I'm perturbed by the number of hackers getting taken down who blather on about their personal lives, use a VPN with no encryption and think it's safe, and still manage to break into these rather large systems. Either they're skilled but reckless and cavalier, they're idiots and security everywhere is a joke, or both.

Not sure which of those scenarios is more disturbing. Either way, I suspect that, in the wake of these latest arrests, we'll see both better opsec from Anon, as well as an increased focus on security from those who are likely to be targets. In the meantime, I'll get 15 messages on my facebook wall saying, "see who's visited your profile!"

sigh

The only thing they had was the Tor IPs, and SSL doesn't hide IPs.

This is nothing surprising. If you listen to the (public) disclosures of wiretaps on e.g., Mob bosses, etc., it's full of mundane chatter about what they had for lunch, who they met, their bowling scores, etc. The reality is that after some time of being secretive and not getting caught, it's human nature to just act normally and let your guard down. If you think about it, the criminal only has to make one mistake out of thousands of individual actions to be caught and prosecuted.

Criminals are just ordinary people, not supervillains!

and there isn't really such a thing as a 'VPN without encryption'

Probably a good call, really. It requires physical presence, but done right it could be nigh undetectable, whereas reporting over the target's uplink could alert a very sharp target, and possibly even reveal who its masters are (based on destination).

...anything beyond the IPs because that would be considered wiretapping.

But that is exactly what it appears they had the authority to do no?

Doing this does not count as wiretapping, as it was ruled to be akin to a dump of phone records, rather than listening on the conversation itself. Yes, they are splitting hairs, but that is how justice has to work.