Anonymous and the Feds

The Anonymous story just keeps getting better and better.

The latest must-read on the subject comes from Somini Sengupta of the New York Times, who offers a great analysis on how a growing crackdown against the global hacker group is playing out across the darker corners of the web.

The piece focuses on The Real Sabu, a hell-raiser on Twitter who in reality was a virtual turn cloak.

Here's how Sengupta put it:

"It turns out that Sabu had become an informant for federal law enforcement authorities. On Tuesday, in what could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the government crackdown on a loose, large confederation of politically inspired 'hacktivists,' he was unmasked and revealed to have helped the authorities catch several fellow hackers in Europe and the United States."

This latest development follows last week's news that Interpol arrested 25 suspected Anonymous members across Europe.

But it's the case of The Real Sabu that could do the most lasting damage to Anonymous.

“It is going to be very difficult for Anonymous to recover from such a breach of trust,” Mikko Hypponen, a security researcher at F-Secure Labs in Helsinki told Sengupta. “You can see the Anonymous people now looking left and right and realizing, if they couldn’t trust Sabu, who can they trust?"

GlobalPost's own Jeb Boone offered his own well-informed take on the matter on his excellent new blog, the Grid.

Of course, Anonymous marches on.

As Jeb reported Mar. 5, the group took on the powerful pro-Israel lobby the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in its typically scary and compelling fashion:

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