LulzSec and Anonymous, the two hacker groups at the center of cross-country arrests this week, issued a joint statement on Thursday directed at the FBI and law enforcement around the world. Neither collective will be hanging up their keyboards any time soon.
"We are not scared any more," reads the statement. "Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our mission to help these people and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - you can possibly to do make us stop."
The groups took particular issue with remarks made by Stephen Chabinsky, deputy assistant FBI director, following the arrest of 14 suspected Anonymous members and two others for various cyber crimes this week.
During an interview with NPR, Chabinsky said: "We want to send a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable. [Even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts."
"The Internet has become so important to so many people that we have to ensure that the World Wide Web does not become the Wild Wild West," the deputy assistant director reasoned - a statement eerily similar to one made by Paul Bigner, MPAA Chief Technology Officer, last week.
"When was the Internet not the Wild Wild West?" quipped the hackers, who stated that governments and corporations which lie and conspire against the people are their enemies and that both groups "will continue to fight them with all methods we have at our disposal." In other words, expect website hacking to continue.
According to the LulzSec's Twitter feed, the group's recent attacks against Rupert Murdoch and his media empire News Corp. are only a sign of things to come. "We're currently working with certain media outlets who have been granted exclusive access to some of the News of the World emails we have," the group claimed. Exactly what the notoriously fickle hackers will do with such an ill-gotten quarry is unknown.
