http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
Despite how it might sound at times I'm not a huge hacker fanboy, but I do know a little about them, and various activities, since I've been online... for a while. You might want to read the above link.
To be blunt Hackers have been going back and forth with the federal authorities for a long time, and in general the authorities have had a truely abyssmal record of catching them. The above raid was a massive crackdown from now over 20 years ago where The Secret Service went on an anti-hacker rampage accross 15 cities and managed to score all of three successful arrests for their time and trouble... and of those arrests... and other things that transpired... well there are plenty of links from that page to all kinds of stuff about vintage hacker hijinks, form your own opinions as to how successful they were.
Baiting law enforcement is pretty much "par for the course" hacker activity, sure Lulzsec has a big platform given how many people are online, but they really aren't the first group to stand there and scream "Nyah, Nyah, Nyah" at the FBI and get away with it... and really I think the point is the establish cred and get themselves viewed in the same league of similar groups who had come before.
Time will tell where Lulzsec goes, but really, I think people are overreacting a bit much with the FBI. If they hadn't spent so long playing keystone cops for hacker groups I might be a little more impressed. Actually it would impress me more of they turned around and actually DID get the hackers, because that would be a chance of pace from the usual.
The current stuff is just noteworthy because of more people being electronically aware, and them not having the experience to put it into context.
