The international wave of alleged hacker arrests associated with the digital vigilante movement Anonymous continued Tuesday, and this time on American soil. Fox News reports more than a dozen arrests across California, Florida and New Jersey, as well as FBI interviews and searches in Long Island and Brooklyn, New York.
Those police actions follow others in England, where an Anonymous-related hacker named Ryan Cleary was arrested last month in Essex, followed by more than 45 other arrests in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Turkey.
U.S. law enforcement have yet to reveal exactly what hacking charges those newly-arrested American suspects will face.
Within the hacker community, many are watching the fate of one individual who goes by the handle “Sabu” and who is suspected of involvement in multiple operations including the attacks on HBGary and later the hacking spree perpetrated by the Anonymous spinoff group LulzSec. Sabu has claimed involvement in yesterday’s hacking of the British newspaper The Sun, and wrote on his Twitter feed that LulzSec will soon release stolen emails from the News Corp-owned tabloid.
Sabu claimed Tuesday on Twitter that he was not involved in the day’s police operations, despite several attempts by hackers in opposition to Anonymous to publicly identify him. One hacker who goes by the name th3j35t3r recently published a suspected name and Portugese address for Sabu on his blog. The LulzSec hacker responded Tuesday by taunting th3j35t3r over the arrests: “Damn, it must hurt you emotionally that I was not part of that.”