Within Anonymous, some members of the group add that Lulz Security, or LulzSec, has been an offshoot long dead, though. Since that collective officially announced its disbandment in late June, Anonymous has gone on to do other activities — arguably their biggest and ballsiest ever — without the aid of Sabu, it would seem. In the months since LulzSec stopped assaults under that umbrella, Anonymous has not only forged relationships with the Occupy Wall Street movement and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, but have gone after numerous law enforcement agencies on an international scale, the private intelligence group Stratfor and most major entities of the United States government; upon announcement that INTERPOL arrested a few of their own last month, the worldwide policing group themselves saw their website crippled by an Anonymous-endorsed retaliation. “Anonymous is not a criminal organization,” tweeted another popular account, @AnonOps, at the time.

Although the FBI calls Tuesday’s raid a success, Anonymous members are charging that authorities arrested the culprit whose influence extended to a collective long passed and nothing else. The @p0isAn0N account, the subject of a Boston Police Department investigation over tweets related to an Occupy Wall Street protest there, was quick to counter on Tuesday that “LulzSec has BEEN dead”

“We don't have a leader,” reads another tweet from the YourAnonNews account. “A movement against authority without leaders drives authority insane; they cant break down a movement by corrupting the leader,” adds the account.

Not only has Anonymous long attested that no such hierarchy exists within the internationally-distributed band, but they have alleged that one of their own had been cooperating with authorities for quite some time. In July, an alleged Anonymous user raised suspicions of Monsegur and posted personal details of his online. At the time he published photos, family information, vehicles registered under his name and even his home address to the Internet. In an online chat between Sabu and another hacktivist named Virus from this past August, Virus wrote, “I’m absolutely positive, you already got raided, and are setting your friends up and when they’re done draining you for information and arrests they’ll sentence you and it’ll make nose.” Others had insisted that Sabu tried to entrap other hacktivists with money.

By Adrian Chen
Mar 6, 2012 7:16 PM

"I'm pissed off," the notorious hacker Sabu told me on the phone last September, lamenting the latest arrests in a worldwide crackdown on the hacking collective Anonymous. "I'm getting real sad, with all the bullshit. It's all media hunger on the side of the FBI, my nigga."

I learned today that when Sabu said all this during an unexpected phone conversation last fall, he was also on the side of the FBI as an informant. 28-year-old Hector Monsegur—a.k.a. "Sabu"—was arrested last June. He pleaded guilty to 12 hacking charges in August and turned informant, helping feds take down members of LulzSec, the Anonymous off-shoot he had once led. Today, thanks to evidence he collected, five of Sabu's former associates were arrested. But he did a pretty good job of playing the underground king when I talked to him, even if, in all likelihood, the feds were listening in and he knew it.

Nothing is ever straightforward about hackers, and the way I ended up talking to Monsegur was typically convoluted. Last fall I came across a phone number said to belong to Sabu; I'd chatted with him on and off while reporting on his and his associates' hacks, but only over the Anonymous chat networks on which he was a constant presence. As far as I knew, no non-hacker had ever heard his voice.

(Our conversations were off the record; we decided to go ahead with publishing the details today after learning that he'd been an informant at the time we spoke.)

More: http://gawker.com/5891047/im-not-scared-of-jail-my-phone-call-with-sabu-the-fbis-anonymous-informant