There's something that doesn't quite sit right with me about this story of HBGary, the private security firm that is now being villified for having hacked the Anonymous movement that supports WikiLeaks, and bragged about their sleuthing skills and ability to deflect hostile attacks on corporate clients such as Bank of America.
Let me first note that human rights activists are very wary of private security firms. We've always questioned them as outsourcers of the government's dirty work in wars. The reason you have scandals like hired security firm employees raping children in Afghanistan is because of this increasing trend and increasing laxness of discipline and civilian oversight. There are more and more of these firms in our day, with less and less scrutiny (and that's the idea). They commit more and more of the acts of war in our name, with less and less of our knowledge, and this is wrong.
If there is a war in cyberspace -- and I believe there is -- then there will be a war on hackers that will involve these private security firms just like the real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we will all be the worse for it -- but that doesn't mean we can't forthrightly explain what the original problem is: terrorists in Iraq; the Taliban in Afghanistan; and their moral (if not actual) equivalents in Anonymous on the Internet.
A good explanation of the background of such "wars" going back to COINTELPRO and such can be found here, and a good profiling of how HBGary and Anonymous really are the same thing: an arrogant and unaccountable coders' and hackers' culture that itself threatens our freedoms.
While perhaps government agencies believe it makes them more nimble and possibly even cost-efficient to be contracting out jobs like this, I think ultimately it makes them more weak. They probably end up spending more money in the end and they become complacent and lazy about functions that should be theirs in a democratic society under the rule of law in which they are charged with maintaining law and order and managing wars abroad (unfortunately for the purists, war itself is not illegal, and is under the rule of law, too).
Scrape away the hype and hysteria in the leftist media (Salon, Huffington Post) about the supposed response of the U.S. government to WikiLeaks, and you're actually left with a perplexing picture. Abroad, observers of the U.S. conflate Mike Huckabee calling for the death penalty against Assange with the entire U.S. government and Congress, and don't see him as the outlier he is. Most politicians, if they are saying anything about WikiLeaks -- and they really aren't saying much -- are saying that it doesn't matter, it only makes us look good, "they hate our freedom," etc. They just aren't commenting. Probably a lot of them are unfamiliar with the foreign anarchist culture the group represents and don't know about WikiLeaks faithful friends, like RCA Victrola dogs, the e-thugs of Anonymous. They might be surprised to learn that this is the same group that hacked into and stole Sarah Palin's email and that defaced Sen. John Edwards' campaign site in Second Life. These are not just people who "help Egypt" or "get up to some pranks sometimes" with obscene material. They are an adult, organized, concerted force operating against liberal democracies, and sometimes exploited or even led by foreign intelligence agenices. That they are willing to put a 16-year-old girl out as a front man like the mythological Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya lets us know something about their amorality, not that the kids are alright and "more clever" than adults.
What has the U.S. government actually done about WikiLeaks? Not a lot. First there was a cease-and-desist letter -- fairly mild -- from the State Department's Legal Advisor, Harold Koh, long a champaign of human rights. Then there have been a few fairly mind statements from Attorney General Eric Holder that an investigation is under way. President Obama hasn't been standing at a podium shaking his fist and vowing to hunt these people down. He's said nothing, really. This is all in keeping with a philosophy of the left and of this administration to treat "global terrorism" and politicized Internet crime of this nature not as something exotic, as if the anarchists and terrorists were impressive warriors in a righteous cause of their own, not to have a "war on terrorism," but instead to treat them like common criminals, people who have merely committed a very specific crime, like a petty misdemeanor or a specific felony, and keep the prosecution of them very low-key, so as to avoid glorifying them and helping them feel like martyrs. That's why the leftist coverage of this is so hilarious -- the Obama Administration, the most liberal in history, is not exhibiting the anger and hysteria or even embarrassment attributed to them, once you look for their actual official statements, instead of what you think they said in your imagination.
A strange thing has occurred that also makes no sense to me: leaks have started coming out of the Department of Justice, or there is some implication from DOJ sources, that the U.S. government doesn't have a case against Assange, that they are unable to show a link between Assange of WikiLeaks and Manning. Apparently to make the case, they'd have to show that Manning was commanded by, or instructed by, or colluded with Assange/WikiLeaks personnel in his hacking venture.
It's very odd that the Administration would deliberately weaken their own prosecution case in this manner, before the trial, but it could be a deliberate distraction from what they are really doing, or part of that "low-key" approach, or it could be wishful thinking on the left, and eagerness to find any DOJ source (perhaps one not representative) saying "there's no case" since this is the ardent belief of the WikiLeaks supporters.
It's very strange for all these people to be claiming there is no direct link between Assange and Manning when there are the Wired chat logs. These are constantly impugned by WikiLeaks supporters everywhere, but in fact, I've noted that some Anonymous are quite willing to drop affiliation and support of Assange per se when it suits them.
Wired, if you notice, has covered this story rather more critically than their own hacker culture would seem to dictate. That may be due to several factors -- the inherent hatred and suspicion that one geek bears for another and their willingness to always show them up and break the tribal ranks when necessary; a certain native suspicion of the bullshit that Assange has spread and a growing dislike of all his contradictory claims and his showboating around the world -- he seems to have departed from the cause into an ego trip; the hard-hitting reporting that some people think Wired delivers (I don't, after participating in one of their articles on Anonymous); and their status as a business that still has to sell magazines touting the wonders of Silicon Valley's produce, which means they can't just be a cheerleader for anarchist collectives.
The Guardian is now very critical of Assange and WikiLeaks; so is the Times. A lot of leftist press like Salon and various blogs haven't kept up with this tide -- I give it another 6 weeks, the usual lag between the European leftist media and the U.S. liberal press, even in the Internet age because people are people, and absorb new information and change their impressions only as fast as they can, which isn't instantly.
The Wired chat logs appear to be authentic. Yes, chat logs can be tampered with, and yes, we get it that a former hacker turned state's evidence, Lamo, a guy who has had close relations with Wired, is a source people impugn. Glenn Greenwald, not surprisingly, has kicked up the most hysteria about this but Wired has made a credible defense. But there is still a kind of sacred relict quality to chatlogs that the script kiddies themselves give them and oddly enough, I've found that chat logs are NOT what they redact or change as a rule. They all seem pretty authentic to me, and nobody is seriously challenging the text qua text; BoingBoing.net may complain they are not complete or not in a fair context, but they don't say the actual text is tampered with -- and while they say the rest of the material Wired redacted (because it was about Manning's personal life) doesn't contain mentions of Assange, what Wired did publish does, and BoingBoing doesn't appear to dispute that.
That text tells you two important things:
o Manning was indeed in touch with Assange, so Assange's lawyers are now lying if they say he was never in touch
o Manning defensively denies a query from Lamo about whether he takes orders from Assange, indicating that in fact he may well have, or feels he has to defend himself from that charge, or feels he has to justify himself -- and that shows maybe there *was* an instruction or a very strong hint or some collusion between Manning's hacking and Assange.
This information will come out at trial, not in the press before hand, unless of course the government itself is so infiltrated by WikiLeaks and Anonymous that various saboteurs will defeat the DOJ's case ahead of time.
Maybe the FBI doesn't have anything more than that chat log, which isn't "trial truth" and likely not enough by itself to establish the case.
Why are they going after Twitter DMs (they don't have to go after anything but Twitter DMs as the rest is a matter of the public record)? Because they may hope to establish ties between WikiLeaks and Manning or even Anonymous and WikiLeaks (that shouldn't be hard to do, given the way in which Anonymous shock troops harass critics like me if they take on someone like Jacob Appelbaum -- they are all his followers, and once they see him condemn someone, the signal tacitly goes out, and they don't even have to give an instruction in the IRC channel (although we have seen how they do).
The entire HBGary caper strikes me as odd. What basically happened here (as we're told the story) is that Aaron Barr, the computer security specialist of HBGary, decided to go after Anonymous so that he could contract out his services to the Bank of America which is being targeted next by WikiLeaks. So apparently all he did is go in the IRC channel, then track them on other social media like Facebook or Twitter or other platforms where they hang out (I call this "triangulation") -- something any of us who has been following this phenomenon even fairly superficially would know to do. Apparently he didn't hack into their email, but bragged he had found them victory-dancing (they always brag of their exploits, which is how you trap them). This seemed really vainglorious and premature -- in fact so outrageously so, and so stupidly so, and so clumsily so, that I have to wonder if this caper is in fact part of an elaborate sting.
In other words, HBGary's guy goads the hornet's nest, they all fly out in a fury and sting the target, exposing all their tracks in that process, and HBGary pretends to take a fall -- and the other security agencies then close ranks and excommunicate HBGary (whereupon it merely re-emerges under one of its subsidaries or even a new name to live to do the same thing again).
That makes more sense to me than a computer security guy falling victim to a SQL injection attack on a CMS system, which is really stupid and even I know that, and falling victim to a social hack that made him give up passwords and log-ons, and even I know that. There's just something very odd with that picture.
Maybe it's something less conspiratorial -- and it's only about several private security firms in their own intramural battle for prestige and influence with big customers like the USG and BofA -- that would explain it, too.
But you have to look at the net effect of this caper: Anonymous is now proven to have committed crimes -- hacking into data bases, stealing and publishing email and proprietary information, blackmailing and coercing people, etc. Once you take away the leftist indignation at the methods HBGary itself used and the hype around their intentions, you have something else: there is now a very vivid criminal trail of Anonymous bad deeds, some attached to real-life names.
HBGary, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have committed any actual crime. Hey, you free-speechniks and Internet freedom-fighters -- making a PowerPoint about your plans isn't a crime; it's a speech. Having a PowerPoint that talks about "neutralizing" Glenn Greenwald or intimidating WikiLeaks donors or attacking WikiLeaks sites or social-hacking Anonymous -- these might all be moral sins, but they aren't computer fraud crimes yet.
(And yes, hacking, which is a word I'm going to keep for a range of activities whether a social hack, a common DDOS attack, or more sophisticated coding and cracking, because I think you define hacking from the perspective of its victims, not its perpetrators. Hacking is using computers in ways they were not intended to damage people's privacy or business -- full stop. People like Deanna Zandt indignantly hectoring us all that we "can't" use the word "hacking" to describe a DDOS or a social hack using social network or public knowledge rather than actual computer programming (Palin's email) -- that's only part of her overall shtick to whitewash the whole thing and make it seem less damaging -- and also to make non-specialists feel off-balance and stupid. We're not. We get it a lot better than this child of German campus radicalism does about the criminal nature of these movements.)
Meanwhile, Anonymous, bragging even more than Aaron Barr bragged and excited and stimulated (they're all saying "let's do this again!" in the IRC chat rooms because they found it such an incredible rusn) has been outed for what it is: a criminal hacking movement targeting and harming people unlawfully.
Mission accomplished?
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