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).

A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes. So how about 3 emoji? According to Virginia prosecutors, three emoji are worth criminal charges, even if the emojier is only 12 years old, and the emoji posted on Instagram.

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.

The growing backlash against the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and the suspension of Internet hosting and financial funding services such as MasterCard, Visa and Paypal (through which Wikileaks was receiving donations) have led to retaliation by so-called ‘hacktavists’ in the form of DOS and other cyber-attacks against the websites of MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, and those Internet hosting and DNS services which have disconnected Wikileaks, in some cases bringing the services to their knees. Paypal was brought down yesterday, as were MasterCard and Visa.

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.

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…