On May 5, hacker group Anonymous hacked the website of airline company GlobalX, the airline carrying out the lawless deportation of Americans, many of them legal residents.
The website was defaced with a message from Anonymous which read:
Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge's order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans.
The message refers to Federal U.S. District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez ruling on May 1 that the Alien Enemies Act cannot be used to carry out deportations. The message quotes the Judge’s order and mocks Trump, stating “You lose again Donnie.”
An archived image of the hacked website can be viewed here.
The group also claims to have stolen flight records and passenger details. The deportation flight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been confirmed.
The hack is one of many done by Anonymous. Formed in the early 2000’s, little is known about its members or organizational structure. Anonymous engages in “hacktivism,” hacking to enact political change.
The group previously hacked Tunisian government servers to prevent government surveillance of protesters during the Arab Spring protests, and hacked the Ku Klux Klan and leaked the personal information of the organization’s members.
In 2020, Anonymous leaked over 269 gigabytes of internal law enforcement data during the George Floyd protests showing that law enforcement agencies engaged in extensive surveillance of peaceful protestors. After Texas passed an abortion ban in 2021, Anonymous vowed to target the websites of abortion “whistle-blowers” and hacked the Texas Republican Party’s website, defacing it with a link to donate to Planned Parenthood.
And from the comments under the original story:
From the diary’s linked Forbes piece, the identities of many of the deportees may finally be known:
However, Anonymous also claims to have stolen flight records and passenger manifests, which include details of the deportation flights and passengers. Investigative journalist, Joseph Cox at 404 Media, said that he “cross-checked known information about ICE deportation flights that come from official and confirmable sources with information contained on the flight manifests and flight details obtained by the hacker,” and information about the deportation flight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was confirmed. I have reached out to GlobalX Airlines for a statement.
“Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Is ‘Only a Matter of Time’” details reports from GlobalX flight attendants that only the guards and other government and GlobalX employees are considered passengers, while the deportees are considered as expendable as cargo (Pro Publica, April 1):
A standard flight had more than a dozen private security guards — contractors working for the firm Akima — along with a single ICE officer, two nurses, and a hundred or more detainees. (Akima did not respond to a request for comment.) The guards were in charge of delivering food and water to the detainees and taking them to the lavatories. This left the flight attendants, whose presence was required by the FAA, with little to do.
[…] The rare guidance some flight attendants said they received on carrying out ICE Air evacuations came during briefings from pilots. What they heard, they said, was chilling and went against their training.
“Just get up and leave,” one recalled a GlobalX pilot telling him. “That’s it. … Save your life first.”
He understood the instructions to mean that evacuating detainees was not a priority, or even the flight attendants’ responsibility. The detainees were in other people’s hands, or in no one’s.
[…] “That was the normal briefing,” said a flight attendant from Lala’s class. “‘If a fire occurs in the cabin, if we land on water, don’t check on the immigrants. Just make sure that you and the guards and the people that work for the government get off.’”
If the data that Anonymous hacked enables deportees to be identified, that could expose how undocumented non-criminals, legal residents, and maybe citizens are being abused by trump’s deportation goons. This could make forced deportation even more unpopular among voters who wanted to believe that trump would only deport criminal immigrants, or that deportations were being conducted humanely.
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Cross-posted from Daily Kos.
