Lot’s of good reading here! These are all going on my wish list!

A nicely written piece that gets to the complexities of the motives and actions of hackers

Among other things, the Stratfor e-mails [obtained by Anonymous] revealed statements by Stratfor employees that the government was spying on US citizens and corporations were spying on union representatives and other activists. They also seemed to indicate that the United States was preparing a secret indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.And so, the question arises: Which hackers were wearing the white hats here and which were wearing the black?

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“Still, some of the same people who did these things also “liberated” the Stratfor e-mails, just as they hacked into the accounts of a venal government contractor, HBGary, and exposed, among other things, that this firm and several others had approached Bank of America with plans to attack and discredit WikiLeaks. (According to an online report by Forbes, they proposed using “forged documents, pressuring donors, and even blackmailing [a] WikiLeaks supporter.”) It was an Anonymous member, too, who wrote the program that allowed Tunisians to go online without government surveillance—a small bit of code that inadvertently catalyzed the Arab Spring.”