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How Anonymous' War With Isis Is Actually Harming Counter-Terrorism (metro.co.uk)
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.
Is spelling Astley's name correctly 33% of the time an effort to irritate your readers into clicking the article? /.'s editors could be replaced with a poorly coded .php script?
Or is it just more proof that
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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!