All posts tagged ‘4chan’

A Tennessee jury on Friday convicted David Kernell of obstruction of justice and misdemeanor computer intrusion in connection with his hacking of Sarah Palin’s e-mail account in 2008, according to local news reports.

The jury acquitted the 22-year-old Kernell of wire fraud, and deadlocked on a fourth charge of identity theft following four days of deliberation.

Kernell famously hacked into Palin’s Yahoo webmail account while Palin was the Republican vice presidential candidate. He used publicly available information about Palin to reset her password to “popcorn,” then posted screenshots of some of her e-mail, and the new password, to the /b/ message board on 4chan so others could enjoy it.

Prosecutors will now have to decide whether to retry Kernell on the identity-theft charge, based on the theory that the former University of Tennessee student stole Palin’s identity by taking over her Yahoo account.

Palin applauded the verdict Friday in a Facebook post that compared Kernell to Richard Nixon’s plumbers. “As Watergate taught us, we rightfully reject illegally breaking into candidates’ private communications for political intrigue in an attempt to derail an election,” wrote Palin, who testified against Kernell in court last week.

In opting for the misdemeanor version of the computer-intrusion charge, the jury rejected prosecutors’ arguments that Kernell broke into Palin’s account in furtherance of another criminal act or civil wrongdoing beyond accessing Palin’s e-mail.

That means Kernell might have walked away from the trial without a felony conviction, if he hadn’t deleted evidence from his hard drive. That, the jury found, constituted felony obstruction of justice.

Kernell is free on bond. A sentencing date has not been set.

Updated 18:30 with Palin’s Facebook comments,

Image: Facebook.com

See Also:

• Palin Hacker Group’s All-Time Greatest Hits
• Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy
• Palin Calls E-Mail Hack ‘Most Disruptive’ Campaign Event
• Group Posts E-Mail Hacked From Palin Account

A Nebraska man is pleading guilty in federal court to a computer-disruption charge for his role in the 2008 distributed denial-of-service attack that temporarily shuttered Church of Scientology websites, the authorities said Tuesday.

Los Angeles federal prosecutors said Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, 20, signed a plea agreement Friday admitting his role in the January 2008 attack (.pdf) –- bringing to two the number of defendants convicted in Anonymous’ attack on Scientology. Next week, Mettenbrink is expected to officially enter his plea, which carries a year sentence, prosecutors said.

“He took their websites down,” Assistant United States Attorney Erik M. Silber said in a brief telephone interview from Los Angeles. “Anonymous: I think one of their primary missions is to bring down the Church of Scientology.”

Mettenbrink’s attorney did not return repeated telephone calls.

Last year, another member of the online troublemaking group Anonymous, Dmitriy Guzner, pleaded guilty to similar charges and was sentenced to a year in prison in what at the time was the first-known prosecution of an Anonymous member.

Past Anonymous targets include uncool virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a neo-Nazi webcaster.

Anonymous members formally declared war on the Church of Scientology in January 2008 after the secretive religious group tried to suppress a creepy Tom Cruise video produced for Scientology members.

See Also:

• Office Space Actor Sues Anonymous Wikipedia Vandal
• 'Anonymous' Declares War on Australia Over Internet Filtering
• Iran Activists Get Assist from 'Anonymous,' Pirate Bay
• The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology
• 'Anonymous' Member Pleads Guilty To Scientology Web Attacks

The internet was in an uproar Sunday when AT&T DSL subscribers around the country found they couldn’t reach the /b/ board on 4chan, that petri dish of mischief that’s led to many an internet meme and more than one federal criminal indictment against Anonymous members.

Did those NSA-loving suits at AT&T block the site in a craven bout of puritanism? How would Anonymous retaliate? The pieces seemed set for the greatest battle between control and chaos since Control versus Kaos.

“If you’ve been affected, I would advise you call or write customer support and corporate immediately,” 4chan founder Moot wrote on the site’s status page Sunday.

AT&T responded Monday morning with a press release confirming it had temporarily blackholed img.4chan.org. But it said the ban (which has since been lifted) was a defensive response to denial-of-service traffic hitting an AT&T subscriber, and originating from 4chan’s own network. Reached by Threat Level, AT&T declined to elaborate.

Now 4chan’s founder, Moot, has admitted that his network was sending spurious traffic, but he still faults AT&T for going too far with its response.

“They essentially dropped a nuke instead of using the fly swatter,” Moot said in an e-mail to Threat Level. “I was told by someone within the company that an engineer essentially overreacted and made a mistake in choosing how to deal with a rather trivial issue. That’s how we got to where we’re at now.”

The trouble was triggered by 4chan’s response to a denial-of-service attack that’s been targeting the site’s image board for three weeks. “We were able to filter this specific type of attack in a fashion that was more or less transparent to the end user,” Moot wrote in an afternoon update. “Unfortunately, as an unintended consequence of the method used, some internet users received errant traffic from one of our network switches. A handful happened to be AT&T customers.”

Continue Reading “Oops! AT&T Blackhole Was 4Chan’s Fault” »

A 16-year-old North Carolina boy arrested for allegedly making a bomb threat against Purdue University has been charged as an adult for that threat, and for threats against eight other schools and two FBI offices, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

Ashton Lundeby allegedly staged bomb hoaxes from mid-2008 until his arrest last March. He’s charged with conspiring to make threats against Purdue, the University of North Carolina, Florida State University, Clemson University, Boston College and FBI offices in Colorado and Louisiana.

The indictment also accuses him of making a series of five more calls to high schools around the country on March 4, two days before his arrest.

Lundeby’s mother, Annette Lundeby, admitted in an interview with Threat Level in May that her son was “Tyrone” — a notorious prank phone caller who performed for a live internet audience in exchange for PayPal donations. But she claimed that he was with her in church at the time of the Purdue hoax.

An former fan of “Tyrone” who helped police track him down told Threat Level that the prank caller had begun accepting donations in exchange for shutting down donors’ schools for a day with fake bomb threats — a charge reflected in the indictment.

According to prosecutors in South Bend, Indiana, where the case was filed, a federal judge granted a government motion to try the teenager as an adult — an unusual request from the feds that cleared the way for his indictment and the public release of his name. Lundeby is in custody.

Ashton Lundeby’s arrest stoked widespread outrage on the web after Raleigh, North Carolina’s WRAL-5 reported on the case, noting that the boy is a patriotic homeschooled student with an American flag bedspread. Much of the online fury was triggered by Annette Lundeby’s incorrect claim — uncritically reported by the station — that the boy was being held without any legal rights on the authority of the 2001 USA Patriot Act.

See Also:

• Mom Loses Bid for Purdue Bomb Hoax Suspect’s Freedom
• Teenage Bomb Threat Suspect Was Internet Prank-Call Star
• Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim

The mother of a 16-year-old internet prank call star charged with phoning in a bomb hoax to Purdue University has lost her habeas corpus lawsuit demanding his release, meaning the teen will continue to be held without bail in Indiana.

Annette Lundeby relocated from her North Carolina home to an Indiana motel room last month to personally fight for her son’s freedom. She filed a 14-page brief in federal court reasserting her claim that her son was with her in church at the time of the February 15 telephone call that summoned a bomb squad and evacuated the Mechanical Engineering building at Purdue. She also leveled a series of more exotic arguments, including challenging the authority of her son’s prosecutor to represent the United States.

The judge overseeing Lundeby’s son’s case, which is sealed because he’s a minor, summarily dismissed her petition on Wednesday, in part on the grounds that the teenager’s own lawyer has already unsuccessfully sought his pre-trial release, but has not yet appealed the loss.

“Assuming Mrs. Lundeby stands in her son’s shoes for habeas purposes — a dubious assumption — she hasn’t exhausted the available remedies or shown that exceptional circumstances justify the relief requested,” U.S. district Court Chief Judge Robert Miller wrote.

“A.L.[the teen] may raise challenges to his pretrial confinement and the sufficiency of the indictment as well as jurisdictional and due process concerns in the pending pretrial proceedings and, if desired, on appeal,” the judge continued.  ”A.L. already has challenged his pretrial detention unsuccessfully and may take an interlocutory appeal of his pretrial detention. … Mrs. Lundeby hasn’t identified any nonfrivolous basis for pursuing habeas relief in advance of trial.”

Continue Reading “Mom Loses Bid for Purdue Bomb Hoax Suspect’s Freedom” »

The mother of the 16-year-old North Carolina boy arrested for allegedly making a bomb threat against Purdue University has filed a federal habeas corpus petition demanding his release, and attacking the government’s authority to prosecute anyone.

In the 14-page brief filed Friday in federal court in Indiana, where the teen is being held without bail in a juvenile facility, Annette Lundeby reasserts her claim that her son was with her in church at the time of the February 15 telephone call that summoned a bomb squad and evacuated the Mechanical Engineering building at Purdue.

But Lundeby, acting as her own attorney, also levels a series of more exotic arguments. In one section, she argues that the courts had no authority to transfer her son from North Carolina to Indiana, where Purdue is located, and where her son has been charged.  She references the trials of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and coconspirator Terry Nichols, whose cases were moved to Denver for fear that an Oklahoma jury could not impartially judge the evidence.

(In the excerpt below, Lundeby uses the legal term “Next Friend” to refer to herself; A.L. is her son).

Point 3: Where is satisfaction of extradition?

A.L. was taken into custody in North Carolina. Through whatever process, he has ended up here in Indiana. That transfer can’t “just happen.” See, e.g., 28 U.S.C. 5 2253 (warrant for transfer not directly reviewable).

If it is Plaintiff’s theory that the event of focus occurred relative to a federal zone near Indiana, then a suspect found outside of that place must be afforded the normal extradition process. A.L. has simply been yanked around here and there.

To clarify a few points, Next Friend is not confused by the consequences of the removal from general circulation of the last vestiges of the only system of weights and measures found in the silver quarters removed from circulation circa 1965. Next Friend is fully aware that “this state,” a/k/a “United States,” in geographic terms, is one huge “federal zone,” consisting of 45 contiguous states, DC, Alaska, Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the rest of the territories and protectorates. Next Friend is fully aware that in the eyes of “this state,” “North Carolina” is merely a “county,” and “Indiana” is also merely a “county.” DC is the “capital” of “this state.” No other perspective explains the otherwise outrageous transfer of the cases against McVeigh and Nichols from the “State” of Oklahoma to the “State” of Colorado.

Continue Reading “Mother of Purdue Bomb Hoax Suspect Sues for Son’s Release” »

A surprise legal maneuver by the defense in the Sarah Palin hacking case could undermine key charges carrying the stiffest potential penalties.

A lawyer for the Tennessee college student charged with hacking into the Alaska governor’s Yahoo e-mail account last year says his client couldn’t have violated Palin’s privacy because a judge had already declared her e-mails a matter of public record.

“He’s not suggesting that e-mail can’t be private,” says Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department cybercrime prosecutor. “He’s saying this particular e-mail was not private or personal because of who she is and because it wasn’t intimate communication. ”

Additionally, photos that 20-year-old David Kernell allegedly obtained of Palin and her family were not private since the Palins are “the subjects of untold numbers of photo-ops,” the lawyer argued last week, in one of a slew of motions and memorandums attacking the government’s four-count federal indictment against Kernell.

Threat Level broke the story last September that a hacker had obtained unauthorized access to Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account — gov.palin@yahoo.com — by using publicly available information to reset her password to “popcorn.” The intruder then posted screenshots of Palin’s e-mail, as well as her new password, to a forum at 4chan.org under the handle “Rubico,” enabling other intruders to access the account. Bloggers quickly traced the name Rubico to an e-mail address that Kernell was known to use.

Last October, federal prosecutors in Tennessee had Kernell indicted on one felony count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Then in March prosecutors filed three more charges — one count of identity theft for allegedly impersonating Palin to access her e-mail account; one count of wire fraud for allegedly scheming to defraud Palin of property by obtaining information from her account and posting it to a web forum; and one count of obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying evidence.

Now defense lawyer Wade Davies is asking a federal judge to dismiss all of the charges on various grounds, with particular attention to the hacking and wire fraud charges. The attorney’s pretrial arguments provide insight into his defense strategy should the matter proceed to trial.

Last year, following the initial indictment, Davies objected to the computer hacking charge on the grounds that the government had erroneously used two misdemeanors pertaining to the same crime to elevate the charge to a felony. In order for hacking to be a felony under the federal law, it has to be done for the purpose of committing an additional crime, or a “tortious” act — i.e., an action that could give rise to a civil suit.

But in a circular argument, the government had essentially charged Kernell with obtaining unauthorized access to information in Yahoo’s computers for the criminal purpose of obtaining unauthorized access to the information.

In March, prosecutors addressed the circular problem by amending the charge to state that Kernell’s alleged unauthorized computer access violated Palin’s privacy, committing a tortious act under the laws of Tennessee, where Kernell resides.

Davies, however, says the Tennessee law is improperly invoked, and Palin isn’t entitled to privacy protection.

Continue Reading “Accused Palin Hacker Says Stolen E-Mails Were Public Record” »

As if we needed further proof that everything is connected to Anonymous, a woman who was a long-ago object of fascination to the notorious griefer collective nearly took the gold this week in the reality TV competition America’s Next Top Model.

New Orleans college student and artist Allison Harvard, 21, survived 11 elimination rounds to reach the show’s season finale, which aired Wednesday. The hands-down favorite with Top Model fans, she nonetheless lost in the competition’s final minutes when host Tyra Banks and a panel of judges anointed rival Teyona Anderson — a contestant with a more conventional look.

Well before Harvard became famous to a national TV audience, she was both appreciated and feared on the “/b/” board on 4chan — the birthplace of the internet’s greatest memes and most felonious pranks. The waifish, wide-eyed blonde’s self-portraits — which she’d posted on the web — circulated in that community in 2005, according to Encyclopedia Dramatica, the canonical record of all things channish. 

The ghostly digital photos of Harvard in heavy eyeliner and broken-babydoll outfits and poses, along with her fascination with nosebleeds, simultaneously aroused and frightened Anonymous members, who dubbed her “Creepy Chan.”

Continue Reading “‘Anonymous’ Pin-Up Girl Is Runner-Up For America’s Next Top Model” »

A 16-year-old North Carolina boy arrested for allegedly making a bomb threat against Purdue University had a secret identity as a superstar in an unusual online subculture — one dedicated to making prank phone calls for a live internet audience, his mother admitted Thursday.

“I heard the prank phone calls he made,” says Annette Lundeby of Oxford. “They were really funny prank phone calls…. He made phone calls to, like, Walmart.”

Lundeby confirmed that her son was known online as “Tyrone,” a celebrity in a prank-calling community that grew late last year out of the trouble-making “/b/” board on 4chan. Using the VOIP conferencing software Ventrilo, as many as 300 listeners would gather on a server run by Tyrone to listen to him and other amateur voice actors make often-crude and racist phone calls, some of which are archived on YouTube. The broadcasts were organized through websites like PartyVanPranks.com.

A former fan of Tyrone’s work helped lead the police to Lundeby’s son after the boy allegedly moved beyond pranks this year and began accepting donations from students eager to miss a day of school. In exchange for a little money, Tyrone would allegedly phone in a bomb threat that would shutter the donor’s school for a day.

“People would pay about five dollars, and they get to submit a number,” says Jason Bennett, a 19-year-old college student in Syndey, Australia. “It was getting way out of hand.”

Lundeby admits that her son received donations for his prank phone calls, but denies that he made bomb threats. She says her son was with her, coming home from church, at the time of the February 15 phone call that summoned a bomb squad and evacuated the mechanical engineering building at Purdue University in Indiana.

Bennett didn’t hear the Purdue call, but he says he heard Tyrone admit to that bomb threat later, and decided enough was enough. He contacted university police and began helping them get the goods on “Tyrone.”

The case came to a head on March 4, when Tyrone made a series of rapid-fire bomb threats against five different schools around the United States. Bennett recorded the calls.

“This is a warning to every staff, student and anybody else who may be in the school tomorrow afternoon at 11:00 a.m.,” the caller is heard saying in a voicemail message for Mill Valley High School in Shawnee, Kansas.

“There are twelve bombs located throughout the entire campus at the school,” the caller continues (.mp3). “They are in random lockers throughout the school — I will not tell you which lockers they are located in. There are also two in the bathroom and there is one in the gym. You have exactly one hour after 11:00 a.m. to find and disarm the bombs. That is all I have to say. All will be cleansed.”

Continue Reading “Teenage Bomb Threat Suspect Was Internet Prank-Call Star” »

Update: Teenage Bomb Threat Suspect Was Internet Prank-Call Star

It’s the false TV news report heard ’round the world. Raleigh, North Carolina’s WRAL-5 reported last week that a 16-year-old bomb hoax suspect was hauled out of his mother’s home by federal agents, and is now being held without any legal rights on the authority of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, which “supersedes the Constitution.”

This tale of injustice has since shown up on Drudge, Digg, Reddit, and a thousand blogs and shoot-from-the-hip mailing lists. The boy’s name is rising on the Google Trends index. Radio show host Alex Jones interviewed the boy’s mother on Tuesday, and pundits on the left and right are seizing on the story to rail against the government’s unfettered power to make an innocent citizen disappear at will. Some outraged reports are claiming the teenager hasn’t even been charged with a crime.

The arrest of the teenager is real enough. FBI agents investigating a February 15 bomb hoax that evacuated the mechanical engineering building at Purdue University traced the phone call to the juvenile’s Oxford, North Carolina home, served his mother with a search warrant and arrested the teen. They issued a press release about it, omitting the suspect’s name. That was on March 5, and he’s been held without bail in Indiana ever since.

The claim that the boy is a victim of USA PATRIOT, though, appears to have been cut from whole cloth. While there’s plenty to criticize in that post-9/11 law, it doesn’t contain any provision that abrogates a defendant’s right to a trial. It’s also not responsible for making it illegal to phone in a bomb threat. That’s been a federal crime since 1939.

Continue Reading “Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim” »