Take an indefinite vacation

Brian McFadden in today’s NY Times.

The Richard Aoki imbroglio

Richard Aoki

Seth Rosenfeld

On August 20^th an article by Seth Rosenfeld in the San Francisco Chronicle touched off a combination of soul-searching and finger-pointing on the left, particularly those segments that view Richard Aoki, a well-known activist who killed himself in 2009, as an icon. Rosenfeld claims that Aoki was an FBI informant who supplied the guns borne by the Black Panther Party in a famous photograph of the group on the steps of the state capitol building. Rosenfeld is on a publicity blitz for his new book “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power” that includes a chapter on Aoki’s alleged ties to the FBI.

For those who have a considerable stake in Aoki’s reputation, such as his biographer Diane Fujino, it became imperative to discredit Rosenfeld’s findings. It was also important for those who believe that the Panthers’ legacy is mostly positive to weigh in on Fujino and other Aoki supporters’ side. Rosenfeld became seen as a kind of gatekeeper for the 1960s who wanted to quarantine the Panthers in much the same manner as Chris Hedges was seen by black bloc supporters not only as an enemy of “diversity of tactics” but of the most effective group in the Occupy movement.

On August 23^rd Rosenfeld and Fujino were the featured guests on Democracy Now where they aired out their differences. Rosenfeld stated that he has no way of knowing whether the FBI was involved in providing the guns or even if they knew Aoki was giving them to the Black Panthers. Fujino mainly urged the audience to not leap to any conclusions about Aoki based on the files obtained through FOIA since there was not enough to go on, including the incorrect reference to him having the middle name Matsui.

Fujino also raised the possibility that Aoki was the posthumous victim of “snitch jacketing”. If that was the case, one has to ask why retired FBI agent Wesley Swearingen, who reviewed the FBI files with Rosenfeld, would want to lend himself to this cause in light of what Rosenfeld reported:

One of the documents that was released was a 1967 FBI report on the Black Panthers. And this report identified Richard Aoki as an informant. It assigned him the code number, T-2, for that report. But I still wanted to find out more about it, so I spoke with a former FBI agent named Wesley Swearingen. Mr. Swearingen had been in the FBI for over 25 years. He had retired honorably. He had later become a critic of the FBI’s political surveillance, and particularly he had helped vacate the murder conviction of a Black Panther named Geronimo Pratt.

I should mention that the FBI directed Aoki to join the CP and the SWP before he ever got involved with the Panthers. Years later when the SWP sued the FBI, Swearingen proved to be more principled than the average snoop. As a witness, he revealed that the FBI was lying when it claimed that it was committed to protecting the identity of its informants. Why he would turn around years after he had retired to tarnish the reputation of Richard Aoki is something of a mystery, unless you believe that a plot is afoot to deradicalize the Occupy movement or something like that. And to establish his credibility even further, Swearingen took the trouble to write a book titled “FBI Secrets” for South End Press, with a laudatory introduction by Ward Churchill. Whew!

Scott Kurashige, the Director of Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at University of Michigan, weighed in on Aoki’s behalf the day after Rosenfeld’s article had appeared in the S.F. Chronicle. Using Facebook, Kurashige claims that Aoki was exploited by Rosenfeld to serve a liberal political agenda by focusing on Aoki’s involvement with the TWLF (Third World Liberation Front) at Berkeley that was supposedly “violent” and turned off many white students. In contrast to the TWLF, Rosenfeld endorses the “good, wholesome” Free Speech Movement. This amounts to a “white liberal narrative of the 1960s that at least in part wants to blame violent activists of color (even if in this case they are steered by the FBI) for the demise of liberalism and the rise of neoconservativism.” Well, gee whiz, who wants to be part of a “white liberal narrative” so I guess it makes sense to defend Aoki against various and sundry charges.

According to Kurashige, Rosenfeld strongly suggests that Aoki working on behalf of the FBI sparked the TWLF’s “violent” turn. Diane Fujino’s version of Richard Aoki makes it even more unlikely that he would have acted to derail the student movement at Berkeley. He simply didn’t fit the profile of a “disruptive” element:

And in another way, Richard Aoki does not fit the profile because many times, especially if they’re agent provocateurs or even infiltrators, they’re either low-key or they are people who try to get people to constantly engage in provocative and disruptive and risky behaviors. And Richard was a scholar. He’s known for giving—the things that he’s best known for—well, until this week—was giving the first guns to the Black Panther Party to support their police patrols to stop police brutality in the black neighborhoods. And Richard was a scholar also. He was advanced theoretically and could spar theoretically with anyone around him. And that is not a typical profile of an infiltrator.

Hearing all these different versions of what Richard Aoki did or did not do motivated me to plunk down $43.55 for Seth Rosenfeld’s book and read the chapter on Aoki. Was he more like a Symbionese Liberation Front member or more like someone addressing a plenary session at a Modern Language Association conference? Maybe a bit of both?

Most of it was what I expected and what has been already reported but I stopped dead in my tracks when I read this:

On March 14, the TWLF central committee debated whether to end the strike. Richard Aoki argued for escalating the violence. “I was willing to risk everything for keeping the struggle going,” he told the author. “We’d have taken on the National Guard. Then it would have gotten real violent. I figured we would have gotten more if we continued it just a bit, even though I he threat of massive escalation, because of bringing in of the National Guard, would’ve really resulted in some stuff. But we had plans. I had plans.”

The plan was to steal guns from National Guard armories. “We’d have had their weapons,” he said. At that time, Aoki recalled, there were “National Guard armories all over this area, stocked with that stuff, and we knew where they were. My faction was willing to take the strike to a higher level.” At a meeting in Stiles Hall, however, weary strikers voted overwhelmingly to end the strike.

Frankly it did not matter to me at this point whether Aoki was urging the theft of guns from the armories to use against the National Guard in a firefight upon the instructions of his ostensible FBI handler or whether he was urging this course as a “sincere” genuine ultraleft numbskull. It is practically beside the point. The 1960s movement was largely destroyed because of such adventures, from Weatherman bombs to the kind of militarism that Aoki espoused. The left has to be grounded in reality, not fantasies drawn from “Battle of Algiers” or an NLF poster.

I should add that it was not just febrile notions of guerrilla warfare that destroyed the left. Spared for a time from ultraleft self-immolation, the SWP also crashed and burned largely as a result of a self-deception of another sort. Instead of styling itself as urban guerrillas, the SWP bought into another fantasy, namely that the late 1970s—the time of cocaine, disco, capitalist expansion and general retreat from the 60s radicalization—marked the onset of a working-class radicalization that would culminate in a bid for power led by the party’s brilliant leader. The collapse of the SWP assumed a different dynamic than that of the SDS or the Panthers but fell into the same general category: political psychosis.

I have no idea whether Aoki was an FBI agent or not, although if I was a betting man I would put money on it. And if he was, I would not be surprised if he maintained connections with the bureau all the while he was convincing his comrades that he was on the level. The mind of such people, who get paid to infiltrate left groups, can be exceedingly complex. Ed Heisler was a national committee member of the SWP for a number of years, largely on the strength of his work in the railroad workers union. He was someone who had fully absorbed Marxist theory even if he never believed a word of it. His speeches at Oberlin conventions were always a hit with the membership. And all the while he was on the FBI payroll.

This is something that the great and late Walt Contreras Sheasby posted to Marxmail in June 2004:

Hello Friends-

Paranoia is one of the biggest problems facing the left. But occasionally we discover suspicious interventions, such as a former FBI informant who may have continuing links to the government. We need to set this former informant aside from our Green Party discussions without implying that this person is currently acting as a government informant.

Apparently there is no doubt that the 61-year-old Ed Heisler who is on many Green lists is the same Ed Heisler who was an FBI informant in the late 1960s and 1970s. I was reluctant to reach such a conclusion without fairly conclusive evidence.

Heisler himself provides sufficient circumstantial evidence in his Yahoo profile for the camejoforpresident list, which is appended below. Immediately above that I have pasted a copy of a blurb on Heisler’s book in 1976 on the dissidents in a Teamster affiliate that I discovered.

Finally I want to say a few words about the Black Panther Party. Again I have no idea whether the FBI was behind Aoki providing guns to them but it really doesn’t matter. The initial splash that was made when they appeared armed in public was very good for the Black liberation struggle in the same fashion that Robert F. Williams’s NAACP-based (!) Black Armed Guard was a step forward in 1959. The idea of self-defense against racist terror was something that most people could understand to one degree or another even when the media tries to depict people like Williams or Malcolm X as promoting violence. When the Panthers marched on the California state house in 1967 carrying weapons in protest against a law that would prevent carrying them in public, they electrified the Black community and gave many young radicals, including me, the hope that revolution was on the agenda.

But by 1971 the Black Panthers were on the ropes, victims of FBI provocations and armed assaults as well as their own detachment from reality. The August 1971 issue of their newspaper should be seen by anybody who is inclined toward rosy-tinged nostalgia for a group that made terrible mistakes despite the best of intentions (of course, the same thing was true of Che Guevara in Bolivia.) There’s an article hailing “revolutionary suicide” as well as a cartoon of a Black Panther astride a dead cop with the words “The Lumpen Will Rise to Deal With the Oppressor”.

In many ways the orientation to the “lumpen” was what destroyed the Panthers. Instead of trying to figure out a way to build an organization of Black workers, including bus drivers, Con Ed utility people and sanitation workers, they oriented to petty thieves and drug dealers. In 1971 if you boarded a city bus, chances were good that the driver had an Afro out to here and a pick comb with the red-black-and-green nationalist colors. Were they for revolution? Damned right, even if most voted Democrat.

What was needed of course was a Black political party that could have drawn in such workers and given it the social weight to withstand police attacks, even if they were bound to come. In a very real sense, the political psychoses of most of the 60s left were a function of relative working-class quiescence. Blacks were ready to move but not on the terms of “revolutionary suicide”.

Now that we are 12 years into the 21^st century and 4 years into a seemingly intractable financial crisis that has left perhaps up to 12 percent of the population without a job and millions with foreclosed homes, the conditions are ripening for a new left that is based on reality and not fantasy. Let’s not blow our opportunities since too much is riding on the outcome.

Lenin on Pussy Riot

Why is there not a single political event in Germany that does not add to the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy? Because Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in championing every protest against tyranny…It intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and political life; in the matter of Wilhelm’s refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city mayor (our Economists have not managed to educate the Germans to the understanding that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with liberalism!); in the matter of the law against ‘obscene’ publications and pictures; in the matter of governmental influence on the election of professors, etc., etc.

(From “What is to be Done”)

Striking miners killed in South Africa

Cops target Red Spark collective and Occupy Seattle Activists.

Cops target Red Spark collective and Occupy Seattle Activists.

Read more about this at the link below.

Spread the word!

http://kasamaproject.org/2012/07/10/swat-raid-organizers-of-occupy-seattle-and-e4e/

Antibodies; Evil

Within the past week or so, I have seen two movies on Netflix streaming that remind me why I like “foreign” films. It has nothing to do with being a snob—even though I confess to being one from time to time. It has more to do with a need to be entertained. A few weeks ago, I got this comment from Ben Courtice under my review of The Forgotten Space, a Marxist documentary I compared favorably to “escapist trash”:

I actually have a preference for one piece of escapist crap after another – I spend my days as an activist wading through torrents of information about how the world is going to shit – but this sounds really good! Thanks I’ll look out for it.

I told Ben that I might have something to say about “Woman in Black”, “Chronicle”, and “The Grey”, three films I saw at my local Cineplex, but simply lacked the motivation to follow through since despite being watchable, they were just not good enough to qualify as “escapist” fare.

Interestingly enough, the European films reviewed below pay homage to Hollywood “escapist trash”, perhaps demonstrating that other countries can take our own designs and improve upon them, like the latest Chinese consumer electronics.

(Sorry, English-subtitled trailer for Antibodies not available.)

The first is a German film made in 2005 titled Antibodies that might be described as a shameless rip-off of Silence of the Lambs.

The two main characters are a serial killer named Gabriel Engel (André Hennicke) and a part-time cop from the boondocks named Michael Martens (Wotan Wilke Möhring) who comes to the big city where Engel is being jailed in order to determine whether he killed a teenage girl in his tiny farming village. All of Engel’s victims were boys so there was some question in Martens’s mind whether she was one of his victims.

Engel enjoys taunting Martens through the bars of his cell, in the same way that Hannibal Lechter taunted Agent Starling, another cop from the boondocks. Engel insists that he is not the girl’s killer and teases Martens with insinuations that the cop might be hiding something, very possibly some dark secret about his sexual impulses. Since Martens is a pious, if not downright prudish, Catholic, he dismisses Engel’s insinuations and presses on with his interrogation.

When he returns home, Martens finds himself at odds with his fellow villagers who resent his ongoing investigations of a homegrown murderer, not Engel. The most violently opposed to the investigation, which includes a blood test for a DNA sample to compare with the semen-soiled underpants of the young victim, is his father-in-law who shoots Martens’s dog in an opening scene when they are out deer-hunting.

The village is a reminder of how backward rural society is in Germany, especially in Catholic villages. The sexual repression is thick enough to cut with a knife. Director/screenwriter Christian Alvart is clearly tuned in to the same morbidity found in Michael Haneke’s 2009 The White Ribbon, a film focused on the rural social base of an incipient Nazi movement. In my review I noted:

Beneath the Baron is the Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) who is enough to turn anybody into an atheist. A rigidly authoritarian figure, especially to his own children, he decides to tie his teenaged son’s hands to the bed each night to prevent him from masturbating. The name of the movie originates from his decision to force his children to wear white ribbons as a reminder of their sins.

While the last thing in the world I would want to do is disclose the powerful ending of this film, I can say that it casts the small-town cop and his teenage son in a modern version of the biblical tale of God ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his son, in order to demonstrate his faith. I always found this story that formed the core of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling about as effective an argument against religion as can be found.

The other film is Evil, a 2003 Swedish work directed by Mikael Håfström and based on the semi-autobiographical novel Ondskan written by Jan Guillou, a long-time leftist like the late Stieg Larsson.

The main character is Erik Ponti (Andreas Wilson), a 15 year old who lives with his mother and his sadistic stepfather who beats him over the slightest infraction. Not being able to strike back at the man, Erik takes it out on his schoolmates who are never able to match his fighting skills and–more importantly—his blind rage.

Hoping that a change of scenery might calm him down, his mother sends him to Stjärnsberg, a boarding school that is about as rigidly class-stratified as feudal India. Greeted by Otto Silverhielm (Gustaf Skarsgård), a self-described nobleman in the senior class, Erik learns the rules of the game. If he stays out of trouble, he will eventually become a senior and enjoy all the privileges that go with that status. Silverhielm also clues him on the social make-up of the school. There are aristocrats like him, students from wealthy backgrounds, and ordinary folk whose parents manage to scrape together the money to send them to Stjärnsberg. That last category describes Erik, whose mother sold family heirlooms to raise the tuition money.

Erik is escorted to his dormitory room where he meets his new roommate Pierre Tanguy (Henrik Lundström), the bookish and physically ungifted son of a Swiss diplomat. As the two take an immediate liking to each other (the case of opposites attracting each other), Pierre makes sure to warn him about student life at the school. If you keep a low profile, you will do okay. If you get noticed, especially by the upperclassmen, you will have big problems.

In one of Erik’s first classes, he is introduced to the school’s Nazi in residence who lectures the students about racial differences. The Nordic race is handsome and physically powerful. The further south you go, the weaker the specimen. He has Erik and Pierre stand up in front of the class to demonstrate the racial differences, much to their chagrin.

At lunch the next day, Erik gets an introduction to the kind of hazing that is universally accepted there, just as it is in fraternities and private schools worldwide. In a school like Silverhielm, it is not just about social acceptance. It is about inculcating the kind of deference to authority that serve as a lubricant in the machinery of the military and the corporation. When a student sitting at his table uses the word “crap” in a sentence, an upperclassmen calls him over to receive punishment (cursing is strictly prohibited, as is smoking), which consists of being smacked on the head with a butter knife. It is much more painful than it sounds.

A few moments later, Erik makes the same infraction. But when he is ordered to receive his punishment, he refuses. Like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and countless other memorable characters in prison and sadistic private school movies made in Hollywood, Erik is a stubborn nonconformist. He is also like James Dean, a “rebel without a cause”. Just to make sure that the audience makes this specific connection, Erik and Pierre confess their love of this quintessential 1950s rebellious youth movie in the course of sharing enthusiasms. As will be instantly recognizable, the two boys are stand-in’s for the James Dean and Sal Mineo characters in Nicholas Ray’s classic.

The plot revolves around the clash between the upperclassmen and Erik who refuses to bend to their will. No matter how much they escalate their harassment and physical abuse, he refuses to fight. He understands that if he gets expelled from Stjärnsberg, he will not be able to get into college.

Evil was nominated for best foreign film of the year at the Academy Awards in 2003, but the novelist upon whose book the film was based on was not permitted into the United States since he is listed as a terrorist by the State Department.

I strongly recommend a look at the wiki on Jan Guillou that leads off as follows:

Jan Oskar Sverre Lucien Henri Guillou (Swedish pronunciation: [jɑːn ɡɪjuː]; born 17 January 1944) is a Swedish author and journalist. Among his books are a series of spy fiction novels about a spy named Carl Hamilton, and a trilogy of historical fiction novels about a Knight Templar, Arn Magnusson. He is the owner of one of the largest publishing companies in Sweden, Piratförlaget (English: Pirate Publishing), together with Liza Marklund and his wife, publisher Ann-Marie Skarp.

Guillou’s fame in Sweden was established during his time as an investigative journalist. In 1973, he and co-reporter Peter Bratt exposed a secret intelligence organization in Sweden, Informationsbyrån (IB). He is still active within journalism as a column writer for the Swedish evening tabloid Aftonbladet.

In October 2009, the tabloid Expressen accused Guillou of having been active as an agent of the Soviet spy organization KGB between 1967 and 1972. Jan Guillou confirmed he had a series of contacts with KGB representatives during this period, he also admits to having received payments from KGB, but maintains that his purpose was to collect information for his journalistic work. The accusation was based on documents released from the Swedish Security Service (Säpo) and interviews with former KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky. In a later trial Expressen denied having accused Guillou of having been a Soviet spy, claiming that this was a false interpretation of its headlines and reporting.

In 1973, Folket i Bild/Kulturfront, a left-wing magazine, published a series of articles written by Guillou and Peter Bratt, revealing a Swedish secret intelligence agency called Informationsbyrån (“The Information Bureau” or IB for short). The articles, based on information initially furnished by former IB employee Håkan Isacson, described the IB as a secret organization that gathered information on Swedish communists and others deemed to be “security risks”. The organization operated outside of the framework of the defense and ordinary intelligence, and was invisible in terms of state budget allocations. The articles in Folket i Bild/Kulturfront accused the IB staff of being engaged in alleged murder, break-ins, wiretapping against foreign embassies in Sweden and spying abroad.

The exposure of the IB in the magazine, which included headshots with names and social security numbers of some of the alleged staff published under the headline “Spies”, led to a major domestic political scandal known as the “IB affair” (IB-affären). The activities ascribed to this secret outfit and its alleged ties to the Swedish Social Democratic Party were denied by Prime Minister Olof Palme, Defense Minister Sven Andersson and the chief of the Swedish defence forces, Stig Synnergren. However, later investigations by various journalists and by a public commissions, as well as autobiographies by the persons involved, have confirmed some of the activities described by Bratt and Guillou. In 2002, the public commission published a 3,000 page report where research about the IB-affair was included.

Guillou, Peter Bratt and Håkan Isacson were all arrested, tried in camera and convicted of espionage. According to Bratt, the verdict required some stretching of established judicial practice on the part of the court since none of them were accused of having acted in collusion with a foreign power. After one appeal Guillou’s sentence was lessened from one year to 10 months. Guillou and Bratt served part of their sentence in solitary cells. Guillou was kept first at Långholmen Prison in central Stockholm and later at Österåker Prison north of the capital.

Like Stieg Larssen, Guillou has devoted much of his journalist career to exposing the ultraright in Sweden. When my wife and I began watching Evil through our beloved, new Roku box, she was puzzled at first by the scene in the classroom where the Nazi professor was spouting his nonsense. “How can that be in a social democratic country”, she asked.

That was how it appeared generally, but I reminded her of the Dragon Tattoo novels that revealed the underbelly of Swedish society. Although I made a mental note to myself to do some research on Swedish fascism in the Columbia Library after reading the first two books in Larsson’s trilogy, I never got around to it. As is usually the case with me, research topics vie for my attention. Maybe after I retire, I will have the time to give them all the attention they deserve. Before that glorious day arrives, however, I hope to have more to say on the topic of the Swedish fascist movements.

Anonymous hacks FBI conference call

NY Times February 3, 2012

F.B.I. Admits Hacker Group’s Eavesdropping

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The international hackers group known as Anonymous turned the tables on the F.B.I. by listening in on a conference call last month between the bureau, Scotland Yard and other foreign police agencies about their joint investigation of the group and its allies.

Anonymous posted a 16-minute recording of the call on the Web on Friday and crowed about the episode in via Twitter: “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

Hours later, the group took responsibility for hacking the Web site of a law firm that had represented Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who was accused of leading a group of Marines responsible for killing 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005. The group said it would soon make public “mails, faxes, transcriptions” and other material related to the case, taken from the site of Puckett & Faraj, a Washington-area law firm. A voluminous 2.55 gigabyte file labeled as those files was later posted on a site often used by hackers, Pirate Bay.

Regarding the conference call, an F.B.I. official said Anonymous had not in fact hacked into it or any other bureau facilities. Instead, the official said, the group had simply obtained an e-mail giving the time, telephone number and access code for the call. The e-mail had been sent on Jan. 13 to more than three dozen people at the bureau, Scotland Yard, and agencies in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden. One recipient, a foreign police official, evidently forwarded the notification to a private account, he said, and it was then intercepted by Anonymous.

“It’s not really that sophisticated,” said the official, who would discuss the episode only on condition of anonymity. He said no Federal Bureau of Investigation system was compromised but noted that communications security was more challenging when agencies in multiple countries were involved.

“We’re always looking at ways to make our communications more secure, and obviously we’ll be taking a look at what happened here,” he said.

The bureau issued a brief statement confirming the intrusion, which was first reported by The Associated Press: “The information was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained. A criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible.”

The breach, clearly an embarrassment for investigators, is the latest chapter in a continuing war of words and contest of technology between hacking groups and their perceived opponents in law enforcement and the corporate world.

The F.B.I. e-mail titled “Anon-Lulz International Coordination Call” — a reference to Anonymous and to an allied group of hackers, Lulz Security — announced a conference call for investigators “to discuss the on-going investigations related to Anonymous, Lulzsec, Antisec, and other associated splinter groups.”

The recording posted on YouTube and elsewhere included American and British voices discussing suspects in the case. The call begins with banter between an American named Bruce and British officials named Stewart or Stuart and Matt, who are joined by another official from F.B.I. headquarters, Timothy F. Lauster Jr., who sent the e-mail announcing the conference call.

The conference call illustrates both the scale of the international police effort to identify and prosecute the hackers, and the striking contrast in age and status of the investigators and their targets: what seem to be middle-aged law enforcement officials on two continents are overheard dissecting the illicit activities of teenagers.

A British official refers to Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, two British teenagers who have been arrested and are wanted in the United States on suspicion of having ties to Anonymous. The British official describes a 325-page report analyzing Ryan Cleary’s hard drive, and an F.B.I. agent in Los Angeles discusses various suspects and their nicknames.

The investigators also refer to several suspects who had not yet been arrested, including one who calls himself Tehwongz, described by the British official as “a 15-year-old kid who’s basically just doing this all for attention and is a bit of an idiot.”

The conversation was part of an international criminal investigation that began in 2010 after Anonymous championed WikiLeaks by mounting electronic attacks on MasterCard and PayPal and other sites that had stopped collecting donations for the antisecrecy organization.

Last month, Anonymous attacked the Web sites of the Justice Department and major entertainment companies in retaliation for criminal charges against the founders of Megaupload, a popular Internet service used to transfer music and movies anonymously.

The hackers could have penetrated the law-enforcement official’s personal e-mail account by guessing a weak password, sneaking into an unencrypted wireless network, or, most likely, with a common and relatively easy tactic known as a phishing attack, said Keith Ross, a computer science professor at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and a security expert. A phishing attack involves sending an e-mail that looks like it is from a friend or relative and persuading the recipient to click on a link that allows every keystroke entered on that particular computer to be recorded. Recording keystrokes is an efficient way to steal someone’s e-mail username and password.

“The real issue for law-enforcement officials is they need to be better educated about how they handle sensitive data on their e-mails,” Mr. Ross said. “It’s an easy vulnerability to crack. If you’re not careful it’s a very dangerous attack.”

The same methods may have been used to hack the Web site of the lawyers who represented Sergeant Wuterich, Neal Puckett and Haytham Faraj. Their Web site was defaced by the hackers to display a message from Anonymous saying it was exposing “the corruption of the court systems and the brutality of U.S. imperialism,” Gawker.com reported. Later, the site was taken down.

In an interview late Friday, Mr. Faraj said he thought that little of the material stolen from their site related to the Haditha case, though some documents might relate to a polygraph that he said Sergeant Wuterich had passed. He said he feared the documents might include a confidential statement from a rape victim in an unrelated case. “I think in their haste to put stuff out there, they’re going to hurt some people,” he said.

Mr. Faraj said he had represented Guantanamo detainees and had supported and offered to represent Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of providing documents to WikiLeaks, suggesting that the hackers of Anonymous may be inadvertently attacking someone who shares some of their presumed political views. “They got the wrong guy,” he said.

He said the F.B.I. had contacted the law firm and opened an investigation.

Sergeant Wuterich, 31, pleaded guilty last month in a military court in California to dereliction of duty, telling the judge that he regretted ordering his men to “shoot first, ask questions later.” As part of a plea agreement, however, he received no prison time, though his rank was reduced to private. The sentence sparked anger in Iraq and among some human rights advocates, and the Anonymous message complained that Sergeant Wuterich had gotten “only a pay cut” as a penalty.

Somini Sengupta and Nicole Perlroth contributed reporting from San Francisco.

 

Man faces 75 year prison term for videotaping cops

Mobilize to protest cop attacks in NYC

New Yorkers should turn out tomorrow from 5:30 to 7pm at One Police Plaza tomorrow. Back in the old days when I was in the SWP the party used to vote to “mobilize” its members to go to a demo or a conference during the Vietnam antiwar movement. The Marxism mailing list and the Unrepentant Marxist blog does not have anything quite like this, given our rather disembodied cyber-existence. Anyhow I plan to be there and hope to see you there as well.

Details are here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=214291185301829

Time	Friday, September 30 · 5:30pm – 7:00pm
Location	One Police Plaza (NYPD Headquarters)
Created By	Alex Vitale
More Info	(NYPD Headquarters is located on Park Row across the street from City Hall and through the Municpal Buildings archway) We the undersigned condemn recent police attacks against the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations underway in Lower Manhattan. The NYPD has: -pepper sprayed people in custody -violently arrested non violent demonstrators -curtailed the expressive activities of demonstrators in Liberty Square All of this is part of a long standing practice of the NYPD to make public protest extremely difficult, unpleasant, and even dangerous. Join us in calling for an end to police repression of protests in New York, and to support the ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Bring signs and soapboxes/milkcrates Please invite your friends. To sign onto this call, add your name to the wall and we will add people to the official list as best we can. Please include any relevant identifying information. [Organizations listed for identification purposes only.] Alex S. Vitale, author of City of Disorder, Brooklyn College, Executive Council PSC-CUNY Penny Lewis, Murphy Institute for Labor Education, Executive Council PSC-CUNY Francis Fox Piven, CUNY Graduate Center Stanley Aronowitz, CUNY Graduate Center Leslie Cagan, peace and justice organizer Larry Goldbetter, President, National Writers Union Jonathan Tasini, President, Economic Future Group Jackie DiSalvo, Baruch College Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos, Brooklyn College Ben Shepard, author of The Beach Beneath the Streets, NYC College of Technology-CUNY Michele Hardesty, Hampshire College Ron Hayduk, author of Democracy for All, BMCC-CUNY Mitchel Cohen, Brooklyn Greens/Green Party. Chair of WBAI Local Station Board Doug Henwood, Editor, Left Business Observer Liza Featherstone, journalist Theodore Hamm, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, MCNY Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, NYU Mark Winston Griffith, Exec. Dir.,Brooklyn Movement Center Carolina Bank Munoz, Brooklyn College Glenn Kissack, Hunter College High School, (ret.) Michael Letwin, Former President, Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Co-Convener, New York City Labor Against the War Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind, Brooklyn College Kitty Krupat, Murphy Institute for Labor Education Marnie Brady, CUNY Graduate Center Stephanie Luce, author of Fighting for a Living Wage, Murphy Institute for Labor Education Eric Laursen, activist, author of The People’s Pension Maida Rosenstein, President, Local 2110 UAW Sean Jacobs, The New School Jessica Blatt, Marymount Manhattan College Michael O’Neil, Secretary of Green Party New York State and Secretary of the Green Party of Brooklyn Mahayana Landowne, John Jay College Andrew Hsiao, Senior Editor, Verso Books Bill Freidheim, BMCC retired, Executive Council PSC-CUNY Rev. Billy Talen Christine Culpepper De Ruiz Charles Post, BMCC-CUNY Jennifer Loewenstein; University of Wisconsin-Madison Tibby Brooks, 9/24 arrestee Mark Brenner, Labor Notes Jack Hammond, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center Fran Geteles, CIty College, retired Stephen Leberstein, City College, retired Renate Bridenthal, Brooklyn College, retired Jonathan Buchsbaum, Queens College, PSC-CUNY Executive Council Jim Perlstein, Co-chair Solidarity Committee PSC, Chair Retiree Chapter PSC TIMES UP Barbara Winslow, Brooklyn College, CUNY Bruno Gulli, author of Earthly Plenitudes, Long Island University (Brooklyn Campus) and Kingsborough Community College Don Madison, MD (Retired Professor of Social Medicine and Health Policy, University of North Carolina Karsten J. Struhl, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

Good coverage of police riot