Anonymous advised its members to protect their online identities, and not to wear the traditional Anonymous mask in public, or even purchase them online, as a core group decides if it should take on a Mexican drug cartel that is said to have kidnapped a member of the group.

The hacker group had earlier threatened to expose the identity of members and supporters of a Mexican drug cartel by Nov. 5, in retaliation for the kidnapping of a group member, and hacked the web site of a former state official, alleging that he has associations with the dreaded Zetas cartel.

But there are fissures showing among the leaders as fear of handling the drug cartel builds up, with some expressing concern that new, inexperienced members could get quickly exposed and compromised.

The action has been cancelled, Sm0k34n0n wrote in a Twitter message in Spanish on Monday. High-profile colleague anonymouSabu described sm0k34n0n as one of the campaign's promoters in another Twitter message. But other groups from Latin America are said to be considering a core action group, and warning other members to stay away. AnonymouSabu was all for the action late Sunday.

A video in Spanish posted on YouTube on October 6 by a person calling himself "MrAnonymousguyfawkes", threatened that Anonymous will publish the names, photos, and addresses of police officials, journalists, and taxi drivers that collaborate with the drug cartel, hoping the government will arrest them.

"You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release him. And if anything happens to him, you (expletive) will always remember this upcoming November 5th," said a masked person in the video, according to a translation provided by another user of YouTube.

November 5 is known in the U.K. as Guy Fawkes day after his November 5, 1605, conspiracy to attempt to blow up the British Parliament. The Guy Fawkes mask, popularized by the movie V for Vendetta, has been adopted by Anonymous.

Anonymous claimed on Sunday to have defaced the website of a former official in the Mexican state of Tabasco. On Monday, the website bore a message in Spanish by Anonymous Mexico stating that he was a part of Zetas.

"We all know who they are and where they are," said the speaker in the video. Anonymous did not however claim that its hacking skills gave it special access to information on the cartel. Nor are its traditional tactics such as DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on websites likely to be of use against armed gangs, according to various analysts.

The drug cartel has killed people who have criticized them on blogs and other social media, according to reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists in New York reported in September the murder of a journalist in direct retaliation for information posted on social media.

As newspapers are censored by fear, Mexican citizens, and many journalists, are turning to social media and online forums to share news and inform each other, said Sara Rafsky, a research associate in CPJ's Americas program. "So it should be no shock that drug cartels are turning their attention to the Internet."
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/242845/anonymous_threatens_to_expose_mexican_drug_cartel.html

Those of you that aren't in the know, here is a breakdown of what's happened since they began releasing these documents:(provided by The Guardian)

Sunday 28 November

• TECH: DDoS attack hits WikiLeaks as first set of US diplomatic cables is published.

Wednesday 1 December

• TECH: Tableau Software, which offers free software for data visualisation, removes the public views of graphics built using information about the diplomatic cables. It is the first company to distance itself from Wikileaks, and admits that the reason was pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent senator with ties to the Democratic party.

• POLITICS: Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, calls for Wikileaks to be taken offline. "I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. Wikileaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company - whether American or foreign - should assist Wikileaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials."

• TECH Amazon removes Wikileaks's content from its EC2 cloud service, but later insists it did so because the content could cause harm to people and did not belong to Wikileaks – and that it was not due to political pressure or the hacker attacks against the site.

Friday 3 December

• TECH: Wikileaks.org ceases to work for web users after everyDNS.com(*edit* not easyDNS), which had provided a free routing service translating the human-readable address into a machine-readable form, ends support.

Wikileaks shifts to a backup domain registered in Switzerland but actually hosted in Sweden, at Wikileaks.ch, though the cables are hosted in part by OVH, an internet provider in the north of France.

EveryDNS claims that the DDOS attacks against Wikileaks were disrupting its service provided to thousands of other customers. (*edit* there was a mixup, and everyDNS, not easyDNS was resonsible. EasyDNS has posted that it's "The Company That Did NOT Take Down Wikileaks" beside a cartoon character showing a thumbs up.

• POLITICS: French industry minister Eric Besson writes to internet companies warning them there will be "consequences" for any companies or organisations helping to keep WikiLeaks online in the country.

Saturday 4 December

• MONEY: PayPal, owned by US auction site eBay, permanently restricts account used by WikiLeaks due to a "violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy". A spokesman said the account was suspended because "[it] cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity."
You can still donate at Commerzbank Kassel in Germnany or Landsbanki in Iceland or by post to a post office box at the University of Melbourne or at http://wikileaks.ch/support.html

• TECH: Switch, the Swiss registrar for Wikileaks.ch declines pressure from US and French authorities to remove the site or block access to it.

Sunday 5 December

• TECH: The Pirate Party in Sweden says that it has taken over the hosting of the Cablegate directory of Wikileaks after the server in France at OVH, which had been hosting the contents of the US diplomatic cables released so far, goes offline.

Monday 6 December

• MONEY: Credit card company Mastercard withdraws ability to make donations to Wikileaks. "MasterCard is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products," the credit card outfit says.

• TECH: Wikileaks' servers in Sweden attacked by distributed denial of service attack.

• MONEY: Postfinance, the Swiss postal system, strips WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of a key fundraising tool, accusing him of lying and immediately shutting down one of his bank accounts. The bank says that Assange had "provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process."
Assange had told Postfinance he lived in Geneva but could offer no proof that he was a Swiss resident, a requirement of opening such an account. Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty told The Associated Press the account was closed Monday afternoon and there would be "no criminal consequences" for misleading authorities. "That's his money, he will get his money back," Josty said. "We just close the account and that's it."

Tuesday 7 December

• MONEY: Credit card company Visa withdraws ability to make donations or payments to Wikileaks. "Visa Europe has taken action to suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks' website pending further investigation into the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules," said a spokesman.

That was about as funny as a Denial of Service attack on VideoSift.
haha.

Siftbot's greatest fear... Denial of service attacks...

In layman terms does this mean we're being bombarded by hits from another server? Like in a Denial of Service attack?

Or am I wayyy off?

quantummushroom asked, "1) What about the ballot card? ... It's what gets dropped in the ballot box. What if the voting machine records and the cards' records don't match?"

That's not how it works. Much like your car key, the smart card grants you the ability to use a voting machine. The only thing that card does is signify that you may vote. Before it is ejected from the machine, each smart card is marked as invalid so you can't vote twice. In the normal course of events, the voter returns the used card to a poll worker, who can mark the voter card as valid again and hand to the next voter. [1] Wash, rinse, repeat.

The only record of your vote is on the machine itself. There are no records that have to match up. You, the voter, get no receipt. If the machine catches fire, several hundred or thousand votes may be lost. [2] Gee, it sure would suck if a one or several machines suddenly had amnesia at the end of the day.

One point that I'll mention briefly now and come back to later: Normal voters do *not* get a printed receipt. The internal printer is only used for initial and final tallies [3].

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quantummushroom stated, "2) That sure is a lot of sneakernet work to infect thousands of machines, one at a time." and "3) Where I live, an armed deputy is assigned to almost every polling place."

The machines run Windows CE [4]. They're vulnerable to viruses. [5] All you need to do to infect a machine is to open the side door, "secured" by what amounts to a desk-drawer lock, insert your our memory card, and reboot. [6] This can be accomplished in under a minute. You certainly won't raise eyes until you've used a voting machine for over twenty.

Let's look at two ways to infect thousands of machines:

First, if you already know which machine will act as the accumulator, you don't have to infect thousands of machines. At the end of the night, the memory cards are pulled from every machine and fed to one that adds all of the cards up. Just infect that machine. And then, if that card is taken to the next polling station for accumulation of several polling stations, even more results can be manipulated. [7]

Second, I quote: "A poll worker, election official, technician, or other person who had private access to a machine for as little as one minute could use these methods without detection. Poll workers often do have such access; for instance, in a widespread practice called “sleepovers,” machines are sent home with poll workers the night before the election [8]."

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quantummushroom stated: "4) If a victicrat wins any election in a time of war, I'd certainly suspect fraud."

Strawman argument that has no bearing on Diebold machine security.

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quantummushroom stated: "5) theo47 is correct. Eternal vigilance is the price for liberty."

There's no way to be vigilant while voting with one of these machines because there's no paper trail and no way to guarantee that you voted the way you voted. If the machines break, your vote is lost.

Consider a different model of electronic voting that does offer these things: first off, the voting machine doesn't record any votes. All it does it help you pick candidates. When you're done, hit the print button, which will print out a two-part receipt, of which you keep half. It should be time-stamped, include a way to identify the voter but not reveal their name, and the votes in plain text.

A voter can read it, verify it, put the submission in a ballot box to be scanned later, and take the receipt home. The receipt is a backup, if you will, that could be used if, for example, the ballot box caught fire.

A final thought: Diebold makes ATM's. Do you think they would they use a lock that can be picked in 10 seconds by an amateur [9] on those?

[1] http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ts-paper.pdf 3.3.2 Voting
[2] ibid. 2.1.2 Denial-of-Service Attacks
[3] ibid. 3.1 Hardware
[4] ibid. 3.1 Hardware
[5] ibid. 4.3 Demonstration Voting Machine Virus
[6] ibid. 2.2.1 Direction Installation
[7] ibid. 4.4 Demonstration Denial-of-Service Attack
[8] Marc Songini. E-voting security under fire in San Diego lawsuit. Computerworld, August 2006.
[9] http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ts-paper.pdf 2.2.1 Direct Installation