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How Anonymous' War With Isis Is Actually Harming Counter-Terrorism (metro.co.uk)

Posted by samzenpus on from the thanks-but-no-thanks dept.

retroworks writes: According to a recent tweet from the #OpParis account, Anonymous are delivering on their threat to hack Isis, and are now flooding all pro-Isis hastags with the grandfather of all 2007 memes — Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video. Whenever a targeted Isis account tries to spread a message, the topic will instead be flooded with countless videos of Rick Astley circa 1987. Not all are praising Anonymous methods, however. While Metro UK reports that the attacks have been successful, finding and shutting down 5,500 Twitter accounts, the article also indicates that professional security agencies have seen sources they monitor shut down. Rick Astley drowns out intelligence as well as recruitment.

13 of 393 comments (clear)

  1. What is this, click bait? by smittyoneeach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is spelling Astley's name correctly 33% of the time an effort to irritate your readers into clicking the article?
    Or is it just more proof that /.'s editors could be replaced with a poorly coded .php script?

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    1. Re:What is this, click bait? by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, it is proof that /.'s editors HAVE BEEN replaced with a poorly coded .php script!

      This is slashdot, it's a poorly coded perl script.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. What's more effective? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It all comes down to whats more effective. IMHO shutting down recruitment has more value.

    Also, so called intelligence didn't stop France attacks ... so the value of monitoring the sources is even more dubious.

  3. Worse than clickbait ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ... Rick Aston drowns out intelligence as well as recruitment ...

    I call that bull

    If the so called 'professional security agencies' have been so successfully monitoring Islamic State's account why didn't they stop the people being recruited into the terrorist organization?

    1. Re:Worse than clickbait ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hell, if they were so successful in monitoring ISIS, why the fuck weren't they able to stop the Paris attacks from happening in the first place?

      I don't know what's scarier, ISIS itself, or the fact that international intelligence agencies are so clearly inept that they're actually incapable of stopping any sort of terror attacks. If they actually DID manage to stop terror attacks, they would be trumpeting their victories loudly and on the front page of every newspaper and every news website this side of the GMT line. The fact that they haven't is pretty much proof positive that in fact they haven't managed to do a damn thing.

      Between the US and Europe, we're practically lining up to sacrifice our rights in the name of "security", but the fact of the matter is that the emperor has no clothes - if our governments haven't managed to prevent these sorts of attacks given the atrocious level of personal privacy we've had to give up already, what proof do we have that they'd be able to do so while giving up more rights? Yet this is exactly what politicians are going to demand that we do in the wake of the Paris attacks.

      I'm not terrified of ISIS. Statistically speaking, I'm most likely not going to be gunned down by some angry dude with an AK-47. What I AM terrified of is our governments systematically stripping our rights under the guise of preventing terror, which they've been objectively shown to be unable to do in the first place.

    2. Re:Worse than clickbait ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't know that I would peg this as incompetence by our intelligence agencies.

      A large problem we face is that recent years have shown it is in their best interests to let the attacks happen. It's pretty trivial to claim that the terrorists were just one step ahead and there was no way to know the attack was going to happen. Afterward, governments fall all over themselves trying to give the intelligence agencies more power to stop the next attack.

    3. Re:Worse than clickbait ! by H3lldr0p · · Score: 3, Insightful

      2) If intelligence agencies are watching Twitter accounts for covert intelligence, that is idiotic. Twitter posts are public, easy to find, and unencrypted (I suppose you could hide a secret message in a Twitter post, but anyway...). It seems to me that the Rickrolling is perfect for disrupting ISIS sponsored Twitter recruitment accounts. When it comes to actually planning attacks, I imagine this makes no difference whatsoever--that is more likely done by ISIS on encrypted non-public channels that the intelligence agencies are trying to find and decrypt.

      Except that they're not using encrypted channels to do the planning and execution. That's been made abundantly clear in the last week with multiple articles in the papers telling us as much. All of their chatter was done over phone texting. That's it. Nothing fancy. Nothing requiring any government to intrude on or break otherwise normal encrypted messaging. Maybe that's the problem. We've built up a boogieman in our minds that is this incredible supervillian-esque monster that's going to be doing everything on side channels with embedded encryption protocols and stenographic images.

      I mean, that's what they're doing, right? It's what the old Soviet regimes were thought to do. Who knows, maybe these guys are just stuck in the world the way it was thirty or forty years ago.

      To my mind it goes back to the OP's point. They're not using intelligence to stop these people. The question is it incompetence, malfeasance, apathy, or some combination of all three?

    4. Re:Worse than clickbait ! by kheldan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ostensibly, not a single one of us in this discussion is an analyst or other operative for an intelligence organization, so as such all we're doing is 'armchair quarterbacking', and worse, 'Monday morning armchair quarterbacking' when it comes to this type of work. I'm not sticking up for these people, but I will say it's easy to criticize what they are (or are not) doing when you don't have any real-world idea what the work actually entails.

      --
      Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
  4. Bullshit by kbg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the intellegency can't do their job just because Anonymous is shutting down public Twitter accounts and flodding Rick Astley video on hashtags, then they are not competent at their job. They have direct access to all these social media databases which Anonymous doesn't.

    Anything that hinders ISIS in spreading their message is a good thing.

    1. Re:Bullshit by silentcoder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And er... what exactly are they supposed to do *before* hand anyway ?
      This is the free world - we aren't allowed to lock people up who haven't committed a crime. Sure conspiracy is a crime, but it's not an easy one to prove.

      The truth is there is very little that free countries *can* do to prevent terrorism, which is why it's been a part of their history for the last 200 years. There is nothing new or special about current events. There has been some group or another bombing civilians in Europe or the USA every single decade since well before the US revolution.
      This is just the latest in a long, long line and at no point in all that history has your risk of dying in such an attack *ever* been higher than about 1 millionth of your risk of dying because you slipped in the shower. Suicide is a much more likely way to die.

      Actually in terms of ways to die... this is so far down the list that there is absolutely *no* sanity in being the least bit concerned about it. And everybody losing their minds over it is simply abundant proof that humans are absolutely terrible at risk assessment.

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  5. Harming intel operations? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    More like the NSA and other 3 letter organizations are being shown up by Anons.

    Show me one place where their warrantlessly wiretapping citizens has lead to one terrorist being stopped or inconvenienced in the slightest?

    Anonymous has basically shut down ISIS's recruiting machine. Show me where any of the Govt. organizations have been able to do anything that effective short of putting boots on the ground or short of flying drones over syria and bombing suspected terrorist camps (and killing innocents in the crossfire by the way.)

    You can't do it.

  6. The Professionals by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It is the job of the professional security agencies to lie. It is safe to assume everything they say is a lie, unless proven otherwise!

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  7. Your reply is bad and you should feel bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    How is this voted insightful, holy living fuck Slashdot you've gone down the toilet. Intelligence agencies foil terrorist plots all the time, but guess what mr insightful: they don't talk about it! Do you know why? Because that would harm existing operations! The terrorists only need to succeed once, whereas the people you are bemoaning as incompetent have to succeed all the time. I get that you probably want to sound your horn on important topics to give the impression that there's a lick of intelligence inside you, but the mods upvoting this rubbish? For shame!