Anonymous, a band of online vigilante activists, has turned its ire on the U.S. Department of Justice, threatening to release secret, internal documents the group hacked in memory of Aaron Swartz, the Internet prodigy who committed suicide before his federal trial.
“With Aaron’s death we can wait no longer. The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration. The time has come to give this system a taste of its own medicine,” read part of the message and video posted on the U.S. Sentencing Commission website, which the activist group claimed responsibility for hacking yesterday. The website was down for most of the day before appearing to be back up late last night.
Anonymous — whose members have railed against U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz for threatening Swartz with a 35-year sentence and $1 million fine for downloading obscure academic papers through a Massachusetts Institute of Technology server — said it has infiltrated government computer systems, and offered to give media “heavily redacted partial contents” of the data,
“With Aaron’s death we can wait no longer. The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration. The time has come to give this system a taste of its own medicine,” read part of the message and video posted on the U.S. Sentencing Commission website, which the activist group claimed responsibility for hacking yesterday. The website was down for most of the day before appearing to be back up late last night.
Anonymous — whose members have railed against U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz for threatening Swartz with a 35-year sentence and $1 million fine for downloading obscure academic papers through a Massachusetts Institute of Technology server — said it has infiltrated government computer systems, and offered to give media “heavily redacted partial contents” of the data,