The 28-page indictment, unsealed on Thursday, accuses the
defendants of engaging in Operation Payback, an Anonymous-led
initiative that went after the US Copyright Office, major credit
card companies and international law firms and trade groups
starting in late 2010. The movement was in response to attempts
from those entities to keep otherwise protected materials from
being freely circulated on the Internet.
According to the indictment, Operation Payback targeted victims
which Anonymous claimed “opposed its stated philosophy of
making all information free for all, including information
protected by copyright laws or national security
considerations.”
Indictment, courtesy of Gregg
Housh
The wave of attacks – an orchestrated effort to temporarily take
websites offline by overloading them with illegitimate traffic –
was launched shortly after the notorious file-sharing site The
Pirate Bay was taken down in 2010.
Targets included the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the US
Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, Visa, MasterCard and
Bank of America, as well as entities outside of the United
States, such as British intellectual property rights protection
firm Davenport Lyons and the British Phonographic Institute
(BPI), a UK trade group that served as the across-the-pond
equivalent of the MPAA.
Federal prosecutors say that Anonymous launched a series of
coordinated distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks
against targets using custom software called the Low Orbit Ion
Cannon, or LOIC, that flooded web servers with traffic and
rendered sites unavailable for legitimate users.
The defendants are all charged with conspiracy to intentionally
cause damage to protected computers, and range in age from 21 to
65, according to Reuters reporter David Ingram.
At least one of the defendants, Dennis Owen Collins, has
previously ended up in the sights of federal investigators.
Collins and 13 others were indicted in 2011 for a similar wave of
DDoS attacks that targeted PayPal in response to the company’s
refusal to process donations to the anti-secrecy website
WikiLeaks. That group, the so-called “PayPal 14,” is expected to
appear in federal court in California later this month.
Other defendants in the Operation Payback case include Jeremy
Leroy Heller, Zhiwei Chen, Joshua S. Phy, Ryan Russell Gubele,
Robert Audubon Whitfield, Anthony Tadros, Geoffrey Kenneth
Commander, Phillip Garrett Simpson, Austen l. Stamm, Timothy
Robert McClain, Wade Carl Williams and Thomas J. Bell.
The 13 suspects, the indictment claims, participated in and
coordinated the DDoS cyber attacks by deciding on which websites
to strike and when, then circulating announcements across the web
using flyers distributed on forums and social media platforms and
chat rooms.
One September 2010 flier – allegedly circulated by a defendant
and cited by the prosecution – quotes Anonymous as admitting that
the RIAA and MPAA were brought down by the group during a 72-hour
span. Another, which was dated one month later, encouraged
Anonymous to “send pizza and other crap” to the chairman
and CEO of the RIAA.
In addition to retaliating against the closure of The Pirate Bay,
Anonymous also protested the shuttering of Limewire, another
file-sharing service that was brought down with the assistance of
the RIAA. The defendants in the Operation PayBack case allegedly
circulated one flier on the web claiming that the trade group, in
shutting down Limewire, “exercised more control than any
private entity should be allowed.”
“Globally, these corporations are trying to censor the
internet, a place without borders, a place where millions freely
share ideas and information,” the flier read. “If Limewire
is gone today, what will we lose tomorrow?… When does this
stop? Anonymous says it stops right now…Be against censorship. Be
against private corporations having more rights than the average
citizen. Be against the massive power of copyright labels. We
must fight back. No more shall we wait. It is time for action. If
they dare to take down Limewire, then we shall take down the RIAA
in kind.”
According to a two-year-old Gawker article, defendant Zhiwei Chen
was raided in early 2011 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI). In a Reddit post that has since been deleted, Chen
reportedly admitted that the FBI came into his dorm room,
“pushed everyone out of bed” and “searched the place
and questioned all people involved.”
A search warrant reportedly posted on the web by Chen in early
2011 revealed that the FBI seized a number of electronic devices,
including computers, an iPhone, and multiple USB drives from
Chen.
Copyright: RT