Linton Johnson still MIA

Oh brotha, where art thou?

Linton Johnson, the all-purpose public voice of BART, remains on leave more than a month since his public relations war with protesters put him even more under the spotlight. BART officials said Wednesday they don’t know when he will return. Johnson’s response to email messages says that he is on a two-month leave for family reasons and he will return around Oct. 17.

His previous email message had him returning Sept. 19, but that was amended with the later return time.

Johnson, the chief media spokesman for an agency often in the news, made news in the last month during the continuing tensions between BART and protesters and hackers upset with shootings by BART police officers.
-Inside Bay Area

Family reasons?
More like he has been shamed into submission by anonymous hackers who posted a picture of him exposing his family jewels while embracing a shirtless man.
His incompetence on the job, which is detailed in the Inside Bay Area article quoted above, pales in comparison to the damage done by this.
Even though Anonymous gets accused of being immature and unfocused, I call this brilliant move very strategic and very targeted, and apparently, extremely effective.
Immature, maybe, but effective as well.
When you're paid a helluva lot of money to be a public persona, don't be surprised if your persona is made public.

BART police union website hacked

Now we're talkin. Anonymous hacked into the MyBART website and released names and contact info of its customers on Sunday. That's how they usually roll, and it's a tactic that doesn't exactly win them a lot of public support. However, today, in the wake of a mildly annoying protest in San Francisco on Monday, they took the fight to the cops.

A hacker group broke into a BART police union website Wednesday and released names, home addresses, email addresses and personal passwords of 102 officers in the second cyberattack against the transit system in a week.

BART and the police union confirmed the attack and criticized it as jeopardizing the security of police officers, who guard their home addresses carefully.
-Inside Bay Area

"Is this an act of war, gentlemen?"

So last week, Spanish police detained 3 alleged members of the Anonymous hacktivist collective. Then this weekend, someone hacked the IMF's website, and Operation Empire State Rebellion reiterated their demand that the Bernank resign with the release of this video.

This morning, LulzSec posted info on their website proving that they infiltrated the US Senate website.

A cursory investigation does not reveal the exposition of any sensitive data.... This time. Yet one thing LulzSec most certainly acquired was the user/pass combinations of all individuals affiliated with the Senate, and are likely currently actively downloading all their emails.
-Zero Hedge

Oh, and by the way, tomorrow is Flag day, and OpESR has been promising protests/actions nationwide to celebrate.

"Occupy a public space."

Stay tuned, if you can.

3 alleged "Anonymous" hacktivists arrested in Spain

A week after NATO officially took up the hacktivist group "Anonymous" on their invitation to "the first infowar ever fought," Spanish police arrested 3 alleged members of the de-centralized, unstructured, anarchist "group."

MADRID (Reuters) – Spanish police arrested three suspected members of the so-called Anonymous group on Friday on charges of cyber-attacks against targets including Sony Corp's PlayStation Network, governments, businesses and banks.

Police alleged the three arrested "hacktivists" had been involved in a recent attack on Sony's PlayStation Network, as well as cyber-attacks on Spanish banks BBVA and Bankia and Italian energy group Enel SpA.

The arrests are the first in Spain against members of Anonymous following similar legal proceedings in the United States and Britain. Police told Reuters all three men were Spanish and in their 30s. One worked in the merchant navy.
-Reuters

Interestingly though, someone other than Anonymous also attacked Sony.

Anonymous also recently targeted Sony with a DDoS attack campaign in early April, but called off the assault after receiving backlash from Sony customers who did not appreciate the network downtime. When the network failed again due to the network breach, Anonymous issued a press release on April 22 that sought to dispel any notion that the movement had taken part in the latest PSN outage.
-Infosec Island