You have to wonder, do the GCHQ agents involved really think Anonymous is worth their time? Are the people actually carrying out these attacks convinced that their efforts are better spent on that than identifying and infiltrating terrorist networks?
I get spying. I get compromising and penetrating the networks of rival countries. I even get economic espionage, in the same way that I understand why the US Marines overthrew sovereign governments in service of United Fruit.
But DDOSing Anonymous? Were they loading up LOIC and firing their lazors at freenode? That just seems fucking pathetic. It looks like a bunch of children got written a big cheque and were told to go play.
We're constantly inculcated with notions of spy agencies as supremely powerful, supremely competent cloak-and-dagger organizations that work in the shadows to guide world events. But this just makes them look like bratty kids with a rich uncle. It's pathetic.
do the GCHQ agents involved really think Anonymous is worth their time
Anonymous are political agitators, of course they think that.
We're constantly inculcated with notions of spy agencies as supremely powerful, supremely competent cloak-and-dagger organizations that work in the shadows to guide world events. But this just makes them look like bratty kids with a rich uncle.
Self-important assholes that feel justified in being the biggest hardass possible towards anybody that rocks the boat? Sadly this is nothing new.
That is certainly a clear headed and reasonable explanation of why it might be tabled as an option... but I can't fathom who thought deploying a nation state level intelligence agency (in a western democracy) against the communications infrastructure of political dissidents was proportionate. Or even a good idea.
I would love to see how the DDoS was argued as being "legal". Whose bandwidth was used? Where was the target server hosted? Is it legal for an intelligence agency to launch a denial of service attack against civilian infrastructure in another sovereign state to disable dissident political speech? And if it is legal for GCHQ to do it, then why is it not legal for MSS to do the same thing? If GCHQ can DDoS Anonymous, then MSS can DDoS Falun Gong. If GCHQ can hack Anonymous' laptops, then the PLA can hack Tibeten government in exile's laptops.
Allowing GCHQ to be used like this undermines the ability of the UK to be a force for good in the world. Losing the moral high ground for something as pathetic and petty as this? It is embarrassing to see Western Democracies behaving like script kiddies.
> That is certainly a clear headed and reasonable explanation of why it might be tabled as an option... but I can't fathom who thought deploying a nation state level intelligence agency (in a western democracy) against the communications infrastructure of political dissidents was proportionate. Or even a good idea.
Using special branch to infiltrate political groups is commonplace. So much so that there are recent scandals from officers living false lives having children with the people they are surveiling, and trials collapsing.
GCHQ have to obey the laws of England. They are usually mentioned in law to give specific exemptions.
I have no idea how they handle the laws of other nations. I'm guessing that they obey those laws where they align with English law.
It's not the first time they've done "script kiddie" antics. Hacking terrorist information websites to replace bomb making instructions with the recipe for cupcakes is another example.
I realize this sounds snarky, but I'm just a North American from the middle of that continent...
Who is deemed capable of deciding which political groups to infiltrate? It seems to me that there's a narrow line between manipulating politics the way you want them to go and observing threats.
I agree with you that it is fantastically problematic to infiltrate political groups.
In theory all of them get scrutiny.
The UK has had considerable trouble with things like employers compiling blacklists of political activists and union activists in order to deny them employment.
Some of the police infiltration scandals have been bad - police either get converted and refuse to provide evidence (while still being paid to gather evidence) or they encourage law breaking amongst legal groups.
I can understand monitoring all political groups (although I don't agree with it) but the UK does this poorly.
If we are worried about "Losing the moral high ground" then we've got a lot more to be worried about than a few civil servants acting as script kiddies.
Wait a minute. Intelligence agencies _are not_ law enforcement. This is a common misconception. Intelligence agencies do not engage in law enforcement, even though in some nation-states police have access to some intelligence agency information.
My bet is they didn't really consider Anonymous a threat, but just experimented to see how much effort it is to clobber them if need should arise at some point in the future.
Here in Germany, police and intelligence agencies are separated more clearly than in most other states[1]. The anglosphere tends to be rather sloppy with these things.
So a bunch of punks went out and threw eggs and toilet paper at a government agency's building. So the government got butthurt and ordered the army to load 10 tons of eggs and 10 thousand rolls of toilet paper end go egg and TP houses and parks where those punks hang out. That's the level of maturity we're dealing with here. That's the people that everybody assumes are so good at what they're doing that it's OK to forcefully take your money to pay them salaries and put you in jail if you don't do what they tell you to.
That's because you're making the mistake of believing them that what they're doing is monitoring or attacking terrorists most of the time. But it's not. Most of the time, their spying capabilities are used against stuff like this or against innocent people, who the government doesn't like.
That's really why they want to keep this power, and they don't have a good reason for keeping it, or at least not one they can say in public. That's why Clapper keeps saying "ok, we haven't foiled any terrorist attack - but trust us it's really important to keep it!". They know they can't just come out and say "hey, we need this to spy on allied politicians, judges, corporations, and other people you might think are innocent, but are really pissing us off, like many of the activists do".
- A government agency or government contractor notes a new threat to the status quo
- Question: Can we use technology to track, prevent, hinder or prosecute?
- If answer is 'yes' then invest large sums of public money to effect the plan
- If answer is 'maybe' then invest large sums of public money * 10 to evaluate and effect the plan
- If answer is 'no' then invest large sums of public money * 100 to evaluate and attempt and evaluate multiple possible solutions.
Therefore I believe that the underlying cause is money. Agencies and more often than not, third party companies who are trying to make a profit from government agencies are out there coming up with new ways to oppress the public. As a result the public fights back against the oppression. They can then be targetted as dissidents and the cycle ups a beat and continues round the merry-go-round. The sums of money getting higher and higher each time.
Invent the problem, sell the solution, profit, repeat.
It somewhat reminds me of the old idea that as a department (either of a private company or government) you should never ask for a new yearly budget lower than the year before. You always ask for more.
At the time, there appeared to be a concerted attack on the electronic infrastructure of the economy, which Anonymous was claiming responsibility for. It seems perfectly justified to me that GCHQ was attempting to disrupt those attacks and identify the perpetrators.
Mediatised attack. Their actions are at much smaller scale than any other criminal organization that operates in the shadows (hacking is more profitable than the drug market).
Anonymous is a threat not because of their actions but because they challenge the established powers.
GCHQ has a bunch of people. Some of these are experienced staff. Some of them are new to the post. It's possible that some things like targeting anonymous are used as training exercises.
I'd hope the training was more subtle than DDOS that group.
Don't forget that this is an event that became public and that we don't know what work GCHQ were doing behi d the scenes. The IRA and STEAKKNIFE operations show that British Intelligence isn't as hopeless as a lot of current stories make them seem.
Nobody is laughing. I've started re-listening some of the podcasts by people from the CCC and from that have gathered a reasonable situation-assessment mechanism:
Assume "their" (NSA, GCHQ) managers are as competent as yourself. So what would you do if you had all this info, all this infrastructure access and your prime objective is your mission, which you believe to be to observe and stop anything that brings danger or instability to the state.
That's what we are dealing with. A blunder here or there does not even make a dent in the position of power that these intelligence agencies now hold.
.. I think its more like in terms of 'having something productive to do that the Masters will enjoy hearing about at the end of the month', in the case of GCHQ. My assessment of the people I know who work at GCHQ (quite a few, actually) is that they are all authority-worshipping lackeys of the 'management class' they serve. Hacking Anonymous gives them a way of justifying their hacker lifestyles to the toffs that rule them. Its a cultural thing.
> In terms of a threat to the United Kingdom, or in terms of a threat to GCHQ's budget?
Groups like Anonymous are a gift to intelligence services. They're mildly subversive and therefore "other people" to most people, and most people don't understand what they do or how they do it; they're shadowy and mildly scary.
Anonymous is a force multiplier for budget and mission creep.
I know what I think it means, maybe we should argue about semantics? Perhaps a better comparison would be witches or ghouls (legion means demon or devil in the Christian tradition).
Funny. When I hear the word "Legion", I think of lots of Roman soldiers with big shields and spears.
"My name is Legion, for we are many."
- A demon, in Mark 5:9
It's clear he (the demon) borrowed the word from the romans. And anonymous is using it the same way. "There are many of us" is not an existential threat. "We are demons" is silly and would make me think they're imaginary.
Your entire point is one of semantics, so don't be so dismissive. You made a claim based off what Anonymous says, picking apart the semantic meaing of "Legion". I'm well within my rights to call bullshit on "existential threat" as nothing more than a rhetorical flourish.
> the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack
I remember when this idea was still pretty much seen as a "conspiracy theory" around the time when Wikileaks was getting DDOS'ed.
> Pike was less interested in sensational scandals like Church’s poison darts and foreign assassination plots than he was in getting to the guts of the intelligence apparatus, its power, its funding, its purpose. He asked questions never asked or answered since the start of the Cold War: What was America’s intelligence budget? What was the purpose of the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies and programs? Were they succeeding by their own standards? Were taxpayers getting their money’s worth? Were they making America safer?
> Those were exactly the questions that the intel apparatus did not want asked. The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct threat to America’s security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were concerned.
From what I've noticed, nobody is asking these questions today, and yet NSA and CIA keep getting bigger and bigger funding, with NSA having nothing to show for it and yet with expanding capabilites, and CIA wanting more funds mainly to operate more drone strikes in secret (i.e. covert wars). This is a path that's actually dangerous for national security, either because they are collecting data on people that can later be hacked and gotten by rival nations, or because they're starting wars with other nations who knows for what selfish reasons, without the people knowing anything about it. We should have a big debate about it, yet no one seems to be starting it.
So he expected a government agency to track its efficiency and see if the money spent is really warranted compared to the effects produced? That's crazy talk. That would be running the government like a good business. Nobody does that. And yet less folks like CIA or NSA. They protect us from evil, so people should shut up, pay up and be quiet and trust them, they're the good guys after all.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The NSA, CIA, GCHQ - these are the most corrupting influences on western society, and they are responsible for a great deal of terror, instability, and insecurity in the countries they operate.
The day we depose these people and put them in the asylum where they belong, will be a bright one indeed.
Anonymous channels existed in IRC servers around the globe, on million-user-plus networks and tiny networks alike. It's chilling to think whole networks of people completely unrelated to Anonymous could get taken down just because a few morons were using a channel to organize attacks.
(Also, am I missing something, or did they completely miss an opportunity to collect intel by taking them offline and making them move to more private channels?)
I would like to see more information on the botnet were or are operating. Is it fully theirs or did they rent it? If they rented it, how and from whom? If it is fully theirs, what did it consist of? Did they rent a bunch of servers, or did they use a collection of residential connections? Were these connections used with the consent of their owners, or did the GCHQ hack them? If there was consent, who gave it to them? ISPs?
The legality of this is interesting. I suppose it takes a peculiar legal structure to operate a botnet lawfully.
"For the third time in less than a year the sentencing of Hector Monsegur (aka Sabu) has been delayed without explanation."
Subu as a founder of Lolzsec, organized "elite hackers" to attack a number of targets, until (and after) he was arrested and immediately turned informant.
Working for the FBI, Subu continued to recruit new hackers for new operations while feeding all information to his government bosses.
Politics is not the problem, politics is essential for our lives, what's wrong is that it simply serves big capital these days, with growing disregard for civil rights.
By eliminating taxation (governments can simply print the tax money they need according to a fixed formula against the national GDP), and then using computers, allow citizens to directly apportion their equal portion of the taxes to the causes they think are worthy, updated on a regular basis (I suggest daily so that the populace can respond quickly to things like natural disasters).
A simple approach would be to let each person subdivide their tax "share" (which is equal among all voters) by 1% increments. In addition, private individuals could establish "tax baskets" that could be used to fund a number of smaller entities with a single appropriation, so that your 1% could be apportioned among hundreds of entities without you having to type them all in.
This approach completely eliminates money from politics: politicians no longer have the power to tax specific individuals (or grant special exemptions), and they also no longer have the power to give money to people within (or outside) government.
It does not eliminate the ability of government to meddle with regulations, but the populace can trivially respond by docking their budget immediately in retaliation. It's amazing how much better behaved government institutions are when they are directly answerable to the people.
This approach is completely reasonable in the information age and with monetary systems, like the US, where fiat money is used. We already calculate GDP numbers, and the number for taxation would simply be fixed as an amendment to the constitution (while simultaneously invalidating all other tax powers from the government).
For extra fun, double the amount of tax dollars created and give everyone in the country a basic income out of it. I suggest that half of all taxes go towards a basic income (social money for individuals), and that the other half go to the community in the form of government, law enforcement, schools, police, etc. and whatever other social programs individuals want to apportion their social tax dollars to (social money for the community).
Certainly an idea that should be discussed in the mass media. (I'm not counting on US mass media, though, for some time to come.)
In other words, it can be summed up as 1 way to make democracy more direct. (The problem is, Washington with its ever-increasing level of corruption, is never going to want a more direct democracy.)
Anonymous failed because its members were systematically targeted, falsely accused and in some cases assassinated. The only thing the group stood for was the inherent right to information. Information should be freely available. This is the only route to true security.
The government says if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. We'll wtf governments?! Why you so scared? If I were to apply the same logic, I could get the impression you're hiding something.
Why is the lady in the video on this page reporting this from Russia even though she said they got the docs from Snowden before he went to Russia? Are ALL their pundits in Russia for the Olympics?
Snowden gave his documents to a handful of journalists (Greenwald, Poitras, Gellman, etc), who give documents to media outlets to publish. It's that simple, I think.
So it was never about terrorism to start with; it was and has always been about retaining power & oversight by selling "security" to the cheap sheep. Was there a doubt on its true motivations? No, I don't think so.
But looking at how things have been in America for the last 10+ years (since the justification of WTC) I don't see much hope unless the citizenry rises to the occasion and fixes these rascals to their place. I sincerely hope they do, but I am given up on this already.
I get spying. I get compromising and penetrating the networks of rival countries. I even get economic espionage, in the same way that I understand why the US Marines overthrew sovereign governments in service of United Fruit.
But DDOSing Anonymous? Were they loading up LOIC and firing their lazors at freenode? That just seems fucking pathetic. It looks like a bunch of children got written a big cheque and were told to go play.
We're constantly inculcated with notions of spy agencies as supremely powerful, supremely competent cloak-and-dagger organizations that work in the shadows to guide world events. But this just makes them look like bratty kids with a rich uncle. It's pathetic.