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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
We all knew this about a week ago, thanks very much.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
I found this article more than a bit Astonishing.
One guy: "‘When it comes to terrorist attacks, one of the big worries is that you could take down forums and cost someone their lives,’ a GhostSec spokesman known only as Digital Shadow told..." And it is the really the article author that is telling us, even Mr. Shadow simply said it was a worry.
I didn't think Anon was all that good before, something like the medicine is as bad as the disease. You could say they were close to terrorists themselves, as their releases hurt lots of good people, no matter how worthy their cause was.
This is of course, a good cause. The best. If there was ever a way for Anon to redeem themselves, not just to me, but to the intel hawks in Washington that hate them; this is it. I don't think Intel is complaining, and If they are smart, they can use this to enrich, verify, and prune the intelligence they have now. If they are watching people that get Anon-rolled, then they will see results and reactions, or the lack thereof; all of which is good intel.
More like the NSA and other 3 letter organizations are being shown up by Anons.
Not really. This was an obvious possible backfire.
Also, you don't tell the other guy you broke his codes. Intelligence is by its nature secretive. It is as tinfoil-hat to believe that the NSA has never intercepted intelligence to stop terrorist attacks as it is to believe that they are listening to every conversation within range of any microphone.
I suspect that the "anonymous" attacks are the intelligence agencies. My thoughts were that they can find thousands of accounts with maybe a 5% error rate. They cannot get a warrant with that, and don't want complaints of "you brought down my legitimate site" so they just have an "anonymous" announcement that they will do it.
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.
Aside from the intelligence advantages of having people who are comparatively difficult to infiltrate in person voluntarily post lots of stuff to online services almost entirely within western jurisdictions; I have to wonder how much of the freak-out about ISIS' Twitter Accounts!!! is reasonable, and how much of it is a petulant reaction from western military and intelligence officials who have no real experience with not enjoying substantial media cooperation and the ability to keep things 'on message' as they prefer.
They certainly like to talk about 'radicalization' as though it is something that can insidiously corrupt anyone exposed to enemy propaganda, regardless of their prior circumstances; but what do we actually know about the impressionability of these 'radicalized' targets? Does it actually work on anyone; or primarily on people who were somewhere between deeply skeptical of, and overtly hostile to, 'the west' in the first place?
In the same vein, given that there are nontrivial numbers of people who are anywhere between skeptical and hostile; are we actually worse off if the sinister terrorist propaganda incites them to leave and go join the glorious struggle in jihadistan? Yes, having more recruits available makes our attempt to pretend that Iraq isn't a total clusterfuck harder; but it also means that the people who most actively dislike us are no longer living next door and brooding; but off getting themselves killed, or enjoying their medieval theocracy.
I'd certainly wan to avoid having people leave and then return; that is just asking for trouble; but are we actually worse off if the people who like us least have an exciting relocation option?
All what the secrets are doing is surveillance. All they want to do is monitoring. It is safe, and convenient. When will we starting taking real action? Like fight those guys? Anonymous came and did fight, did destroy those communication channels. Should we be sorry as there is nothing to monitor or be happy the bad guys have one less way to communicate?
Surveillance will not stop terrorism.
Rick Aston is this minute being waterboarded by CIA agents trying to find out the hidden messages in Rick Astley's hit meme song. All because of a fly that landed on the typewriter ribbon at the wrong time.
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.
At least Anonymous does not have a vested interest in perpetuating the conflict forever as a means of state control.
A large room in the NSA building, filled with serious men in dark suits sitting in front of hundreds of computers.
Every few minutes "Never gonna give you up" is heard from a random place in the room.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
When Anonymous or someone else floods a hash tag with thousands of identical links to the same video, the cpu resources to collect all the postings, filter the spam out, track the original posts and follow ups would require humongous CPU resources and server farms. So it is going to hamper our spooks' ability to ... wait .. oh oh!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I am not a security expert, but my thoughts are that "Anonymous" isn't really hurting anything.
1) An article from The Guardian speculating that Anonymous might be doing more harm than good does not equate to national intelligence agencies complaining that Anonymous is doing more harm than good.
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.
2) The CIA etc. are very, very good at identifying leadership, money, and top players. That is what their intel does.
3) When they do stop an attack, they do NOT broadcast it. Instead they try to backtrack it the higher ups, taking them out. They can't do this if they tell the news.
4) We are sacrificing many rights for false security. Airline crap is a prime example. Not only does it not work, but it is costly. Similarly, they are unconstitionaly taking way too much information about American citizens and sharing it with other agencies. But that doesn't mean the security agencies are doing nothing. They are more effective than people realize.
I would agree that we have given them too much importance and made too many sacrifices. But when you denigrate their real, effective, efforts, you hurt your own argument.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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?
"the article also indicates that professional security agencies have seen sources they monitor shut down. "
And why would that be a problem? "Security agencies" don't seem to be aware, able, or willing to stop attacks.
France has now passed more laws using the Paris attack as an excuse, and they got it done quickly (like faster than the PATRIOT act).
Ponder that then read this.
https://theintercept.com/2015/...
And that's not the only example of FBI manufactured "terrorist".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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!
1. Richard Reid—December 2001. A British citizen and self-professed follower of Osama bin Laden who trained in Afghanistan, Richard Reid hid explosives inside his shoes before boarding a flight from Paris to Miami on which he attempted to light the fuse with a match. Reid was caught in the act and apprehended aboard the plane by passengers and flight attendants. FBI officials took Reid into custody after the plane made an emergency landing at Boston’s Logan International Airport.[3]
I'm fucking laughing so hard.
That was two wasted words. Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense and Vice President, he wasn't in the intelligence community. He also doesn't seem to suffer from various personality disorders and syndromes common here. He has also been away from power for a very long time and yet he still bothers you. I suspect that is more a reflection of what is going on between your ears than his.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
While this is undoubtedly harming some existing intelligence gathering operations, it's probably more useful in providing other information such as how does ISIS's network react when attacked by another network actor. Think of Anonymous as the hounds chasing ISIS for the the intel community. Watching ISIS's online behaviour under attack is probably very useful.
Actually, no. The very nature of their job is that if they're successful, absolutely nothing happens. Consequently, the only evidence they have that an attack was thwarted are some written plans, drawings scrawled on a napkin, or chemicals that could be used to make a bomb. They can't even be sure that they really did stop a terror attack, or if they just caught some raving lunatic with delusions of executing a terror attack. And they can't crow about it until many years later, because doing so could tip off related terrorist cells that they're close to being captured.
In 1995, Philippine police stumbled upon a terrorist plot to assassinate the pope, bomb airliners, and fly one into CIA headquarters. The plot was discovered when the terrorists accidentally set fire to their apartment while preparing bombs. It hit the world news briefly, with most of the news services describing it as a plot to blow up airliners and fly them into buildings. My friends and I discussed it briefly. We concluded it was the Philippine police/intelligence exaggerating to try to make it look like they stopped something huge from happening. (1) If it was a real terrorist plot, why were they bragging to the international press about having thwarted it? Shouldn't they be keeping quiet while they used the intelligence they'd gathered to catch co-conspirators before they even realized their plot had been foiled? (2) While we knew there were wackos out there who had no qualms about bombing an airliner and killing everyone aboard it, the part about flying them into buildings was just too far-fetched. We had a psychologically barrier preventing us from conceiving of someone going beyond merely killing those people, to actually using them as part of a weapon to kill more people. Nobody could be so callous and disrespectful of human life, right? (3) It would require the perpetrator(s) to die aboard the plane as well. The whole point of using a bomb was that you didn't have to be aboard the plane when it went off. So that seemed unlikely as well.
Then 6 years later, 9/11 happened.
Anyhow, this is a big part of the problem with intelligence (and safety engineering for that matter). If you succeed, nothing happens and nobody hears about what you did. If you fail, you get blamed and it gets replayed on the news over and over. In light of a success being when nothing happens, how do you determine how effective your anti-terrorist ops are? What is an appropriate, measured response to the threat? Those in the intelligence and security community like to interpret nothing happening as an indicator of the great job they're doing, and why their (illegal) monitoring needs to be allowed to continue. Those opposed like to interpret nothing happening as an indicator that nothing would've happened if all those intelligence and security measures hadn't existed. Because the primary evidence is the lack of evidence, it can be interpreted to support both viewpoints.