One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informant’
The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust, with an estimated one in four hackers secretly informing on their peers, a Guardian investigation has established.
Cyber policing units have had such success in forcing online criminals to co-operate with their investigations through the threat of long prison sentences that they have managed to create an army of informants deep inside the hacking community.
It’s Philip K. Dick’s world, we just live in it.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
Never read any of PKDs stuff. Sounds interesting.
Hackers are a small time version of the mafia so of course they’re going to turn on each other. The only positive side is that when they turn states witness they or their family won’t be murdered.
Indeed interesting, until I got to the bit about the Guardian. Sorry Ed, don’t believe a word they print.
…yet my PSN account was still hacked and the information actually used to steal from my CC account. So much for those moles.
This is in the hopper & very sad. I am in my 70’s and I knew some of the guys that were busted by the fbi’s first bust in the early 1980’s in Princeton NJ.
So it has taken our gov from 1980 to 2011………….to infiltrate the Hacker Community!?
Those were and still will be the days of “glory for bragging rights!”
That I agreed with! Now NOT SO MUCH!
“The Happy Hacker”