I've supported anonymous like groups in their defence of wikileaks and other such causes. But I'm struggling to understand the rationale of this attack.

If you're a person who wants to defend wikileaks - don't you believe that one should be able to express one's views online without being harassed by thugs, whether they be government, corporate or hacker groups?

While I'm a big supporter of wikileaks and have donated money to them in the past, they are not, nor should not be immune to criticism or negative press.

These people are becoming exactly what they seem to hate. Leave PBS alone.

This is Lulzsec for the record, has absolutely nothing to do with Anonymous. It's an actual group with members and not 'everyone from the internet' like Anon. These guys have quite the history as well. Owned Fox pretty well recently and Sony.

Looks like PBS' claim to have the situation under control isn't quite accurate:

http://www.pbs.org/ShadowDXS/

http://www.pbs.org/lulz/

They're on Formspring answering questions as well: http://mobile.formspring.me/profile/view/LulzSec

Pastebin dump: http://pastebin.com/B3gmw5NS

inb4 'oh noez, they're crackers not hackers' sissyfit.

Note that they say this is just a warmup for dumping presumably Sony tomorrow in #sownage. Lulzsec says Wikileaks piece by Frontline was a smear and throwing dirt on Manning and Wikileaks. NYTimes piece is really sparse on details for some reason.

Meh. While I don't support this behavior without some sort of an understandable cause to compel them, I view the overall activities of "oh noes; posted something on your website!" and "oh noes; got yer emailz!" as an important part of boosting the immune system. Imagine what kind of shitty police department you would have if they never had any crime to pursue and just ate donuts all day? These small fries keep people on their toes just enough to almost justify security specialists and keep funding security efforts in corporations from being automatically crossed off the list to save a few bucks.

So, in your opinion, crime is a net positive because it reinforces the need for police?

No, in my opinion a system thrives when it is challenged. An immune system, a legal system, an enforcement system, or a security system. The challenges provoke adaptation. Evolution. I'm not a fan of illness, but some degree of exposure is necessary to build up the human immune system on both local and global scopes. Likewise, I'm not a fan of network penetration and security breaches, but they reinforce the re-focus that which they attack as a whole.

And note that we're talking about screwing with a couple articles on a web page and getting some passwords. Sure, that's bad, but it's not shutting down the power grid that feeds a hospital or stealing social security from elderly women. Likewise, I tolerate colds and cold season as part of reinforcing the immune system while I would probably not be so tolerant of small-pox unleashing itself across the population.

It seems you're describing the difference between the police (who have to deal with a range of minor crimes regularly) and the TSA (where the average agent will never meet a real terrorist).

> Imagine what kind of shitty police department you would have if they never had any crime to pursue and just ate donuts all day?

So what? THERE'S NO CRIME.

This, in and of itself, isn't particularly interesting. What is, and what doesn't bode well, on the other hand, is the possibility for groups like this to cause another flash crash or some sort of international incident.

I'm more shocked that John Markoff still has a career, when he hasn't had anything sensationalistic to tie his opportunistic bylines to since Mitnick.

The documentary appears to be "WikiSecrets", which the article neglected to mention. I would link to it, but cannot find an official one that works.