Having thought I knew the Wikileaks story well, I was at first planning on reading redundant facts that have been all over the mainstream media sites for months. Wikileaks seemed like a good thing to me when I first heard about it (last summer). Giving the American public a good look in the mirror at what their own country has been up to overseas in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
After reading the assigned articles and listening to the NPR talk-show, I realized that many of the supporters of Julian Assange and Wikileaks also support the group known as Anonymous. Anonymous uses sites, such as 4chan, to gather sheeple (sheepish people) into IRC chat rooms in order to organize Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attacks on corporations that are unsupportive of Wikileaks. In a 2600 News Magazine press release posted in December 2010, Emmanuel Goldstein describes Anonymous as a, "Misguided effort that doesn't accomplish much at all. DDOS are incredibly simple to launch and require no technical or hacker skills (to participate in)."
Besides the lack of morality Anonymous has shown, they are also fighting to protect an organization that has put several secret informants at risk of being murdered. While the cybercrime Anonymous commits may result in large financial burdens for the corporations they attack, it's not a life or death battle these amateurs have fought. While the sheepish Anonymous posse has no real serious risk of being killed for their actions, the informants that they have revealed do face possible death. Do these so called activists fully understand the ramifications of their actions?
As New Yorker author Seymour Hersh writes, "Cyber-espionage is not cyber-war." While mainstream media likes to use the buzz term "Cyber-war," in actuality, nearly all questionable activity taking place (involving Wikileaks and Anonymous) should fall under the term"Cyber-espionage." The word "War," should be used in conjunction with much more grim conflicts, those that actually involve direct loss of life. DDOS attacks tend to be cases of cyber-espionage with economic consequences, not actual loss of life. Remotely disabling a passenger plane would be an example of cyber-warfare (or cyber-terrorism).
As governments continue to spy on each other and their citizens, as they have done for centuries, the public is beginning to spy back on their government. Clearly the U.S. government has underestimated the technical knowledge of its opponents. In April 2001, a U.S. spy plane got in an accident with a Chinese military plane over Chinese waters. The spy plane's N.S.A. provided equipment was at the risk of being recovered and analyzed by the Chinese government after the plane was forced to make an emergency landing at a Chinese military base. In a New Yorker article entitled, "The Online Threat: Should we be worried about a cyber war?" Seymour Hersh explains, "The Navy's experts didn't believe that China was capable of reverse engineering the plane's N.S.A. operating system." Sure enough, just months later the N.S.A. detected the Chinese using N.S.A. proprietary technology to signal that they had indeed figured out the operating system and more than likely gained access to highly classified data.
Just as Wikileaks and Anonymous has shown that the U.S. government is not as secure as they like to think they are, the Chinese have shown that they too have the intelligence to spy on the U.S. government. Perhaps if the U.S. government was more transparent about their interests and activities, the rest of the world wouldn't be as tempted to spy back.
(Playing Devils advocate)
ReplyDeleteGreat supporting details about Wikileaks revealing how government(s) spy on one another, but I didn't see where you made a solid stand on the issue.
But one thing, don't you think that the U.S. government being more transparent about their interests and activities would open itself up to national risk from countries that dislike it, like say, North Korea?
Maybe so, but I don't like the idea of living in a country who's government uses national security as an excuse to covertly spy on their own citizens, while not letting us spy back at the government. "Checks and balances," is all I am asking for. Clearly to make it to a high enough position to get briefed on national security threats, you need to have proven that you are acting from the same viewpoint as everyone else that's that high of rank. The press has been seen as the main provider of "Checks and balances," in the past, but have gotten really soft and pretty much in bed with our government. Someone needs to monitor the bureaucracy that is our government.
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