Shawn Henry, an executive assistant director at the FBI, is stepping down after twenty years with the agency, citing frustrations with fighting a losing cyber-war. Hackers have proven themselves capable enough to sneak into the mainframes of companies such as Sony, NASDAQ, the CIA, FBI, and a litany of others. Even HBGary Federal, a cyber-security firm, was hacked. They even stole the source code for Symantec’s Norton anti-virus software and published it to the internet. It is not surprising that the man in charge of cracking down on this mess has resigned, but it is surprising that he took another job with a private cyber-security firm. “I don’t see how we ever come out of this without changes in technology or changes in behavior, because with the status quo, it’s an unsustainable model,” Henry said. “Unsustainable in that you never get ahead, never become secure, never have a reasonable expectation of privacy or security.” Well, I think it is time that We the People stepped in and started talking about the problem as a matter of national discourse, just like any other conventional war we have fought in the past.
The first step is to ‘know thy enemy’. Just as we mislabeled so many Muslims at the outset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is our heavy-handed and reactionary response that has driven so many otherwise unmotivated, tech-savvy youths to taking part in this ‘war’. Hacking, the act of breaking through digital security, has existed in concept since the invention of the first thieves. When items worth stealing started appearing on the internet in the ’90s, “hackers” started getting worldwide attention. There were ‘black-hat’ hackers who would steal quietly for personal gain. There were ‘white-hat’ hackers who broke through security systems on behalf of companies to demonstrate the weak points in the system. There were some in the middle, dubbed ‘gray-hat’s, who would break into companies without permission but would nonetheless disclose their methods to the companies. All of these hackers were talented individuals acting out of their own volition; hacking has always been a hobby.
The new breed of hackers hitting the scene are different in a few respects that are worth understanding, it might even help ‘win the war’. Where old-school hackers were secret, these new hackers are brazen in their activities; they usually steal so much information the owner’s can’t help but notice, the information is often published without the owner’s permission for everyone to see, and the hacker collectives often take credit for their dirty work. That begs the second major difference; modern hackers are often working in groups. Not just private groups it turns out, in McAfee’s 2007 annual report states that over 120 nations are exploring the prospects of cyber-warfare, including both China and America which feature state sponsored hackers as part of their military apparatuses. China has been caught breaking through the US military’s security on satellite systems, but didn’t do anything once they took control. Remember when America’s spy drone crashed in Iran and caused a global kerfuffle? It had been postulated that perhaps para-military hackers had taken control of the craft over Afghanistan and then flown it to Iran where they crashed it.
However, by far the largest hacker headache of the internet comes from groups unaffiliated with any government; rogues, pirates, scoundrels. For example, the WikiLeaks crew was responsible for stealing so much information, the world’s entire supply of journalists was almost mobilized to sift through the damning evidence until the organization was swiftly descended upon by several key nations. The problem of WikiLeaks, the same problem of conventional warfare, was that they had a face for the organization; Julian Assange was very vocal about his activities and motivations. Love him or hate him, you could at least understand his brand of “hacktivism” because he bothered to talk to news cameras. Since then, hacktivists have tried flying personally under the radar while simultaneously touting their accomplishments. Allowing them to wage a war of propaganda while remaining relatively safe from any nation they might be operating from within or against. The downside is that we no longer get the journalistic exposure afforded even in war with our enemies. They have officially become “terrorists” in the eyes of the law, and “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.”
In 1936, the celebrated author H.G. Wells went before the British parliament and announced that he had been working feverishly on a massive encyclopedia that he hoped the world could use as a starting point for a shared history. He believed that “without a World Encyclopedia to hold men’s minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles.” Wells then dared any and all critics of his “World Brain” to ‘do it better or be damned.’ Imagine the joy Wells would have felt if he could only see the internet today! There are almost a billion people connected via Facebook; that’s one in seven of all humans alive today. News from all around the world is shared and discussed in real-time. There is even a massive, collaborative encyclopedia that the entire world participates in and benefits from at no cost, known as the great Wikipedia. The internet is the first incarnation of a true ‘world brain’, and we are quickly bringing the entire world closer together and elevating the worse-off to a new standard of living with it.
If something as amazing, miraculous, and advantageous as the internet were ever threatened, wouldn’t you rise up and defend it? Such a war would not be fought with guns or bombs, but with hearts, minds, and computer code. This is the context that the press at-large I feel is leaving out. If there is one thing the wars in the Middle East have taught us, it is that what we can try to label as a “terrorist”, from the other side of the fence looks more like a “freedom fighter waging an asymmetric war.” The Patriots of the Revolutionary War stood up for what they believed in, used hit and run tactics to extreme effect against the world’s most powerful military, and revolutionized war in the process. For their troubles they were labeled as terrorists by the crown of England, but are we worse off for letting those terrorists get their way? I am not saying we should give every terrorist what they want, but what do the Islamic fundamentalists want? They want to be left alone, they want America to stop interfering in the politics of the Muslim world. At this point, Americans could not agree more with them. You fight terrorists with words and dialogue, not by making examples and crushing them; that only makes it worse.
The most infamous hacktivist collective out there these days is known as Anonymous, popularly recognized by the Guy Fawkes mask and the disembodied business suit. The movement draws its inspiration from the 2005 blockbuster V for Vendetta, itself based on a ten-part graphic novel based on the conflict between anarchy and fascism. The film is set in an Orwellian future where the British government survives the global chaos by controlling every aspect of the people’s lives, and the people themselves live in the fear of their government’s shadow. Enter a masked man who single-handedly destroys the cabal running the government and returns the power to the people. The climax of the movie features the entire populace of London taking to the streets in solidarity wearing the same Guy Fawkes mask as the anti-hero. It is this spirit that the hacktivists wish to frame themselves; as the little guy fighting back against the tyranny of the powerful.
Their activities started in 2006 utilizing the internet as an organizational tool and often targeted those they felt were in need of some street justice. For instance, around the turn of the new year in 2007, Anonymous flooded white supremacist Hal Turner’s website with activity on a scale for which he was unprepared. The website crashed under the activity, but not before ringing up thousands of dollars worth the bandwidth. Mr. Turner attempted to sue the websites that Anonymous used to organize the attack but failed. A year later, the group was credited with bringing Chris Forcand, a Canadian serial pedophile, to justice. They also carried out actions against the Church of Scientology, the Epilepsy Foundation’s forums, and other websites who talked smack about the group. All of these actions are hallmarks of youthful pranksters. In 2009, they showed signs of maturity and restraint, working to help the struggling democracy of Iran’s ‘green revolution’ and acting out against Australia’s proposed internet censorship legislation.
What WikiLeaks was doing was regarded by many nations around the world as a form of ‘nouveau yellow journalism’. Hackers would sneak into secured areas and steal more information than could realistically be sorted, which was then disseminated to the press who would find within the haystack the needles that the companies were trying to hide. In 2010, the United States was made the target in what became known as “Cable Gate,” it set its sights on the organization and on the informant, Pfc. Bradley Manning. WikiLeaks released a nugget of a video clip that showed a US military helicopter gunning down two members of the international press who had been mistaken for terrorists. Apparently, digital cameras and machine guns are hard to distinguish on grainy film. The United States declared that the actions of WikiLeaks were putting innocents at risk; perhaps by enraging the Iraqis against the American cause. Their global assets were frozen and any news agencies who possessed the documents were told it was against the law to publish them. Assange himself is being held under house arrest in Britain, facing extradition to some other nation who would be willing to hand him over to the United States.
This treatment reminds me of how the Catholic Church suppressed Galileo when he published something very uncomfortable for the powers that be of his day. Assange’s decisions may have been uncomfortable, but at least it was semi-transparent; the documents were not released willy-nilly into the interwebs, but rather given to people with press credentials who could responsibly sort out the information. Even Robert Gates, then Secretary of Defense, admitted, “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.” Nevertheless, facing potential pressure from the government, many companies acted against the hacker-journalists; Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, Amazon.com, and many others joining in the cause. The counter-stroke was provided by Anonymous, who launched Operation Payback against many of those companies; taking their websites offline by flooding them with activity and, where possible, stealing sensitive information in the spirit of WikiLeaks. In my opinion, this is the battle that marked the beginning of the aforementioned cyber-war that the FBI’s Shawn Henry laments is a losing fight.
What we have is a struggle for the soul of the internet. Will it be free, open, and impossible to hide information? Or will it be closed, impossible to use, and a tool to be used exclusively by companies with the power to defend themselves? That question is at the center of the debate over legislation such as SOPA and PIPA in the United States and the ACTA legislation in Europe. What I tend to notice is who is affecting whom. Anonymous and WikiLeaks have been little more than a hiccup for major companies. With any luck, their efforts will result in a better understanding of what these secrets being hidden from us are, and I am a firm believer that more information available enables us to make better and smarter decisions about anything from who to vote for to which brand of detergent should I be purchasing. These hacktivists have done a pretty good job of keeping the average global citizen out of harms way, but acknowledges that there will be unintended consequences and apologizes for them in advance. On the contrary, their targets are trying to institute “changes in technology or changes in behavior,” neither of which sounds like something we should be eagerly awaiting.
I still am hopeful we can find a solution that works best for all parties. The internet is a two-way street; companies can use it to distribute music at rates hitherto incomprehensible, and likewise it can be used to rip our favorite music off of YouTube videos for free. Our government should be acting in a way that preserves this freedom for everyone, and our vigilantes should be picking and choosing targets who genuinely deserve it, be they individuals, companies, or para-military groups. I will leave you with this question, would you throw Batman in jail for working outside the law? Australia wouldn’t, it turns out. Assange recently declared his intention to run for his mother nation’s senate in the upcoming election, and his WikiLeaks submission website is now open for business again.