A new support website has been set up for Bradley Manning, an army analyst accused of leaking material to the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. There are stickers and flyers available in addition to instructions for making banner drops.

They also have a twitter feed at https://twitter.com/FREEBRADLEYorg.

Please keep Manning in your heart and donate what you can while he goes through this difficult ordeal. He has been thrown in solitary confinement in a military prison and can only receive mail and books from pre-authorized senders.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked Verizon, a certificate authority, to stop trusting the certificate issued to Etisalat.

Etisalat was caught using its authority to sign an update for blackberries in the United Arab Emirates which caused malicious code to be downloaded onto blackberry user's devices without their consent. This code (better called surveillance software) was used by the government of the UAE to spy on blackberry users.

Because browsers and other software trust Etisalat's authority, this means that any users SSL connection with any site could be hijacked completely transparently. This leaves their personal information vulnerable as well as their computers if they download executable code which is signed by Etisalat.

Hopefully Verizon revokes this certificate and the SSL trust system will be made slightly more secure. As long as trust for this system is not distributed and resides in a hierarchy, problems like this will continue to occur.

If any of you have been getting Macintosh security advice from a person who goes by the name Hard_Mac, now would be a good time to cut ties. That person is actually Darren Thurston [1] [2], a known snitch from the green scare cases. Who needs good computer security when one of your friends will sell you down the river anyway? He also goes by Rad_Boy.

More references: Vancouver Anarchist Online Archive, crimethinc, Portland IMC

Rap News has created a hilarious but accurate rap video newscast about the government's attempt to create an "internet kill switch" and the importance of maintaining a free internet. Featuring guest speakers Julian Assange, a representative of the pentagon, and a tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorist. The video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3adw9oLBkBI

CNET is reporting that security researcher Jacob Appelbaum who works at the Tor Project and volunteers for Wikileaks was detained by federal officials upon re-entering the United States.

His phone was stolen by border guards and was detained by over three hours. Unlike some not-so-smart students at MIT, who talked to the feds , Jacob refused to answer any questions. Like many of us, Jake appears to understand that there is a line in the sand; that the government is not our friend.

As hackers, we have to stop tolerating people who speak to federal authorities and help in their persecution of hackers and organizations like Wikileaks. They should be expelled from our events, mailing lists, and community.

The FBI and the rest of the federal government is bringing down heat strong on the hacker movement due to the recent actions of Wikileaks. We must not budge, we must not talk, and we must let people know when we are targeted or harassed. Their greatest power is that of keeping us silent.

Wikileaks has posted a mysterious file in their Afghan War Diary leak. The file, called Insurance, is larger than any other part of the leak and is encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption. Cryptome and others have speculated that they posted this hoping it would get well-distributed and that in the event that they are attacked by the military, justice department, or other foes in retaliation for their recent leaks, they could release the passphrase. Presumably, this file contains something important.

Please download and seed the torrent for this file. We need to get this file as widely distributed as possible in the event that using this insurance becomes necessary for Wikileaks. For those who use magnet links (Gnutella and BitTorrent), the magnet link is:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:76a36f1d11c72eb5663eeb4cf31e351321efa3a3&dn=insurance.aes256&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.thepiratebay.org%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%2Fannounce

If you want to download it straight from a torrent site, the Pirate Bay has a torrent at:
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5723136/WikiLeaks_insurance

Its not exactly news that the government doesn't have much concern for citizen privacy. And it shouldn't be a surprise that government agencies are doing their best to disrupt and destroy radical communities by using various forms of violence. There was a bit of coverage of the infrastructure in place to enable large scale monitoring via deep packet inspection and calea support in issue 10 of HTZ, and now there is some legal news on the white house trying to extend the power of FBI requests for email usage (who mail is being sent to and when, aka envelope information) as well as url request history from service providers without aproval from a judge. More on this can be found on the Washington Post's coverage of this story here.

Tor can be downloaded from https://torproject.org. The HTTPS Everywhere Plugin (https://https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere) for Firefox enables HTTPS surfing on many websites such as Wikipedia, The New York Times, Facebook, and others.

As many of you know, Bradley Manning has been charged with releasing the classified video Collateral Murder that brought the war home to millions. He is also suspected in other leaks and needs our urgent assistance. As the hacker community, we have an obligation to defend those who have been accused of fighting for the freedom of information. You may write Bradley at the following address:

Update: This address has been removed as it is no longer valid. For updates, see freebradley.org

Please note that ALL mail is read by guards and that ANY statement made by you, whether solicited or not, can hurt him. Be careful what you write and remember he is ALLEGED to have leaked the video. No staples, weapons, money, glitter pens, or anything else that will get him thrown further into the hole.

If you're sitting on a pile of cash, now is the time to donate.

Facebook has added an account delete option but it wasn't well publicized until around a day ago on Slashdot. Unlike the "de-activation" many users have been forced into when trying to close their account, the delete function actually deletes your account and all your personal information. If you're excited to hear the news, here's the link: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Hackbloc tabled with Aftershock Action Alliance at The Next Hope in downtown Manhattan, NYC. We were able to get out a good number of HTZ #9, #10, and #10.5. We helped out with a presentation on the last day titled Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology. Smokey discussed the history of government oppression during natural disasters and covered a brief history of technology in crises situations. Evoltech spoke about the tapatio project, specific challenges involved with developing and deploying comms tools for mobilizations, and our plans for future comms development. Ringo closed up the talk with discussion of social responsibility as it applies to the hacker ethic.

I am often critical of hacker culture in general as it tends to be leaden with patriarchy, homophobia, and an acceptance of snitch culture. This conference wasn't different, but it was refreshing to hear folk confronting these issues during different discussions. Johannes Grenzfurthner's of monochrom talk titled "Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself" and the presentation titled "Informants: Villains or Heroes?" were especially interesting to me. While I have zero tolerance for snitches in the communities that I associate with I know that this is not the case with the hacker community where Emmanuel Goldstein speculated that 1 in 4 hackers would end up turning on one of their friends. Specifically relevant to this discussion was the outing of Adrian Lamo as an informant who turned on Bradley Manning for the alleged leak of the Collateral Murder video. What I appreciated from the informant talk was that it provided a forum for dialogue about snitch culture and state oppression specifically as it relates to the individual lives of victims in the hacker community where otherwise I think this would have just gone ignored and would not be addressed publicly.

Ironically, we published an article proposing a stop snitching movement as it applies to hackers in issue 9, not knowing how timely and relevant it would quickly become. It was inspiring to hear the clapping and cheers every time we brought up expelling snitches from the movement both in our presentation and the one by Wikileaks.