The bombs keep dropping from Anonymous—first local cops, then the FBI, and now the Marine Corps: sensitive documents from 2005's Haditha Killings trial. Anon doesn't think the Marine in charge should have gotten off so lightly. This is their payback.


Seven years ago, (then Sergeant) Frank Wuterich and several other marines he commanded killed 24 Iraqi citizens in Haditha, Iraq, in an apparent act of revenge for an unrelated IED strike. Despite admitting to the killings, Wuterich just last week officially got off with only a charge of "negligent dereliction of duty." No jail time, no serious conviction whatsoever.


Now the law firm that defended Wuterich, Puckett and Faraj has been hit with Anonymous long internet arm of "justice." Their site has been hijacked, and a giant 3 GB trove of personal information pertaining to the case (and other matters) busted wide open by Anon:

We went ahead and fired off some shots of our own - at the servers and personal email accounts of Puckett & Faraj. We defaced their website and dumped nearly 3GB of private email messages belonging to Neal Puckett and Haytham Faraj. The contents of these email messages include 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. And to add a few layers of icing to this delicious caek, we got the usual boatloads of embarrassing personal information. How do you think the world will react when they find out Neal Puckett and his marine buddies have been making crude jokes about the incident where marines have been caught on video pissing

on dead bodies in Afghanistan? Or that he regularly corresponds with and receives funding from former marine Don Greenlaw who runs the racist blog http://snooper.wordpress.com? 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.

Anonymous draws an immediate comparison to Bradley Manning, the soldier behind the Wikileaks Cablegate bonanza whose trial has been a pretty far cry from transparent—about as opaque as brig walls.

Bradley Manning who was brave enough to risk his life and freedom to expose the truth about government corruption is threatened with life imprisonment. When justice cannot be found within the the confines of their crooked court systems, we must seek revenge on the streets and on the internet - and dealing out swift retaliation is something we are particularily good at. Worry not comrades, it's time to deliver some epic ownage.


Unable to do anything about the Manning case, Anonymous will have to hope "epic ownage" is a decent replacement for activism and advocacy. So far, no promised torrent for the data has appeared on the Pirate Bay account Anonymous is pointing to, but that's sure to change any minute now.

Update: I placed a call to Puckett & Faraj, and they have no idea they've been hacked. Waiting for a call back.


Update 2: The firm's site is currently down.

Update 3: A source within Anonymous tells me all of today's strikes are indeed a coordinated effort, though not all tied to the Wuterich case: "Each attack has it's particular motivations. For example, boston police have been in our crosshairs ever since they started harassing the occupation movement there."


Update 4: You can find a screencap of the original defacement and manifesto here.

Update 5: A torrent of the firm's data is currently being prepared for the public.


Update 6: A day later and still no public torrent, although the snatched data is available via encrypted browser network Tor. Our pals at Gawker have already found some nuggets.