The video uses the same, fairly standard text as found on the Pirate Bay dump: “We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.” This is certainly the avowed intent of Anonymous, but does not seem to be achieved in this hack.
“Government agencies and high-profile commercial enterprises are and will continue to be targets of politically and ideologically motivated hacktivists,” commented Neil Roiter, research director at Corero Network Security. “As we see again in the case of the Bureau of Justice Statistics breach, these groups often are indiscriminate about what they take and what they make public, simply grabbing what they can and posting it online. They do not consider who it might hurt and how.”
This was certainly an indiscriminate dump – just the whole database. It runs counter to the comments recently made by Chis Doyon, aka ‘Commander X’, currently on the run from the FBI. Doyon claims to be the Supreme Commander of the Peoples Liberation Front (PLF), separate to, but affiliated with Anonymous. He also claims, as the PLF, to have access to all known US government classified databases (mostly via whistleblowers and sympathizers with ‘legal’ access rather than via hacking). Doyon, however, claims that incriminating data will be released in a targeted manner; that is, not in whole database dumps.
The contradiction between Doyon’s claims and the DoJ dump lead to some interesting conjecture. Firstly, Doyon may not be what he claims, nor has access to the data he claims. Secondly, there may be no real affiliation between Anonymous and the PLF. Or thirdly, and probably most likely, Anonymous successfully hacked the DoJ, but found nothing really useful to further its cause. So it simply released the entire database. It is a statement of capability more than anything else. “You miss the point,” appears on its news channel in answer to criticism. “These are archived files and their retrieval served as a premise of control. If you're going through the effort to actually find 'juicy-details,' then you'd be better off in the tabloids.”
The DoJ hack and dump is primarily Anonymous saying ‘we’re still here; you should still expect us.’