On Sunday, the official site of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) went offline. On a couple of the website’s subdomains, Anonymous hackers published a message in memory of Aaron Swartz, the Reddit co-founder and activist who recently committed suicide.

“Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for […],” the hacktivists wrote on the defaced pages.

“Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences,” they added.

The hackers ask the government to “reform” computer crime and copyright and intellectual property laws.

“We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response,” they wrote.

“We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.”

They concluded their statement by apologizing to MIT administrators for temporarily taking over the website.

MIT has ordered an internal investigation into the case of Swartz. Furthermore, JSTOR – the digital library that accused him of illegally downloading content – has released its own statement regarding Swartz’s death.

At the time of writing, the main MIT site appeared to be working properly. The subdomains that hosted the hacktivists’ message have been taken offline.

In the meantime, a petition to remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz has been created. The petition appears to be supported by both Anonymous and the controversial Kim Dotcom.
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FILED UNDER:MIT ANONYMOUS HACKTIVISM PROTEST DEFACED WEBSITE

In a petition submitted to the White House’s “We the People” website, Anonymous hacktivists are asking the Obama administration to make distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks a legal form of protesting.

“With the advance in internet techonology, comes new grounds for protesting. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), is not any form of hacking in any way. It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage,” the initiators of the petition wrote.

“It is, in that way, no different than any ‘occupy’ protest. Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time,” they added.

“As part of this petition, those who have been jailed for DDoS should be immediately released and have anything regarding a DDoS, that is on their ‘records’, cleared.”

Hacktivists have often used DDOS attacks in their protests. It was their “weapon” of choice when US authorities took down the popular Megaupload file sharing service.

At the time, they disrupted numerous high-profile websites, including the ones of the FBI, the US Department of Justice, the White House, and ones belonging to the motion picture industry.

They've also utilized DDOS attacks to protest against Israel and the Syrian government.

The petition, created on January 7, has been signed by 814 individuals. However, in order for it to be taken into consideration, it needs to be signed by 25,000 people by February 6.

Official Anonymous communication channels have hundreds of thousands of followers, so getting 25,000 signatures shouldn’t really be an issue. However, some supporters might be discouraged to do so because those who sign the petition are required to create a whitehouse.gov account.

The hacking collective Anonymous has clarified that it has no plans to fade away in the New Year. It issued a statement over the weekend that warned the world to "Expect us 2013."

Along with the statement, the group created a video that boasts of its campaigns and exploits carried out in 2012. The video details the group's temporary shutdown of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music, and the Motion Picture Association of America's Web sites in protest of the U.S. government's indictment of the operators of popular file-hosting site MegaUpload.

The video also shows newsreels of Anonymous' campaign against Syrian government Web sites because of that government's alleged shutdown of the Internet, along with Anonymous' "cyberwar" against the Israeli government in protest of government attacks on Gaza. The group also recounts its hack into the Web site of the Westboro Baptist Church in response to plans by the controversial church to picket the funerals of those massacred at the elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

"The operations which are listed in the video are only examples, there are far more operations," Anonymous wrote in the statement. "Some of them still running, like Operation Syria. We are still here."

Despite the hacking group's threats, some believe that the collective may not actually make a big impact in the online world in the coming year. Security firm McAfee Labs released its "2013 Threat Predictions" last week and claimed the decline of Anonymous.

The firm argued that a lack of structure and organization, false claims, and hacking for the simple joy of it has affected the group's reputation. McAfee also said, however, that higher-level professional hacking groups may take up the slack, and promote a rise in military, religious, political, and "extreme" campaign attacks.

A 15-year-old hacker convicted of multiple felonies was handed an unusual sentence by a Long Beach, California juvenile court on Wednesday, one that will see him all but banned from the internet until his twenty-first birthday.

The hacker's real name was not disclosed because he is a minor, but according to a report, he goes by the handles "Cosmo" or "Cosmo the God."

As a member of the notorious UG Nazi hacker collective, Cosmo participated in an online reign of terror involving many of the year's most significant hacking events, including a DDoS attack that brought down Twitter for several hours.

Cosmo was finally nabbed in June, following a coordinated law enforcement action that also led to 23 other arrests, spread across eight US states and 13 countries. He was eventually arraigned on a laundry list of charges, ranging from credit card fraud, to identity theft and online impersonation, to making bomb threats.

Had he stood trial and been convicted, he faced a sentence of three years in prison. Instead, he pleaded guilty to all of the charges against him, in exchange for a six-year probation that will allow him to avoid incarceration – for a price.

Under the terms of his plea bargain agreement, Cosmo cannot use the internet without the prior consent of his parole officer, for the duration of his probation. Even then, he cannot go online "in an unsupervised manner," and he cannot use the internet for anything but education-related purposes.

Furthermore, he must turn over the usernames and passwords for all of his online accounts, and if he has access to any devices that are capable of connecting to a network, he must identify them to the court in writing. The devices the court already knows about – the ones that were seized in the FBI raid on his home – won't be returned.

Finally, Cosmo is to have no contact with any members of UG Nazi or Anonymous, nor their associates, nor a list of "other individuals," as specified by the court.

Violate any of those terms, and he goes straight to the slammer for the full three-year bid.