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.

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.

via Occupy Los Angeles:

On July 12th, participants in OccupyLA met to raise awareness for unlawful arrests of activists that had been targeting a lobby group with a stranglehold on power over local and state politics. The activists handed out chalk and shared the story of unlawful arrests and police repression. The LAPD responded by amassing in riot gear and issuing a tactical alert effectively shutting down the Downtown LA art walk and trapping many patrons inside of local businesses as a response to chalk art being drawn on the sidewalk. The mainstream media misrepresented the sequence of events, blaming occupiers for the near riot in Downtown LA even though the police were responsible for escalation.

The public, frustrated by the absurdity of police violence over 'sidewalk chalk', filled the streets demanding that the police cease their intimidation over what many consider a fundamental right to free speech and assembly. The law enforcement arm of the state saw fit to intervene violently in a peaceful expression of free speech and 'do it yourself' art, on behalf of the private interests that control the downtown space. They shot the crowd with the near lethal force of rubber bullets and foam grenades inciting fear and panic so that their violent intervention appears justified. In light of recent police murders in Anaheim, it is important we show that crowd control tactics taken against any who dare protest are not acceptable uses of force by any police state. More than that, these acts of terror by the police state will not deter us from assembling and seeking justice for our communities.

The political and financial elite cannot bear to see us assemble, cannot bear for us to share ideas and strategies or grow our vision and movement into revolution. We know that this is not about chalk. It is about whose interests are affected by our message, whose interests are protected when so-called public servants protect lifeless sidewalks from the messages of a frustrated populace. It is about censorship, political freedom and the merger of corporation and state working to silence the voice of the people. It is about the extrajudicial authority of the national security apparatus for the mere purpose of intimidating the masses into silence.

On August 9th, Occupy Los Angeles calls for you to fill your squares and take your streets and sidewalks with chalk. Call to all people everywhere to show that dissent is as simple as writing your grievances on the sidewalk, as accessible as hopscotch in the streets- reclaiming public space and engaging in public dialogue and expression. Join us (if you're close enough) for a day of solidarity and fun to celebrate the human spirit and chalk for our collective liberation. Together we will remake the art of public life in our alley ways, on the doorsteps of banks whose only allegiance is to profit, and in the streets built by our labor.

In solidarity, regardless of all nations and borders, we will engage in willful public expression against political repression.

SUBMIT CHALK PHOTOS HERE: http://chalkitout.tumblr.com/

NOTE: Be aware that your actions make evoke a police response and it is important all participants are familiar with local private and public property laws so that they can assess their own level of risk and make informed decisions.

Occupy Cinema collective project Anna Pavlova's dying swan dance onto the bull.

There have been at least 40 alleged members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous arrested during the past year. In an interview with the National Post, one of the group's last remaining leaders tips us off to the group's next planned action.

Christopher Doyon, aka "Commander X," whose name is public because he's been indicted for hacking a California county government website after government officials forcibly removed a homeless encampment from courthouse steps. Doyon faces 15 years in prison for that action. For the interview, he met with a reporter and photographer from the Post in Canada where he is a now a fugitive from the FBI.

At the end of the interview, Doyon makes a whopper of a claim, make of it what you will:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

Every classified database is a bit of a stretch for me to wrap my brain around. I can't even begin to imagine how many such databases our nation uses. But remember that Bradley Manning released a few hundred thousand emails from just one such database.

The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Now this claim, that the Anons next action could be the result of an inside job is quite plausible, and again, recall Bradley Manning. As we saw with Manning's Cablegate, just that one database created quite the stir for the U.S. government. Even with the "keys" to but a few of these databases would make Anonymous quite the force to be reckoned with, despite their diminished membership.

You may have read or heard rumors that "Anonymous" hacktivists planned to shut down the internet in a Global Blackout on Saturday, March 31. Not so, say Anonymous hacktivsts known to be truly connected to the collective group. However, if such a thing were to happen, it won't be them.

Citizens of the Internet. We are Anonymous.

It has come to the collective's attention that there have been threats made by Anonymous to "shut down the internet". These threats are NOT those of the collective as a whole!

Be aware that Anonymous itself is an idea. Everyone has the right to an idea. Because of this, anyone can use the name 'Anonymous'. An attack on internet service providers may possibly be by Anonymous, but not the collective as a whole.

There's also quite a possibility that the government may be behind the threats as an effort to push stricter internet laws. Remember, the government has conducted false flag operations in the past.

Or, this can simply be a ploy to discredit Anonymous in the eyes of the public.

The collective uses the internet to operate and plan ops. Therefore they have no reason to attack internet service providers. In the end, it would hurt more innocent people than corrupt government officials, and that's never the goal of the collective.

There's no justice in harming the innocent and there's no excuse for it!

Governments have used our differences to keep us arguing and fighting each other so that we overlook what really matters. Our choices are simple, we can either learn to accept each other for who we are, or die divided by relatively insignificant issues.

Pointless bickering isn't going to get us anywhere and that's exactly what the corrupt individuals in our various governments want.

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