There's this whole drama going on about the battle between SpamHouse and CyberBunker, which has now become one of those "Internet" "narratives" (as Evgeny Morozov might scare-quote it because he believes there is no such thing as the Internet) that invokes this literay concept, so beloved of geeks, that the Internet "might be broken" or "is breaking".(I've pointed out in the past how selective geeks are about deciding what "breaks" the Internet.)
Before you start sweeping up little broken pieces of Internet around your doorstep, consider what this is really all about, more of the War in Cyberspace which is like the Cold War -- and with really, the same players and the same "active measures" and "agents of influence" on the Kremlin side.
When the Times wrote about this attack first, they ended up writing repeated corrections because nit-picking little hacker nerds corrected them to try to minimize what they were saying, and Pirate-Party boosters were in the comments busy telling us that copyright theft "isn't stealing" blah blah. (Of course it's theft, as it steals the ability to commodify digital properties).
Then the Times blogged about it:
A squabble between a group fighting spam and a Dutch company that hosts Web sites said to be sending spam has escalated into one of the largest computer attacks on the Internet, causing widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world, John Markoff and Nicole Perlroth write on Wednesday in The New York Times.
And Markoff continued to write about it and I had this comment, which got a NYT Pick:
Please pay attention to what we learn from this. Spamhouse is blacklisting Cyberbunker over the issue of spam and malware. Note that it could do this normally, as an accepted practice, as a matter of course. It blocked the URLs. It blocked the DNS. And guess what, it did this on a vast basis, as we see it rolling now throughout the Internet, and yet the Internet is not breaking. Or, if it is groaning and threatening to break, it's for good reason, because we'd all like spam and malware to be controlled.
Now, the exact same thing -- but on a far, far smaller level because there is far, far less of it than spam -- is involved in blocking piracy sites and sites that permit massive amounts of copyright infringement persistently, over time, of a certain commercial value, for profit.
And yet everywhere, geeks -- starting with Google, which wants to promote free content for its ad business -- complained that we "couldn't" block pirate sites because this would "break" the Internet. See how ridiculous that was?
And we also see now how Google required this "breaking" notion to stick as a business matter for their new DNSSEC which other big companies have *not* implemented because it's either too expensive or really not needed.
What's really breaking the Internet? It isn't SOPA, that would have blocked pirate sites. It's the inability to respect private property.
The "broken Internet" meme is one I always counter -- SOPA would "break" the Internet but Spamhaus, though it might try, isn't really "breaking the Internet" -- and in any event, the clash of the titans is what really strains -- but doesn't break -- it.
Naturally I could see one of my SL interlocutors, Gwyneth Llewelyn in the comments with many other geeks claiming this was something oh-so-hard to parse. She admits it's "tricky" but points out that the great ROI for 100,000 pieces of spam means that spammers are only incentivized to keep spamming and SpamHaus has good reason to exist because the law doesn't cope with this phenomenon enough. She chastizes CyberBunker for DDoSing which she says (unlike so many) isn't justified, and says they are no better than the mafia. That produces more comments about how the victims are to blame for their bad security -- the Anonymous "rape crew" logic ("She was wearing a short skirt.")
Now there's even more reporting -- the Times loves this story as it has business, tech, and politics all in one, something for every department. Unlike the tech press, which never critically studies one of their own, but always errs on the side of giving them a pass, the Times does a very critical profile of Sven Olaf Kamphuis, the CyberBunker owner, the Dutch hacker who makes awful antisemitic remarks and exists to enlarge that "lovely" Autonymous Realm that hackers always defend as their own "country". Says the Times:
He describes himself in his own Web postings as an Internet freedom fighter, along the lines of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, with political views that range from eccentric to offensive. His likes: German heavy metal music, “Beavis and Butt-head” and the campaign to legalize medicinal marijuana. His dislikes: Jews, Luddites and authority.
The Times also reports this:
For a time, CyberBunker’s clients included WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay, a Web site whose founders were convicted by a Swedish court in 2009 of abetting movie and music piracy. In May 2010, six American entertainment companies obtained a preliminary injunction in a German court ordering CB3ROB and CyberBunker to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay.
I got another NYT pick for this comment (maybe they are finally coming around to being more critical of hackers -- for so long, they weren't, and I'd find my comments even suppressed at times by the comment perlustrators)
The chief tactics of Anonymous and other hacker collective conspiracies is to lie blatantly about their own culpability, and try to aggressively shift the attention to their victims as somehow deserving of hacking or as somehow being oppressive or suppressive of free speech.
So we Kamphius loudly proclaiming "Spamhaus a censor that judges what is or isn’t spam" and even accuses them of "Jew lies" (!). Hopefully that lets you know how discredited they are. The real forces taking away free speech are groups like CyberBunker and the stormtroopers from Anonymous they whistled to in their battle against the freedom of others.
One of the big enablers of hacking, malware, spam, etc. is Russia. It's a state policy. It is about undermining the West. 2.4 million cyberattacks last year in Europe emanated from Russia, overwhelmingly more than from any other place, including China. NATO is characterizing this as enemy activity. Russian state TV rushes to portray these people as freedom fighters and shift the locus of blame from their own country.
And yet what these antisemitic totalitarians always hope to do is to distract from their own crimes to the measures liberals have to take against them, and to get skittish "progressives" to worry about whether they are "censoring".
It is all a very old story from the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. Now they exist in cyberspace in cyber-garments and are none the more attractive for it -- or shouldn't be.
And I responded to the usual hacker-apologists blaming the victim and saying it's all the corporations fault for having poor security.
Now, interestingly, John Dvorak, who is sometimes a little bit critical of the tech he mainly sells with his articles (he's the only one I've ever found to roundly critique Creative Commons as a system), asked the question whether in fact this entire drama is really about WikiLeaks.
He senses that there's "something else" going on with this story -- and I totally agree. One of the very taciturn commenters put it this way "CyberBunker is a fence for criminals". Indeed.
Now Dvorak's perfectly legitimate query, trying to get at the story-beyond-the-story -- and framed as a question and not a report -- put the hacker set into a tizzy.
Adrian Lamo, who is the hacker notorious for reporting Bradley Manning to the FBI, was among the most vocal and aggressive.
Still can't get over how conspiracy-heavy, evidence-lacking @JohnCDvorak's http://j.mp/15ZSchU is. @PCMag should apologize to readers.
He felt this was poor reporting and PC Magazine and Dvorak should "apologize". Why, for analyzing a story and giving their opinion?!
Oh, yes, says Lamo and other hackers, because it was so easily "discounted". Well, by that they mean, that they can come up with a web cache page that merely looks like a page "about" WikiLeaks, like any such tech website with services and the views they have might put up -- a kind of infomercial, and not "proof" that they hosted WikiLeaks. The Times reported it as hosting.
Meanwhile, Lamo points us to RT -- hardly a paragon of news credibility even by his own admission -- to get the quote that CyberBunker "only" provided a mirror site. Well, gosh, that's still hosting, really. I mean, if the main host is down and a lot of the mirror sites are down -- which they have been -- that *is* the source for these ill-gotten diplomatic cables.
What's really telling in this story as in other hacker stories is the RT take. Russian Television, in case you didn't get the KFC-like disguising of the fat content -- which in this case comes from the Kremlin directly. RT utterly exonerates -- celebrates -- Kamphius. In sharp contrast with the Times, they don't report on any of his antisemitism or craziness or controversies. They take him as a "freedom fighter" and they use the coverage of him to hammer on their favourite anti-Western theme -- that those who fight for Internet freedom, i.e. against Russian censors who are busy blocking social media, searching NGOs, and taking down sites -- are themselves "hypocrites" because they wield too big an axe when they fight against spam, piracy, child pornography, and illegal drug sales . All things which primarily originate in Russia.
When you visit any RT page on a hacker story, you will marvel at the enormous effort the Kremlin's mouthpiece puts into covering the hacker sagas -- numerous stories, videos, interviews, high production values, special features, linked pages -- it's a real extravaganza, which makes you realize the talk show with Assange is only the half of it.
My guess is that indeed this goes farther than the clash between an anti-spam provider and a piracy bunker and isn't about WikiLeaks per se -- except insofar as WikiLeaks is part of the Kremlin's overall clash with the West, keeping it in a perpetual state of new Cold War. When you have 2.4 million attacks, that's a state policy, not about a weak legislature or administrative power. This is about Russia, it's about the Kremlin, and it's about its own self-initiated war on the West.
In that war, it's always been a problem trying to get Europe to stand up to the Russians, or to criminality of the Bolshevik type. This comment on the Times from "jh" sums it up perfectly and tracks with everything I have encountered about the Dutch over the years -- freedom-fighters, people to be admired for standing up to Nazis and Communist alike in their day; friendly to Americans, when other Europeans are snotty (the French); easy-going and tolerant of lifstyle "sins" that the US won't legalize (prostitution, marijuana) -- but then for some of the hacker set, endlessly indulgent of licentiousness that takes away from others' freedoms:
I love Dutch people whenever I meet them, and I admire their freedom, but their toleration is selective, and they often end up tolerating the wrong things and refusing to tolerate the right ones. They will jail somebody for being "divisive" by insulting Islam (for its crimes against gays and women), but they are loath to lock up a Muslim extremist until he actually kills somebody (like Theo Van Gogh). Defining Spam shouldn't be so difficult that private firms like Spamhaus have to do the Dutch government's job for it, and pay the price in an anarchic internet environment abetted by legal and law-enforcement lackadaisicalness. It took forever for the Dutch to do anything about Pirate Bay, and even after they did, they allowed Kamphuis to go his merry way disseminating Spam and encouraging cybermischief. Why are they only NOW investigating him? In the U.S., he'd have sent up red flags at least a decade ago, and be on a permanent watch list for the illegal activities to which he is obviously prone. And although I have a lot of trouble with some of the provisions of the Patriot Act, or some of my government's Big Brotherly behavior about the internet, I feel completely comfortable with their being vigilant about the internet skinheads of the world.
The other contribution which the Netherlands makes to the underworld of cybercrime is the anonymizing agencies. Whenever I see a spam attack or a hate attack on my own website, more often than not it traces to the Dutch anonymizers that such persons use to conceal their tracks. Yeah, I get it that Iranian bloggers are using them, too *cough*.
But I do think you have to look past the shoulders of these footsoldiers and lieutenants in the cyberwar to the generals. They're in Russia.
This article in the Atlantic explains the history of how the Soviet Union would sponsor terrorist groups abroad. "Russia is the birthplace of modern terrorism," explains even the left-of-center Atlantic -- and that's absolutely the case. Al Qaeda is often falsely described as something the US created (as part of Russian anti-American propaganda); in fact, the US never supported Al Qaeda and its support of Afghan freedom fighters couldn't do much to prevent the Soviets from killing one million civilians in their war in Afghanistan and setting up the stage for hundreds of thousands of refugees, especially orphaned boys who were taken into Pakistani madrasses to be trained. I'll never forget how a colleague once returned from Afghanistan in the 1980s and said it's a war between Communism and Islam, not Communism and the West; we're irrelevant.
In any event, Russia's birthplace of modern terrorism means its methods -- the socialist and communist terror methods of Lenin and other Bolsheviks -- have been ported into many extremist methods supported by the Soviet Union in their day, whether Palestinians or the Baath Party in Iraq under Saddam and Syria under Assad. And these methods are now used in cyberspace, whether or not some group is technically or literally in touch with a Kremlin paymaster. The coverage of RT tells you all you need to know about which side in this war the Kremlin is on.
Recent Comments