Now They've Done It

The rise of the Islamic State, ISIS, has demonstrated how effectively Islamic extremists use social media such as Twitter and Facebook.  Well, they did - past tense.  Now the Charlie Hebdo massacre has earned them an enemy, one they should fear - Anonymous.

At Least Someone is Pushing Back

The FBI claims that, beginning last December,  Anonymous has waged a campaign hacking U.S. government computers.

The hackers exploited a flaw in Adobe Systems Inc's software to launch a rash of electronic break-ins that began last December, the FBI said in a memo seen by Reuters, then left "back doors" to return to many of the machines as recently as last month.

As I have read about this I have wondered what to make of it.   Of course hacking into government computers and lifting data is against probably several laws.  That makes it a crime.  Yet it's a crime with a David versus Goliath aspect along with just a touch of Robin Hood taking down the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.

I'm starting to accept that this whole crime & punishment stuff is really not all it's cracked up to be.  I can't say that I approve of what Anonymous is doing but I know that today I can't condemn them either, certainly not on something as flimsy as the FBI's say so.   Not after WikiLeaks.   Not after the NSA Prism scandal.  Not after we embraced CSEC.  Not after Five Eyes.  No, the only way any surveillance state remains in business is by deception and concealment and that mission starts the moment they open their mouths to 'warn' the public.

Sorry but that's part and parcel of the modern democratic deficit, the rise of the corporatist state.  I'm willing to accept that Anonymous may be committing crimes (as defined, conveniently, by the state victim) but I'm not at all sure they're not committing those crimes on my behalf, on behalf of all of us.

And, when it comes right down to it, at least someone is pushing back.

I Don't Believe Anonymous Did Anything Wrong

Did Anonymous threaten Vic Toews as is being suggested?   Did Anonymous warn Toews that, if he didn't kill C-30, it would out him over his involvement with a Manitoba judge?  In other words, did they try to extort Toews?   Was he being blackmailed?

I don't think so.   This question ran through my mind when I first heard the Anonymous clip posted on YouTube a week before the substantive clip came out.   I couldn't identify any element of blackmail to it.  There was no, "if you don't do this, we'll do that," element to it.   It was, "this time next week we'll be releasing this information."  Pretty unequivocal and hard to see how that could be construed as blackmail.

It's On. Anonymous Under Attack.

The battle to disrupt the Anonymous collective is underway.  The latest campaign has been directed at Spanish-speaking activists.

Spanish cops arrested several suspects earlier this week and further arrests followed in South America.

The group now says it wasn't police technical sleuthing that got them but infiltration of one website used by them.

Interpol, which announced the arrests Tuesday, did not say how it encountered the 25 suspects, who it says were involved in cyberattacks originating from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain that targeted sites including Colombia’s defense ministry and presidency and Chile’s Endesa electricity company and national library.

Activists encountered in the chat room said some of those arrested belonged to a group of hackers called Sector404 while others were unsophisticated activists who took part in denial-of-service attacks, which overwhelm websites with data requests.

“The GREAT majority of those implicated were people inhabiting the servers of anonworld.info, something that disconcerts us,” said the activist “Skao,” who identified herself as a law student.
In the communique released on its blog, Anonymous Iberoamerica said the 25 were snared not through “intelligence work or informatics strategy” but rather through “the use of spies and informants within the movement.”

The activists said many of those arrested had been careless, leaving digital tracks.

The group subsequently retaliated with denial of service attacks against Interpol.   It will be interesting to follow how Anonymous reacts to the crackdown.  Inevitably members of the organization will be taken down but it may be too loosely organized to be seriously harmed.   If anything, Anonymous has a real advantage in being able to apply insurgency tactics to their online campaign.

The FBI warns that many businesses aren't taking the hacktivism threat seriously.

The youth of alleged Anonymous hackers, who are often teenagers or in their early twenties, has lead a number of businesses to dismiss the hacking group without taking into account the ramifications of a successful hack, FBI cyber-investigator Eric Strom told the RSA Conference 2012 in San Francisco on Wednesday.

 

 Some businesses and public sector organisations reputations have been damaged by Anonymous exposure of information. For example, law firm ACS-Law, which disastrously accused thousands of people of illegal file-sharing, went out of business after details of people who had allegedly illegally accessed pornography were exposed during an Anonymous hack. ACS-Law was later fined £1000 by the Information Commissioner's Office for the exposure of personal information.

 

Anonymous is an amorphous group whose goals reflected its differing membership, said academic and journalist Mischa Glenny, who was appearing in a panel discussion with Strom.
"We have a real problem here in trying to identify what is genuine idealism, what is criminality, what is a sort of anarchic attitude to the internet, and what is a cover for piracy and other intellectual copyright issues," said Glenny.

Anonymous Strikes Deep

If only we didn't have the attention span of house flies.

Some 50-groups are now wading through over 5-million e-mails obtained from the self-proclaimed 'shadow CIA' intelligence company, Stratfor.   The documents were distributed by WikiLeaks on behalf of Anonymous.

One recipient was the Yes Men, a loose collaboration of some 300 imposters who infiltrate corporations, often with hilarious results.  They're only just starting to wade through this mountain of documents but they're already coming up with gold.

Just as Wall Street has at times let slip their fear of the Occupy Wall Street movement, these leaks seem to show that corporate power is most afraid of whatever reveals "the larger whole" and "broader issues," i.e. whatever brings systemic criminal behavior to light. 

"Systemic critique could lead to policy changes that would challenge corporate power and profits in a really major way," noted Joseph Huff-Hannon, recently-promoted Director of Policy Analysis for the Yes Lab.

Among the millions of other leaked Stratfor emails are some that reveal dubious financial practices, including an apparent insider trading scheme with Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz, who joined Stratfor's board of directors and invested "substantially" more than $4 million in the scheme, called StratCap. "What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments," wrote Stratfor CEO George Friedman in September 2011. StratCap was designed through a complex offshore share structure to appear legally independent, but Friedman assured Stratfor staff otherwise: "Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral... It will be useful to you... We are already working on mock portfolios and trades." (StratCap has been due to launch in 2012, though that could now change.)

Other emails show Stratfor techniques of a truly creepy Spy vs. Spy sort: "[Y]ou have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control," wrote CEO Friedman recently to an employee, Reva Bhalla, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on Chavez's cancer. (Stratfor's "confidential intelligence services" clients include, besides Dow and Union Carbide, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.)

Perhaps most entertainingly of all, the email trove reveals that Stratfor's "Confederation Partners"—an unethical alliance between Stratfor and a number of mainstream journalists—are referred to informally within Stratfor as its "Confed Fuck House." (Another discovery: Coca Cola was spying on PETA. More such gems are sure to surface as operatives sift through the 5.5 million emails.)

I understand WikiLeaks distributing the documents on such a wide basis to make suppression more difficult, perhaps even impossible.  But this time the dissemination appears chaotic, disjointed.  It's going to be harder for outsiders to monitor the revelations over the considerable time required to process this volume of information.

And yet these documents may offer us an extremely valuable window into the spread and influence of corporatism today and how they operate.

Wiki-Anon, The New Empire Busters?

The dynamics of this duo promise to be earth-shaking.  WikiLeaks joining forces with Anonymous.  As Cole Stryker writes over at Salon.com, we may be on the brink in a new era of guerrilla  transparency:

This is huge; it’s the first time Anonymous has ever cooperated with an aboveground entity, lending an unprecedented amount of political legitimacy to the often inscrutable group. But why? What do these strange bedfellows have to gain from collaboration? With this new collaboration, Anonymous has obtained new credibility, and WikiLeaks has obtained a hugely valuable new source. This potentially powerful alliance could point to the future of the leak economy, and this awkward symbiosis provides each party with exactly what they need to move forward. A new age of transparency activism may have just begun.

Is this an insurgency?  Yes, of sorts.  It's also in its infancy and the direction and distance it will travel is very uncertain.   It strikes at the very heart of today's authoritarian and corporatist movements that are dependent on being able to operate free of prying eyes.  Read that last sentence again only, this time, think of Stephen Harper.


Like any threat to authoritarian order, it would be unimaginable that the instruments of state power would not be deployed to push back and the resilience of Anonymous will soon be put to the test.  Yet I suspect they'll probably be difficult, perhaps impossible to take down.   The stakes are high for both sides but, like any insurgency, Anonymous need only survive to win.