New phone-hacking allegations at Rupert Murdoch's now closed newspaper News of the World have been made.

Sources told The Guardian on Friday that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has been hit with 600 new hacking claims, some new victims, and some people who had earlier decided not to sue. Scotland Yard’s new information reportedly comes from a former suspect turned informant for the police. The news comes just days before Britain’s high court will hear arguments from more than a dozen people—including Cherie Blair and David Beckham’s father—who settled last fall with News International, News Corp.’s British wing. With the new claims, the investigation into hacking at News Corp. could last well into 2015:

Further details are expected to emerge on Monday morning at the high court during a hearing relating to the existing litigation by hacking victims against Murdoch's News International (NI) – hours before MPs are due to vote on joint Labour and Liberal Democrat amendments that would introduce a backstop law to stiffen regulation of the press.

Sources say Scotland Yard detectives believe they can identify as many as 600 new incidents after obtaining the phone records of an insider who is now being lined up as a crown witness. As a result of the new information, the force's Operation Weeting is revisitng the timetable for concluding its investigation, which had been due to be completed with the conclusion of trials this year. Police now expect their work to continue into 2015.

The 600 new potential litigants fall into three groups: new victims; others who sued over hacking but signed agreements with NI allowing them to sue the company again; and a third group who signed agreements potentially barring them from suing again. The indications are that there may be "some hundreds of new legal actions" from the first two groups.

On Monday the high court will hear formally of at least a dozen settlements out of the 167 civil claims filed last autumn from individuals including Cherie Blair and David Beckham's father, Ted. Blair was one of 170 victims who chose to sue in the high court instead of going through the NI private scheme, which has so far accepted 254 compensation claims.

And here I thought there wasn't a phone left that Murdock's goons hadn't hacked yet...

A new investigative report from Seth Rosenfeld of the Center for Investigative Reporting has revealed that one of the most well-known radical activists of the 1960s, Richard Masato Aoki, an early member of the Black Panthers, was an FBI informant.

Via:

The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training - which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s - was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report.

One of the Bay Area's most prominent radical activists of the era, Richard Masato Aoki was known as a fierce militant who touted his street-fighting abilities. He was a member of several radical groups before joining and arming the Panthers, whose members received international notoriety for brandishing weapons during patrols of the Oakland police and a protest at the state Capitol.

Aoki went on to work for 25 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator at the Peralta Community College District, and after his suicide in 2009, he was revered as a fearless radical.

But unbeknownst to his fellow activists, Aoki had served as an FBI intelligence informant, covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him.

Reportedly recruited as he was graduating from Berkeley High School, A Nov. 16, 1967, intelligence report on the Black Panthers lists Aoki as an "informant" with the code number "T-2."

"He was my informant. I developed him," FBI agent Burney Threadgill Jr. said in an interview. "He was one of the best sources we had."

A breaking news story from Cleveland, Ohio today. Occupy Cleveland's May Day festivities have been cancelled today after an announcement from the FBI that 5 members of Occupy Cleveland had been arrested after an attempt to blow up an area bridge, as well as targets at other locations.

From Cleveland's News channel 5:

The Cleveland office of the FBI announced Tuesday the arrests of five people who allegedly tried to blow up a bridge in northeast Ohio.

The FBI displayed a photo of the Route 82 bridge in Brecksville, just east of Riverview Road and referred to it as the "Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge" during a 10 a.m. news conference, and confirmed that was the target. The bridge crosses the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and connects Brecksville to Sagamore Hills.

According to a news release from the US Attorney’s Office, these five were arrested Monday evening and charged with conspiracy and attempted use of explosive material to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce:

- Douglas Wright, 26
- Brandon Baxter, 20
- Anthony Hayne, 35
- Connor Stevens, 20
- Joshua Stafford, 23

Continue reading »

A prominent member of the amorphous hacktivist collective Anonymous was reportedly turned informant by the FBI, leading to the arrest of five hackers in three countries. Prosecutors announced charges Tuesday against the men, spread across Britain, Ireland, and Chicago, and alleged that they have been engaged in efforts to steal information from the computer systems of U.S. companies, and hack government websites. The officials alleged that the five were involved in the recent hacking of Stratfor, a Texas-based intelligence company that had documents leaked on the Internet after WikiLeaks got a hold of them. The FBI was led to the five men by an informer, Hector Xavier Monsegur, a hacker who was arrested in June and began cooperating with law enforcement.

MSNBC:

"Sabu (aka Hector Xavier Monsegur) was seen as a leader ... Now that Anonymous realizes he was a snitch and was working on his own for the Fed, they must be thinking: 'If we can't trust Sabu, who can we trust?' " said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish computer security company F-Secure.

"It's probably not going to be the end of Anonymous, but it's going to take a while for them to recover, especially from the paranoia," Hypponen said.
...

Anonops, which sends online messages on behalf of "Anonymous," sent a message on Twitter following the arrests. "#Anonymous Is an idea, not a group. There is no leader, there is no head. It will survive, before, during, and after this time," Anonops tweeted just after noon on Tuesday.

If any time to "recover" was needed, Anonymous may well have moved on as "Sabu's" role as an informant was revealed to the internet community last November, when this anonymous blog post came to light:

It’s been a few months now since the original release of this website and since then a lot of further information has come to light. Upon the public release of this information Sabu went to the ground for an entire month, beginning on the exact same day just hours later. His reappearance was not much of a surprise, as it has been a frequent public rumored (and secretly verified) that Sabu was identified, apprehended by the FBI and turned to an informant. Over the past several months, all of the original LulzSec member except Sabu himself have been arrested. Even though Sabu has been publicly doxed and completely owned on several occasions. You may be asking yourself, why is he still free? The answer is Intel. The longer he is “free” is the longer that the FBI and other LEAs can gather information on other hackers and move in for more arrests. Simple as that.

You can view the court documents on the case below.

Sabu Court Dox