A sting operation led by Australian federal police against a well-known hacking ring ended in embarrassment after the police computer system was hacked by the very cybercriminals they’d aimed to wipe out, according the Sydney Morning Herald.

Aussie police reported on the TV show Four Corners that they had infiltrated the hacking forum r00t-you.org, which has about 5,000 members, by tracking hackers logging in to the site and then raiding the Melbourne home of the site’s administrator. Police had logged into the r00t-you.org forum as the administrator to gather information about other cybercriminals, and told the TV program that they had gained access “fairly seamlessly with no harm to our members with continual and actual significant penetration.”

What the police didn’t realize, though, was that they had failed to set a password on their own database application.

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In pictures, Vaughan Ettienne is a champion bodybuilder of surreal musculature. In conversation, he is polite and thoughtful.

And in the looking glass of his computer screen, he becomes a man of fierce, profane views on how to keep law and order. A few weeks ago, he posted a description of his mood on a MySpace account. “Devious,” he wrote.

The next day, a man accused of carrying a loaded gun would go on trial in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn–and in large part, the case rested on the credibility of Vaughan Ettienne, bodybuilder, Internet user and arresting officer.

What seemed like a simple gun possession case became an undeclared war over reality: Was Officer Ettienne a diligent cop who found a gun after chasing an ex-convict weaving through traffic on a stolen motorcycle? Or was his story a “devious” facade in keeping with the ruthless character he revealed on social network Web sites?

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The footage is shaky and low quality, with chaotic shouts and protests from onlookers at a subway station in San Francisco’s East Bay. But it clearly shows three policeman roughly handling a group of young men–including one who is pinned to the ground by two officers and shot in the back.

This shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant–who died later in hospital–has outraged many in California and triggered riots in Oakland in a case that many feel echoes the brutal beating of Rodney King by LA police in 1991.

Transport police were called to the Fruitvale train station in the early hours of New Year’s Day after reports of a fight. Grant was one of a small group of men taken off the train and restrained, at which point several passengers began to film, using mobile phones and cameras.

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Six tech companies with offices in Bangalore, India, have received emailed bomb threats, according to IDG News Service. Among the threatened companies were Indian IT outsourcers Infosys (INFY) and Wipro (WIT). The threat reportedly came from an emailer in Bangalore, according to police officials cited by IDG.

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This morning when I checked the news about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, I saw many people on Twitter reporting that the Indian police or government had asked Twitter users to please stop reporting on police and military operations related to the attacks.

That struck me as odd. I’ve heard police and military make similar requests of news organizations (especially live TV) during crisis situations–but asking social media users for this sort of self-censorship? It seemed not merely futile, but perhaps a bit draconian.

It also occurred to me that such an official request might be a milestone in the evolving power dance of the police/military, professional press, and the public. What precedent could this set for future police/public interactions during other kinds of events–like political demonstrations, natural disasters, or food riots?

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