Anonymous grabs email from firm that defended Marine in Haditha case

Computerworld - In what's turning out to be quite a busy Friday for the hacking collective, Anonymous today said it has broken into the website of a law firm that represented a U.S. Marine accused of killing civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

Anonymous said it had hacked into the site of Puckett & Faraj PLLC and accessed more than 3GB of 'court mails, faxes, transcriptions etc" related to the Haditha case. The group said it plans to release the documents soon.

Neal Puckett and Haytham Faraj were trial defense attorneys for Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, a marine accused on charges that he was responsible for the deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha in 2005.

Wuterich late last month pleaded guilty to negligent dereliction of duty in connection with the deaths and faces up to three months in prison, a pay cut and a demotion in rank.

The Anonymous attackers today said they defaced the law firm's website to protest the decision.

"We believe it is time to release all of their private information and court evidence to the world and conduct a People's trial of our own," the group said in a statement.

In a lengthy diatribe, Anonymous claimed it had grabbed 3GB worth of email messages from Puckett & Faraj which it plans to release soon.

According to Anonymous, the emails contain "detailed records, transcripts, testimony, trial evidence, and legal defense donation records pertaining to not only Frank Wuterich, but also many other marines they have represented."

"We got the usual boatloads of embarrassing personal information," the message noted.

No one from the law firm was immediately available for comment or to confirm if the firm's emails have in fact been stolen. The Puckett & Faraj home page had been replaced with a video of rapper KRS-One's Sound of Da Police and a long message explaining the rationale for the attack until early this afternoon when it was apparently shut down.

This is the second incident reported by Anonymous today. Earlier, the hacking collective posted a 16-minute recording of an intercepted phone call between the FBI and the Scotland Yard.

According to an FBI officials quoted in the New York Times, members of Anonymous appear to have gained access to an email detailing the time, phone number and access code for the call, which they then used to snoop in on the conversation.

Anonymous replaced the Puckett & Faraj home page with a video of rapper KRS-One's Sound of Da Police and a note explaining its action.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan, or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed . His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.

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