Nice story about the Anonymous/LutzSec latest events.

From friday's FT, FYI,
David

March 9, 2012 7:46 pm
Cyberhackers are the most sinister of troublemakers
Christopher Caldwell By Christopher Caldwell
There is at first sight a mystery about the six internet hackers revealed to be facing criminal charges in related cases in New York and Chicago on Tuesday. It is that one of the group’s ringleaders, Hector Xavier Monsegur, should have turned state’s evidence. Mr Monsegur pled guilty to several charges of hacking and conspiracy last August. He has since closed the net around his comrades. Intelligence agencies and prosecutors dream of finding a “grass” near the boss. But actually having an organisation rolled up by one of its key figures is rare.
What made Mr Monsegur turn? After all, he and his associates were not just ideologically committed to a “free” internet – they were the best in their shady business. Between them, those indicted face allegations such as disrupting PayPal, MasterCard and Visa last autumn to protest their refusal to process donations to the secret-divulging website WikiLeaks. Government servers were allegedly infiltrated: Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen and Zimbabwe, the US Senate, and the Fine Gael party in Ireland. Prosecutors imply they took particular delight in hacking anti-hacking organisations: the FBI, the CIA website, the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, the Irish Garda and a number of private security companies.
Many of the intrusions cited in the indictments were of media outlets sceptical of hacking in general and WikiLeaks in particular. Someone stole information about a Fox TV show, filched personal codes from employees of the Public Broadcasting System in the US, broke into Sony’s computers in Belgium, Russia and the Netherlands, and hacked the Tribune Company. One operation involved leaked passwords and emails from the online foreign-policy newsletter Stratfor. (Defenders of this attack who described Stratfor as a “shadow CIA” used the word “shadow” the way conspiracy theorists do: as a portentous and sinister-sounding synonym for “non-”.)
The groups Mr Monsegur belonged to and the broader movement of hackers, known as Anonymous, cast themselves as either good-humoured or idealistic pranksters. Until recently there was sympathy for this view even among hackers’ most dogged adversaries in law enforcement. One of the Americans arrested this week had been sentenced to two years for a hacking offence half a decade ago. One of the Soca hackers had been arrested last year and released.
But there has been a sea change in attitudes towards hacking. When the internet was a corner of the economy used by a few relative sophisticates, it was easier to analogise hacking to crimes such as breaking and entering or pickpocketing. But increasingly, the internet is the economy. Although hackers aim at institutions they find noxious, they inflict collateral damage on a lot of poor schlubs minding their own business.
The charges unveiled this week include misuse of login credentials, publication of other people’s mail and filching hundreds of thousands of credit cards together with fraudulent use. Mr Monsegur had four car engines sent to him and used hacked credit cards to pay his own bills. Prosecutors in the Anglo-Irish case allege a “deliberate campaign of online destruction, intimidation, and criminality”. A favourite practice is doxing – revealing a great deal of personal data “with the object of, among other things, intimidating the victim and subjecting the victim to harassment”.
To borrow the distinction Johan Huizinga drew in Homo Ludens, hackers are not cheats but spoilsports, a far more dangerous class of troublemaker. They don’t just threaten the outcome of a particular game or convention. They threaten the existence of the community that makes the game possible. Over time, hacking has become a much more serious, society-threatening crime – less like pickpocketing, say, than counterfeiting. All governments are bound to come down on it like a tonne of bricks. That is what flipped Mr Monsegur. Authorities were able to threaten him with 124 years in prison.
Why did the US government permit the group around Mr Monsegur to carry out several devastating hacks in the seven months since they turned him? Perhaps it believes the group had the potential to engage in even more destructive operations. Anonymous has tried to feed this unease, posting on its Twitter feed: “LulzSec was a group, but Anonymous is a movement. Groups come and go, ideas remain.”
True, but there is an ironic role-reversal here. Hackers used to be savvy futurists. They understood something about technology’s impact on society that others did not. But now it is they who have been passed by. Are hackers cyberterrorists or cyber-activists? The public is increasingly inclined to say the former. You have to be a bit stuck in 1998 to say the latter.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012.