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The First Great Infowar
Dec. 8th, 2010 10:42 pmI don't think there can be any doubt at this point that 2010 will go down in the history books as the year of the First Great Infowar, when Wikileaks tried to release reams of extremely dangerous governmental data and was stopped by the united and virtuous efforts of the governments of the world.
Oops, sorry, typo there!
That bit about the First Infowar is probably right, though Great is likely hyperbole, but what I meant to say is that Wikileaks released lots of mostly useless (WikiLeaks: Get an Editor!) information--that probably should have been public in the first place--and the governments of the world ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, aided in some part by cowardly and foolish corporations like Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard, and it all didn't do crap to actually stop the flow of information.
Hello, the Streisand Effect is so ten years ago that I can't believe that people are still so damned idiotic at such huge (and high) levels.
I mean, for frig's sake, if the Great Firewall of China can't keep photos of students being murdered in Tianmen Square from the laptops of anyone in China under the age of 25 who wants to see it, how in the world do the supposedly free governments of the world think that they can censor things on these tubes?
And I think that's the reality of "infowars": if more than a couple of people want to publish info, it'll get out there.
Move on.
What I find much, much more disturbing about this infowar is the DDOS attacks that have been hitting Wikileaks constantly since about when they threatened to release damaging information on banks.
Because I think it's damned unlikely that the typical hacking suspects are hitting Wikileaks for a lark.
I think it's pretty damned likely that either the typical hacking suspects are being paid or else a corporation or a country is engaging in the DDOS attacks directly. We already know that China engages in this sort of attack (and I believe that was actually confirmed in, of all things, some of the recent Wikileaks), but I'm not convinced they have a dog in this fight. So, who's doing it?
And what's even more disturbing is that not a single news story I've seen thinks to question who it is that is launching these massive censoring attacks.
First rule of crime: ask, who benefits?
The EFF Talks About How Wikileaks is, at the least, doing something that's never been prosecuted ... and has severe first-amendment issues if it ever were. To quote the recent brief from Congressional Research Services: "we are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it"
Now DDOS attacks, on the other hand, those are prosecutable.
Oops, sorry, typo there!
That bit about the First Infowar is probably right, though Great is likely hyperbole, but what I meant to say is that Wikileaks released lots of mostly useless (WikiLeaks: Get an Editor!) information--that probably should have been public in the first place--and the governments of the world ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, aided in some part by cowardly and foolish corporations like Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard, and it all didn't do crap to actually stop the flow of information.
Hello, the Streisand Effect is so ten years ago that I can't believe that people are still so damned idiotic at such huge (and high) levels.
I mean, for frig's sake, if the Great Firewall of China can't keep photos of students being murdered in Tianmen Square from the laptops of anyone in China under the age of 25 who wants to see it, how in the world do the supposedly free governments of the world think that they can censor things on these tubes?
And I think that's the reality of "infowars": if more than a couple of people want to publish info, it'll get out there.
Move on.
What I find much, much more disturbing about this infowar is the DDOS attacks that have been hitting Wikileaks constantly since about when they threatened to release damaging information on banks.
Because I think it's damned unlikely that the typical hacking suspects are hitting Wikileaks for a lark.
I think it's pretty damned likely that either the typical hacking suspects are being paid or else a corporation or a country is engaging in the DDOS attacks directly. We already know that China engages in this sort of attack (and I believe that was actually confirmed in, of all things, some of the recent Wikileaks), but I'm not convinced they have a dog in this fight. So, who's doing it?
And what's even more disturbing is that not a single news story I've seen thinks to question who it is that is launching these massive censoring attacks.
First rule of crime: ask, who benefits?
The EFF Talks About How Wikileaks is, at the least, doing something that's never been prosecuted ... and has severe first-amendment issues if it ever were. To quote the recent brief from Congressional Research Services: "we are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it"
Now DDOS attacks, on the other hand, those are prosecutable.