Jonathan McRae was arrested while wearing an Anonymous mask during a public hearing regarding election and voting issues in Maricopa county, Arizona. Note that we did not say that he was arrested for wearing the Anonymous mask, but rather while wearing the Anonymous (Guy Fawkes) mask. And, in fact, the mask wasn’t even covering his face (he had it up on his head – see the below video link).

Score one for the good guys: the Justice Department has said that they have taken down a huge, international child pornography ring that ‘met’ on an online bulletin board known as DreamBoard, where the members in the exclusive, members-only Dream Board child porn ring would trade images and videos of children involved in sex acts, all under the age of 12, and including children as young as infants. Heartbreaking!

Aaron Swartz, a co-creator of RSS , open access advocate, and author of the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, and now a researcher at Harvard, has been arrested for hacking into the JSTOR system. JSTOR, which stands for “Journal Storage”, is a system that archives academic journals, and makes them available to institutions and, in a more limited version, to the public.

From our “We told you so” department, San Mateo County sheriffs have executed a warrant, seizing computers and other items from Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s residence, following the appearance of a lost secret iPhone 4G prototype both in Gizmodo’s possession, and on their blog, where they fully disclosed Apple’s proprietary prototype. Jason Chen was not arrested, although he was patted down.

In case you hadn’t heard of the Facebook poking arrest that happened last month, Shannon D. Jackson was arrested for ‘poking’ Dana Hannah on Facebook – meaning that Jackson used the Facebook “poke” function to “poke” Hannah which, while perhaps rude, childish, and annoying, doesn’t usually rise to the level of an arrestable offense. However in this case, it is alleged that the poke violated the terms of a protection order (think “restraining order”) which Hannah had in place against Jackson. Now the whole thing has been referred to a grand jury.

Remember that guy who used his camera phone to make a video of himself having sex with his girlfriend, (and can you imagine the logistics involved?), only to have the video show up in the corner porn shop, and on an Internet auction site? And the folks who use their camera phones for upskirting and downblousing, courting prison time in the process? We had thought that these were the height of camera phone stupidity – especially the guy who reached out and touched someone while filming it. But noooo…. That dubious honour now goes to…drum roll please…