Welcome to Infowar, version 1.0

[Violet_Crumble]

Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow recently tweeted that the world is seeing its first ever infowar, and that “WikiLeaks is the battleground”.

The pressure being brought to bear on WikiLeaks, through fair means and foul by powerful governments around the world speaks volumes that cannot be ignored about the state of modern warfare.

We won’t be dropping our guns and decommissioning warplanes tomorrow - but we, as a race, have emerged blinking owlishly into a new era of combat. One which, for the most part, most Australians haven’t a hope in hell of understanding past this simple premise: People with computers are fighting in cyberspace.

It may sound a bit far-fetched, but this is a very real fight, with real-world consequences. As John Perry Barlow points out, it’s a war - and it’s the first, honest-to-God, out-in-the-open information war the world has ever seen. The stuff of science fiction made real. We have entered a new phase of combat, where nation states are engaging with individuals as equals.

On the one side of the fight are those that want information to be free - regardless of the impact it may (but probably won’t) have on other individuals. On the other, there are those that want it kept secret. It’s not a new paradigm by any stretch of the imagination - but the dynamic of the battle between these two groups, and the internal dynamics of the two sides themselves, is something that the world has never had to come to grips with before.

<snip>

For the luddites, think of it this way. The governments and corporations are what they are - strong, heavily armed and well-defended. Anonymous are like the rabble of Palestinian kids we see throwing rocks at soldiers, occasionally getting accurate and giving a man in a uniform a bit of a boo-boo. DDoS attacks are, at their most effective, a nuisance. Cyber sabre rattling, and nothing more.

The point is that they are fighting, and with every weapon at their admittedly quite meagre disposal.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/42010.html

[wtmusic]

1. Every minute PayPal is down they lose $10,000 in business

DDoS attacks are a bit more than a nuisance.

[Goldstein1984]

2. From "The Mask of Anarchy" - Shelley

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

[tomg]

3. Thanks for the reminder. I

teach Shelley next semester. "The Mask of Anarchy" is back in the syllabus.

[Goldstein1984]

5. The context in which Shelley wrote The Mask of Anarchy is very

appropriate.

History rhymes, too.

[tomg]

9. Absolutely.

I think my students will be getting a lot more of the politics of the Romantics this semester.

[EFerrari]

4. And in the middle of this complicated struggle, there's Sarah Palin

calling Julian Assange "unAmerican".

:)

[myrna minx]

6. LOL. Just LOL.

:rofl: I didn't know she sad that, although it shouldn't surprise me. LOL.

[Violet_Crumble]

7. LOL!

She really is that stupid, isn't she?

[SpiralHawk]

10. Profound is her ignorance

Profound.

[Greyhound]

8. K&R. But there are several glaring inaccuracies.

Portraying this part of the conflict as "The governments and corporations are what they are - strong, heavily armed and well-defended. Anonymous are like the rabble of Palestinian kids we see throwing rocks at soldiers, occasionally getting accurate and giving a man in a uniform a bit of a boo-boo." gives the uneducated a very distorted view. The battlefield is far more level than the Big Boys want people to know.

The real cyber-warriors(?) are well armed with relatively secure operating systems, tight, effective software, knowledge that is at least equal, and an overwhelming advantage in numbers which translates into a greater potential for sheer power.

The corporations and governments have virtually unlimited resources and their own capable operators (many of who's sympathies lie with the opposition), and the ability to bring the war into the real world where they can physically hurt the soldiers on the other side, when they can find them.

The war has been going on for a long time at a low level because it was never in anybody's interest to escalate it, hackers have been taking their tribute from the PTB for years and the PTB have been keeping it quiet because admitting how impotent they are might cause the uneducated to doubt the power of authority and withdraw their trust, but that appears to be changing.