The hacktivist collective Anonymous has released what it claims to be a cache of personal details of members of the Westboro Baptist Church, after members of the extremist religious group said on Twitter that they would picket Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the scene of a mass shooting where 26 children and adults were killed on Friday.

Supporters of Anonymous appeared to have taken down the extremist group’s website, most likely through a distributed denial of service, or DDoS attack. They also posted a YouTube video (above) threatening to “destroy” the group.

Westboro is a small extremist group based in Topeka, Kansas, notorious for picketing the funerals of soldiers and victims of shootings with signs and banners claiming tragic events are God’s punishment for the existence of homosexuality.

A document posted on Pastebin claims to reveal physical addresses of the group’s founding Phelps family, telephone numbers, even a social security number, and background information on the group. It's unclear how public these personal details already were for Westboro’s members, given their controversial activities.

A representative of Westboro, believed to be its regular spokeswoman Shirley Phelps-Roper, also carried out a Reddit IAmA, or “Ask Me Anything,” earlier Sunday under the nickname GodSentCTShooter, not surprisingly meeting few questions and plenty of irritation from Redditors.

This isn’t the first time Westboro and Anonymous have clashed. In February 2011 a supporter of Anonymous took part in a radio debate with Shirley Phelps-Roper, during which a small group of hackers surprised Roper by taking down several parts of Westboro’s site during the show.

Hacktivist group members of the Anonymous collective are calling for a global protest against Trapwire, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security deployed electronic surveillance system uncovered in WikiLeaks latest Global Intelligence Files (GIF) series documents.

The global protest is scheduled for Saturday, October 20.

Information about the protest is being shared by Operation INDECT (OpINDECT International) and there is an #OpINDECT/#TrapWire Facebook Event Page.

It is not the first INDECT protest, but recent news about TrapWire from the Wikileaks leak of private intelligence firm Stratfor's documents has added new fuel to the fire.

According to Trapwire's website, the surveillance system uses data from a network of CCTV systems and numberplate readers to figure out the threat level in huge numbers of locations:

"Trapwire detects, analyzes and alerts on suspicious events as they are collected over periods of time and across multiple locations. Through the systematic capture of these pre-attack indicators, terrorist or criminal surveillance and pre-attack planning operations can be identified"

An in-depth report published by RT.com, states that TrapWire has been deployed "in most major American cities at selected high value targets (HVTs)," as well as in multiple Las Vegas casinos, for the state of Texas, as well as for the Pentagon and other military agencies. It said TrapWire was created by a company called Abraxas, which features a management team largely drawn from the intelligence services and military branches. An Abraxas spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the company's relationship with TrapWire.

The French online retailer "Early Flicker" has reportedly registered both the logo and slogan of hacktivist collective "Anonymous" with France's trademark agency, INPI.

The company, which sells personalized gifts and t-shirts, perhaps isn't aware of the logo's source, because who would purposely provoke a powerful legion of hackers who could easily delete Early Flicker from existence?

In an Anonymous call-to-action video posted to YouTube, the group demands a retraction of the trademark application, as well as a public apology in exchange for not raising hell on the internets.

Transcript of the video follows:

Hello Citizens of the world, We are Anonymous. Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes and expose the truth!

Anonymous logo and slogan has been defiled and registered through the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI). An online t-shirt company online called "Early Flicker" or "E-flicker" has registered the anonymous slogan and logo and passed it on as there own. Now under french law the company owns the rights to the anonymous logo and slogan.

The companies website is pick a pop dot F r .

In a response the National Institute of Industrial Property said that "the conditions seem fulfilled since the mark is registered and it does not seem to have made ​​use."

There arrogance and ignorance of what they have done will not go un punished. Anonymous will take down any business they have going on the internet and the ninety nine percent will not stop until the registration has been revoked and a public apology has been made.

The name of Anonymous will not be the whore of the world.

We are anonymous.

We are Legion.

We do not forgive.

We do not forget.

Expect us.

The Anonymous hacking group claims to have defaced almost 500 websites in China.

Targets hit in the mass defacement included government sites, its official agencies, trade groups and many others.

A message put on the hacked sites said the attack was carried out to protest against the Chinese government's strict control of its citizens.

It urged Chinese people to join Anonymous and stage their own protests against the regime.

The announcement about the defacements was made via an Anonymous China account that was established in March. A list of the 485 sites affected was put on the Pastebin website. Separate Pastebin messages posted email addresses and other personal details stolen when sites were penetrated.

Sites defaced had the same message posted to them that chided the nation's government for its repressive policies.

It read: "Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall."

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“We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists,” a documentary covering the hacking collective Anonymous, premiered March 11th at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

The film takes us inside the world of Anonymous, the radical "hacktivist" collective that has redefined civil disobedience for the digital age. The film explores early hacktivist groups like Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater, then moves to Anonymous' raucous beginnings on the website 4chan.

Through interviews with current members, people recently returned from prison or facing trial, writers, academics, activists and major players in various "raids," the documentary traces Anonymous’ evolution from merry pranksters to a full-blown movement with a global reach, the most transformative civil disobedience of our time.

More showings this week (For those of you in the Austin area):

Wednesday, March 14
5:00PM - 6:29PM

Venue: SXSatellite: Alamo Slaughter

Friday, March 16
4:15PM - 5:44PM

Venue: Alamo Lamar B

The award winner will be announced on Saturday, March 17th,

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

Hacktivists linked to "Anonymous" and "AntiSec" have compromised InfraGard's servers yet again.

Elements of the collective said on Friday that they were responsible for defacing the website of the Dayton, Ohio-based chapter of Infragard, a public-private partnership for critical infrastructure protection sponsored by the FBI.

"Today we targeted the Dayton Ohio chapter of InfraGard, the sinister alliance between law enforcement, corporations, and white hat wannabees," the group wrote on the defaced website.

"We broke into their webserver, perused their assorted presentation materials, and finally deleted everything and vandalized their website so we can boost our zone-h rankings."

The Ohio site was replaced with the video for Coolio's 1995 rap hit and a profane message attacking Infragard as a "sinister alliance" between corporations and law enforcement.

InfraGard describes itself as a non-profit organization that serves as a public-private partnership between American businesses and the FBI by sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States.