A Nebraska man is pleading guilty in federal court to a computer-disruption charge for his role in the 2008 distributed denial-of-service attack that temporarily shuttered Church of Scientology websites, the authorities said Tuesday.
Los Angeles federal prosecutors said Brian Thomas Mettenbrink, 20, signed a plea agreement Friday admitting his role in the January 2008 attack (.pdf) –- bringing to two the number of defendants convicted in Anonymous' attack on Scientology. Next week, Mettenbrink is expected to officially enter his plea, which carries a year sentence, prosecutors said.
"He took their websites down," Assistant United States Attorney Erik M. Silber said in a brief telephone interview from Los Angeles. "Anonymous: I think one of their primary missions is to bring down the Church of Scientology."
Mettenbrink's attorney did not return repeated telephone calls.
Last year, another member of the online troublemaking group Anonymous, Dmitriy Guzner, pleaded guilty to similar charges and was sentenced to a year in prison in what at the time was the first-known prosecution of an Anonymous member.
Past Anonymous targets include uncool virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a neo-Nazi webcaster.
Anonymous members formally declared war on the Church of Scientology in January 2008 after the secretive religious group tried to suppress a creepy Tom Cruise video produced for Scientology members.
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