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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.
And Nazi links. Several German newspapers have published stories on them, but the media in the US supports him so they refuse to cover them.
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.
There was no evidence Hitler hated women so he is literally worse than Hitler.
web site and expose his KKK links.
He has links to Hillary?!?!?
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.
How thoroughly modern and such a novel idea.
There was no evidence Hitler hated women so he is literally worse than Hitler.
Also, Hitler liked dogs, and was a vegetarian. Trump does not own a dog, and eats animal flesh. He is worse in every way.
"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
Hillary has DD's I would suspect, certainly not KK's
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Yeah, Hitler's attitude to women was great, apart from keeping his niece prisoner and driving her to suicide, that is. Oh and nearly driving Eva Braun to suicide... before her actual suicide.
And yes, he killed that dog too.
Match the following two lists:
a) Lazy, bigoted, racist, got up at 10 or later, drank heavily and smoked cigars like the end of the world was about to come
b) Ascetic vegetarian, no women, did not drink, did not smoke, lived pretty much like a saint
c) Womanizer, had several charges of sexual harassment, got government troopers to get him blowjobs, screwed his aides in the office
a) Adolf Hitler*
b) Winston Churchill
c) Bill Clinton**
See the connection?
*Ok, admittedly, in the 2000s it became clear that Hitler was bit addicted to painkillers...
** To his defense, Monica Lewinsky saw an ad that said "Come to the White House, get a taste of the presidency". She came in the White House and tasted the President. So she needed reading glasses, not her fault!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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
Aren't you forgetting Eva Braun? The celibacy thing was more of a political strategy than reality. It seems to me the claims of his sex life go from one extreme to the other, more a consequence in how one desires to see him and what form of sexuality one is most repulsed by.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
90% of blackbloc you see are cops
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.
Painkillers? Perhaps as part of his daily amphetamine cocktail...
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.
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.
He was addicted to something, that I know. If it was painkillers I don't
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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.
It's possible he was. The exact contents of his cocktail were known only to his personal physician. That tons of speed was involved is known. Which is fortunate for us all. The amphetamines are a likely source of his increasingly unwise decisions and magical thinking - had he been thinking clearly, the war may have turned out very differently. In a bad-for-everyone-else sort of way.
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.
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
A lot of his "increasingly unwise decisions" later in the war were due to his conflicts with top Army officers. They kept acting like it would be possible to negotiate a peace, and were doing their best to lose the war slowly to make Germany's diplomatic position better. Hitler realized that, given what Germany had done under him, an honorable negotiated peace was not going to happen, and that losing slowly was just losing. Therefore, Hitler and his generals were distrustful and didn't understand each other. Hitler wanted to take increasingly dire risks to win, while his subordinates didn't want to risk the collapse of the German position. Not that Hitler was a particularly good general in the first place, and he was definitely irrational later in the war, but many of his decisions made some sort of sense.
The surviving generals pushed a narrative in which Hitler was responsible for most things that went wrong, and kept claiming that Hitler had prevented them from winning the war.
"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!!!
There was also an inherent distrust of experts and expertise, along with the belief that ideological purity was more valuable than experience. So the generals who disagreed with Hitler were clearly not true believers so they lacked the will to win. The idea of negotiating a peace just wasn't a concept the Nazis could fathom, they were inherently superior so victory was inevitable.
In general, you're right, but there are other factors. Paranoid dictators are more likely to go along with the experts to achieve their goals, and late in the war this wasn't going to happen with Germany without extreme risks.
Hitler knew there wasn't going to be a negotiated peace, unlike his subordinates, and he was correct in that. Therefore, there was no real difference between losing in 1943 and losing in 1946, and he consistently went for the big risks because they were the only ones that could pay off. The Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge) could have been modified to try to destroy the US First Army, which German generals though possible, but that would not have seriously affected the outcome of the war. Hitler's grandiose scheme, although very unlikely to succeed, might have. (He was also seriously deluded about Western Allied determination to prosecute the war.)
Invading the Soviet Union was the whole point of waging the war, the war in the West being something of an unwelcome distraction. By attacking when he did, he caught the Red Army when it was extremely vulnerable, and likely had his best chance of winning.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Apart from engineering.
I would say that Hitler&Pals never actually considered the possibility of failure. That the German people were not only the best around, but nigh invincible, wasn't just propaganda for the masses. The Nazi leadership believed it. They also believed Aryans came from Atlantis (on the other side of the sky), and only lost their godlike psychic powers because they interbred with 'mud races'. (fun fact- the only actual Aryans in Europe were the Gypsies Hitler tried to eradicate)