The Internet activist group known as Anonymous is preparing to defend a number of its members as a federal grand jury moves to consider evidence collected by the FBI during recent raids.
As TG Daily previously reported, law enforcement officials carried out the sweeps in response to a DDoS campaign executed against four major financial companies in retaliation for blocking contributions to WikiLeaks.
“The FBI is breaking down people’s doors with guns drawn,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a member of the board of the National Lawyers Guild, told Bloomberg.
“A group of people are engaged in a modern day electronic sit-in, and the FBI wants to treat that like it’s terrorist activity.”
Anonymous spokesperson Barrett Brown expressed similar sentiments and emphasized that the organization remains dedicated to “the defense” of liberty.
“Its goal is a perpetual revolution across the world that goes on until governments are basically overwhelmed and results in a freer system,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ryan Calo, an expert in cyber crime at Stanford University in Stanford, California, explained that civil disobedience is historically “more effective” when a state cracks down in a heavy-handed way.
“It is not just the act but also all the follow-up – the subpoenas, arrests, a trial…[Because] that’s [really] all part of the act of civil disobedience.”
Nevertheless, the US government and FBI continue to frown on such forms of digital civil disobedience and maintains that “facilitating or conducting” DDoS attacks is illegal and punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
