one intel group vs another? The good guys’ intel tak­ing on the bad guys? The mes­sage to take out the brown shirts? Noticed that the arti­cle was posted on Nov 9th (a sig­nal?) but the YouTube on Nov 7th (no sig­nal?). Hope­fully its legit and action against the Broth­er­hoods’ US bud­dies too.

too many ‘ifs and buts’ full of innu­en­does and maybes...unbelievable

@LarryFW: There are some good Intel peo­ple still out there, and a few of them may be assist­ing Anonymous.

@Claude: There are some pretty crooked peo­ple in Anony­mous still, but this arti­cle clearly shows that there are also some good guys in there too. Hope­fully, Wik­ileaks can make a sim­i­lar turn as well.

As for the Broth­er­hood? I think they’ve done exactly as they’ve been told, and that this is a gen­uine back­lash against the world crime net­work. Hope­fully, it will suc­ceed quite well in crip­pling the Islamic-Fascists. =)

@Bakunin: I feel it was likely a gen­uine mis­take on their part. Still, though, I feel they’d be QUITE inter­ested to hear Dave’s research. =)

I think the most impor­tant line in the post is Mr. Emory’s:
“An edu­cated guess is that the Broth­er­hood may well blame any dif­fi­cul­ties they expe­ri­ence on Israel/Mossad/“the Jews”.”

The inter­nal Anony­mous rea­sons are mixed I’m sure but that is a red her­ring. What mat­ters is that cre­at­ing more anar­chy in the region and rea­sons to point fin­gers is clearly in the Riech’s interest.

@Paul: Hope­fully things do even­tu­ally turn out in favor of those who truly do believe in democracy.

I think this is the first instance of Freudian flag wav­ing I’ve heard of:

...
Many Islamist polit­i­cal par­ties— from the giant Free­dom and Jus­tice Party founded by the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, to the smaller par­ties founded by ultra­con­ser­v­a­tives known as Salafis and the real­tively lib­eral Cen­ter Party— put up cam­paign ban­ners and deliv­ered speeches in the Fri­day demon­stra­tion, giv­ing it the feel of a polit­i­cal rally. Some demon­stra­tors waved Saudi Ara­bian flags, but a few said they were car­ry­ing them only for their Islamic slo­gans even though they objected to Saudi Arabia’s unde­mo­c­ra­tic rule. A ven­dor said he stocked the flags because he could not find flags of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and had got­ten requests for Saudi flags, but he added that he was going to dis­con­tinue the prac­tice because he had got­ten com­plaints as well.

Woah, Anony­mous just picked one hel­luva rock to look under!:

’Anony­mous’ declares ‘Blitzkrieg’ on neo-Nazis

Pub­lished: 2 Jan 12 12:46 CET

“Anony­mous” hack­ers have declared “Blitzkrieg” on neo-Nazis for the New Year, dis­abling a num­ber of their web­sites and pub­lish­ing lists of extreme-right supporters.

A “Nazi-Leaks” por­tal has appeared on the inter­net list­ing hun­dreds of names of peo­ple sub­scribed to var­i­ous shops sell­ing far-right cloth­ing, as well as writ­ers for the Junge Frei­heit news­pa­per which car­ries con­tri­bu­tions from far-right commentators.

The hack­ers say they have man­aged to close down 15 web­sites asso­ci­ated with the neo-Nazi National Demo­c­ra­tic Party (NPD), the Frank­furter Rund­schau reported on Mon­day. They have report­edly called their cam­paign “Oper­a­tion Blitzkrieg”.

...

Long lists of names, some with addresses, pur­port­ing to be cus­tomer reg­is­ters of firms such as the infa­mous Thor Steinar cloth­ing firm were posted on the “Nazi-Leaks” portal.

Peo­ple listed on the por­tal as hav­ing writ­ten for the Junge Frei­heit news­pa­per included Peter Scholl-Latour, accord­ing to the Frank­furter Rund­schau. He is a respected jour­nal­ist and Afghanistan expert who has writ­ten for, among other pub­li­ca­tions, the Stern magazines.

The Local/hc

@Pterrafractyl: There is still hope yet! Def­i­nitely have hopes for Anony­mous now that I KNOW there’s def­i­nitely still some good and hon­est peo­ple left in there. =)

I also think the bit about the flag was rather ironic indeed. I believe this was a sin­cere mis­take on the pro­test­ers’ part, but why couldn’t they make up their own symbols?

Here’s some­thing to note regard­ing any activ­i­ties by Anony­mous off­shoot LulzSec. In August 2011, the LulzSec leader was flipped and work­ing with inves­ti­ga­tors so any LulzSec later LulzSec oper­a­tions raise the ques­tion of ordered them.

I strongly sus­pect that the ’Anony­mous’ imprompter has been com­pletely co-opted. I have seen some ‘Anony­mous’ videos pro­mot­ing Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion type BS.

Any­one can post a video claim­ing to be ‘Anony­mous’, and they are anonymous.

@Vanfield: Frankly, I’ve been pretty con­cerned about just such a pos­si­bil­ity myself, Vanfield(the same thing hap­pened with Wik­iLeaks and the W.C.N. tried to destroy O.W.S., too, although the lat­ter had suc­cess in repelling infil­tra­tors). Hope­fully peo­ple can start telling the dif­fer­ence between crim­i­nal impos­tors and the real deal, and I’m afraid this will be rather dif­fi­cult at first.

There are still some good peo­ple in Anony­mous and I do hope the anti-crime net­work fac­tions will one day win out. Because if they don’t, we will have lost an impor­tant poten­tial ally.

@Pterrafractyl: Thanks for the info. =)

There’s new group going after Anony­mous: head-hunters:

US urged to recruit mas­ter hack­ers to wage cyber war on America’s foes

Top defence expert says the US should avoid ‘ridicu­lous’ pros­e­cu­tions and use hack­ers’ skills to detect and track enemies

Rory Car­roll in Mon­terey
guardian.co.uk, Tues­day 10 July 2012 10.00 EDT

Instead of pros­e­cut­ing elite com­puter hack­ers, the US gov­ern­ment should recruit them to launch cyber-attacks against Islamist ter­ror­ists and other foes, accord­ing to a lead­ing mil­i­tary thinker and gov­ern­ment adviser.

The bril­liance of hack­ing experts could be put to use on behalf of the US in the same way as Ger­man rocket sci­en­tists were enlisted after the sec­ond world war, said John Arquilla, a pro­fes­sor of defence analy­sis at the US Naval Post­grad­u­ate School in Mon­terey, Cal­i­for­nia, in an inter­view with the Guardian.

He said that the US had fallen behind in the cyber race and needed to set up a “new Bletch­ley Park” of com­puter whizzes and code­crack­ers to detect, track and dis­rupt enemy net­works. “If this was being done, the war on ter­ror would be over,” he said.

Arquilla, who invented the term cyber­war­fare two decades ago, said a few mas­ter hack­ers had already been recruited but more were needed.

“Let’s just say that in some places you find guys with body pierc­ings and non-regulation hair­cuts. But most of these sorts of guys can’t be vet­ted in the tra­di­tional way. We need a new insti­tu­tional cul­ture that allows us to reach out to them.”

Many dab­bled in ille­gal or ques­tion­able acts but the US, he noted, had turned Wern­her von Braun, Hitler’s top sci­en­tist, into an Amer­i­can hero after putting him to work on US rock­ets and space programmes.

Arquilla lam­basted lengthy jail terms for hack­ing, say­ing it “poi­soned” rela­tions between both sides. “It’s very, very trou­bling.” He dis­agreed with the attempt to extra­dite Gary McK­in­non, a British sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor who has been accused by one US pros­e­cu­tor of the “biggest mil­i­tary hack of all time” using the code name Solo.

“I think it’s ridicu­lous. They’re try­ing to use deter­rences that won’t work.”

Arquilla, who advised Gen­eral Nor­man Schwarzkopf dur­ing the first gulf war and sec­re­tary of defence Don­ald Rums­feld dur­ing the sec­ond, esti­mated there were around 100 mas­ter hack­ers in the world, with many, if not most, in Asia and Russia.

He had estab­lished con­tact with sev­eral in the US — “they are like shy wood­land ani­mals” — and even brought one to meet the CEO of a major com­pany to alert him to his infor­ma­tion system’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. The exec­u­tive, scorn­ful at first, was stunned when the hacker broke into the sys­tem with a hand­held device in just a few min­utes. “All hell broke loose,” said Arquilla, who declined to iden­tify the company.

The Pen­ta­gon and other secu­rity agen­cies must exploit that sort of abil­ity, he said. “This is huge human cap­i­tal. They are the rangers of the cyber sphere. Most of them are drawn to it for its beauty and com­plex­ity.” Few had overt polit­i­cal agen­das, but they could be turned into patri­ots. “Most of the hack­ers I have known would love to destroy al-Qaida.”

...

The vet­eran ana­lyst said al-Qaida’s loose, decen­tralised organ­i­sa­tional struc­ture had flum­moxed the US a decade ago, and that under strate­gist Abu Musab al-Suri it would become even flat­ter and looser, imped­ing tra­di­tional counter-terror efforts. The move­ment, how­ever, was vul­ner­a­ble. “This global net­work sim­ply can’t thrive with­out the world wide web and inter­net. It can’t oper­ate with­out it, or if it does, at a greatly reduced level.”

...

Hack­ing, he said, was most effec­tive when incor­po­rated into wider mil­i­tary strat­egy. The Rus­sians, he said, pio­neered this dur­ing the August 2008 con­flict with Geor­gia when cyber-attacks sliced through US-designed tech­nol­ogy “like a knife through but­ter”, dis­rupt­ing Geor­gian forces and paving Russia’s quick victory.

Moscow denied mount­ing cyber oper­a­tions, and their prove­nance was never dis­cov­ered. But Arquilla said “Russian-aligned inter­ests” suc­cess­fully attacked Estonia’s net­works dur­ing a diplo­matic row in 2007. “It’s all veiled, but the real lead­ers in the field are the Rus­sians.” China and North Korea were also highly sophis­ti­cated. “They under­stand the strate­gic uses.”

Arquilla com­pared com­puter fire­walls to the Mag­inot line — France’s failed defence against Ger­many — and urged US state agen­cies and com­pa­nies to use strong encryp­tion and cloud com­put­ing to keep data on the move. “The level of inse­cu­rity is huge. The aver­age indi­vid­ual is a zom­bie in some hacker’s bot­net within half an hour of going online.”

...

Holy crap, the aver­age indi­vid­ual is a zom­bie in a bot­net within a half-hour going on line?! And here I thought my sud­den crav­ing for brains was due to low blood sugar.

Note that the Russ­ian cyber attacks that appar­ently “sliced through US-designed tech­nol­ogy” in 2008, should not be seen as par­tic­u­larly sur­pris­ing. One has to won­der how effec­tive al-Qaeda-affiliated hack­ers would be at that task.

Anony­mous esca­lates cyber­war against Israel–
http://www.timesofisrael.com/anonymous-escalates-cyber-war-against-israel-and-pro-israel-groups/