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The day he was arrested, Anonymous's "Sabu" helped the FBI

56 points| iProject | 14 years ago |arstechnica.com | reply

19 comments

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[+] mahmud|14 years ago|reply
I read elsewhere that he is the sole guardian of the two daughters of his aunt who's in jail. They're aged 6 & 10, IIRC. The kids have no one else and they would be shipped off to state custody if he ever goes away. Under those circumstances, I understand him wanting to go home before they come back from school.
[+] roguecoder|14 years ago|reply
Except that he was willing to break the law in the first place, including using home computers where those girls live.

There are other explanations that would cover both his initial Anonymous activities and his rapid cooperation with the police, like enjoying the attention and power that comes with getting one over on other people.

[+] JoachimSchipper|14 years ago|reply
Truly, there is no honor among thieves.

This surprises me, actually: he was willing to invest a ton of time and effort in this, but rolls over at the first sign of trouble? It's not like it's surprising that he eventually got caught...

[+] ChuckMcM|14 years ago|reply
It is a funny thing about people, sometimes they believe things that aren't true. You have teens who do crazy stuff because they don't believe they will fail and die. And you have criminals who do things believing that they will never get caught. Heck you have soldiers believing they can dispassionately kill other humans and not be affected by it. And when reality intrudes on the self deception, the results are even more unpredictable.

So we can't know what Hector's state of mind was, but we know that when he was confronted with prison time and the immediate loss of freedom he responded by mitigating that with co-operation. If you compare the impact on his personal life of that choice, versus 'taking one for the team', well it seems he made the right choice for Hector.

I suspect that recruiting people who would make the right choice for 'the cause' would require a different strategy than what is currently employed by the Anonymous community.

[+] Anderkent|14 years ago|reply
And it's not surprising that once he was caught, the FBI could easily leverage his two daughters to terror him into cooperating?
[+] jakejake|14 years ago|reply
It doesn't really surprise me at all. I don't imagine most members of anonymous to be hardened criminals who are ready to go to prison.