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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
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.
I found this article more than a bit Astonishing.
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?
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
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!
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.