Jon Nazca/Reuters

Federal authorities arrested 16 people on Tuesday, 14 of whom are suspected members of the activist hacker group Anonymous, officials said. The other two individuals were arrested on cyber-related charges.

Earlier Tuesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed three search warrants in connection with the hacker group, law-enforcement officials said. Two of the raids were executed at homes on Long Island, while the other raid took place in an apartment building in Brooklyn. The authorities said they seized computers in the raid.

The United States Department of Justice said in a statement that Tuesday’s arrests took place across the United States in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.

The charges, which were brought by federal prosecutors in the Northern District of California in San Jose, allege that Anonymous members performed a distributed denial of service attack against PayPal, the payment Web site, taking the company’s Web site offline for four days.

The attacks, which took place during December of last year, were in retaliation for PayPal’s refusal to process WikiLeaks credit card payments.

All of the defendants charged in the case are between the ages of 20 and 33 years old. The defendants are all being charged with several counts of conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer. Authorities said they will be arraigned Tuesday in the areas they were arrested.

Anonymous has been at the center of the news lately with members of the loosely organized group ramping up attacks on corporate and government Web sites. In recent months the group has started to call its efforts AntiSec, or Anti Security, and says it hopes to expose security flaws online.

Anonymous has claimed responsibility in the past for attacking MasterCard and Visa in an effort to assist the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. The group has also attacked sites related to the Church of Scientology.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.