Mystery surrounds arrested Iranian blogger's reported death

BEIRUT -- Human rights activists are calling on Iran to investigate the apparent death of a blogger who was in custody after being arrested for criticizing the government in online postings.

Sattar Beheshti, 35, reportedly died this week while in detention after his arrest Oct. 30 by Iran’s cyber police unit.

Beheshti maintained a website, My Life for My Iran, on which he criticized the Iranian government, said the human rights group Amnesty International.

The exact time and cause of his death are not publicly known, Amnesty said in a statement.

“The Iranian authorities must immediately carry out an independent investigation into his death, including whether torture played a part in it,” Amnesty International said.

WikiLeaks and Anonymous spar over fundraising campaign

If politics often makes strange bedfellows, fundraising can make just as strange enemies, WikiLeaks found this week. The secret-spilling website ended up at odds with the loose network of hackers known as Anonymous after WikiLeaks introduced a pop-up window seeking donations.

The window showed up when Internet users tried to reach newly leaked files, including an advertised 13,734 emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor about Mitt Romney and the Republican Party.

To get the window to go away, it appeared users had to donate or share the link through Twitter or Facebook. Some users said they could evade the campaign by disabling Javascript or that the window vanished after repeated attempts to reach WikiLeaks documents.

After the fundraising campaign went live, members of Anonymous denounced the window as a “paywall,” saying it was wrong to hinder access to leaked files. The hacking collective has usually been an ally of WikiLeaks, seeing its quest to reveal government and corporate secrets as a common cause.

“This, dear friends will lose you all allies you still had,” one Anonymous Twitter account declared. A longer statement, linked through another Anonymous account, said WikiLeaks had become “the One Man Julian Assange Show,” straying from its core mission of revealing vital information.

WikiLeaks countered on Twitter that the window wasn’t a paywall, pointing out that users could also share or tweet the campaign. It later removed the pop-up without added comment. Members of Anonymous greeted the decision with approval, with one major account writing that the two groups were still friends.

UK government sites disrupted as Anonymous protests for Assange

British government websites have suffered interruptions as supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange launched online attacks over his asylum case.

The British Home Office said its website had been “targeted by protesters on Monday night but only experienced very minor interruption to the service.” Though the website was disrupted, it had not been hacked and none of its other systems were affected, the office stated.

The Justice Department also said its website had been disrupted but that no private data were at risk, since the website was meant to provide public information and didn’t hold sensitive files.

"Measures put in place to keep the website running mean that some visitors may be unable to access the site intermittently,” it said.

Anonymous, a loose network of hackers and Internet freedom activists, claimed credit on Twitter for the attacks on the Home Office and Justice Department websites, along with several other British government sites that appeared to be functioning smoothly on Tuesday.

It billed the attacks as #OpFreeAssange, warning, “Gov. of UK Expect Us!”

25 suspected Anonymous hackers arrested in international sweep

Twenty-five alleged hackers from the freewheeling, decentralized Anonymous protest movement have been arrested across Europe and South America in a massive sweep coordinated by Interpol, an agency based in France that links police around the world.

Suspects arrested in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain were believed to have carried out coordinated digital attacks against the Colombian Ministry of Defense, a Chilean electrical company and other targets, the Associated Press reported.

The Spanish national police said Tuesday that they had arrested four “cyberdelinquents” tied to Anonymous, accused of blocking and defacing websites of political parties, institutions and businesses. Authorities seized 25 personal computers, hard drives and other equipment for analysis. Two servers used by the group in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic were blocked.

One of the arrestees, known by the aliases "Thunder" and "Pacotron," was believed to be in charge of the Anonymous infrastructure in Spain and Latin America, Spanish police said.

The Interpol website was down Tuesday evening. Online chatter hinted that Anonymous had carried off a revenge attack, echoing retaliatory hacks in the past when other members were arrested.

“interpol.int seems to be #TangoDown. We can’t say that this surprises us much,” an Anonymous account tweeted.

The loosely linked band of hackers has carried off a number of cyber attacks, many of them with activist aims, such as opposing broad bills against online piracy or supporting the "Arab Spring" protests.

In December, it brought down the Stratfor security think tank server and claimed to have stolen credit card numbers from its clients to nab money for Christmas donations.

Last year, it claimed to have obtained emails, credit card information and other sensitive data from U.S. police websites in retaliation for the arrests of alleged members in the U.S. and Britain.

The year before, it said it had attacked PayPal as part of "Operation Avenge Assange" after PayPal decided to stop processing donations for WikiLeaks, which many of its members admire.

And just a few weeks ago, it posted a 16-minute recording of an FBI conference call with foreign policing agencies about two British teenagers allegedly tied to the hacking group. 

"There are future operations planned in the way of everything from campaign finance reform, to elections, to infosec [information security] and much, much more, stay tuned," an Anonymous activist told the CNET technology news website in an interview Tuesday. "Expect us."

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-- Emily Alpert in Los Angeles