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Hacker Phineas Fisher is Trying To Start a 'Hack Back' Political Movement (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The hacker who breached Hacking Team and FinFisher is trying to get more people to "hack back" and fight "the system." For some, thanks to his targeted attacks and sophisticated political views, Phineas Fisher is quickly becoming the most influential hacktivist of the last few years. In response to his most recent hack where he released a 39-minute how-to video showing how to strip data from targeted websites, specifically a website of the Catalan police union, Phineas Fisher told Motherboard, "Everything doesn't have to be big. I wanted to strike a small blow at the system, teach a bit of hacking with the video, and inspire people to take action." Biella Coleman, professor at McGill University in Montreal, believes Phineas Fisher has a good chance of inspiring a new generation of hacktivists and "setting the stage for other hackers to follow in his footsteps." She says he has been better at choosing targets and justifying his actions with more rounded and sophisticated political and ethical views than Anonymous and LulzSec-inspired hackers. Phineas Fisher told Motherboard, "I don't want to be the lone hacker fighting the system. I want to inspire others to take similar action, and try to provide the information so they can learn how."
how about an example of his "sophisticated political views"?
or is that an euphemism for whatever views writer of this puff piece holds?
any real "sophisticated political view" would be nuanced and will not have a binary view of society and groups in it.
but without binary views and resulting simplistic us versus them mentality, there wont be any "targets" to "attack" using illegal methods.
"Stripping data" from a website is not a power to be taken lightly.
web site and expose his KKK links.
My grandad used to tell me how the anarchists in his day blew things up to try start European wars, if say everyone since then has gotten exponentially lazier.
He supposedly stole money from a bank then donated it to the fighters of his choice in Syria. That's what he claims anyways.
What a dumb ass.
You haven't heard of the Taliban/ISIS? Get off Slashdot every once in a while.
Anarchists reject authority. Talibans and Daesh operate under authority. They ain't no anarchists. Black block may qualify although they're mostly left wing useful idiots whose actions are used to justify even more brutal crackdowns on legitimate protests.
He's a hacker, he says so. That makes him a criminal, it's the law.
And, frankly, it's s'kiddies like him that gave reason for that law to come into existence, depriving us of a previously much more useful word. The latter often overshadows the former, but it's worth recognising the former: The law is overly broad and deliberately vague, and therefore a threat to anyone liking to get creative, or "creative", with computers.
How thoroughly modern and such a novel idea.
"sophisticated political views" seems to be synonymous with being a vandal.
Is it bad that I want to see the police beat this guys ass?
Gravillo Princip, who started the First, and indirectly the Second World War was an Anarchist. 100 Million dead people later, Europe is still ruled by a government
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
He's an anarchist. Which these days means an emo kid with internet access.
Wow, attacking a union. Way to go, strikebreaker. Stay on the good guys' side. What an asshole.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
More inmates for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. I hope they like fried Spam sandwiches and Kool-Aid. And did I mention sex? Yeah! Lots of sex.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
90% of blackbloc you see are cops
But the society is fundamentally changed. The Parade's End occurred, metaphorically, as well as the strengthening European nation state. My country didn't even exist without these events. If that is close to what the anarchists of the time wanted is open to interpretation.
It is no more valid an approach to the democratic process than is terrorism.
Anon was a bunch of hardened 4chan trolls herding an army of impressionable kids into their own living botnet. At least this guy doesn't make others do the hard work and bear the risk of prison instead of him. That being said, his "sophisticated" political ideas, such as:
aren't exactly new. Just like the punks of old, "hacktivists" use the same ill defined phrases to try and create an ideology around vandalism.
But nobody has the right to bring about so much death and destruction, or to sacrifice the lives of innocents for a cause. That we made a better world from the ashes of their evil justifies nothing.
The 60s called. It wants its pot smoking hippies back.
Sorry, Phineas, but someone with "sophisticated" political views doesn't talk about "The System." They talk about specific policies, they talk about history, they talk about context and cause and effect. I respect your abilities to compromise computer systems, but if all you have is "fight the system" then you are not ready, at all, to talk about politics.
Love sees no species.
Is he out to just cause political damage? How about identify and support a realistic political alternative.
What if in your view the status quot is sacrificing the lives of the innocent? Don't you at some point have to stand up and fight injustice. If violence and risk to the innocent can't any vicious dictator presently in power simple say "Well I am going to have start executing radomly selected school children if you don't stop protesting" and end your fight right there?
I disagree I think there are levels of injustice that can in turn justify actions that are likely to result in the killing and maiming of the guilty and innocent a like. Most fights involve collateral damage, we have a moral obligation to minimize it but if none was ever acceptable we would have no choice but to simply abide the worst abuses and evils.
What I think is missing from modern just war theory is the requirement you play to win! In my view once you have decided a situation is so unacceptable that you are willing to kill and maim to see it change, you owe it to everyone killed and maimed to realize that change. Imagine what kind of monsters we would have been if we had told the Germans retreat to your original boarders and the Nazi's can stay in charge and you can murder whatever Jewish population you still have? The only acceptable terms were total surrender. The only just way to fight the war was to win it, even when that required attacking what might nominally be consider civilian assets in order to cripple the German states ability to make war.
This is what is largely wrong with the wars in the middle east today. We are so unwilling to harm any civilians we never succeed in actually routing the leadership of these extremist sects we are fighting. Israel has the same problem with the West Bank. Either stop fighting each other or actually fight to win. To do anything else just continues what is needles carnage. Translation Go big or go home.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I think dumping information like the Panama papers is the best way to do hacking that makes the world better. The ls the global elite can hide their corruption the better.
Anarchists reject authority. Talibans and Daesh operate under authority. They ain't no anarchists. Black block may qualify although they're mostly left wing useful idiots whose actions are used to justify even more brutal crackdowns on legitimate protests.
In the USA, modern Anarchists are almost respectable and we call them Libertarians and Tea Party members
The anarchists didn't probably know what they were doing. They just wanted to destroy the royal figures they saw as holding up the then society as it was. The burning question is if we have learned something from the past and are able to see the obvious beyond the horizon of a single individual so that the problems of the future can be solved without a war spanning continents. Or any kind of total or even limited war at all. It's the dammed pride and fear of change what are to be blamed.
Any hackers reading this: never-ending debates are how they distract you from writing code instead. If they cared what you wanted, they would have made the system optional.
It may also be counterproductive. In the case of Middle Eastern extremism, harming civilians only serves to align the populace against the proximate cause of that harm. If, for example, children are unintentionally killed in an Israeli military strike because militants were firing mortars from their school, the militants don't get the blame, Israel does. It doesn't matter that they were trying to take out an artillery emplacement, or that the militants intentionally put the children in harm's way; Israel winds up with more enemies than it just killed.
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You won't be laughing when they upgrade the system to Windows 10:-)
We found the trump troll boys.
He's mad because someone is sticking it to the man, and by man I mean the rich elitist pricks who run this country. His dad must be one of those, or he is one of those.
Are you one of those?
It is easier and more "direct" to effect change by throwing a bomb at someone. That's why there was an attraction to the "propaganda of the deed" at the turn of the 20th Century. Even though they're going to get themselves killed, they think they are going to start momentous things.
The thing is... they're right. The problem is that if they don't take the considered and deliberate path towards those goals, they will tip off momentous occurrences that they have no control over. And that means there could be death and destruction and mayhem... for absolutely nothing.
Look at the Bolsheviks. Lenin might have been upset that repression was still needed decades after he died to maintain the communist state, but he was the sort of person who would never have stepped away from that repression if he thought it was needed to meet his ultimate goal.
However, I imagine that Lenin would have been devastated to realize that after all of that, his goals utterly failed. Russia would have been better off if they'd just let the Provisional Government remain in control instead of insisting on bloody revolution and repression to bring about this ridiculous ideology of a Worker's State in a country that barely had industry at the time.
That's the problem I have with people who want to Occupy this or that, or who want to willy-nilly release government documents or hack things. They *will* have an impact. They could very easily cause pain and suffering while trying to overthrow the status quo. But what is absolutely unforgivable is that in all of that, they really have no way of turning that action into something that would achieve the goal of a better world. They're just acting out and hoping that the world is primed to teeter off of the status quo right into the place they want it to be.
And they're right, the status quo is a balancing act that can be disrupted. The problem is that they're so concerned with toppling the current world order that they have no way of influencing the future world order. There is always something worse than the status quo. That's not an argument to keep the status quo, but it is a damn good argument for those who would topple it to have a realistic plan that they are willing to sacrifice for. And sometimes that sacrifice has to be that they are willing to be the person who lived for their cause, rather than who died for their cause. In other words, someone who has a plan and is willing to do the dirty, and frustrating work of making it happen over a long period of time.
Is the world going to be a better place because you hacked the Catalan Police Union website? Perhaps it will be, but what is the goal of that action? How does it work to make the world a better place? We all know that cops can be bad. But we also know that we need cops. So if you're going to attack them on one side, you'd better explain how you're going to "fix" the police with this action. Without that, a hacktivist is just lighting fireworks to see what is going to happen. Some people like that, but don't pretend you're going to help the world out just by pissing people off or spreading around their documents.
In the UK, around a million people marched through London in opposition of the (then proposed) UK involvement in the Iraq war (part 2). It was probably the biggest single peaceful march in the UK in decades, and was accompanied by thorough analysis and critique by various media outlets. Indeed, many millions more marched in other countries as well. I think we can say that 'the people' were pretty well convinced.
We still ended up in a war, which to this day many (qualified) people consider to gave been illegal (We're still waiting for the official report on our leadership's behaviour).
So... peaceful protest - not so successful after all.
Rubbish! Gravillo Princip was a Yugoslav nationalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip
One million is a whole lot of people, but what about the other 63 million? Having 1.5% of the population on your side is great, but it is not 'the people'. More importantly, just because it didn't work for them, doesn't mean it doesn't work at all.
He doesn't get all the credit for starting the First World War. The Great Powers had maneuvered themselves into a situation where almost anything could touch off a war, and some of them were in political situations where backing down in a confrontation seemed more politically dangerous than starting a war.
Essentially:
Overall, I'd rate Princip's contribution as significantly less than the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German contributions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yep. Because it takes real balls for some AC to label someone a "trump troll".
Simply because I have ethics that aren't founded in envy of those with more money than myself.
Simply because I have ethics that prevent me from performing criminal acts on people I disagree with personally or politically.
Again, I have no problem with this person's skills.
I have a problem with how they choose to employ them.
And I have a history of dealing with so-called "hacktivists" before. Some of them are even still in jail today for the stupid shit they pulled.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!