ATTACK
re...@ecn.ab.ca
Well, the Mother of All Hacker Attacks seems to have abated somewhat. I
don't believe that all the .gov sites were knocked off the air. I happened
to be at a seminar on the day of the insurrection with some of the FBI
agents on the gH raid, and they were shaking their heads about their web
page hit and - and I hate to tell you this - and laughing. "Those hackers
were just kids," one said. "Oh, well, they'll learn." Then came the all
out effort to get revenge for the FBI raids. This NLA (Net Liberation Arm
y, I made it up) apparently hit between 40 to 100 sites, some with denial
of services attacks, some with web page graffiti that expressed what
passes for idealism (my idealism is fine, yours sucks - in the democratic
tradition) and humor (I won't even try
here). Somehow the martyrs questioned by the FBI, they who had their
stuff confiscated, seemed less impressed than anybody. In the words of one
of them, "It's going to all come back on me."
But the ignominy of these freedom fighters must have been total when they
were completely pushed out of the news by, of all things, a virus! Not
even a virus, for Pete's sake, but a crummy worm! Granted, a worm with a
trojan horse attached. This electroni c collection of mindless 1's and 0's
did more damage in less time than this revolutionary army of hackers. I am
not saying this to encourage you crackers, just to give you an idea where
you stand in the table of terror. And, you virus writers, here is ano ther
paraphrase of an A-V guy. "It's one of the most brilliant viruses I've
ever seen. It must have taken months to write the code. It took us about
15 hours to come up with the code to kill it."
And I did get quite a few emailings on my last article. I want to thank
all of you who wrote because your letters were uniformly intelligent and
made quite a good case for your various points of view, even those who
disagreed with my premise. J.P, you're getting a better class of web
archfiends at this site. One stated that I obviously had never been put
through the humiliation of a surprise FBI raid and couldn't know how they
felt. I hate to dissolution you, but this old fart has been through an FBI
raid
and had my stuff confiscated, a two story office building ransacked, and
several hundred people put out of work. It was not fun, but as two of the
hackers from gH admitted, the guys were pretty bright and courteous. I was
later questioned for about 4 hou rs and you know, the guy in the lead
sounded just like Columbo. They were polite and we stopped for going to
the head, Cokes, and snacks. I would have been disappointed if they hadn't
questioned me. Still, the building was left a total mess and they have had
my stuff for over 7 years. These things I don't like. ( I was innocent,
myself, by the way.)
Another writer agreed with me, but criticized the grammar of my opening
paragraph. That really hurt, man. He later confessed that he had been
studying for an English test and was approaching critical mass.
Most letters expressed a real concern for loss of our first amendment
rights. I share this concern. I think the government and its bureaucracy
are whittling bigger and bigger chunks out of the Bill of Rights. I talked
to a congressman a few years back and
noted that many bills are passed that are blatantly unconstitutional. He
said that they do it because they can. There is neither the time nor the
inclination to fight the unconstitutionality of most laws. Now this scares
me. When you're in the jungle, it 's not the elephants and tigers that get
you, it's the gnats and mosquitoes.
However, if you guys are genuinely concerned about this, remember that the
2nd Amendment lost a lot of ground when the Littleton incident occurred.
You don't make your points on freedom to bear arms by shooting a lot of
people. You want to really pull the
roof in on yourselves? Declare a hackers war. You eventually find that
most power is an illusion in which we like to bask. Remember that the
virus is most quickly killed which does the most harm and makes the most
commotion.
Back to the hacking, the legal work the FBI guys have to go through to
pull a raid is heavy. One of military intelligence gurus at the seminar
said that they are fighting 21st century technology with 18th century law.
Right now the technology exists to tr ace any hack back to its source - in
a hurry. But it is illegal for them to use it. They must use the old,
traditional methods of investigation. In short the law protects the bandit
more than it helps the posse.
Another problem is that there are no geopolitical boundaries on the net
and jurisdictions get really complex. So, all the various IT security
services, military, civilian, and private are talking to each other - as
in our seminar. This leads to knowledge being shared among all the hacker
trackers.
Finally, it is hard to get across an espoused ideology that the espouser
ignores. I have a hard time believing those who campaign for complete
freedom of information on the net when they deny it to those who do not
agree with them.
So to wrap up this over-long article, I bow to a literate correspondent
who corrected my Orwell quote. "All animals are created equal. But some
animals are more equal than others."
--
Graham-John Bullers
moderator of alt.2600.moderated
email : re...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca | ab...@freenet.toronto.on.ca