LulzSec say they'll release big Murdoch email archive The hacktivists behind a hack on The Sun's website claim to have extracted an email archive which they plan to release later on Tuesday. News International's systems were hacked on Monday night. As a result, visitors to The Sun's website were redirected towards a fake story on the supposed death of Rupert Murdoch by infamous …
Hopefully there are some juicier tidbits to this release than the Sarah Palin emails.
Also, I hope most of us can agree that this is a more worthy target for attack than Sony or other gaming sites. There are a lot of sketchy things going on with Murdoch. I, for one, don't trust him at all.
I doubt the hacked emails as provided by anonymous would be accepted as evidence, because anonymous could have tampered with them before publishing. And it could be argued that the original email archive on NI's servers are also no longer valid, because if anonymous copied them, who's to say they weren't also able to modify them in-place?
Unless the police have a pristine copy made before the hack, with proper chain-of-evidence documentation, the hack won't help in court and will probably hinder.
By all means, my heart truly bleeds for the injustice suffered by Mr. Murdoch and his clan. Truly, it does. HAHAHA! just kidding.
tl;dr; Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
PS It IS worse for a professional media organization to behave like brigands than it is for brigands to behave as expected.
(1) Have you never heard of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"? We can argue the rights and wrongs of retributive justice all day, but it has a long history and many supporters.
(2) Iff this was carried out by an insider, or as a result of information obtained from an insider, then there is a genuine public interest defence - unlike for the stuff Murdoch was publishing.
It isn't *only* wrong when NI does it - LulzSec and Anonymous are also capable of being wrong, though it is not a foregone conclusion. Equally, NI would not necessarily have been wrong: for instance, if they had been investigating political corruption (for instance, a modern Watergate), then this would be a very different situation. NI overstepped the boundaries this time, and have been caught. Hopefully, Anonymous and LulzSec will keep their eyes on the correct targets (corrupt and uncaring companies and government departments), which is not, per se wrong.
However, are you telling me that you are not getting some small schadenfreude from NI mails being made public?
If LulzSec have managed to extract emails that show the guilt of senior people at NI, that would make them better than the police!! Even with all the laws in the world working in their favour, the police failed miserably to get the evidence and charge the miscreants. It would seem that criminal investigations are better handled by just about anybody than the police!! Unless, of course, they found the evidence, but it went........missing.
I have a couple of questions:
So, if they do have emails and they release them and there's some super-big bombshells in there, what are the legal implications for their use as evidence? Can NI just claim they are faked?
A more techie question follow-up question - is it possible to confirm they are real emails? (I.e. not faked ones designed to rile up public opinion for the lulz...)
Ta for any response
Well, such an e-mail would give reasonable grounds for the police to subsequently seize and search all of the back-ups to confirm wether or not those e-mails are indeed fake. Then if it turns out they're not fake they'll have obtained legal evidence against the lot of them.
Unless NI went around cryptographically signing all their e-mails (And their encryption keys weren't nicked in this attack), there is no way easy and certain way for anyone to confirm wether or not a given e-mail is genuine without going through the back-ups to find it. The offline back-ups, that is.
Sure, Sony has been pretty bad in terms of restricting access to their devices and controlling their IP. I am not a supporter of how they attempt to control access to their platforms.
However, Sony HASN'T, as far as I know, been hacking into the phone records of victims of horrible crimes and tragedies, in some cases causing police to back off from cases and giving false hope to families. Also, I haven't heard anything about the people who brought to light the rootkits on audio CDs showing up D-E-A-D within a few weeks.
So, Sony might be evil... but they certainly aren't THAT evil.
Seriously, is there anything quite as air-headed as hacking evidence that would be used to prosecute the weasels?
Now that weasel-central security has been breached by Air-head Hackers United, NI has a golden "get out of jail" pass because they can claim that any and all evidence may have been tampered with.
Mega-Paris award to you for the most dimwitted hack of the century, way to go!
"Seriously, is there anything quite as air-headed as hacking evidence that would be used to prosecute the weasels?"
Perhaps they have no faith that our Lords and Masters have any real inclination to prosecute these so-called weasels?
I certainly have none.
The validity of your usage of the term "would" in the above sentence is debatable to say the least.
now's a good time for them to clear the air and finally silence the Right Wing by hacking into George Soros' emails to prove he's not the Left's answer to both Murdoch and Frank...
...crickets
fail at anything other than the usual shortsighted dramatic propaganda to feed the rest of the dole-dependent types. Any of these "hackers" have real jobs and pay their own rents?
