by Virgil Vaduva

Xenia is a small city in Ohio, peppered with foot-deep potholes, abandoned buildings with a high unemployment rate and very busy bureaucrats. Just a few months ago, the city’s council decided to spend $6 million on a new “Justice Center” and the cost is expected to balloon well into the $20+ million range. The city is in dire need of infrastructure upgrades, road repairs and sewage system improvements, but a new police station and a new office building for the city’s employees became critical.

But these are not even the worst things about the city of Xenia.  A few years ago, Xenia also decided to ban the practice of panhandling. At the request of the police department and cops who were “too tired” of dealing with homeless people on the street, the city decided to pass an ordinance that banned panhandling virtually anywhere in the city, making it impossible for anyone to ask another individual for financial help, anywhere in the city. In essence, the city has made it illegal for someone to speak with a stranger if the speech involves asking for immediate help.

Many individuals have been fined and prosecuted under this unconstitutional ordinance, raking in thousands of dollars of fines extracted from the most vulnerable and poor people on the streets.

A bit over a year ago I decided to speak to the Xenia City Council and warn them about the fact that their ordinance is unconstitutional. They ignored my warning, and as a result the very next day I decided to take the path of civil disobedience and panhandle in front of the city hall and police station. I raised $41.98 which was donated to United Voluntary Service, a charity helping the homeless in Xenia. I was also ticketed for violating this unconstitutional law, which led to a full-blown jury trial after which I was found guilty, sentenced to 30 days in jail, community service and fines. The jail sentence was suspended on the condition of good behavior for a term of 2 years. During the trial I was not allowed to talk about the constitutionality of the law and my first amendment rights, I was not allowed to even mention the constitution, or the fact that the police in town were behind the passing of this ordinance. A judge literally told me, “there will be no mentioning of the Constitution in this court room.”

After immediately appealing, the appeals court finally reversed my sentence and they sent the case back to the court to be retried. All the charges were dropped a few days ago, and the city’s attorney said they will change the ordinance or get rid of it. Right now it’s unclear what this means.

After about a year and a half, the swift hand of the judicial system finally found me innocent of any wrongdoing spending tens of thousands of dollars of the city’s money and my own money, hundreds of hours going into my defense and substantial effort aimed to win and undo the work of the Xenia bureaucrats. What took them only a few minutes to ratify with the stroke of a pen, caused hundreds, if not thousands of people to be harassed, arrested and fined by their cops. None of the cops and Xenia bureaucrats involved in this will ever be held personally responsible for their decisions, and while I am fortunate enough to afford the legal fees to pursue such a case just for the immoral and unconstitutional aspect of their law, most people cannot do so and rarely, if ever anyone speaks on their behalf or stands up for them.

Now while this may be a win for me personally, the issue is nowhere near close to being resolved. The hundreds of people who have had their first amendment rights violated will need retribution. I am in the process of collecting all the names of the individuals detained or fined under this law and bring this issue to the attention of federal courts.

To make matters worse, the city of Beavercreek, which is next door to Xenia, has an ordinance identical to the one in Xenia, also banning panhandling everywhere within city limits. More and more local bureaucrats decide on a regular basis and in a systematic way to violate the constitutional rights of people in need who are unable to represent themselves in court. Beavercreek is the same city where a police officer shot a black man named John Crawford in a local Walmart for holding a BB gun he picked off a store shelf.

Beavercreek will be our next target for their unconstitutional and illegal practices regarding panhandling, and there will be no rest for the corrupt and immoral politicians and cops running these cities and violating our rights. Yesterday I “panhandled” for charity in Beavercreek and I was given a “warning” from their police and asked not to do it again in the future. I raised $18 dollars which will also be donated to United Voluntary Services to help the homeless in the area.

Officers Hall and Darkow (the second officer involved in the shooting of John Crawford) of Beavecreek PD showed up and threatened, attempted to intimidate me and warned me about standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign that said, “Help the poor.”  In today’s America, this is now a crime.

Officer Darkow was the backup officer involved in the shooting and killing of John Crawford in a Beavercreek Walmart. He is currently being sued by the Crawford family.

Officer hall attempting to give me a written warning about panhandling in the city of Beavercreek and threatening me with arrest if I continue to peacefully raise money for charity

Officer hall attempting to give me a written warning about panhandling in the city of Beavercreek and threatening me with arrest if I continue to peacefully raise money for charity

The officers refused to answer questions about the constitutionality of the law and why they are violating their oaths to the Constitution by enforcing a law targeting Americans’ first amendment rights.

The same individuals who have sworn an oath to obey and protect the Constitution are actively using their roles to undermine the very document and rights they were entrusted to protect.

If you have been one of the hundreds of people harassed, arrested or fined by the Xenia and Beavercreek police for panhandling, please contact me as soon as possible at [email protected] so I can help you out. I want to hear your story.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

By Catalin Cimpanu

TruthSec, one of the smaller hacking crews that claim to be part of Anonymous, has responded to a Miami police officer who doxed an innocent woman, by releasing his private information as well.

At the end of January, Claudia Castillo, a Miami resident, noticed a cop speeding down the freeway. She engaged in a pursuit, managed to make the cop pull over, and told him to stop speeding. The cop apologized for his actions, but all of this was recorded and released to the US media via CBS

A few days after the incident went public, Javier Ortiz, another Miami police officer and the local leader of the Miami FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) union, has published Mrs. Castillo’s contact info, including telephone and email, and asked his followers and friends to call her and give her a piece of their mind.

This information was released via Mr. Ortiz’s Facebook account, and later the cop continued to badger Mrs. Castillo via Twitter (see images at the bottom of the story). The Facebook post in which Mr. Ortiz doxed Mrs. Castillo is now gone, but we don’t know if someone reported it to Facebook and had it taken down, or if it was Mr. Ortiz himself.

Enter TruthSec to deliver social justice

The incident seems to have caught the eye of some of Anonymous’s hackers, who have scraped all sources they could find to put together a similar list of personal information for Mr. Ortiz, which they later released online as well. A small piece of the dox, in a redacted version, is available as proof at the end of this story.

The hacktivists also urged people to call Mr. Ortiz, just like Mr. Ortiz urged his followers to harass Mrs. Castillo, who did complain about threats she received via telephone and email soon after Mr. Ortiz’s Facebook post.

In the end, the whole story is even more ridiculous because Mrs. Castillo, as well as the cop she pulled over, officer Fonticella, both have a history of bad driving. Mr. Fonticella is now at the center of an internal affairs investigation following Mrs. Castillo’s video.

Below are two videos from TruthSec containing Anonymous’ statements on this incident. Be advised, the videos contain strong language.<

By Deric Lostutter

It’s been two days since the Paris attacks that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent concert goers. The entire world stood still in silence for the first time since 9/11. Friends and family divided over the acceptance of Syrian refugees into the United States and other countries as a result of a coordinated ISIS attack meant to divide us and fill us with fear. Does that mean they are winning?

Anonymous says no, and they will hunt ISIS down to the end of the Earth.

As a former operative in the hacker/activist group myself, I knew just were to find the people lurking in the dark corners of the internet, and monitored their chat in real time as they took down website after website, which they claimed were used to recruit people to ISIS and spread propaganda to instill fear in those that seen it.

I spoke with a 19 year old American Anonymous hacker named “Vex” via IRC chat in the #OpParis channel using the handle “flyingnimjeh”.

[14:54] (FlyingNimjeh:) Okay. So you are a hacker/activist in OpParis correct?
[14:55] (Vex:) Yes you could say that.
[14:55] (FlyingNimjeh:) What made you get involved in OpParis?
[15:00] (Vex:) Well for around 2 months I was on OpIceIsis working on taking down, defacing Isis sites that would lead to the recruitment of vulnerable people. The night of the attack I was shocked and we all scrambled to the chat to figure out what was going on, we all sat in OpParis looking for leads to the attack, Isis people claiming responsibility and what not. I believe I got in OpParis because I suffer
[15:00] (Vex:) watching France go though isis attacks and other countrys. Im trying to do what I can from where I’m at.

Just one day after the attacks on Paris, Anonymous reportedly took down 3,824 ISIS Twitter Accounts.

I continued my interview with Vex, who claimed to have taken down 24 sites himself, defacing, or destroying the integrity and design of well over half.

[15:01 ] (FlyingNimjeh:) How many sites would you say that you have personally taken down or defaced in the name of the Anonymous operation?
[15:03] (Vex:) Overall I think on my own I have taken down around 20 sites and left around 14 defaced.
[15:05] (FlyingNimjeh:) Are you American? and how old are you? what do you think the age range of the operatives in this operation is?
[15:07] (Vex:) I myself am American. I am 19, but I believe the age range for this operation and most of our operations range from 16 or 17 to 36 or 40

Anonymous comes in all shapes and sizes, old and young alike participate in cyber-attacks, civil disobedience, and activism. During the OperationPayback campaign, people ranging in age from 20-60 years old were charged with participating in the distributed denial-of-service, or DDOS attacks of PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa in response to their attacks on WikiLeaks.

Vex went on to tell me what the goal of OpParis is, to him at least;

[15:09] What is the next big move for this operation? What is the end goal?
[15:14] Right now parts of the operation are to be kept silent about due to recent Isis hacks, but what I can say is we are working a huge, growing list of Isis social media accounts. Taking them off social media. End goal I would say Is take them off our internet and let it be known to them that recruiting people for isis through our web is not okay, and we will find every last one and expose them.

I continued to ask questions, wondering if any of these sites were based in the United States. Vex had resolved some of the registrar information and found that the majority of the ISIS websites they were targeting were protected by CloudFlare, a United States based company out of San Francisco, California, who has raised millions of dollars in mitigating DDOS attacks.

Vex informed me that despite their efforts at reporting the accounts to CloudFlare, the American company continued to protect the recruiting websites of ISIS.

[15:46] (FlyingNimjeh:) Have you uncovered any United States connections, or are any of the sites used to recruit being hosted in the United States?
[15:49] (Vex:) Yes, but very few. Most sites by Isis I have found to be hosted in Rome and France
[15:56] (FlyingNimjeh:) What connections?
[17:28] (Vex:) So far I cannot say we have found “connections” persay, although we are(America) shipping weapons to “guns for hire” but what I do know is that these Isis members are registering hosts with US servers
[17:31] (FlyingNimjeh:) do you have an example site with a US server?
[17:31] (Vex:) Let me see if I can dig one out of the wreckage for you.
[17:32] (FlyingNimjeh:) ok. imgur any screenshots of registrar information if you can
[17:37] (Vex:) Putting into Imgur now 🙂
[17:39] (Vex:) http://imgur.com/XCzMphR
[17:39] (Vex:) this is the sites adress: www.islamic-dw.com
[17:45] (Vex:) Also something might peak your interest here. CloudFlare is Protecting 70% of these sites AFTER reporting them.

Vex confirming that a United States company protecting ISIS assets may be a huge implication for the company, and it’s shareholders and business partners. Damning evidence that may skew the public as to who is on who’s side in the fight against terrorism.

I asked Vex if he has been involved in any other operations, and where he learned his skills before signing off.

[17:49] (FlyingNimjeh:) How did you learn your skillset? and have you been involved in any other operations?
[17:53] (Vex:) Since I was a young kid I was drawn to code, picked it up by myself I guess. Later on when anonymous hit big we started making tutorials for new members so they could help, thats when I got more developed in “hacking”. OpKKK, OpIceIsis, OpNimir, OpSandra, OpBaltimore, OpDeathEaters to name a recent few
[17:56] (FlyingNimjeh:) has cloudflare responded to anyones inquiry thus far as to why the continue to protect the websites of these extremists?
[17:56] (Vex:) No responce so far.

Vex confirmed that CloudFlare has not responded to any of the groups reports about ISIS websites under their protection.

I have placed a call to CloudFlare for comment, and was told they could not comment on the matter and to email [email protected] I am currently awaiting reply.

by Virgil Vaduva

Update (August 6, 2015):

Representatives from Ohio Students Association have contacted me and have denied any association with the individuals behind the e-mails sent to Jim Anderson. As of right now, nobody has taken any responsibility for the statements made in the e-mails sent to Jim.

Original story: 

A clear pattern of discrimination and exclusion has been emerging within the last few days regarding the organization Black Lives Matter. It started with the organization attempting to schedule an event at the same time and location as other organizations and immediately attempting to put in place rules limiting attendance, excluding members of Anonymous, members of Cop Block and members of Ohio Open Carry, all organizations which oppose police brutality and work hard to further liberty.

These actions and attempts to control the narrative and attendance to the one year anniversary demonstration of John Crawford’s shooting by Ohio police have stirred up quite a debate in various circles, prompting individuals that would otherwise work together to further the cause of liberty to take sides based on political views and other opinions.

Black Lives Matter, the George Soros funded organization, is now on full attack against Anonymous, a de-centralized organization which has been attempting to participate in exposing police brutality throughout the world for years.  The attempt on the part of BLM to limit speech and control the message at public events is not new and I have documented a number of instances where bigotry is on display by members and leader in Black Lives Matter.

Just today an activist and journalist named Jim Anderson based out of Columbus, Ohio contacted me to inform me that he was told by members of BLM that he was “too white to attend a police brutality protest.”

As early as November 2014 the leaders of Black Lives Matter Columbus have contacted Jim and demanded that he cancels his event against police brutality due to conflict (as they scheduled it after he did) and informed him that no members of Anonymous are welcome to any of their public events.  Furthermore Guy Fawkes masks were banned and white people were told not to attend and were not welcome at any planning meetings. These tactics are identical to the tactics BLM is attempting to use to intimidate white attendees in Beavercreek, Ohio planning to attend the one year anniversary protest of the John Crawford shooting on August 5, 2015.

Screenshots of e-mail exchanges between Jim and representatives from BLM and Ohio Student Association show what appear to be outright and unapologetically bigoted attitudes towards police brutality supporters simply because of their association with Anonymous or simple due to their skin color.

When Jim inquired about the confusion generated by the exclusion of Anonymous members, he was told that Anonymous members lack “revolutionary-ness” (sic) and can be threatening to people of color. The insensitivity of the language used to describe Anonymous is astounding. The BLM leaders are attempting to describe Anonymous members as violent, unaccountable individuals who show up at protests in order to intimidate people of color.

This is not the first time members of Black Lives Matter have excluded whites from their events. In an event scheduled in Dayton, Ohio early in 2015 several messages went out indicating in essence that “no whites are allowed” at their events and that white people are not welcome to participate or take part in police brutality protests. When an outraged community pointed out the bigotry of these demands the request made on Facebook were deleted and BLM leadership pretended they never happened.

In a recent video allegedly recorded in Cleveland, Ohio, another white journalist who attended a BLM meeting to support their cause was assaulted, pushed, cursed at and grabbed before he had a chance to leave the public property he was on.

When asked about the bigoted remarks, the organizers defended the behavior by claiming this was a “private” meeting, however the meeting is clearly out in public on what appears to be public property.  Not only that, but the journalist was clearly in the process of leaving, as he was asked to do, when he was assaulted and threatened. You can watch the video here.

Talis Gage, a leader in Black Lives Matter compares Anonymous members with the KKK in a Facebook post

In a more recent event, a Black Lives Matter leader did not mince words when he outright stated that “the mask is the new sheet” when criticizing Anonymous for attending some BLM events.  He stated:

“Sometimes I wonder if the mask is the new sheet and are they in cahoots with each other I know I know there is some black mask anon members but like the old days you had house negros and field negros and we are not that far from those times. I have associated in all these diff groups but I can’t say I trust them.”

Additional BLM members followed with more inflammatory comments against Anonymous:

“Both anonymous masks and guns endanger people of color…”

All these comments were removed when I warned them that I was taking screenshots, as the story would be hard to believe otherwise.

I am aghast at the idea that Anonymous is being compared with one of the most despicable and racists groups in the world, the KKK, which has lynched, burned and executed people simply because of the color of their skin. Furthermore, Anonymous has shown incredible support for the black community on the issue of police brutality. Several prominent investigations by Anonymous have led to exposing internal e-mails and comments from NYPD and Baltimore PD showing extensive racism among police officers.

When members of Anonymous contacted the BLM leaderships to inquire about the public event scheduled in Dayton Ohio in April, they were told in very clear terms, “It’s an event that’s not for anonymous members.”

The ingratitude shown by Black Lives Matter and the outright disregard for any desire to cooperate with people and groups which have supported them for the past year is very disturbing, to say the least. Exclusion, discrimination and bigotry appears to be alive and well throughout the BLM organization, and is dishonorable to police brutality causes where black Americans have been targeted by police throughout the country.

I am unsure how to encourage BLM leadership to resolve this problem, or even if they are willing to solve the problem or eliminate bigotry from their midsts, but if you want to contact BLM, you can do so by going to their website and writing them a message about the serious problem they are creating by attacking groups of people which have been supportive of the cause of police brutality well before BLM even came into existence.

Words don’t break bones, but they should certainly prompt someone to step back and reconsider their support for such organizations.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

by Virgil Vaduva

Updated at 2:12 PM EST.

In what appears to be an all-out fear mongering and intimidating announcement, IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, which is a website maintained by the FBI, issued an emergency alert stating that “family members of law enforcement personnel and public officials are also at risk for cyber attacks and doxing activity.”

While re-packaging the announcement as a brand new Internet Security emergency, the fear-mongering is little more than a copy and paste from an announcement made in January 26, 2011 by  the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) emergency “Security Tip” titled “Staying Safe on Social Networks.”  While masquerading as a “national emergency,” the emergency alert is little more than a poorly-written list of activities or steps that anyone could take to increase their online privacy rather than just law enforcement or police officers.

Without citing any specific threat, Mindi McDowell wrote in 2011 that law enforcement personnel are at risk of having personal information unveiled and exposed on social media networks and other public web sites. Yesterday, April 21 2015, the FBI, using their IC3 website issued a newly re-packaged alert re-stating the same warning, with the exception of going into a bit more detail but still not quoting any credible threat and sticking to very generic language:

“Recent activity suggests family members of law enforcement personnel and public officials are also at risk for cyber attacks and doxing activity. Targeted information may include personally identifiable information and public information and pictures from social media Web sites.”

To make matters worse for the average reader of this release, the IC3 advisory is even explaining “doxing” as being one of the main reason for issuing this advisory, except doxing is a perfectly legal activity and it largely involves gathering publicly and legally available information about a particular topic or individual. Their alert however defines doxing as follows:

“The act of compiling and posting an individual’s personal information without permission is known as doxing.”

Not only is this blatant fear-mongering on the part of FBI and Homeland Security, but as I mentioned above, doxing is in fact completely legal activity and it involves little more than the simple ability to use online search tools like Google and other search engines to find and compile information legally available!

The brand new “fake” security alert was picked up by other government agencies and was sent out to millions of information security and IT professional subscribers late yesterday:

IC3, NCCIC and US-CERT have all been tasked with maintaining awareness about ongoing cyber threats to our national defense systems and Internet infrastructure, however it appears that these organizations and the alerting mechanisms they are using to create awareness about serious threats are now being used to instigate fear about actual legal activities which are being used every day by millions of Americans for research work.

One notable FBI case related to doxing was the case of the Steubenville, Ohio rapists who were exposed by an Anonymous hacker Deric Lostutter. Working under the handle KYAnonymous, Lostutter was interviewed for this article related to doxing and said,

“…as far as the legality of doxing goes, it is perfectly legal should you use data gathered from public sources such as google, spokeo, linkedin etc. The problem the feds have with the practice is they dont hold the people who leave all of their information freely on the internet accountable. When the FBI raided me in april of 2013, I explained to agent bixby of Ohio that Spokeo had an address that I lived at that was a safe house. He stated “well that just seems illegal”. Seeming illegal and being illegal are two different things. It was my fault, as it is the fault of the target, that the information is publicly obtainable. Information on the internet grows exponentially.”

In that case, Lostutter claims to have spent a substantial amount of time researching legally accessible information which was publicly available to identify the rapists and expose them. Shortly thereafter he was raided by an FBI SWAT team, arrested and his computer equipment was confiscated. As a result he is now facing more time in prison than the rapists he helped expose.

His closing statement to TruthVoice about doxing and his message to the FBI was,

“I can find anything out, about anyone, dead or alive. cop or not. all legal, they can suck my left nut“

Unfortunately FBI’s methodology of pushing announcements about doxing via emergency notifications channels may be having the opposite effect and may be detrimental to maintain awareness about Information Security topics by lowering the bar for what constitutes a true cyber security emergency and desensitizing the security industry to real threats and risk factors.

If the folks at Homeland Security, IC3 and NCCIC (who are largely former law enforcement officers) truly believe doxing to be such a danger to the general public, they should issue a general advisory for all Americans who may be at risk of having their privacy violated, not just to cops or current law enforcement members.  The issuance of this alert is illustrating that the current channels used for emergency alerts are little more than a joke and are now seemingly being used for what appears to be political motives and reasons.

You can read the original advisory here: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/tips/ST06-003

You can read the re-packaged advisory here: http://www.ic3.gov/media/2015/150421.aspx

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak.  He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.