cyber warfare, hackers and phreakers
some asturian pipes this time.
we are living exceptional times now. i was wrong. most cables being released now are impressive. i can’t wait for the rest. the us funding coups, corruption, corporate terrorism. the good stuff is here. which turns our simplified picture into a richer one. i’m no longer skeptic of wikileaks and its mission. they are showing us the truth we’ve suspected all along, and we’re reading it early enough that we can prosecute the criminals. whether we will be able to, is the big question.
hacking these days says little about what it was initially. hacking is no more than exploiting fragilities of information systems. phreaking on the other hand is the human kind of exploiting of fragilities. for example, you could use some unknown software failure to access some internal website, or you could call the company, emulate some voice tone and professional vocabulary and request the same information. one exploits machines, the other exploits humans.
old school hackers like assange are highly knowledgeable of both. the key aspect of wikileaks is that it isn’t neither humanly nor politically naive. in fact, it follows a very elaborate philosophy, though somewhat lacking in questioning pillars of the establishment.
still, the wikileaks movement might still be phreaked. assange was phreaked because of his own vulnerabilities (narcissism and women). states and secret agencies are very cunning in this kind of hacking, and have spun it very well. then, there is the simple fact that the whole movement might be used as a reichtag event to justify new laws. these will obviously run while the fires are going on, so nobody can see them come through.
i tend to favor incompetence over conspiracies, since they are indistinguishable in practice, and the first seems to be simpler and more in line with human nature. the de facto events tend to be the same, irregardless of whether there is some unseen hand behind it or not. like i was arguing before about planned obsoletion, it happens both by planned decisions and pure managerial incompetence. for the consumer, they are indistinguishable.
so now we are seeing the typical disaster / ransack human reactive mindset. states are reacting any way they can (the same states that preached openness), by trying to spin this nightmare in their favor. they were incredibly incompetent in protecting their secrets, so to protect them they must conjure up any kind of elaborate reaction. if it does come through, it will be indifferent whether this was planned or not. in practice, rights are lost anyway.
meanwhile, the cyber troops are banding up and now we have a real battlefield. the internet empowered the citizens, and anyone can download a ddos software and use it. so damaging big companies is possible (just read about the 16 year old arrested in holland this week for doing ddos attacks). if a state is afraid of children, we can’t even begin to rationalize how this will play out.
something will have to give. on one hand, the naive and suddenly empowered anonymous citizens, with a leader to look up to with clear ideals and philosophy (though little dissent from the mainstream political culture). on the other hand, the status quo, the powerful rulers of the planet, feeling threatened for the first time.
so it can easily go one way or the other. my guess is that there will be strong crackdown on dissidents and we’ll lose some internet rights along the way. only time will tell.