A Most Interesting Development in the Rauhauser case

Colin Sul­li­van: You’re an FBI infor­mant? Are you fuck­ing kid­ding me?
Frank Costello: Grow up! Of course I talked to the FBI.
Colin Sul­li­van: Do they know who I am?
Frank Costello: I… I never gave up any­body… who wasn’t going down any­way. Nobody knows nothin’.
Colin Sul­li­van: Frank… Frank. Do they know about me?

The Departed 2006

I’ve been busy with my own things lately but Stacy McCain is still on the Neal Rauhauser story and noted an… inter­est­ing devel­op­ment at the begin­ning of the week:

OK, so what’s going on here? Why has some­one within Anony­mous started pub­lish­ing these recorded phone calls and other documents?

We can spec­u­late on motives, but my best guess is that Rauhauser is sus­pected of being a gov­ern­ment snitch, and this evi­dence is being pub­lished by some­one who is try­ing to make Rauhauser “radioactive” — an untouch­able, an enemy of Anony­mous — so that every hacker will be warned to stay away from Rauhauser.

Inter­est­ing Anony­mous has a prob­lem with Rauhauser, chooses to dump this stuff, and a few days later sud­denly Stacy notes another.…inter­est­ing development:

Exactly why left-​wing lawyer Jay Lei­der­man felt it nec­es­sary to denounce Neal Rauhauser, I’m not sure. Per­haps it has some­thing to do with the appar­ent sus­pi­cion among mem­bers of Anony­mous that Neal Rauhauser is a paid fed­eral infor­mant:

Very inter­est­ing…it would explain why the Kimberlin/​Rauhauser stuff never seemed to make an impres­sion on any­one with author­ity, Stacy continues:

As a law-​abiding cit­i­zen, I am all in favor of peo­ple help­ing the FBI arrest crim­i­nal hack­ers, but the hack­ers at Anony­mous may feel dif­fer­ently. Con­sid­er­ing that one of the files posted by Anony­mous includes Neal Rauhauser’s admis­sion that he was “Carlito2000,” who helped prokoke the melt­down that sent for­mer Anony­mous spokesman Bar­rett Brown to fed­eral prison … Well, that’s prob­a­bly just a coin­ci­dence, huh?

Yes a coin­ci­dence, an inter­est­ing coin­ci­dence and I’m sure Stacy will have more actual facts as they come out but here is what jumped out at me.

Rauhauser’s actions have been well doc­u­mented and com­mented on for a while, yet none of that was enough for Jay Lie­der­man to aban­don him. Yet Anony­mous leaks infor­ma­tion that could sug­gest Neal was work­ing with the FBI and violá he is cast aside.

Per­haps Lie­der­man, being a man of the left, con­sid­ers asso­ci­a­tion with the FBI, even through a sec­ond party, unwel­come. Maybe he is afraid of Anony­mous, after all many are but consider.

It’s my under­stand­ing that lawyers are by def­i­n­i­tion offi­cers of the court. That being the case am I the only per­son who finds this lawyer’s deci­sion to move away from Neil Rauhauser when he is aban­doned by a law­less group very .…inter­est­ing?