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Former U.S. intelligence analyst
jammed Iranian government websites
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
 In
a recent speech about the situation in Iran, Obama pointed out: “This is
not an issue of the United States or the West versus Iran; this is an
issue of the Iranian people", who in a way are willing to “open” new
roads. “We respect Iran’s sovereignty and the fact that it is the
Iranian people’s job to make such decisions".
Of course, Obama –who not long ago set up a cyber command to protect the
Pentagon’s networks from hacker attacks– probably knows nothing about
the role of U.S. hackers in the media’s war against Iran.
One of the cyber-supporters who launched the attack on Iranian
government sites is Matthew Burton, a former intelligence analyst, ITPer
and Technology Consultant to the U.S. Intelligence Community, a
self-proclaimed all-out defender of his Government whose website http://www.impublished.org/wordpress/index.php
is aimed, he says, at helping national security and democracy.
As you can see in the statement below, Burton is anything but
wishy-washy when it comes to his hacking activity. Actually, his
cyber-war philosophy is quite similar to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s, as evidenced by the way she urged Twitter to sign on to her
government’s plans to destabilize Iran: "I consider it important to keep
that line of communication open and enable people to share information,
particularly at a time when there are not many other sources of
information. It is a fundamental right for people to be able to
communicate and organize. The United States believes passionately and
strongly in the basic principle of free expression.”
published by M. H. Lagarde en 12:19
original:
http://cambiosencuba.blogspot.com/2009/06/ex-analista-de-inteligencia-de-estados.html
================================
This is the original, not a translation.
MATTHEW BURTON Using the Web to help national
security, government, and democracy http://impublished.org/
http://www.impublished.org/wordpress/index.php
On the Weaponization of the Collaborative Web 3:57
pm, June 17, 2009
Around this time yesterday, I, along with
countless others, tried to bring down the Web sites of Iran’s
information and justice ministries, and state-sponsored media outlets.
The idea was to silence the pro-Ahmadenijad, anti-dissent messages
coming from these outlets, and in so doing, strengthen the opposition
protests in Tehran.
You didn’t have to be computer smart to take part:
a developer in San Francisco had set up a push-button tool that would,
upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with
requests. I clicked Start, and in the 10 little boxes below, I could see
the pages load and reload. About half of them were already down.
This was exhilarating. The goal was to promote
democracy, and I could actually watch as it happened. Empowering.
But there’s more to it than that. I’m conflicted
about the virtue of this idea. I’m still trying to sort out my thoughts
about what happened, but I know that we will be talking about yesterday
morning for years to come. We turned our collective power and outrage
into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having
to feel the consequences. Network warfare became available to the
general public. That is frightening. Here is how my thinking evolved
throughout the day:
After a few minutes of watching these Web sites
sputter, I spread the word on Twitter. I was met with a few dissenting
replies. Clay Shirky felt that by doing this, we were validating the
idea of Denial of Service attacks, and that if we endorsed it now, we
couldn’t argue against it when the state uses it against dissidents.
I disagreed. While our use of it may make us look
hypocritical the next time we complain about a state’s actions, I don’t
think we can avoid tactics simply because of that risk. If we forsake
every weapon that the enemy uses, simply because the enemy uses it, what
options do we have left?
I don’t think the idea of disabling your enemy’s
communications is right or wrong. That judgment hinges on a few factors.
First, “sticking it to The Man” is not a standard philosophical
justification, but there is something about it that feels so right.
There were reports that the Iranian government disabled SMS on election
day and attacked Moussavi’s campaign site. Giving a citizenry the
ability to turn the tables on its own government is, I think, what
governance is all about. The public’s ability to strike back is
something that every government should be reminded of from time to time.
The nature of the information being silenced also
counts. And when the loudest voice is distributing pure drivel, that
voice has to be stopped.
I should also mention that the US military is the
preeminent practitioner of communications hacking: when we invade, the
telephone switches are the first to go.
Fernando Cervantes made a good point: when you
attack a Web site, you don’t just attack that site, but every other site
on that host as well. You also clog bandwidth. And as I write this, we
in the West are still heavily relying on the Internet to tell us what is
going on over there; though it’s unclear to what extent, we can also
assume protestors are using the Internet to coordinate. By attacking
these sites, we’re hurting not just the state, but the people we’re
trying to help as well.
This is true. But if government is disabling
services that we do want to be available (SMS, Twitter, etc), then we’re
allowing the public to be exposed to whatever news the state deems fit,
and this is the worst possible outcome. Google gave up the “Don’t Be
Evil” mantra on the day they gave in to China and agreed to filter
news.google.cn, on the basis that some news is better than no news at
all. This argument reeked of B.S. And now that I had the ability to
upend that judgment just a tiny bit, I was going to take advantage of
it.
I still agree with all of my thinking above. But
after a few minutes of letting the attacker run in the background, I
stopped it. I don’t know why, but it just felt…creepy. I was frightened
by how easy it was to sow chaos from afar, safe and sound in my
apartment, where I would never have to experience–or even know–the
results of my actions. All I had to do was click a button. And while my
intentions were honest, there is something inherently wrong with the
ability to so easily cause harm, without bearing any of the ill effects.
I could have been causing the failure of emergency services that I was
not relying on. I wouldn’t even suffer the guilt of knowing what I’d
done, as it’s unlikely I would ever find out.
(UPDATE, just to elaborate: When people want to
attack someone or something, they usually can’t do it immediately. It
takes time to prepare. And during that preparation, they are repeatedly
forced to reconsider their actions before going trough with it. Each
step–buying/building a weapon, choosing a time and place of attack,
traveling to the location of the attack and finally seeing their
potential victims–forces the sane mind to pass through “moral
checkpoints” that force them to think twice. Carrying out the plan is
both physically and psychologically difficult. Even heat-of-passion
criminals are forced to deal with seeing their victims. I am sure these
two factors weed out lots of would-be criminals who didn’t have the
heart or the means to go through with it.
The DDoS tool does away with these barriers.
Nothing forces us to think through the act before we click Start. And we
remain safe from the threat of retaliation. The thing about war is that
you can’t do it without exposing yourself to danger, thus discouraging
you from starting it in the first place. But that is no longer the case.
Scary.)
We can assume that from now on, something like
this is going to happen every time a citizenry butts heads with its
government. (If there was any doubt, the creator of the DoS tool made
the code available on his site; the target sites can be easily
modified.) It’d be silly to think that we could contain it by declaring
it invalid. Still, we–the technopolitics community–need to consider the
morality of this tactic, as our collective ability to spread the
“Attack!” message is not inconsequential.
For comments, see the original post on Personal
Democracy Forum.
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