It’s looking increasingly likely that the hacking collective LulzSec, responsible for high-profile attacks on the CIA, SOCA and the Arizona Department of Public Safety over the last few months, will release a slew of private emails taken from News International servers today.

We have been monitoring internet back channels associated with LulzSec. While activists hoped data would be released to coincide with Rebekah Brooks’ testimony to parliament yesterday, the emails run to some 4 gigabytes and are taking longer than expected to sift through. Sources have told Scrapbook that members are editing the leaked material into a media-ready package with the ambitious aim of “bring[ing] down News International”.

On Monday night, members of the mischievous but formidable group hijacked The Sun’s website, posting a fake report on the suicide of Rupert Murdoch. During the same attack they also compromised sections of the News International email servers, downloading a large cache of private data — including login details for an email account used by Brooks while she was editor of The Sun.

Shortly after Monday’s attack, high profile member Sabu tweeted:

“Sun/News of the world OWNED. We’re sitting on their emails. Press release tomorrow.”

Sixteen members of Anonymous were arrested yesterday in the US, along with four in the Netherlands and one — reportedly a key member of LulzSec — in South London. But the group has hit back, claiming: “There are six of us, and we’re all still here.”

It looks like the “Louise Boat” will keep on sailing.

UPDATE: Despite building up to a large scale release throughout this morning, no emails have been released today. The Anonymous announcement twitter feed began expressing doubts this afternoon over whether a full scale data dump could compromise any future criminal prosecutions.

Since then LulzSec have announced that they are “working with certain media outlets who have been granted exclusive access to some of the News of the World emails we have.”