Anonymous hacks US Sentencing Commission Web site in response to death of Aaron Swartz

Jacob Penderworth -

Early this morning, hacker group Anonymous took control of the U.S. government's Sentencing Commission Web site. This surprise attack was in response to the death of Aaron Swartz two weeks ago. Swartz was a programmer, writer, and Internet activist. He committed suicide on 26 January, but Anonymous does not believe it was self-inflicted. In light of that, they wish to avenge his death.

Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed. Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win -- a twisted and distorted perversion of justice -- a game where the only winning move was not to play.
The hacker group has downloaded sensitive information from the government's servers and is threatening to make it public unless "outdated" laws are modified. The group believes that the government is currently employing "poorly-envisioned legislation" that was "written to be so broadly applied as to make a felony crime out of violation of terms of service, creating in effect vast swathes of crimes, and allowing for selective punishment."

Anonymous says this time there will be reformation in these rules, else the group hopes to bring down the government in some way or another. The ending line of the lengthy letter from the hacker group reads, "Not this time. This time there will be change, or there will be chaos..." When chaos will ensue is unknown, though "Operation Last Resort", as it is known, has already begun and confidential information is available on several mirrors. Some of these links are already beginning to go offline after persistence from the FBI but one will always be left, and from that's P2P network The Pirate Bay.

As the FBI fights to regain control of its domain, the Sentencing Commission site remains unreachable. The only version available is one cached by Google, and even that includes the text that Anonymous replaced the main page with.

Source: USSC (Cached by Google)