Anonymous Hacked Bank of America and Seemingly Revealed That the Bank’s Spying on Hacktivists

You’ve probably already heard of Anonymous, the world’s most infamous group of cybertrolling hacktivists. They frequently make headlines for crashing websites and looting corporate and government servers. Usually these hacktivists come together in defense of others, such as Julian Assange, the people of Gaza, victims of police brutality, or even victims of rape. But now, Anonymous has turned its eyes on a personal rival. This enemy has its own cybersquad of secret spies who, according to Anonymous, spend the majority of their time in chat rooms collecting intelligence about them. With this latest release of stolen data, Anonymous has just pulled back the curtain on their foe: the Bank of America.

On February 25 @AnonymousIRC, an Anonymous Twitter account with over 280,000 followers, began posting “teasers” about a massive Bank of America data leak. The first post declared, “If you spy on us, we spy on you.” What followed was 14 gigabytes of private emails, spreadsheets, and a “text analysis and data mining” program called OneCalais. The emails in the release originated from “Cyber Threat Intelligence Analysts” who identified themselves as employees of a company called TEKsystems. The TEKsystems website appears to be nothing more than a staffing agency and seems wholesome enough. There’s definitely nothing that screams “we are cyberspies!” It’s safe to assume these analysts were hired by Bank of America, regardless of their TEKsystems titles, because according to the leaked emails that Anonymous released, each of them were using @bankofamerica.com email addresses while filing their reports.

Having a team on staff to protect a corporation from potential cyberthreats is nothing new. This isn’t what caught the attention of Anonymous to begin with; it was the methods being employed by Bank of America to gather data. Each of the 500 plus emails pilfered reads like a surveillance report, most of them reporting on the activities of online activists from Anonymous to Occupy Wall Street.

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Occupy’s Rolling Jubilee Wants to Give Americans Money for Nothing

Walking the streets of New York City this spring, you would have been hard-pressed not to come across posters promoting the Occupy Wall Street-led May Day general strike. “A day without the 99 percent,” is how it was billed. With the strike, the group was attempting to light a fire that might bring down capitalism and launch the US into an American Spring. However, Occupy’s rallying cry fell on deaf ears, as the rally had poor attendance and limited impact. Looking back, it seems like that was the moment that the pied pipers of political and economic discontent’s critical mass finally dissipated. The group’s momentum seemed to have run its course, and the fickle media’s attention turned to the sideshow that was the 2012 presidential election.

After May Day, Occupy had to find itself all over again. Call it an identity crisis. But in an organization as decentralized as OWS, where individual efforts and actions are constantly emerging as branches and nodes of a shape-shifting whole, identity is a fluid concept anyway. The post-May Day breakdown was a chance for rebirth—a function of Occupy Wall Street’s built-in eternal recurrence mechanism. It was in this ferment that Occupy forged its next project: Rolling Jubilee, a plan to buy anonymous medical debt, thus offering relief to Americans burdened by exorbitant healthcare costs.

“From the very beginning of Occupy Wall Street, the question of crippling debt that people are forced to carry has always been part of the agenda,” says Yates McKee, a member of Occupy’s Strike Debt team, which is leading the Rolling Jubilee project. “Student debt, mortgage debt, medical debt, and municipal debt—all of that has been a part of Occupy from the very beginning.”

Activists within Occupy Student Debt, an early sub-group of Occupy focused on the debt crisis, had the idea of using Occupy’s I Am The 99 Percent Tumblr to present real people who were debtors and break the silence around debt. It was a issue that was close to their hearts, as  many of the original Occupy campers were debtors of all stripes.

As Yates explains it, Occupy Student Debt went on to create the Pledge of Refusal, which many Occupy participants signed. “It wasn’t about forgiveness,” Yates emphasizes. “It didn’t say, ‘Let’s come up with a piece of legislation that forgives our debt.’ Rather, it noted that going into debt is systematic. In order to live, you have to enter into this predatory debt. So the Pledge of Refusal was non-compliant with the debt system. It was similar to a debt strike.”

Originally, the debt strike concept gained a lot of traction within the Occupy movement, but people across the country weren’t ready for such an idea and conditions across the country couldn’t support a mass default. So in the post-May Day void, where Occupy’s idealism finally gave way to reality, they knew they had to take another approach to fighting debt. Luckily, the Occupy Student Debt movement still had a great deal of enthusiasm behind it, even after May Day.

“The only campaign that still had a lot of energy was the Occupy Student Debt campaign,” observes Yates. “So over the summer, we decided to have what we call ‘thematic assemblies,’ where in one assembly we talked about the environment, and in another assembly we talked about labor. And then we did one on debt. And we made sure to invite everyone from Occupy Student Debt, Occupy Universities, Free University, and Occupy Labor.”

The larger assembly then got together and discussed what would it mean to build a political movement around debt in all its forms and not just on certain types of debt in isolation, like student loans. This ultimately lead to the transformation of Occupy Student Debt into Strike Debt, the sub-group which now healms the Rolling Jubilee.

“One phrase we started to use was ‘Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent’” says Yates. “There is something structural about the debt economy we’re forced to go into in our lives. And this was when we flipped the idea of a debt strike to Strike Debt. What would it mean to strike debt, to attack debt from all these different angles and metaphorically cross it out?”

Occupy describes the vast swaths of America’s debtors as “an invisible army of defaulters.” What if this invisible army were to come out of the shadows and become a political force? Out of this thought experiment came debt memes like “You are not alone” and ultimately the Rolling Jubilee program.

Jubilee, as laid out in the Bible’s book of Leviticus, was a time when debts were forgiven. Strike Debt appropriated the concept in a symbolic way and used it as the namesake for its first major project, in which a fund—financed by donations—buys debt.

May Day Made My Day

May Day was a repeat of every other OWS action I have covered, but with ten times the cops, barricades, unions, and ladies. Occupy Williamsburg and Occupy Bushwick started their day at the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge. From there they marched across the bridge and through lower Manhattan, culminating in a late-night clusterfuck downtown. We won’t get into all the specific who’s and what’s and where’s of the whole day here. If that’s what you’re looking for, click over to the live blog that we updated every few minutes yesterday from around the world. This here post is strictly for picture-looking and video-watching. Enjoy.

We talked to Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, about Occupy, the internet, & dissent.

May Day 2012 is finally upon us. The video above is a live stream from New York City hosted by our editor-in-chief, Rocco Castoro, and maybe some relief reporters if Rocco loses his voice or gets hit in the head with a Molotov cocktail. The stream below is a live blog from the VICE global offices around the world. Stay tuned.

Free The Network - Occupy Wall Street Protesters Work to Build an Independent Internet

(Source: Vice Magazine)

Occupy St. Patrick’s Day

This Saint Patrick’s Day, occupiers and undercover cops with green ties celebrated OWS’s six-month anniversary. The goal was to reoccupy Zuccotti Park, and it went pretty smoothly till police raided it once again, around midnight. For most of the day, the protesters gallivanted around the downtown area, bringing back the drum circle and eating loads of birthday cake. Many attempted to throw up tents and pick fights with the cops. Once all these Direct Action troublemakers were escorted out of the park and into paddy wagons, the movement reached a peaceful standstill. A few hours later, a large group of foreign bagpipe players showed up and were instantly shut out by the cops. A cop broke one of their bagpipes and when a protester asked why, the infamous hipster cop responded, “They are French.” At this point of the evening, the protesters had enough and began putting their own barricades up around the park. Hundreds of cops regrouped and moved in, dragging them out by their faces. OWS activists are calling for a general strike on May 1 to protest these arrests.

We asked 4chan to contribute to vice. Here’s what we got.

“Worse, it was as if someone along the way purposefully destroyed all confiscated electronics, a strategic smashing of at least part of the digital record logged by full-on occupiers. “Dude, all the laptops are in a row,” he tells us, baffled and raking his shock of brown hair. “They’ve all been smashed with bats.” When asked about the mangled property, [sanitation worker] LiPani admits that, inevitably, certain items could’ve been damaged in the shuffle: “I’m not surprised,” he says, to hear of damaged laptops. He adds that the DSNY is providing clearance forms to those occupiers concerned their property may’ve been mishandled or misplaced.

But Wilder wants footage – visual proof to show to whoever it is he hopes will step up, legally, to defend the FNF. Hell, we want footage. At some risk, admittedly, we hand him an iPhone. He heads back inside.

Resurfacing a few minutes later, he shows us these:

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Who Smashed the Laptops from Occupy Wall Street? Inside the NYPD’s Lost and Found

Now that I live in New York City I hardly ever go camping, and that’s sort of a shame. I’ve thought about heading out to the Catskills or something, but the process of renting a car and driving through the hellish bridge-and-tunnel traffic is pretty terrifying. I thought I was one of the few New Yorkers who missed camping, but several weeks ago a crowd of passionate, mostly young people pitched tents in the middle of a park in lower Manhattan as part of a political protest.

I was a little confused, at first, as to what the “message” or “demands” of this movement were, because every time I went down there I was confronted with a lot of confusing signage. But it became clear to me yesterday, as protesters clashed with cops and dismantled barricades in response to Tuesday’s court ruling that park owners could legally bar them from having tents in the square, what these dissidents felt so strong about: They’re just fighting for their fundamental right to camp wherever they want.

Continue: Harry’s Freedom Foxhole