Propaganda Campaign Against Vigilante Hacking Groups: Gov't Officials Warn That The KGB Could Infiltrate Lulzsec

from the for-the-lulz dept

Things just keep getting more ridiculous with the reaction of governments to things like Anonymous and LulzSec. The latest is that Simon Moores, a UK government "advisor" on online crime issues, is warning that the KGB might "infiltrate" LulzSec:

“If you have a LulzSec or an Anonymous that is perhaps being manipulated by a foreign actor, it takes us back to the days of the Stasi and the KGB, which were manipulating [anti-nulear campaign group] CND quite easily from Moscow,” he said, referring to reports that the anti-nuclear peace movement was unwittingly compromised and manipulated by Kremlin machinations.

According to Moores, mustering popular support for an issue through online hacktivist groups and forums could be used as a tool to drive policy to perform actions that furthered a country's interests.

This is based on... what? It appears absolutely nothing. It appears to be pure conjecture of what could happen, even though it's extremely unlikely. While it could be argued that some members of these groups can be influenced and pushed in certain directions, it goes pretty far to then assume that leads to an effective infiltration and use by foreign powers.

Filed Under: anonymous, hacking, lulzsec, propaganda

Arresting People Associated With Anonymous Unlikely To Have The Impact The Feds Expect

from the things-don't-work-that-way dept

One of the big stories of yesterday was the wide array of raids and arrests by the FBI in order to arrest people they claimed were members of "Anonymous," who took part in various denial of service attacks. All day yesterday the number of people arrested kept growing. I first saw three, then 12 and the final tally was apparently 16. Apparently the arrests are specific to the efforts to take down Paypal after Paypal decided to stop letting payment transfers go to Wikileaks. The specific charges are "intentional damage to a protected computer" and conspiracy.

Now, I've been very clear since Anonymous started this effort -- shutting down various websites using what is effectively crowdsourced distributed denial of service attacks -- that I think the strategy is really dumb. Does it get attention? Yes. But it turns parties doing questionable things into victims. It doesn't open any new eyes to the problems Anonymous should be trying to highlight. It just draws attention to the attacks themselves. It just seemed really likely to backfire -- especially as law enforcement and politicians focused in on the attacks, rather than the reasons for the attacks, and we're seeing some of that now.

But I can't deny that their efforts, combined with the slightly more sophisticated hacking efforts both from Anonymous and the spinoff group LulzSec and others, have actually had a much greater impact than I expected, especially with things like the hacking of HBGary and the release of ACS:Law files. As I noted last month when a bunch of people were arrested in Europe with claims that they were members of Anonymous, it's not clear to me that these arrests will have much of an impact, really. Will it scare off some random kid from becoming a scriptkiddie? Maybe at the margin there will be some. But the thing is, the types of folks who get involved with these things tend to overestimate their own abilities, and dramatically underestimate the likelihood of getting tracked down or caught.

And given the very distributed nature of the group (i.e., that it's not actually a group at all), it kind of makes you wonder if the arrests will only serve to get more folks jumping into the effort, perhaps for increasingly misguided reasons. As we've stated, governments and law enforcement seem to be taking a top-down approach to this, as if they were rounding up a criminal gang, not recognizing the distributed nature of this effort and how the focus is not criminal, but ideological. Arresting people just drives home their general fear of a world in which certain entities have too much power, leading more people to hit back.

I still don't think their strategy is smart. And I don't think it'll really create lasting positive change (in fact, the backlash could do the opposite). I also worry quite a bit about what happens when they suddenly rage against an innocent party or a group or an individual who really doesn't deserve their wrath. But, at the same time, I can't see how a big FBI crackdown does anything positive, either. It just serves to reinforce their general point. And, with something like the DDoS on Paypal, it seems a bit ridiculous to suggest that it really created that much "harm." It was, as many noted, a modern version of the sit-in. Yes, it probably was a nuisance and cost some people money, but it lasted for a short while and it's difficult to argue there was any lasting damage.

Defenders of law and order will insist "something" needed to be done, and will believe that these arrests will scare off people from the next round of attacks. I think those people are greatly underestimating how people who feel disenfranchised by the world, but sense power through their internet connection, react in such situations. Punishment for the sake of punishment may make sense to some people, but I prefer that the focus be on actually getting to the root of the problem, rather than trying to attack the symptoms in a way that makes the cause grow bigger.

Filed Under: anonymous, arrests, distributed systems, fbi, hacking

Will Arresting 'Anonymous' Members Help Or Hurt Anonymous?

from the just-wondering dept

I'm on record as saying that I think the activist hacking by groups like Anonymous, designed to take down websites in protest, are not particularly smart or useful. I will admit, however, that I'm surprised at how effective they've been in drawing additional media attention to certain stories, and how they really have helped drive two particular stories forward (the ACS:Law situation in the UK, and the HBGary Federal story in the US). And while I still don't think it's a particularly effective overall strategy, I must say that I find the whole effort (and similar efforts from "groups" like Lulz Security) fascinating. I've also pointed out that what may be even more interesting is how traditional law enforcement and governments can't really grasp what they're dealing with.

I think that point may be driven home with two separate governments claiming success in "arresting" Anonymous members. Spain got some attention for supposedly arresting three "Anonymous" members late last week, and then Turkey also got some attention for arresting "32 members."

If these individuals were involved in actual criminal activities, then the arrests are perfectly reasonable. But if these governments actually understood what was going on, and actually understood what they were dealing with, they wouldn't have said they were arresting members of "Anonymous," which is hardly a group anyway, and the word "member" is misleading. Taking a traditional top down approach, these governments think that by announcing that they've "arrested Anonymous members," they're likely to scare people off from being a part of Anonymous. It's very much speculation on my part, but knowing the sort of people involved, my guess is that it's having exactly the opposite response. By presenting the people arrested as being a part of Anonymous, these governments are glorifying Anonymous, and adding to the allure. And the arrests are unlikely to scare off too many actual participants, since they quite likely think that they are better at covering their tracks... and as things move along, that will likely be true.

These governments could have easily arrested people and charged them with hacking without making the connection back to Anonymous. Making such statements is like responding to trolls on internet forums. It's tough to resist sometimes, but it only encourages more such activity. And, of course, just as with trolls, this sort of thing really only plays into exactly what Anonymous wants. It builds up the group's own profile, increases the very necessary mythology, and likely improves the efforts to do more such activities (while protecting participants even more).

In a world with increasingly distributed power, Anonymous and others are really a precursor to what's coming down the road, demonstrating how certain forms of activism really don't work the way people in power expect them to. I don't agree with their specific tactics, but I'm fascinated by their ability (intended or not) to get companies and governments to play right into their strategy.

Filed Under: anonymous, arrests, distributed systems, hacking, spain, turkey

NATO Threatens Anonymous; Kicks Off Weekend-Long Hackathon

from the hornets'-nests-all-the-way-down dept

Following in the footsteps of Obama's promise to fight hackers with guns, General Rapporteur Lord Jopling has issued a long and sternly-worded statement to NATO, warning them of the threat hackers pose to the security of the allied nations. The draft details Anonymous' involvement with both Wikileaks and HBGary along with with a rundown of recent hacktivist activity in the Middle East and Africa.

Jopling's paper is thorough and fairly well-balanced, although it includes some troubling statements about governmental transparency:

[T]he Rapporteur believes that even if one is in favour of transparency, military and intelligence operations simply cannot be planned and consulted with the public. Transparency cannot exist without control. The government, and especially its security agencies, must have the right to limit access to information in order to govern and to protect. This is based on the premise that states and corporations have the right to privacy as much as individuals do and that secrecy is required for efficient management of the state institutions and organizations.

In addition, transparency can be misused on several levels – by providing unprofessional or poor-quality interpretation of information or documents, by conducting superficial or biased analysis, by lack of experience on the topic or by pursuing a political agenda. Thus, not everything carried out under the “transparency label” is necessarily good for the government and its people.

While he makes a good point that full transparency can often lead to faulty conclusions, the fact is that this sort of thing (poor-quality interpretations of information, biased analysis, pursuit of political agendas) is happening already, and increased compartmentalization and secrecy will only exacerbate the problem. The information will still get out somehow, but at this point, nearly every government in the world is showing an unhealthy distrust of its citizens. Rather than working towards more transparency and openness, they seem to be looking to lock up as much information as possible. 

Not only that, but the claim that "states and corporations have the right to privacy as much as individuals do" is flat-out laughable. If this were true, these states and corporations would be an open-book, especially here in the U.S. where warrantless wiretaps and searches have become just another ho-hum tool of the FBI and local law enforcement. On one hand, the government is pressuring Google and Apple to protect the privacy of their users, while on the other hand, it's demanding that said private information be harvested and retained indefinitely.

But this is merely retreading arguments long-familiar with Techdirt readers. It's the point where NATO explicitly calls out Anonymous that it gets interesting. While acknowledging Anonymous' positive "hacktivism" efforts in aid of foreign rebellions, the draft also explicitly warns the group that NATO is willing to take them on and prosecute if necessary:

Today, the ad hoc international group of hackers and activists is said to have thousands of operatives and has no set rules or membership.[36] It remains to be seen how much time Anonymous has for pursuing such paths. The longer these attacks persist the more likely countermeasures will be developed, implemented, the groups will be infiltrated and perpetrators persecuted.

It didn't take long for Anonymous to respond. Or rather, Anonymous would have responded if they weren't already tied up disrupting services in Iran, harvesting thousands of government emails and publishing Iran embassy email account information. LulzSec (whose week has already been busy, what with hacking PBS and Sony Pictures), took it upon themselves to go head-to-head with both the FBI and NATO:

It has come to our unfortunate attention that NATO and our good friend Barrack Osama-Llama 24th-century Obama have recently upped the stakes with regard to hacking. They now treat hacking as an act of war. So, we just hacked an FBI affiliated website (Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked its user base.

In addition to taking Infragard offline (it was still down as of 7PM Sunday), LulzSec acquired the gmail address of Karim Hijazi, who runs Unveillance, a "white hat" company specializing in data breaches and botnets. Hijazi released a statement on Friday confirming their attacks. His post also included an IRC chat transcript of a conversation with members of LulzSec, in which they claim they are after his money:

(KARIM) So did we wrong you in some way, let’s get to the point?
(LULZ) <@Ninetales> If you wronged us, all of your affiliates would be crushed. Don’t worry, you’re in the good books. The point is a very crude word: extortion.
(LULZ) <@Ninetales> And what we’re both willing to agree upon that you sacrifice in return for our silence.
(LULZ) <@Ninetales> While I do get great enjoyment from obliterating whitehats from cyberspace, I can save this pleasure for other targets. Let’s just simplify: you have lots of money, we want more money.

Hijazi claims to have protected any sensitive client data from LulzSec and states that he "refuses to comply with their requests." However, LulzSec's statement claims that they're not interested in Hijazi's money, but simply wish to expose his company's involvement with U.S. attacks on Libya's communication systems:

We call upon journalists and other writers to delve through the emails carefully, as we have uncovered an operation orchestrated by Unveillance and others to control and assess Libyan cyberspace through malicious means: the U.S. government is funding the CSFI to attack Libya's cyber infrastructure.

Further twists developed Saturday when a post appeared on Pastebin from someone claiming to have infiltrated LulzSec. According to the anonymous (but not Anonymous) poster, an IRC chat had led to a postive ID of four LulzSec members, naming Adrian Lamo of 2600.com as the registrar of lulzsecurity.com. A rebuttal of sorts followed shortly thereafter, claiming these supposed "unmaskings" to be nothing more than names thrown into the IRC-mix for trolling purposes:

sabu, avunti, topiary, kayla, tflow, entropy, marduk and joepie91
these are some of the lulzsec guys, distanced from anonops, keeping the heat low
sailing the lulzyboat

if you are lucky enough to be invited to their private channel
be aware it is one of many for trolling the trolls :)

yo dawg we herd j00 leik lulzsecs so we put an adrian lamos and kevin mitnicks in your lulzsecs
so you can lulz while you lulz

So, where does that leave everything? Who knows? LulzSec apparently took a joyride through Nintendo's servers, prying free a server configuration file but leaving everything else untouched, out of love for Nintendo according to their tweet:

Re: Nintendo, we just got a config file and made it clear that we didn't mean any harm. Nintendo had already fixed it anyway. <3 them!

With both the U.S. and NATO pledging to fight back against cyberattacks, it remains to be seen how much collateral damage will be needed to justify the use of something stronger than sternly worded statements. LulzSec has made it clear that others are willing to step in for Anonymous proper, if it/they are otherwise detained. While it's certainly conceivable that anti-Anonymous actions are going on behind the scenes, the events of this weekend wouldn't seem to bode well for governmental agencies worldwide.

Filed Under: anonymous, hacking, lulzsec, nato

International Lulz: Anonymous Aids Rebellions in Tunisia, Algeria and Libya

from the these-powers-can-also-be-used-for-good dept

Say what you will about Anonymous*, but they've managed (with a few outlying exceptions) to become one of the most unexpected forces of good in the world. Early indications of this revolutionary sense of purpose emerged during the collective's spirited defense of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and any ideas one might have had that they could be taken lightly were completely shattered by their remorselessly thorough dismantling of HBGary's smack-talking CEO Aaron Barr, who was forced to eat his words nearly as fast as they could be downloaded.

But Anonymous hasn't stopped. An eye-opening Al Jazeera article runs down the latest activities of the headless collective, whose efforts have reached as far as Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. In a day and age when various talking heads decry internet anonymity as a cowardly safe haven for various levels of misanthropic behavior, it's always good to see the conventional "wisdom" undermined by the activities of a group -- who value anonymity and privacy (at least their own) -- using this same safe haven to wreak incredibly disruptive good.

Anonymous hit the ground running in Tunisia, performing DDOS attacks against government websites, providing "care packets" to help cyberdissidents to conceal their identity and developing a Greasemonkey script to block government phishing attacks.  After a false start in Algeria (mainly due to a lack of internet services), Anonymous' efforts moved on to Egypt, helping restore censored websites and operating mirrors, even going so far as to send old school faxes to places without internet service. When supporters of Iran's government began posting a "hitlist" comprising photos of protesters, the "legion" was there to take the websites down.

They (whoever "they" are) may be the newest threat to authoritarian regimes, but they haven't lost touch with their roots:

"In the operations for Egypt and Tunisia, some lulzy methods were used that harked back to Anonymous' past, including placing massive orders for pizza to be delivered to the countries’ embassies."

Now that Anonymous is a do-gooding multi-national, it's tempting to view them as a brutally efficient vigilante force. But as with any vigilante force, the odds of doing the wrong thing (or doing the right thing wrongly) increase greatly. And as with any other ad hoc group, the baser tendencies of the "hivemind" are often indulged.

These inherent dangers, along with the always present "Law of Unintended Consquences," should help keep things in perspective. After all, one day they could be handing out long distance tech support to rebel forces and the next day taking down and defacing a software company's website just because they can. The anonymity cuts both ways in these instances, linking the group with actions both righteous and indefensible.

There are also indications that some members have split off from the core and are now wreaking havoc as its own end, including the possibility that some of the "legion" may have hacked Sony despite official denials. (Well, as official as things get with Anonymous -- a posting with the now-familiar "Question Mark Head" logo.)

With Anonymous, you take the good with the bad. Both run to the extremes and the actions you were applauding one week can turn incredibly malevolent the next. After all, as they cheerfully point out, they are no one's personal army.

*No, go ahead. But make it perfectly clear those are your words and not mine, especially if you're going to start poking at the hornet's nest.

Filed Under: anonymous, lulz, rebellions

German Police Seize Pirate Party Servers Days Before The Election... Because Anonymous Was Chatting?

from the oh-come-on dept

Early this morning, news started breaking that the German police had seized the German Pirate Party's servers. The timing was interesting, in that it happened just two days before an election, which certainly seems questionable. The details, so far, suggest that the action wasn't against the party, but due to a French complaint, because Anonymous was using the Etherpad installation on the server, PiratenPad, to communicate and plan. If you're unfamiliar with Etherpad, it's a pretty popular online collaboration tool. I've used it for other things, including preparing notes for conferences. It's ridiculous overkill to seize an entire server because of the way some people were using Etherpad. It makes no sense, and shows (once again) how law enforcement seems to overreact to things they just don't understand.

Filed Under: anonymous, etherpad, france, germany, pirate party, seizure

Sony Blames Anonymous For Latest Hack...

from the easiest-framing-ever dept

Apparently Sony has decided to pick on an easy target for its latest data breach: Anonymous. Sony is claiming it found a file named "Anonymous" on the server, with the non-group's phrase "We are Legion" in the file:

"The attacks were coordinated against Sony for exercising its rights in a civil action in the United States District Court in San Francisco against a hacker," Sony chairman Kazuo Hirai said in the letter.

"What is becoming more and more evident is that Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes."

Of course, those two sentences don't seem to match. Anonymous isn't known (at all) for trying to steal credit card information for criminal purposes. Its entire purpose is more along the lines of vigilante protests. Also, Anonymous may be the easiest "group" in the world to frame. Because it's not a group and anyone and everyone can be a part of it, you just put a file named "Anonymous" somewhere along with the phrase "We are Legion" and clueless dupes assume it was "the" Anonymous rather than a bunch of organized crime hackers searching for credit card details. It very well could have been an Anonymous operation, but it seems like Sony should have a bit more proof before making such a definitive statement on the matter.

Filed Under: anonymous, breach, data
Companies: sony

Play By Play Of How HBGary Federal Tried To Expose Anonymous... And Got Hacked Instead

from the tick-tock dept

Nate Anderson has put together an excellent play-by-play of the whole HBGary Federal fiasco, mainly by going through the emails that Anonymous leaked. It's well worth reading the whole thing, so I won't repeat the key points here, but what's really fascinating is the back-and-forth between HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr and others at HBGary Federal, including his main technical guy, who clearly thinks Barr's methodology is worthless. It becomes clear that the technical guy sympathizes with Anonymous and Wikileaks and Barr even calls him on this point (admitting that he too sort of feels that way, but he recognizes this as a PR opportunity). The coder at one point mocks the whole plan as:

Step 1 : Gather all the data

Step 2 : ???

Step 3 : Profit

Yup. That's a coder alright. Then there's this fascinating argument where the coder points out that the statistical basis for Barr's claims (basically analyzing who people's friends on Facebook are is about as accurate as your daily horoscope:

Barr: [I want to] check a persons friends list against the people that have liked or joined a particular group.

Coder: No it won't. It will tell you how mindless their friends are at clicking stupid shit that comes up on a friends page. especially when they first join facebook.

Barr: What? Yes it will. I am running throug analysis on the anonymous group right now and it definately would.

Coder: You keep assuming you're right, and basing that assumption off of guilt by association.

Barr: Noooo....its about probabilty based on frequency...c'mon ur way smarter at math than me.

Coder: Right, which is why i know your numbers are too small to draw the conclusion but you don't want to accept it. Your probability based on frequency right now is a gut feeling. Gut feelings are usually wrong.

Barr: [redacted]

Coder: [some information redacted] Yeah, your gut feelings are awesome! Plus, scientifically proven that gut feelings are wrong by real scientist types.

Barr: [some information redacted] On the gut feeling thing...dude I don't just go by gut feeling...I spend hours doing analysis and come to conclusions that I know can be automated...so put the taco down and get to work!

Coder: I'm not doubting that you're doing analysis. I'm doubting that statistically that analysis has any mathematical weight to back it. I put it at less than .1% chance that it's right. You're still working off of the idea that the data is accurate. mmmm…..taco!

That same coder later warned another company exec saying that "I feel his arrogance is catching up to him again and that has never ended well...for any of us." Fascinating read all around.

Filed Under: anonymous, hacking
Companies: hbgary federal

Leaked HBGary Documents Show Plan To Spread Wikileaks Propaganda For BofA... And 'Attack' Glenn Greenwald

from the this-is-like-out-of-a-bad-movie dept

Sometimes reality can be more entertaining than fiction. You may have followed the recent story involving a security firm called HBGary Federal, in which the company's CEO, Aaron Barr, told the Financial Times this weekend that he had secretly "infiltrated" the non-group Anonymous and identified its leadership... and that he was planning to hand over the info to law enforcement. Of course, it was pretty questionable how accurate the information is, considering Anonymous isn't actually a "group" with a hierarchy at all. It wouldn't be surprising to find out that there were some folks who were heavily active, but that's different than claiming there's "leadership." Either way, Anonymous did what Anonymous does when someone does something it doesn't like: they hacked. Beyond taking over Barr's Twitter account and revealing all sorts of private info and taking over various web servers connected to HBGary Federal, it also released 44,000 of the company's emails.

Once again, as I've said before, I really don't think this is a good idea. The potential backlash can be severe and these kinds of attacks can create the opposite long-term incentives that the folks involved think they're creating. It also gets people a lot more focused on the method rather than the message and that seems unfortunate.

Still, the leaked emails are turning up some gems, with a key one being that Bank of America (widely discussed as Wikileaks' next target) had apparently been talking to HBGary Federal about how to disrupt Wikileaks. That link, from The Tech Herald, includes tons of details. The full proposal (embedded below) feels like something straight out of a (really, really bad) Hollywood script.

It appears that the law firm BofA was using as a part of its Wikileaks crisis response task force, Hunton and Williams, had reached out to firms asking for research and a plan against Wikileaks. HBGary Federal, along with Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies put together their pitch. According to the emails discussing this, the firms tried to come up with a plan as to how they could somehow disrupt Wikileaks , see if there was a way to sue Wikileaks and get an injunction against releasing the data.

There are two key slides in the presentation. The first is a totally bizarre plan of attack on Salon journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been an outspoken supporter of Wikileaks. However, these three companies seem to think that they can pressure him to give up supporting Wikileaks in this case and that will somehow solve a big part of the issue. According to the Tech Herald, the word "disrupted" in the final presentation was actually written as "attacked" in earlier drafts of the presentation. This suggests some pretty confused thinking on the part of these firms. The idea that Wikileaks would "fold" without people like Glenn supporting them seems pretty silly, as does the idea that Glenn would suddenly give up the cause. Still, it's pretty freaking ominous for the firm to seriously be suggesting that it can somehow put pressure on Greenwald that would lead him to "choose professional preservation over cause." It makes you wonder just what level of underhanded tricks they were thinking about pulling.

Later on in the presentation is the plan to further disrupt Wikileaks, which is basically to create a propaganda campaign around the organization -- as if the press wasn't doing that already. They also have the idea to upload bogus info to Wikileaks, hope the bogus info gets released and then discredit Wikileaks by showing that it publishes bogus info. Who knows? Perhaps this very presentation is faked and is all a part of HBGary's nefarious plan (since the document is available via Wikileaks...). Either way, the whole thing reeks of the types of organizations that think they're fighting a single, centralized foe, rather than a distributed movement that is interested in transparency. All of these attacks -- even if successful -- wouldn't do much harm to the overall efforts to increase transparency. Even if they succeeded in quieting Greenwald, others would continue to report on this. Even if they discredited Wikileaks itself (and many have tried), others have been springing up nearly every day to take its place.

It's not known whether or not BofA actually agreed to this proposal (or ever actually knew about it), though apparently HBGary Federal employees were hopeful they'd get the deal to provide these services. If so, going on to blab in the press about infiltrating Anonymous probably wasn't the best way of keeping out of the spotlight on these issues...

Filed Under: anonymous, attacks, glenn greenwald, leaks, wikileaks
Companies: bank of america, berico, hbgary federal, hunton and williams, palantir, wikileaks

The Distributed Party Of 'We' Is Already In Control

from the this-ain't-no-tea-party dept

I tend not to be much of a believer in political "parties." They always seem to get lost in groupthink around what's best for "the party," rather than what's best, period. I even tend to have issues with groups like The Pirate Party. While I support many of the ideals and concepts within the party's platform, I don't agree with everything they have to say, and still think the use of "pirate" in the name, while attention grabbing and perhaps useful in the short-term, is quite limiting long-term. And yet, I'm certainly intrigued by a lot of what's been happening over the past few months, in terms of somewhat ad hoc groups coming together and protesting things they just know are not right. While I still don't agree with the denial of service tactics of "Anonymous" and its Operation Payback, I've been saying for a while that this really is a moment when centralized top-down legacy systems are coming into conflict with distributed, decentralized, bottom-up systems -- and not understanding them at all.

Michael Scott points us to an opinion piece from lawyer Douglas Wood, in which he does a nice job describing what he refers to as "The Party of We," which he notes is already in control.

I think that final point is the part that is the most interesting, and the least understood in many of the discussions around what's happening online. In the past, with traditional systems, if you didn't agree with something, you would just protest. But if you look at what's been happening lately, when the public doesn't agree with something -- official secrecy, draconian copyright laws, censorship, privacy violations, etc. -- rather than just protesting, they're simply routing around those things. It's an incredibly important point. They're not protesting by saying "this will not stand." They're protesting by saying "your laws don't matter, because we can simply route around them."

That's a hell of a lot more powerful than most people realize.

Of course, I already know that some will mock this, saying that it's just a bunch of kids (probably "entitled" kids -- or maybe "freeloading" kids) "breaking the law" and such. Or they'll say that the recent arrests of a few folks show that they can't really route around the system. But I think that significantly underestimates the long-term impacts of what's happening. Whether or not you want to call it the "We Party," it does seem clear that a large (and growing) group of people have realized that code trumps laws, and no matter what laws are put in place to try to beat back code, code will always win.

What's most important is the tipping point, spawned not by Assange but by a new body politic -- a new party of individuals bonded by commonality of interest not defined by national or geographic boundaries. The Party of We.

In response to the attacks on Wikileaks, this virtual We Party, comprised of citizens of the world, unleashed an unprecedented -- and united -- attack on parts of the infrastructure that transact payments and sustain eCommerce and for a brief moment shut critical parts of it down.

This was unprecedented not because it hasn't been tried before (even with some success), but because its success, however brief the moment may have been, was only reversed by those who started it and who had a change of heart. Furthermore, it was novel in its motivation not to hack a system or engage in fraud or greed, but rather in support of a cause -- a belief in the idea and purity of unencumbered speech.

What's left out of this is that it's not actually a party. It's not actually an organization at all, which is part of what makes it so powerful. With an organization you can attack the organization or cut off its head. When it's just a whole bunch of people who understand the power of technology, plucking out a few people that can be tracked down does nothing other than attract more people to the power of code.

Whether or not you agree with the concept of "The We Party," or what they're doing, it's difficult to not recognize that what's been happening is significant, meaningful and important.

Filed Under: anonymous, distributed, people, politics, technology, we, wikileaks