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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 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.
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
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.