As soon as the news came out today that Sabu, the head of LulzSec, offered an FBI computer to facilitate the publication of Stratfor (no doubt set up a LulzSec-assisted indictment of Julian Assange in the future)…
Hector Xavier Monsegur, an unemployed 28-year-old Puerto Rican living in New York, was unmasked as “Sabu”, the leader of the LulzSec hacking group that has been behind a wave of cyber raids against American corporations including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the intelligence consultancy Stratfor, British and American law enforcement bodies, and the Irish political party Fine Gael.
[snip]
In a US court document, the FBI’s informant – there described as CW – “acting under the direction of the FBI” helped facilitate the publication of what was thought to be an embarrassing leak of conference call between the FBI and the UK’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency in February.
Officers from both sides of the Atlantic were heard discussing the progress of various hacking investigations in the call.
A second document shows that Monsegur – styled this time as CW-1 – provided an FBI-owned computer to facilitate the release of 5m emails taken from US security consultancy Stratfor and which are now being published by WikiLeaks. That suggests the FBI may have had an inside track on discussions between Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and Anonymous, another hacking group, about the leaking of thousands of confidential emails and documents.
…I though back to the threat Anonymous made to TAKE DOWN THE ENTIRE INTERNET!!! Which of course made more sense understood as a ploy to help fear monger than an actual threat from actual terrorists.
Was it the FBI making such threats?
Which makes this conversation Sabu had just two weeks before he was indicted all the more interesting.
<SABU> You just said there was a claim that I may be a terrorist. You “researched” it and wrote the article
<SABU> There re claims I am with the CIA pushing to get tighter / stricter cyber-laws passed
<SABU> its literally the same shit, two different extremes.
[snip]
<SABU> The people are aware that our governments in the UK and the US have involved themselves in black operations in the past. it makes a lot of sense if lets say a rogue group of hackers suddenly began attaking national interests — spawning a massive overhaul of internet security, theoretically.
<SABU> you’re telling me thats not worse than some random jihadist who barely knows how to use a computer in the first place, “hacking”/
<SABU> Also heres where your entire point is flawed into oblivion
<SABU> why would a terrorist release and dump 90,000 INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY MILITARY PERSONELL PASSWORDS AND EMAILS when they can just intercept military intelligence communications for the next year using this data ?
<SABU> Why would osama bin laden go through all the work of hacking booz allan [a US government and defence consultancy], just to post a pastebin with an ascii art mocking the security of federal contractors.
<SABU> Be realistic.
<SABU> Think.
One other neat detail about the suggestion, of course, is that the CIA went around claiming to be FBI agents while they tortured people. Was this Sabu preparing to go around hacking for the FBI while hinting he was CIA?