Anonymous temporarily brings down Arizona police websites

Anonymous, a loosely-confederated group of hackers, has successfully struck the Websites of the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the Arizona state chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, bring both domains temporarily offline. As of late Friday afternoon, the FOP site remained down, while the Department of Public Safety site seemed to be back in working order.

"Let this third and crushing blow against Arizona police send a strong message to the ruling class around the world," reps for Anonymous trumpeted on Pastebin, a website where the people can upload messages or code. "You will no longer be able to operate your campaign of terror against immigrants and working people in secrecy: we will find you, expose you, and knock you off the internet. Many lulz have been had while we purposefully strung you along slowly and painfully for the past two weeks."

In the message, Anonymous claimed to have unearthed several racist and "anti-Muslim" emails, and encouraged readers to wreak more "mayhem" on the Arizona PD. "We know exactly what we're doing, so think twice before considering crossing us," the message continued. "Hackers of the world, join us as we resist against the governments and corporations of the world, for there is enough bounty for everybody aboard the good ship #antisec."

Horizons readers will remember that "antisec" was the rallying cry of a short-lived partnership between Anonymous and LulzSec, a relatively new group of Internet pranksters. The aim of "Operation AntiSec" was to bring down a range of government Websites, and in the early-going, LulzSec seemed to have some success – the group attacked the site of the US Senate, for instance, and published some non-sensitive data.

And then late last month, LulzSec announced that it would disband. "Our planned 50 day cruise has expired," Team LulzSec wrote in a farewell post, "and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind – we hope – inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love."