With all of this talk about hackers and hacking, I thought it would be apt to take a peek at the mindset of hackers like Guccifer, who claims to be behind the DNC hack and to have hacked Hillary Clinton’s server from behind bars at the Alexandria City Jail, where he was extradited from Romania for 18 months and is awaiting sentencing. Apparently, he is encouraged to have access to a computer while in custody, from where his blog is ostensibly being published. (Some claim that this first Guccifer is the man currently in custody, whereas, Guccifer 2.0 is someone else and that both, based on linguistic analyses of chats are not native Romanian speakers but instead Russian. This investigation is ongoing).
This short documentary by VICELAND interviews past and present members of the hacktivist group Anonymous, who are or were willing to risk prison time and all that this entails, to fight for our freedom, as they see it.
As former Anonymous hacker, Mercedes Haefer says here of her involvement in the infamous take-down the websites of PayPal, VISA and MasterCard, in protest over these companies’ refusal to process payments for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, “I don’t like him as a person but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have rights and that I won’t fight for his rights – because, if he doesn’t have rights, then I don’t have rights. [Either] everybody has them or they’re just privileges.”
Canadian hacker, “Bio”, who has not yet been caught is looking at indefinite detention as a “Terrorist” for temporarily taking down a government website, as part of Op Cyber Privacy, in protest over the Anti-Terrorist Bill C-51, which gives the government broader surveillance powers, sparking concerns of privacy abuse.
When asked if he will continue his DDoS attacks, Bio replies, “It depends on what they do with the Bill. It needs to be repealed.” Bio estimates that the likelihood that he will go to jail is “pretty high”, saying that he knew from the start that it would end one of two ways: “Us in prison or we’d win,” but he maintains, “Anonymous, as a whole will always exist.
