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North Korea's Twitter and Flickr Accounts Hacked By Anonymous
First time accepted submitter njnnja writes "With tensions on the Korean peninsula continuing to rise, Anonymous hacked into the government-run North Korean Flickr site to post a 'wanted' poster for NK leader Kim Jong Un. It says that he is wanted for 'threatening world peace' and 'wasting money while his people starve to death.' They also hacked into NK's Twitter account and posted a link to the Flickr page."
They post less crazy things!
The list included:
hateamerica
nukeamerica
likerodman
rodmanbff
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Antagonising a rogues state into launching a nuclear attack?
Just to be devil's advocate like.
Invaders must die
I don't think there is much to worry about. If our military flying in bomber to show off, in addition to our usual South Korea joint exercise does not do; I highly doubt abuse of their twitter account will.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
they didn't pay enough attention to keeping people from getting in!
. . . they just couldn't fathom the idea why anyone would want to get in . . .
The hackers involve could have ended the current escalation. All they need to do, was to post this headline:
"The fearless leader Kim Jong Un has declared victory over the US! The leader's strong courage has frightened the US! They have halted their plans to attack the Peoples' Republic! The war with the US is over! They won't attack tomorrow, or the day after, etc."
Kim Jong Un might have like the idea, and adopted it as his own dogma. Thus, giving him a way out without anyone getting hurt.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Then, well, it was inevitable anyhow and we might as well get it over with and kill them. Seriously, if they are really so thin skinned, so stupid, and so insane as to launch an attack over something like this, then it would happen sooner rather than later do to something else. In that case, let's have it happen sooner and just get it over with.
Please don't mistake this for me saying "We should go to war with NK!" I'm just saying that if something like this really did spark a war, I wouldn't blame the anon 'tards because the level of insanity, stupidity, and insecurity that it would take to start a war over something so trivial means it would get started over something else anyhow.
What they've done isn't much different than the Cyber-fighters of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, it just pisses people off.
Do you think they made the political situation better? The N. Korean government will claim that Anonymous was sponsored by the evil US and this is a precursor to a military strike on their country.
Their heart my be in the right place, but their method is childish. Real change will come about by providing the people of N. Korea alternative means to get information, not by pissing off the leadership.
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Anonymous escalated the situation. You have a standoff where neither side wants to fight, nor wants to back down so they just flex and hurl words at each other. The last thing you want is somebody to come along and throw rocks setting things off.
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Random dudes on the internet being retarded in public has never, and will never, be acceptable as provocation.
And what happened last time we used a pretext to launch a preemptive attack on an oppressive government? How did that go, both at home and abroad? We don't know, because it isn't done yet...
Why? Not letting inspectors examine non-existant WMD's, and imaginary ties to terrorist organizations was acceptable provocation.
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That's not the impression I get from all that's been happening up there in NK lately. They aren't behaving by anyone's definition of "rational". You can't negotiate or reason with someone that's living in their own self-centered world like they are. They simply don't care what the rest of the world does or thinks about them. And that makes them incredibly dangerous, regardless of what their military capabilities are. They could send a company of chickens with slow-fuse grenades across the border and start/re-ignore a war. They don't need nukes.
For all practical purpose, they are 100% unpredictable. You have no way of telling what they're going to do next. Not by looking at what they've already done, not by looking at how the world is responding to them. None of it matters.
So you can't say that any one action by any outside party is going to "be responsible for" or "will lead to." Anonymous is just another side-attraction in this entire spectacle. They won't likely accomplish anything that could be described as a "goal", but at the same time this won't change what NK does in the next 10 minutes let alone the next 10 months.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I'm actually inclined to agree. I'd rather NK launch an attack now, at a point in time when their previous yields have been in 1 and 7 kilotonnes, rather than later when they may in a position to deliver a 20Kt Nagasaki sized yield (which presumably, would require further R&D on their ICBMs, not to mention the bombs themselves). It's worth remembering that the first bombs tested by the US, UK, and russia were all static tests (by neccsesity), and that it was only after the first few tests that dropping a bomb from a plane was possible, and much later still that mounting them on warheads was possible.
Due to the 'work' of Dr A. Q. Khan, we have a pretty good idea of what nuclear technology they have at their disposal, as well as the exact capabilities of the missile designs he borrowed from china & the USSR. Short of some large unknown uranium deposits in North Korea itself, we also have a pretty good idea of how much fissile material they have available (One would assume we'd notice the huge scars on the landscape caused by uranium mining, so I'm assuming that they don't have significant deposits). It should therefore be possible to determine the maximum theoretical yield of a bomb in the future, and give us a pretty good idea of what they may be capable of now. I'm guessing that a nuclear attack on SK is the only realistic chance the NK has of being able to do any serious damage, since one would assume that the longer the distance the missiles travel, the more chance there is that it would be knocked out by an anti-missile missile.
This does of course raise a few questions. Firstly, what is the success rate of the ABM missiles? Have they improved since the fairly dismal (estimated) 10% success rate in the first gulf war? Would they actually be good enough to prevent an attack on SK? What would be the required density of deployment around NK to be able to provide complete safety to all surrounding countries? Secondly, if NK were going to launch a missile, is the intelligence gathering good enough to be able to identify a long range missile with enough time to make a pre-emptive strike? Going by some of the build up to NK's longer range tests, it would appear that there should be enough time. Going by there shorter range tests, the answer would appear to be no. Thirdly, if the intelligence services have been watching NK for some time, do they know where those nuclear device(s) are currently located, and is there anything they can do to knock them out now?
I was against the 'pre-emptive' rhetoric that led to the invasions of afghanistan and iraq, but frankly, if you're going to declare war, and then threaten the use of nuclear weapons, all bets are off as far as I'm concerned. If the US, china, or russia find themselves in a position to launch an effective pre-emptive strike against NK, I actually find myself leaning towards the notion that they should probably do so. It would seem to be the safer option than trying to knock a missile out of the sky.....
They aren't behaving by anyone's definition of "rational".
That's the biggest danger. Because they are acting irrationally, you can't expect them to react proportionally to any provocation. Rarely is there a single reason for a war, but stupid things can escalate tense situations into outright conflict. Tensions between Honduras and El Salvador turned to war over a stupid soccer riot.
The actions of an outside party may or may not influence the ultimate outcome, but it does hurt attempts to diffuse the situation.
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North Korea (and their leader) are like one of those small, annoying dogs that yaps incessantly to prove it is big and tough. Only in this case, the small dog has sharp teeth and rabies. Sure we can still beat it up, but in the process we'll get bitten quite a bit and it'll hurt a lot. Any war between us and North Korea will be messy on a level that would make Iraq look like a clean war.
Remember, those people might be living through hell on Earth, but thanks to the North Korea government's total control of the media, the people think that the US is to blame. They really think that their benevolent government officials would love to improve the conditions, but that evil United States keeps flexing their evil muscles to keep them down. This level of brainwashing has been going on for generations and will be difficult to undo.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
A false flag attack is a great way to start a war without being look like the aggressor. Operation Himmler is one good example of such back in WWII.
New Economic Perspectives
Kim Jong-un trying to unite people behind him by building up imaginary foreign threat? Not exactly a novel idea or completely without rationale. He's a new leader, people are unsure of his power and some might want to take his place or get rid of him.
Personally, I'm more and more a proponent of planting a few mushrooms across Pyongyang.
So you'd kill a few million people who are trying to live as best they can in a shitty situation, just because you don't like what their dictatorial leaders have said and done?
You must be such a nice guy. Do you also advocate napalming everyone in an electoral district every time their senator takes a bribe?
If you don't like what Kim Jong Un and his friends are doing, target them, don't irradiate the poor slobs who have been oppressed by them for the past fifty years.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
I'm guessing that a nuclear attack on SK is the only realistic chance the NK has of being able to do any serious damage.
This is a non-trivial problem that people who say "just wipe out NK" don't fully appreciate. Seoul is a city of over 10million less than 50 miles from the DMZ and is within range of thousands of conventional artillery pieces. Unless there is an incredibly coordinated plan, wiping out North Korea will probably mean sacrificing Seoul at the very least.
Even if war goes perfectly, how will the vaccuum of leadership and millions of already near starving people be handled? Ideally there would be a unified Korea, but that would mean China would have to cede political influence which is not a given.
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You can't open the paper without some story of a crooked cop, on the take, murdering off the clock, raping a suspect, running over kids because they wanted to drive fast without lights on.
You're missing the point. This happens everywhere, but only in a free society do you have the ability to open a newspaper and read about the ones that get caught. Oppressive regimes like North Korea do not report their failures.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.