Government Putting Quite A Lot Of Effort Into Tracking Down 'Anonymous'
from the kind-of-misses-the-point dept
With UK police arresting five guys accused of participating in the Anonymous cyberattacks to make a statement about efforts to block Wikileaks, as well as the FBI saying that it has executed more than 40 search warrants in the US in trying to track down those responsible, I'm curious if anyone has stopped to realize just how much this misses the point. I agree that the Anonymous attacks were childish and probably counterproductive, but, in the end, are they really much more than an online sit in?By spending so much time, effort and resources in trying to track down some people who were making a statement online, all that officials have done is to give them that much more attention -- which is exactly what they wanted. As warned, these law enforcement agencies are misunderstanding the situation. Arresting these folks just gives the whole effort more attention, and attracts more interest in it. And, given that Anonymous is almost entirely unstructured and not at all dependent on any sort of "leadership," it's not as if these arrests cut off any head of an organization. There is no organization, let alone a head to cut off. But by doing this, it makes effective martyrs out of those involved, and likely attracts even more people to "join the cause."
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Once again, you manage to miss the point of police action. It isn't to stop 100% of anything by the police actions alone, rather it is to make people who might join this sort of illegal action in the future consider the implications.
You may call anonymous "unstructured", but like anything it has it's leaders and it's followers. It's the ideas of a small number of people and a large number of "yeah, good idea" types following along. Take out the small number of people with the ideas (and the balls to use them) and you have are left with a collection of people with not direction and no power.
I suspect that all of anonymous is run by a very small group of people, probably less than 100 with any brains or leadership skills, and a few thousand impressionable kids who are willing to go along. When the police take down a few of the leaders, the rest of the group will scatter, mumbling to themselves about "police state" or something like that. Then they will go upstairs and eat the meat loaf their mom cooked for them.
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What you said might be the "point" of the police actions, but I think the results of such actions will actually be the opposite. Martyr(s) + internet will cause much more exposure than they would have otherwise.
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More likely it's the "followers", as you describe, that got caught. The ones that don't know how to mask their connection source.
Regardless, things have changed and technology has empowered people, the people are getting fed up with government and corporation BS.
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Re: The Point of the Police Action
I think you're willfully missing the implications that this amount of probably mis-guided effort holds.
The first thing that jumps to my mind is "Why did they put so much effort into this?" The material that has leaked so far isn't metaphorically explosive. Apparently, nobody has been killed, nobody has had their cover blown.
The second thing is "What opportunity cost does this have?" That is, why not expend this amount of effort to go after spammers and other internet psychopaths? The spammers and botnet herders probably have more real economic impact than the LOIC had, so WTF?
If this is the best trolling that you can do for your Evil Corporate Overlords, why are they paying you? "Eat the meatloaf their mom cooked for them." Deliberately underplaying or denigrating things that people have direct experience of really doesn't work as propaganda in the Internet Age. Astroturfers and Shills are almost universally recognized and publicly called out these days.
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I think there are still some things that these more modern 'protests' just can't fully replace, like the impact of traditional demonstrations and protests where people physically go to the government and demand reasonable laws. It's sad that not enough people do that, but to really get the laws fixed I think more people need to participate in physical demonstrations. Civil disobedience is an option (ie: breaking copyright law) that results in fines if you get arrested and hence it doesn't really create incentive towards influencing the government to fix the law. Doing it in secret doesn't give the government incentive to fix the law because what good does that do special interest groups. Publicly infringing just makes them fine you and hand money over to them.
and, to some extent, what good does physically protesting the government do, they merely ignore us.
Things like boycotts might be good, perhaps people can choose not to buy anything until the government fixes the laws. Something with economic harm to special interest groups. Or things like less willingness to work, in exchange for using that time to protest, might be somewhat good because it has economical implications. We really need to view the incentive structure and figure out what behaviors will give the government incentive to fix the laws, behaviors that are difficult for the government to resist.
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I think the jail option has mostly disappeared these days. In many cases you can face a fine and jail, but I think the option not to pay a fine has disappeared. Instead, people are forced to support a system of bad laws by paying fines for breaking those laws. I think such is symptomatic of an oppressive government.
I know in the past African Americans were willing to go to jail for resisting bad laws, and the jails were so quickly full of people that it made the government change the laws, but in this case it's because you can't fine them anything since they don't have anything to fine them for. But what about for most people who, while they don't have much, do have something. The government can simply pass bad laws and take your money (in the form of fines) to support the enforcement those laws.
The real solution is that a lot of people need to much more aggressively protest in a way that makes it economically inefficient for the government to do anything besides fix the laws.
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yeah, that always works. thanks to operation sundevil no one hacks computers anymore.
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People won't risk the reaction this is causing again, none of these children realized what would happen. Blogs like Techdirt and such have convinced these people that the authorities have no way to track them down, have no way to prosecute them, and that no laws a really broken. They got a stunning wakeup call (some at 6 am!) that reminds them and all the people they tell that story to that anon isn't really anon at all, and they are at risk for being idiots.
Downloading movies / music / software is done for reward, and the risk / reward calculation is done with some actual reward. Being an anon bot runner isn't exactly rewarding.
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No, many commenters on this thread alone have pointed out that they can easily be tracked down. MM certainly knows it and expressed it several times in the past by the mere fact that he has many posts on people who have been sued left and right for things like infringement and defamation and the judge has ordered the ISP or message board provider to hand over peoples info.
You're an idiot, where did you get the idea that we got the idea that it can't be tracked down. Stop putting words in your opponents mouth and building strawman, it only makes you look stupid.
Many (if not most) of these people doing the DDOS know darn well they can easily be tracked down. They're not tech illiterate, just because you are, for them to be tenacious enough to join these sorts of groups and causes they at least know what an IP address is and how it can be used to track them.
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That tends to work when the people participating in illegal activities are doing so for what they perceive to be their own best interest. People who sell drugs, for instance, sell it because they think it's in their own best interest, they make money for doing it. So, the government can try and make it not in their personal best interest by making it illegal and implementing punishment against those doing it.
Here, that's not the case. Someone who is participating in these attacks are not doing it to make money or because they personally benefit from it, they are doing it because they believe they are doing something right by standing up against an oppressive government. By arresting these people, and especially by implementing insane, cruel and unusual, punishments, you are merely confirming their beliefs that our government is oppressive, which may only drive them towards to be more aggressive.
"An army's effectiveness depends on its size, training, experience, and morale, and morale is worth more than any of the other factors combined."
Napoleon on War
http://www.napoleonguide.com/maxim_war.htm
There is a huge reason why, in war, things like morale are strongly stressed. It's not like politicians themselves arrest people, they have people do it for them. It's not like politicians and rich people fight wars, they have people below them do it. Those doing it need morale, they need to believe that what they are doing is right. If they don't, then who is going to fight the war? Those fighting it will purposely do a bad job. Technology is great, having a large army is nice, etc... but morale is everything. The same thing applies to having a functional society. The people in this nation are losing their faith in our government and there simply aren't enough jails to put every victimless criminal in. If the government can't win the morale of the American people, their efforts will fail, both in war and in trying to build a police state. After all, police are people too and if you can't hire enough police who believe they are doing something good to effectively police the state, it will fail.
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not really. anonymous is a form of leaderless resistance. the point is that there is no central or hierarchical leadership.
al-qaeda has evolved into such a structure.
It's the ideas of a small number of people and a large number of "yeah, good idea" types following along. Take out the small number of people with the ideas (and the balls to use them) and you have are left with a collection of people with not direction and no power.
yeah, the central idea is really simple: get pissed at someone, tell people to download loic and go nuts, rinse and repeat.
these aren't sophisticated attacks perpetrated by skilled hackers. this is literally less than a dozen lines of code and maybe a thread pool.
i've done it by accident using the wrong options for wget.
it's easier than filesharing, and like filesharing, you'd have to go house to house and shoot people to put a stop to it.
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Also every browser know today have some app for auto refresh pages, just mark one second and let it rip.
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The point of ANY oppressive, draconian, violent governmental smack down is and always shall be to instill fear/terror in the governed! What is the definition of a terrorist? just watch and listen, employ a little critical logic and you will soon see who the real terrorists are.
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I'm pretty sure the Polish authorities thought something like that back in the early 80's.
See how that panned out.
We saw something similar in Tunisia just a week or two back.
I'm Spartacus!
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It's hopeless to try to reason with people whose solution to every problem is that somebody just needs a good whippin'. If reality turns out to be more complicated than their beliefs, they'll fault reality rather than adjust their beliefs. Yet at the same time they rant about personal responsibility...
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"Personal responsibility", like many things, is best when applied to *other* people.
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When the Corporate Masters come a-callin'
Like the good book says:
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I simply cannot resist clicking on them to find out why they were flagged.
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I simply cannot resist clicking on them to find out why they were flagged.
Flagging and hiding the comments is censorship that begets the Streisand Effect. Techdirt is a police state that encourages prior restraint. :)
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In other words, it was censored using techdirt's built-in censoring "report" button. Good job, techdirt minions! Let's censor techdirt users while you lament censorship in general!
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But according to techdirt, it's censorship no matter who is doing the blocking, whether they're government agents or not, and no matter the reason the content is being blocked. Using techdirt's own definition of censorship, the "report" button is blatant censorship. The hypocrisy is inescapable.
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Sources? I'd like to see them.
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Oh, come on, you're going to take all the fun out of it for old AJ!
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You're sure that AJ honestly believes that "according to techdirt, it's censorship no matter who is doing the blocking, whether they're government agents or not, and no matter the reason the content is being blocked"? I'm not.
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your all in the masnick's butt and diont know any thing about this
Which is the kind of thing that our trolls like to say.
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^^That was the point of your comment flying over my head. :P
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*clicks insightful and funny on flagged post*
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sit in vs DDOS
it is different in one significant way. You can't use a 'sit in' to disrupt a company's or the gov'ts internal operations. By definition a sit in prevents the public interaction from happening by clogging up the front office.
But because of the internet housing 'all' operational aspects it is possible to stop Citibank from running its internal banking related functions that a sit in could never hope to do directly.
I would probably say it's closer to back in the POTS modem days, calling a phone number from 1000 other numbers to make sure the data calls between computers are not be able to complete successfully. That would likely constitute a violation of the law wouldn't it?
Not defending the Feds on this, but the situation isn't quite as simple as a 'sit in'.
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Re: sit in vs DDOS
If I go to a site that has been DDOS'd then all i get is a error message, but that's all just looking at effectiveness of creating a public awareness.
The total actual monetary damages are probably about the same, if you look at the cost of any police presence, lost sales and everything else.
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Tell that to the entertainment industry and their crony judges.
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The larger point is DDOS can attack more types of targets than just a 'sit in' could do.
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Re: sit in vs DDOS
Sure, they slowed down BoA, and Citi and paypal, but they not only hurt the company but they hurt the by standers as well. The people who count on access to these places to do business. (Think of people who make a living buying and selling on Ebay. They lose money if they can't access paypal or their consumers cant access paypal). You end up making more enemies than friends that way.
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Re: sit in vs DDOS
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Legitmize...
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Bias much?
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Re: Bias much?
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Especially if the government itself was involved. For some reason, the government doesn't much like to investigate and prosecute itself. Imagine that.
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Source?
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Amazing
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Haha, love the only comment on the reuters article:
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arrests already happening
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This is different from a sit in
I do not see that here. This is a situation where I suspect the vast majority of people initiated their part of this, and then moved on to other things in the comfort of their own home. I suspect many of them did not realize that their IP addresses were not protected (and likely some who did took other measures to protect it). They did not even subject themselves to the discomfort of actually having to sit in somewhere away from their own home, much less knowingly and willingly risk the legal consequences.
(I will acknowledge that here they may be charged under harsh anti-hacking laws with long sentences where most participants in sit-ins faced misdemeanors along the lines of disturbing the peace or, in the particular case that led to MLK's letter violating a court order resulting in contempt of court. But I do not think this invalides my point.)
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Re: This is different from a sit in
A: arresting one, or a few, of them will not do anything to deter the rest, since all of them are clearly stating that they are willing to be arrested, and proving it with their address.
B: They don't have enough jails to arrest nearly all of them.
and that might actually lead to having a more reasonable government. It can be government by the people for the people where the will of the masses are followed or else the masses will implement an attack and the masses are way too plentiful to all be jailed and so this can help a majority in opposed to a minority. We can literally start demanding laws that we want or organizing mass attacks, with the willingness to be arrested. So what if a small minority of rich tyrants who demand their own way counters with their own attacks, they are a minority and they aren't plentiful enough to implement an attack nearly as worthy of consideration as the much larger masses.
Perhaps in the future something like this could turn into a reasonable protest mechanism. It's difficult to plan a physical march to Congress, since most people live states away, travel is far, and people have to work, and it's too much of an inconvenience for people to initiate and follow through with a physical protest that the government will mostly ignore. Instead, make the government initiate and follow through with the efforts necessary to arrest way too many people than there are cops to arrest and perhaps they will start caving into the masses. Less work for the people to protest, more work for the government to resist, in opposed to what we have now, where the people have to put a lot of effort and cost to protest and the government resists by merely ignoring our protests.
While I previously disagreed with those doing a DDOS attack, I think that if they do it with their name and address in the packets, and the willingness to take the consequences, there is probably nothing wrong with that.
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Re: This is different from a sit in
Wait. So, first you claim that they did not expose themselves, and then you claim that they did? That..makes..no..sense. If you're going to be an apologist, you need to do better than that.
I suspect many of them did not realize that their IP addresses were not protected.
I seriously doubt that.
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In my book DDoS a site is a digital sit in, as long as you go there and say exactly what you are doing that is all fine with me, you don't need to like it.
Besides there is nobody hiding their IP's when they are doing those things and there is not enough proxies in the world to cause harm to any big website, so people just can't hide.
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You are trying to put words in my mouth. I said that those who participate in sit ins are willing to be arrested for what they believe in. I didn't label those people, but the implication is that they are brave. Then I said that those behind the DDOS attacks act in secret like cowards. Notice that I never said that I personally thought any of them were noble.
So, to your question, the preference to avoid arrest changes their acts from brave to cowardly.
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Yeah, like the cowards that engage in *secret* military operations. If they were *brave*, they wouldn't do them in secret! I understand now.
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You don't think military operations should be afforded some secrecy?
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You don't think protesters should be afforded some secrecy? You sound like one of those authoritarian types that think protesters should all be put in prison (if not shot).
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Stupidity is not a requirement for bravery.
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Wait...so although these attacks from Anonymous spawned a massive, unnecessary, resource-heavy response from law enforcement, which "is exactly what [Anonymous] wanted", the attacks were childish and unproductive?
Makes so much sense!
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@1 @4 @7 *8 @9 @10 @13/14 @16 @17/19 @21 @23/24 @25 @26 @31
@4 , OH and just what does a strike do or g20 protest do by blocking entry or exit form said companies? SEE response i make to @1.
@7 agreed see the double standard. ITS like the mpaa and there associates DDoSing private torrent sites but when they get attacked its mass arrests WHICH btw when jail is the norm costs tax payers far more then say reducing copyrights and patents would be in first place and thus reduce the level of these protests.
@8 the fbi has been and is being pulled off missing child cases is proof it is not a THINK OF THE CHILDREN issue it is THINK OF THE LAWYERS issue and there yacht building campaigns.
@9 i have taught them all well. There is somehting to be learned form just having patience unto and of itself, for it alone yields the best rewards.
@10 who ever i am i represented a membership of a 1000 two years ago. NOW that is 5000. There are 9000 wanting in. Ironic a video says they are 9000.
@13 you cannot catch on the internet that which no longer is there....
@14 and arresting youth will do what? Bring trust to your regime?
@16 Citibank has been for real hacked before, and that person is known to me but the person will never be known to you. WE whom are at the peak of the mountain are watching.
As a poster on another forum once said. "And the real hackers are watching and what they can do makes this lame and calm". You only need do as you are to make it worse for yourselves.
@17 your kidding me right standing up? Patriot act sound familiar. How many hacker sites are hosted inside the USA.
ZERO. We all left your country ten years ago.
@19 OR it may cause them to learn more and make sure that they can do things properly, then you will have a real problem. Hrmmm...good idea perhaps i'll start educating a few hundred or thousand...OH wait see @10...and in 14 years since we began no member has been arrested for a computer crime in any nation they reside.
@21 you been to a g20 protest lately? the one in that nation of canada had people arrested for no legal reasons, when you start doing that , im a wear a mask too.
@23 i was waiting fo rone such as you, whom btw would whoolly be ok with SONY ROOTKITS, erosion of hte public domain and thus destruction of free knolwedge and culture. WHOM sits silently while the mpaa endorses DDoS's on sites and gets no penalty. THIS ABOVE ALL ELSE IS WHY THEY GET ATTACKED. THOSE WHOM SUPPORT THEM ARE GETTING A MILD TASTE OF IT BACK. FOr ever kid you arrest its costs 100,000 USD/year of incarceration. IF your eocnomy can keep arresting kids for downloading music then buy all means until you have an entire generation in prison that you then have no taxes to collect your system will collapse. ITS is fear that they are not in control and that they can't instill you with fear that is why they really do this.
A real hacker would have wiped the server clean and posted all the servers users data to the public. DOS's are far nicer ways a saying YOUR AN ASSHOLE SMARTEN UP.
@24 perhaps what htey should do is use a few million moron windows 7 computers ina massive bot net and send commands ot that bot net 3-4Kbytes/sec each( so its not noticed)
via proxy chains through countries that hate the usa....BOY that list grows don't it. GOT TO LOVE YOUR COUNTRIES POPULARITY. Keep up the good work lolz.
@25 or in your world were we aren't allowed to think. Aren't allowed to cross a street without a passport. Where in your world we can't learn without paying, can't sing , can't afford to create art or share. Where in your world its all ME ME ME ME ME and MINE MINE MINE. Anonymous asked me to take 50000 hacker files offline and not to put up new ones i agree no more public files. NO sense in allowing the corporates to see and prepare....OH and i'm not hiding the ip is used in this post you can post mike. ITS me and ill turn on my webserver so you can show these people , i mean business. My family is my association. It includes everyone but those that are greedy and selfish.
@26 if you know how terrorists and bikers and gangs work you will know how this has been designed, its cellular nature is why as hte hackers manifesto says, you can get this kid , but you can't get us all.
@31 g20- toronto canada- hundreds were arrested without proper legal authority...so you point sit ins and protests are legal is mooted buy police abusing there power.
WHAT might happen if the next one occurs is MORE people will go not less and if the police try and arrest them they will refuse and then you have a riot. SEE what happened to a bell canada store and why no other ISP's store was affected....look up UBB in canada. YES i live in canada.
I'm tired of replies but anyhow....thought you'd like a response from an actual hacker and one that isn't a script kiddy. That phrase btw is funny because automation of anything you want to do is actually a sign of intelligence that allows one to do more.
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True, although in the UK a sit in can amount to trespassing, but that's still civil matter rather than criminal...
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You're completely missing the point Mike. If they don't arrest anyone, they won't be able to "prove" anything in court, and won't be able to use that to censor the internet.
They don't go after the kids because it's the right thing to do, they do it because it's part of their agenda.
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