Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, tells why Anonymous 'might well be the most powerful organization on Earth': via the national news :
Q: As strictly an online army of hackers, how powerful is Anonymous?
A: Anonymous is kind of like the big buff kid in school who had really bad self-esteem then all of a sudden one day he punched someone in the face and went, "Holy shitI I'm really strong!" Scientology (one of Anonymous's first targets) was the punch in the face where Anonymous began to realize how incredibly powerful they are. There's a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth. The entire world right now is run by information. Our entire world is being controlled and operated by tiny invisible 1s and 0s that are flashing through the air and flashing through the wires around us. So if that's what controls our world, ask yourself who controls the 1s and the 0s. It's the geeks and computer hackers of the world.

Q: What does it mean to be a leader of a leaderless organization?
A: We don't sit around and elect a president but that doesn't mean there aren't leaders within Anonymous. Naturally Commander X or Barrett Brown or Peter Fein, whether they have names or are still anonymous, they take a leadership role and are looked up to. The average Anon is not like me, working 12 hours a day dedicating their life to this. He's an IT guy or a cable installer with a few hours to spare and he wants to be told what to do. It takes organizers to get things done. Anyone in Anon can be a spokesperson but my ability to speak is based on how much what I say squares with the consensus of the collective.

Q: It seems like there's a war going on between hacktivists or information activists and law enforcement. (At least 40 alleged members of Anonymous have been arrested around the world in the last year.) Who do you think is winning right now?
A: I think it's a stalemate at the moment. I think eventually we'll win. I've always believed that right will always prevail. But at the moment the arrests have had a chilling effect on the movement. For a 30-minute online protest I'm facing 15 years in a penitentiary. For the moment that's the only indictment against me but I expect there will be more. And it's not just about the potential penalty but it's the trial itself for which they delivered a terabyte of discovery. That's about 150,000 pages for a 30-minute protest. That means my trial will be two years long and during that time I'm under strict surveillance by the FBI. I can't access Twitter, Facebook or IRCs (Internet Relay Chats)¿ I can't contact any known member of Anonymous, who are about 50,000 people around the world.So basically it shuts me down as an activist. Even if I prevail in court, I'm still shut down for two years. Well, I'm unwilling to do that and that's why I'm in Canada. In Syria and Tunisia, Libya, Egypt in Nigeria in the Ivory Coast, we have saved so many lives I can't even count activists and journalists and bloggers and people who come to us to keep themselves safe in these extremely hostile environments and I'm unwilling to lay that kind of work down.

Q: Now that you're in Canada for the foreseeable future, do you feel relatively safe?
A: Yes. We have a lot of contacts in the Canadian government. We were well prepared when I came here, we have an underground railway, and safe houses in Canada. We might be wrong, but our understanding is that the Canadian government is about equally concerned with Anonymous and the United States. Their approach will be: Step lively, don't stay long, and you'll be fine. So we're in negotiation with several countries in Europe to try to get a permanent political asylum situation set up for myself as well as for any other Anons and information activists who might need it. It's too bad Canada will not find the political courage to protect information activists from America like they did in the 60s with the draft dodgers. That's the reality of it, but they will probably not actively seek to track me down.

Q: Do you think the general public is not concerned enough with online surveillance or real-life surveillance?
A: I think the general public is beginning to learn the value of information. To give an example, for a very long time nobody in the U.S. or the world was allowed to know the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan or Iraq. There were wild guesses and they were all over the ballpark figures, until a young army private named Bradley Manning had the courage to steal that information from the U.S. government and release it. Now we know that despite their smart munitions and all their high-technology they have somehow managed to accidentally kill 150,000 civilians in two countries. As these kinds of startling facts come out, the public will begin to realize the value of the information and they will realize that the activists are risking everything for that information to be public.

Q: What do you say to people who believe Anons are just cyber-terrorists?
A: Basically I decline the semantic argument. If you want to call me a terrorist, I have no problem with that. But I would ask you, Who is it thats terrified? If it's the bad guys who are terrified, I'm really super OK with that. If it's the average person, the people out in the world we are trying to help who are scared of us, I'd ask them to educate themselves, to do some research on what it is we do and lose that fear. We're fighting for the people, we are fighting, as Occupy likes to say, for the 99%. It's the 1% people who are wrecking our planet who should be quite terrified. If to them we are terrorists, then they probably got that right. I think eventually we'll win. I've always believed that right will always prevail.Information terrorist is a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with information. But who's terrorized? Is it the common people reading the newspaper and learning what their government is doing in their name? They're not terrorized, they're perfectly satisfied with that situation. It's the people trying to hide these secrets, who are trying to hide these crimes. The funny thing is every email database that I've ever been a part of stealing, from Pres. Assad to Stratfor security, every email database, every single one has had crimes in it. Not one time that I've broken into a corporation or a government, and found their emails and thought, Oh my God, these people are perfectly innocent people, I made a mistake/

Q: Anonymous started out as online pranksters but has gotten a whole lot more serious in the last two years. What happened?
A: I believe Egypt was really a turning point for us emotionally in Anonymous. Obviously there was always that sort of prankster edge to us. But people often ask me "Why are you so mean nowadays?" It started in Egypt, when you work for days to set up live video feeds and the first thing you watch through those feeds is people killing your friends with machine guns, that becomes personal. And then it's not just Egypt, it's Libya, Tunisia, over and over again these Freedom Ops are really what gave us a sort of take-no prisoners attitude. We get to know these people. It may not be the same as you and I sitting here, but when you Skype with people and spend hours and hours talking with them on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and they share their hopes and their dreams with you for their country, their future, when they tell you how they're risking their lives so their children can have a better future in some far-off land, you bond with those people and they become your friends and family.

Q. What's next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It's a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn't hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defense who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don't run anything anymore. It's the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defense in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they're not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they'te coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they're giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. The world needs to be concerned.

a toaster.

June 5 2012 The hacktivist group compiles a list of "pedophiles" from Twitter and then contacts Rhode Island Republican Dan Gordon, who gives the info to the authorities.
@RepDan_Gordon
TYVM #Anonymous & all for all of ur hard work in tracking dwn those thatwould harm kids. Pastes outbound to authorities.#TwitterPedoRing

via the huff post:
1. The "Occupy" Factor: Successful protest movements aren't about occupation, per se. This movement was too tied to its home base, a small symbolic tent-city near Wall Street, and in other similar parks in Boston, San Francisco and other cities. In order to rally scalable national support people needed to see marchers taking to the streets rather than largely hanging out in a park, which served, rightly or wrongly, to portray the Zuccotti Park inhabitants as drifters, vagrants and freeloaders rather than committed protesters.
2. No Leadership: Every successful protest movement needs a leader; a strong, passionate, articulate, visible face and voice of the movement. (See Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa, etc.)
3. The Wrong Message: The wholesale indictment of everyone in the "1%" (including passionate, dedicated, extremely generous liberals like George Soros, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and the Kennedys) was the wrong message. The mission shouldn't have been class warfare, but equality and fairness for all through reasonable government regulation and taxation.
4. No Agenda: While the organizers prided themselves on the fact that they had no real agenda other than to vent the nation's collective anger over the economic divide and injustices on Wall Street, this lack of clear, stated demands was a huge mistake. It should've taken a lesson from the Tea Party movement, which was and remains powerful, articulate and clear in its demands and which sent 63 congressmen to Washington in an election year to advocate and legislate its small government, less taxes agenda.

via the heraldrecord: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a new kind of crime statistic. It is not the astoundingly low number of murders committed in his fair city, 471 in 2009 vs. about 2,000 per year in the 1980s. But it is the number of times last year the police stopped someone on the street and frisked him (or the occasional her) for weapons: 685,724.
In 2002, the figure was 97,296.

most likely a combination of apathy and laziness - just another dead black kid.

the hollywood liberal elite have ponied up $40,000 a plate to dine with geo and barack

it would be tantamount to chaos.

for MintChip to really become a substitute for cash and the retired penny, it will have to succeed where other payment systems have failed: it must be anonymous and secure.

MintChip promises to give Canadians an anonymous, no-fee option for paying with their computers and mobile devices.software developers have been challenged to create innovative digital payment applications using MintChip. the winning developer will be awarded 2 lbs. of gold.

via the atlantic: "The idea that today's emerging adults are as a generation leading a new wave of renewed civic-mindedness and political involvement is sheer fiction," wrote Christian Smith in Lost in Transition

via the christian science monitor: some black community activists see significant progress, but others see a long way to go. read the full article here

bill moyers describes the mellennials as "americans born roughly between 1978 and 2000, saddled with record levels of student debt, entering the workforce at a time of high unemployment, struggling to afford rent, and only dreaming of owning homes... yet, still hopeful."

via the nytimes 5.2.12: A damning report on the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers concluding that Mr. Murdoch is "not a fit person" to run a huge international company has convulsed Britain's political and media worlds and threatened a core asset of Mr. Murdoch's American-based News Corporation.

via the atlantic: if we're going to allow private companies and government to snoop into our private information for the narrow purpose of protecting national security, there needs to be a way to monitor what goes on so that there's at least the possibility that abuses could be caught.

via the new york times: One hundred of America's elite Special Operations troops, aided by night vision scopes and satellite imagery, are helping African forces find a wig-wearing, gibberish-speaking fugitive rebel commander named Joseph Kony who has been hiding out in the jungle for years with a band of child soldiers and a harem of dozens of child brides.
As one American official put it: "There's only one way this is going to end, and that's with Kony shot in the back, running for his life, deep in the forest."

it's time to stop him.

via techcrunch: There is some disagreement with the notion that Red Hat is a 'pure play' open source company. I asked Whitehurst whether their earnings claims were just a matter of semantics: is Red Hat really a billion dollar open source software company, or a billion dollar support and services company? "We sell software," was his immediate response.
Rather than a specific, static piece of software, Red Hat sells you a subscription to their software. While the Red Hat source code is freely available, the compiled bits included in your subscription are not free. What you buy from Red Hat, says Whitehurst, is software that has been rigorously tested, known to be good, and is fully supported.

via wired: In a move sure to attract attention from the music industry, a small group of coders claiming to be part of Anonymous is putting together a social music platform. The rather ambitious goal: Create a service that seamlessly pulls up songs streaming from all around the internet.
The project, called Anontune and still in its infancy, is designed to pull songs from third-party sources like YouTube and let anonymous users put them into playlists and share them, while keeping the service from being shut down by music industry lawsuits.
Reached by e-mail, one of the creators of Anontune told Wired the project was started by a group of anons who met online six years ago on what was then an underground hacking site. The group, mostly focused at the time on "cracking" began discussing music, favorite artists and what they would do to fix current music business models."We would say stuff like, "People really use YouTube as a music player yet it really sucks for that purpose, it's too unorganized," the anon wrote to Wired. And then, "YouTube does make a good music player but you can't play all your songs on it since the obscure ones aren't uploaded, then eventually, Hmmm, what if you were to combine music websites like Myspace, Yahoo, YouTube and others?"
The stated central aims of the services creators are to provide a flexible, open platform for users to listen to music without having to pirate it or face legal repercussions read Anontune's white paper. True to form, users of the service can largely remain anonymous.
Although the site is still very crude and its origins obscure, the idea of Anonymous even a few far-flung members of the group tackling online music is compelling.
The project is not so much a response to Megaupload but a response to the tycoons from the RIAA shutting down music services, the anon wrote to Wired. "You may have heard about what Anonymous has done in Operation Payback. We believe the underlying reasons for the revolt were (mostly) correct, however their approach is unlikely to change anything in the long run."

via tor.org: Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.
Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

from the atlantic: last fall Senator Barbara Boxer introduced the "Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act" (or "MAP-21" as it's now called), to reauthorize funds for federal highway and transportation programs.
While that doesn't sound like anything having to do with your taxes, the bill includes a little-noticed section that allows the State Department to "deny, revoke or limit" passport rights for any taxpayers with "serious delinquencies," proposed Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Address
Caine's Arcade (located inside Smart Parts Aftermarket)
538 N. Mission Rd
Boyle Heights, CA 90033

Hours
Saturday: 8am - 5pm
Sundays: by appointment

To schedule an appointment
email cainesarcade@gmail.com
Please write "appointment" in the subject heading.

there is a paypal account set up for caine.

from nirvan - "We are working on getting some shirts made and will get a store set up very soon. Thank you so much for your enthusiasm and for your patience. There have been some counterfeit shirts. Please don't buy them. We're gonna meet your demand.

We will make an announcement on Facebook/Twitter when the shirts are ready."

Are you a racist if you're willing to take money from one?Paul has accepted donations from Don Black, the leader of Stormfront, a prominent neo-Nazi Web forum. Just saying..

bloomberg looked like he might have this one in the bag, but time has proven that jean quan may be the most despicable mayor in history.

megaupload was less about internet freedom than it was about making money. dotcom seems to live without scruples. in an effort to save himself anything is possible.

duh?

i don't think even he knows, and that's half the problem