The six ex- forces personnel with a combines 74 years of service were arrested in October 2013 after they were accused of entering Indian waters without permission.
They were on board the American-owned anti-piracy vessel the MV Seaman Guard Ohio, tasked with protecting merchant seamen in some of the most dangerous waters in the world.The coastguard accused them of straying into Indian waters without permission as they headed for emergency fuel and supplies.
Once they boarded the ship, officials discovered 35 firearms and ammunition. The men’s pleas that the weapons were lawfully held for anti-piracy purposes fell on deaf ears — even though their paperwork, issued by the UK Government, was all in order and provided proof that the anti-piracy team were given permits to carry the guns by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.
The Indian High Court, at first, accepted the paperwork was in order and dismissed the case but the men were unable to leave India while a lengthy appeal against the charges being dropped was considered. This led to the men standing trial at the magistrate court, who then decided that the men had failed to prove that they were on anti-piracy duties.
In January 2016 they were found guilty by the court and sentenced to five years imprisonment.
This is a complete miscarriage of justice!
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The families are completely devastated and are now doing everything they can to support their dads, brothers, sons and husbands by sending them support packages with items such as foods, toiletries, books, games etc. and are asking you, if you can spare the time and money, to also send the lads something (even just a handwritten letter) to let them know that they have not been forgotten.
The families are also trying extremely hard to get this terrible situation into the media as it certainly hasn’t had the coverage it deserves. So please help us by sharing details via social media and signing the petition.
Thank you all for your support so far for these men who have now been held in India for over 3 and a half years. Let’s hope we can get the lads home soon and overturn this miscarriage of justice!
Join the Campaign to Free these veterans & clear their names!
A “black hat” hacker is a hacker who “violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain” (Moore, 2005).
The term was coined by Richard Stallman, to contrast the maliciousness of a criminal hacker versus the spirit of playfulness and exploration in hacker culture, or the ethos of the white hat hacker who performs hacking duties to identify places to repair or as a means of legitimate employment.
Black hat hackers form the stereotypical, illegal hacking groups often portrayed in popular culture, and are “the epitome of all that the public fears in a computer criminal”.
Apparently ‘surprised’ by release of documents, TV network attempts to push back ransom deadline with promise of payment
HBO reportedly offered $250,000 (£193,000) to the group that hacked its servers under the guise of a “bug bounty”, according to a screenshot of the conversation released by the attackers and seen by the Guardian.
A senior vice president of the company made the offer on 27 July, phrasing the payment as a reward for discovering weaknesses in HBO’s network rather than acceding to ransom demands.
“been working hard since Sunday evening [23 July] to review all of the material that you have made available to us. We simply have not yet been able to do so”.
The executive continues: “You have the advantage of having surprised us. In the spirit of professional cooperation, we are asking you to extend your deadline for one week.
“As a show of good faith on our side, we are willing to commit to making a bug bounty payment of $250,000 to you as soon as we can establish the necessary account and acquire bitcoin.”
$250,000
The offer may have been an attempt to stall for time, rather than a genuine proposal of payment. HBO came clean about the hack four days after the bug bounty payment was offered, telling the public that it had experienced a “cyber-incident, which resulted in the compromise of proprietary information”.
A script for Game of Thrones, and two unreleased episodes of dramas Ballers and Room 104, were put online the same day. A week after the payment offer, on 3 August, the attackers sent out more evidence of hacked materials, and claimed to have access to the company’s entire webmail system – a claim denied by HBO.
The hackers later released the personal details of some Game of Thrones actors, including email addresses and phone numbers, plus some HBO emails and confidential files, along with a renewed demand for a multimillion dollar ransom.
Bug bounty payments are a common occurrence in cybersecurity, designed to encourage third-parties to discover and report weaknesses found in security systems so they can be fixed, rather than sell the information to would-be attackers.
Gary Mckinnon a.ka Solo is a Scottish hacker who masterminded the largest military computer hack of all time
Gary McKinnon must’ve been a curious, restless child, for to gain information on UFOs, he thought it better to get a direct access into the channels of NASA. He infiltrated 97 US military and NASA computers, by installing virus and deleting a few files. All the efforts to satisfy his curiosity, but, alas, curiosity killed the cat. It was soon found that McKinnon was guilty of having hacked the military and NASA websites from his girlfriend’s aunt’s house in London.
While entering and deleting the files from these websites wasn’t enough, McKinnon thought of shaming the security forces by putting out a notice on the website that said,
“Your security is crap.”
Well, looks like McKinnon was something, if he could shut down the US Military’s Washington Network of about 2000 computers for 24 hours, making the hack, the biggest military computer hack of all time!
Kevin Mitnick
Kevin Mitnick was once the most wanted cyber criminal in the world. He had an obsession with computers that escalated into a two and half year hacking spree where he stole millions of dollars of corporate secrets from IBM, Motorola, telecom companies and even the National Defense warning system. He was caught twice in jail twice for his crimes, but now he is a computer security consultant .
Vladimir Levin
Vladimir Leonidovitch Levin is a Russian Hacker of genius proportions. In 1994 while working with a dial-up connection and a laptop from Saint Petersburg, Apartment he accessed the accounts of several large corporate customers of Citibank stealing USD 10.7 million. He ended up spending three years in jail. However, in 2005, an anonymous hacker group came claiming that they were the ones truly responsible for the theft and that they only sold Vladimir the data needed to steal the money.
Mathew Bevan and Richard Pryce
In 1996, Mathew Bevan and Richard Pierce were 21 and 17 respectively, when they broke into military computers. They didn’t only hack into US military computers, but the officials thought they might have also hacked into North Korean Systems as well. These people have the unique distinction of saying that they almost started a war.
Michael Calce
a.k.a
” MafiaBoy”
Michael Calce, a Canadian Hacker was responsible for a series of high-profile cyber attacks in 2000. Project Rivolta a project name he called it meaning riot in Italian was a distributed denial of service attack that took down major websites Yahoo, FIFA, Amazon, eBay, CNN, and Dell among others. He was caught after bragging about the attacks in an IRC chat room for which he got eight months in jail. Why such a short sentence? Michael was only in high school at the time
Adrian Lamo
” The Homeless Hacker”
Adrian Lamo is best-known for hacking into major cooperations like Yahoo, Bank of America, Citigroup, The New York Times and Microsoft but the way he did it made him famous. He used public internet connections like libraries and coffee shops to hack to hack into major sites. Because of that style, he was named as ‘Homeless Hacker’. In 2004 after being caught he was given six months house arrest in order to pay $65,000 in restitution.
Jeanson James Ancheta
Jeanson James Ancheta has been the first hacker ever to create a botnet a group hijacked computers that work together as a legal means. In 2004, he started to work with botnets robot, a computer worm that can spread his net of infected computers which gave him control to 500,000 computers including US military computers. He was forced to give up his BMW, pay more than $58,000 and serve 60 months in prison.
Owen Walker
Owen Walker a.ka AKILL was only 17 when he let in an international hacking group that cause over 26 million dollars in damages. The school teenager was responsible for creating the Bot virus which spread into 1.3 million computers around the world crashing them. Even though he was caught despite all the damage he was released without being convicted
Astra
The hacker named Astra, whose real name was never revealed was a 58-year-old Geek Mathematician, who was operated between 2002 and 2008 during that five-year period. He stole weapons technology data in 3D modeling software from a company called the Salt Group, which he sold up to USD 361 million to buyers all around the world. He was tracked down in an apartment in Athens, Greece.
Albert Gonzalez
Albert Gonzalez, over a two year period he stole a total of 175 million credit card numbers selling them online. A massive yet undisclosed amount of money was stolen from his victims through identity theft, leaving them to battle to restore the credit ratings and get their money back. He was sentenced to 40 years jail.
Anonymous
The concept of being a “digital Robin Hood” was far from being conceived, but in the computer age, it is very likely that someone somewhere has bagged this title. A “hacktivist group” called Anonymous are known with the penname of being the “digital Robin Hood” amongst its supporters. Identified in public by wearing a Guy Fawkes Masks, Anons, as they are widely known, have publicized themselves by attacking the government, religious and corporate websites.
The Vatican, the FBI, the CIA, PayPal, Sony, Mastercard, Visa, Chinese, Israeli, Tunisian, and Ugandan governments have been amongst their targets. Although, Anons have been arguing whether to engage in a serious activism or a mere entertainment, many of the group members have clarified their intent which is to attack internet censorship and control.
On September 11, 1916, a homeless man named Red Eldridge, who landed a job as a transient hotel clerk was hired as an assistant elephant trainer by the Sparks World Famous Shows circus.
Eldridge led the elephant parade, although he was not qualified, riding on the top of Mary’s back; Mary was the star of the show, riding at the front.
There have been several accounts of his death. One, recounted by W.H. Coleman, who claimed to be a witness, is that he prodded her behind the ear with a hook after she reached down to nibble on a watermelon rind. She went into a rage, snatched Eldridge with her trunk, threw him against a drink stand and stepped on his head, crushing it.
A contemporary newspaper account, from the Johnson City Staff, said that Mary
“collided its trunk vice-like about [Eldridge’s ] body, lifted him 10 feet in the air, then dashed him with fury to the ground… and with the full force of her beastly fury is said to have sunk her giant tusks entirely through his body.
The animal then trampled the dying form of Eldridge as if seeking a murderous triumph, then with a sudden… swing of her massive foot hurled his body into the crowd.”
Eldridge’s Death Certificate
It is clear from the photo of her hanging that Mary was either tuskless or had short ‘tushes’ common amongst female Asian elephants.
Execution
The details of the aftermath are confused in a maze of sensationalist newspaper stories and folklore. Most accounts indicate that she calmed down afterward and didn’t charge the onlookers, who began chanting,
“Kill the elephant! Let’s kill it.”
Within minutes, local blacksmith Hench Cox tried to kill Mary, firing five rounds with little effect. Meanwhile, the leaders of several nearby towns threatened not to allow the circus to visit if Mary was included. The circus owner, Charlie Sparks, reluctantly decided that the only way to quickly resolve the potentially ruinous situation was to kill the wounded elephant in public.
On the following day, a foggy and rainy September 13, 1916, Mary was transported by rail to Erwin , Unicoi County, Tennessee, where a crowd of over 2,500 people (including most of the town’s children) assemb led in the Clinchfield Railroad yard.
The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane between four o’clock and five o’clock that evening.
The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip as dozens of children fled in terror. The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks.
A veterinarian examined Mary after the hanging and determined that she had a severely infected tooth in the precise spot where Red Eldridge had prodded her.
Although the authenticity of a widely distributed (and heavily retouched) photo of her death was disputed years later by Argosy magazine, other photographs taken during the incident confirm its provenance.
What do I think?
I think Mary was treated appallingly and those that killed her should have been punished for such a heinous act . However in 1916 the world was a very different place and many folks had strange primitive attitude towards animals and animal welfare.
Thankfully we now live in a more enlighten time and we are way to busy killing each other to execute our fella animals.
Amen!
See below for other Iconic Pictures & pictures that changed the world.
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