Thank you for contacting us. Firstly, the media is over reacting and exaggerating the fact that we cooperated with law enforcement agencies where we being a legitimate company being issued a UK court order on this lulzsec incident.

We DID NOT sell any infos to any party. We are not paying anyone nor anyone is paying to release information. May i know were did you read about us selling off information anyway?

We ONLY store logs of your original IP, date and time of connection. We DO NOT store any records on your internet activities as all the data transferred through the tunnel is encrypted anyway, we have no idea what are you accessing.

You have to understand that what we did was helping law enforcement agencies in hunting down a cyber criminal which played a part in hacking the Sony Playstation Network, hacking into NATO military servers, defacing British newspaper The Sun and The times and many more activities which are deemed illegal and violate the law which governed the internet. A valid UK court order was being issued to us and that is only the right thing to do.

For your info, he use of VPN does not allow one to perform illegal activities. And I can guarantee you that all VPN providers keep logs, if they claimed that they do not, they are seriously misleading you. These logs are for us to locate abusive users (spamming, bots, file sharing complaints etc etc) to prevent our VPN servers from going down due to these abuses. It is very naive for one to think that by paying $11/month you will get total anonymity where you can abuse the service however they like and performing illegal activities behind a VPN.

There is nothing to ‘fight’ against this case as it is clearly a violation of laws in which we are a legitimate company and we DO NOT protect criminals. If we do, what’s the difference are we compared to these cyber criminals?

You might want to read our blog on this entire Lulzsec fiasco: http://blog.hidemyass.com/2011/09/23/lulzsec-fiasco/

Regards,
Joshua
HMA! Team

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Similarly if you are a yemenite dissident or an egyptian one your name and adress will end up with your authorities as soon as a suitable US ally asks.

Given how much the US is currently indebted to China I wouldn’t be using a US provider as a Chinese dissident either.

All in the name of combating “Terrorism” of course.

Seriously, you have to wonder about a world where being able to communicate anonymously is seen as a threat to society. My thought here is that any such society where free communication cannot be considered acceptable is tantamount to one where old Sovjet-style information control is the norm.

Such a society cannot last.

You do realize you are quoting Honecker, last president of the old DDR there, almost verbatim, regarding why “freedom” can not be tolerated in an orderly society?

Bitcoin may or may not fail…but that there will be at least one cryptocurrency which succeeds is more or less inevitable. There’s just too much to be gained in it for too many people.

That there will be frantic opposition to the establishment of such a currency is also a given.

You could make the same case about the lawsuits bringing down the shady practices of big oil companies, big tobacco or the AMA as well. Not to mention what the exposure of shaky loans did to the US economy in 2009.

As Kidwell has it below, it’s not a terrorist action when a corporation fails to safeguard itself through the most basic of measures – or for that matter when a demonstration of a few thousand people manage to prevent a major corporation from functioning.

What it is is embarrassing as all hell which is what causes the powers that be to go nuts – when the public finds out big multi-billion-dollar interests lack anything remotely resembling security the public trust in those interests plummet right along with the stock value.

The political side is far simpler, really – every politician extremely opposed to internet freedom tends to be a laughing stock in the blogosphere, satirically ridiculed in every other page. And that’s why the likes of Berlusconi and Sarkoszy so avidly oppose the internet. It’s the modern variant of trying to shut down the funny pages depicting the body politic as clowns and incompetents.

For gray hat hackers like Anonymous and Lulzsec however there’s a moral and ethical difference between exploiting the vulnerabilities of a corporate-sized douche such as Sony and exploiting the vulnerabilities of a hapless citizens computer.

That being the case a creative use of VPN’s is the norm. You might state that HMA did the proper thing in handing over the information requested by the authorities – but the problem is more along the lines that they explicitly stated they did not keep any such information and are thus lying to their clients about their stated terms of service.

So although handing over logs to authorities as requested by a court is indeed fine, keeping those logs at all does constitute out-and-out fraud in itself which renders HMA vulnerable to a class-action suit.

And that is why HMA deserves every slur heaped on their name. If you are an egyptian or Saudi dissident trying to promote government reform then HMA’s handing over such data to the US or any other ally of that government would mean incarceration, torture, and/or death.