So...I always treat what I read on Yahoo with more than a grain of salt, but a story about hackers taking over a government website seemed fairly significant. Also, it was an AP story, which lent it more credibility.
Still, I read it on Yahoo and wanted to find some confirmation. The NY Times website had nothing. The LA Times on line had the following brief story, which I found by searching for it. It was not prominently displayed.
The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The FBI is investigating.
The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed."
The hackers say they've infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.
Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors. Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.
The FBI's Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, said in a statement that "we were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation. We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person's or government agency's network."Why am I not impressed that the FBI was "aware as soon as it happened?" And why isn't this considered a more important news story?
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