-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.24/pageone.html ----- Laissez Faire City Times June 14, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 24 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------- Cyberwar Against the Feds by Don Lobo Tiggre Ever since the White House web site got hacked last month, CNN has been reporting some very interesting news about hackers and their ongoing fight with the Feds. Ticked off hackers have "defaced" or caused to be shut down numerous government web sites, including sites owned by the FBI, the United States Senate, the Department of the Interior, and, of course, the White House. Hackers are even reported to have vowed not to stop until they hit every ".gov" site on the web. Many people seem to be laughing at the antics of these hackers, most of them apparently teenagers with little better to do, but the FBI isn’t laughing. They’ve thrown the book at a kid from northern Virginia, known on the net as ‘Zyklon’, alleging various computer ‘intrusions’. The reports don’t say if Eric Burns actually did any harm, but the ‘hacker community’ is reacting as though they were the victims of aggression. Either ignorant or uncaring about this reaction, the FBI has been pressing forward nation-wide with its counteroffensive. According to CNN: "The FBI confirmed it executed four search warrants last week in Texas related to an investigation into allegations of computer intrusion, including one search at the home of a prominent hacker in Houston." Even though the FBI won’t comment any further, we know that these ‘law enforcement professionals’ are the same people who waved their naked buttocks at the women, children, and elderly, as well as other members of the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists in Waco, Texas, as they circled their church in tanks and helicopters. It seems likely that they will be as intent upon teaching hackers a ‘lesson’ as they were upon teaching the Davidians a ‘lesson’ ("Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated!"). No one person can speak for all hackers, any more than any one person can speak for "whites", "gays", "plumbers", or any other population-wide categorization of people. However, it seems that a good number of those who call themselves hackers have decided upon a confrontational approach to the situation. According to a June 1 CNN interview with a hacker identified as ‘M1crochip’, a member of a Portuguese group of hackers known as ‘F0rpaxe’, cyber warfare is the only means hackers have of defending themselves: "If FBI doesn't do anything and doesn't stop arresting people and making our life miserable, each member of F0rpaxe will discuss an eventual destruction of every single server. If that happens, everything goes down…. We don't want to proceed that way." This threat of defensive counterattacks may be, as M1crochip says, the only means hackers have to protect themselves, but the FBI is definitely not going to see it that way. They have already postured themselves as the defenders of property against electronic vandalism, making them ‘right’ and the hackers ‘wrong’. Anyone who’s watched the Feds over the last decade knows what their response to any resistance will be: escalate, escalate, escalate. The FBI will never back down, nor do anything to give the appearance of ‘giving in’ to pressure from ‘criminals’. Even if this electronic war turns physical at some point, and the body count starts to rise, the Feds will not back down—the deaths will only give them a justification for pressing harder. The Feds vs. Teenagers Besides, there is an unspoken aspect of this struggle that the U.S. government and its agencies of coercion cannot possibly let slide. If these ‘kids’ are allowed to beat Uncle Sam, what message will that send to international terrorists, domestic insurrectionists, or even Bill Gates (as Reese-Mogg and Davidson like to point out) about their chances for extorting concessions from the U.S. government? Given the increasing importance of information processing to all aspects of the economy, including ‘public sector’ services such as national defense, Uncle Sam cannot afford to lose the slightest amount of face in this matter, none whatsoever. If they do, it’ll be open season on any and all government systems—and hackers have been saying for years that there isn’t a system anywhere that can’t be hacked. It isn’t necessary to imagine robotic jets and tanks of the future having their control systems hacked and turned against their masters in order for statists to have nightmares; just think about what turmoil guerilla cyber-freedom fighters could cause by scrambling the Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid computers today. Imagine everything the Y2K problem is feared to threaten—if all of this is vulnerable to attacks by teenagers fitting the cyberwar in between English and math assignments, how much more so to well-financed and dedicated individuals being paid to do the job? The government’s hard-line response is therefore quite comprehensible, on several levels. What remains to be seen is whether the hackers have the will to follow through on their threats. It’s entirely possible that after a few more arrests, the whole episode could subside—though, even if that happens, the events of the last month could well have already triggered thoughts and plans in the minds of those who would take the opportunity to fight the United States government more seriously. On the other hand, if it’s true that hackers see their attacks against the government as their only defense, they might well continue. Thus far the electronic attacks have amounted to little more than vandalism, but the threat of the "eventual destruction of every single [.gov] server" would be a formidable escalation. If the leaderless hackers do press their little cyberwar forward, the government will escalate its response, and the hackers will have to follow through with this threat. And then things would start to get really interesting. WWW servers are not the most secure systems, being designed to share information with all comers. If the fight escalates beyond the "destruction" of such servers, those of us who are not computer experts will get to see if all the hype about no system being completely un-hackable is true. Choosing Appropriate Targets Being somewhat skeptical by nature, I once asked a computer professional of my acquaintance why, if there’s no system that can’t be hacked, none of the most hated systems have been brought down—systems like the those of the IRS. My friend simply answered, "How do you know they haven’t?" Blink. Good question. The IRS is famous for keeping its own employees in the dark—why, all those people typing tax returns into their little terminals might not even know that the serious parts that enable the system to go after people had died years ago. When you get down to it, there have been reports of crashes and errors—what if those were not simple internal failures, but the results of deliberate attacks? What if the new computer system the IRS had to trash a few years back actually did work, but was ruined by cyberwarriors? We could imagine many hypotheses, but they couldn’t be tested. The point at the moment is that those who doubt the ability of hackers and cyber guerillas to infiltrate and destroy government systems may be basing their skepticism on a false lack of information about past attacks. And if those abilities are real, and if hackers do feel obligated to continue this fight they have started, the United States government could find itself facing its greatest threat since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This situation portends both opportunity and calamity for freedom lovers, yin and yang, as crises often do. If the United States government is attacked in any serious way, it could get quite nasty in its responses, even extending draconian ‘anti-terrorist’ measures beyond its borders, as it is now doing with its War On (Some) Drugs. If the cypherpunks and crypto-hackers are not ready to take on Leviathan just yet, the premature offensive in the information war could be bad news for electronic privacy, tax havens, etc. It could also precipitate more totalitarian measures within the confines of the U.S., drastically reducing the freedom of most people living here. Alternatively, if the cyberwarriors are ready, this could be the beginning of the end of the nation-state’s stranglehold on ‘national’ economies. It could lead to an acceleration of the development of robust and flexible digital cash systems, non-geographically based business domains, and other important components of the coming digital economy. Assuming the fight doesn’t fizzle out, the situation could lead to both consequences at once, for a time, giving freedom lovers all the more reason to stay on their toes. And if it does fizzle this time, there will be another time—how can it fail to happen, when new and more powerful digital tools for resistance are being developed every day, and statists respond with greater hysteria each time resistance manifests itself? So watch out: sooner or later, the cyberwar for freedom is coming. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Don Lobo Tiggre is the author of Y2K: The Millennium Bug, a suspenseful thriller. Tiggre can be found at the Liberty Round Table. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 24, June 14, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------- Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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