Bu
Loz Kaye
Over Christmas a busy, secretive group were at work, with their
own views on who had been naughty and nice. However it was not Santa's
elves, but the amorphous "
Anonymous"
collective making the decisions. This group of hackers released a vast
trove of email addresses, passwords and credit card information
belonging to subscribers of the US intelligence company
Stratfor – and the hangover has carried on into the new year, with the release of
MoD and Nato officials' details.
Stratfor, an authority on strategic and tactical intelligence issues, is considered by some to be a "
shadow CIA",
and provides intelligence analysis and both private and public
briefings on all manner of issues. The release by Anonymous kicked off
discussion about how such a breach was possible at a high-profile
company specialising in all things security, as well as why it had
attracted the attention of Anonymous.
Many of the thousands of
email addresses and personal details belonged to people in sensitive
posts within the defence and intelligence communities. Although the
publication of email addresses (hardly state secrets) is not a threat in
itself, their disclosure can only be extremely embarrassing for a
company selling itself as an expert on security, while the release of
passwords adds to the alarm.
But it is a mistake to talk of
Anonymous's motives as if it were a cohesive whole. The group is a loose
collection of people with different aims, involving themselves in
different "operations" as they see fit. It is leaderless, it doesn't
have a manifesto, it doesn't have a particular direction, nor does it go
in only one direction at any one time. Given that membership of
Anonymous is based entirely on self-identification, it seems that the
only real way of assessing the group as a whole is on the basis of the
kinds of actions it carries out. It is essentially a banner under which
hacktivists and tech-savvy individuals with a political or social agenda
can rally.
So why attack Stratfor? Well, as Anonymous put it, "to
wreak unholy havok [sic] upon the systems and personal email accounts
of these rich and powerful oppressors. Kill, kitties, kill and burn them
down … peacefully. XD XD." Yet, despite the mischievous way it
expresses itself, a significant portion of Anonymous's focus is
political. It's not just about
lulz
or showing off any more. The point of these actions is to draw
attention to how companies such as Stratfor, or organisations such as
Nato are, in its view, "holders of power in a world that has long been
governed in accordance with the dictate that might makes right".
The
various Anonymous communication channels, and supporters, would point
to what they see as moves in the US to restrict liberty, from the
Bradley Manning case to the so-called
Stop Online Piracy Act, which will give unprecedented web censorship powers; from the treatment of Occupy protesters to the
National Defence Authorisation Act
opening up indefinite detention without trial. You don't need to be a
hacker to think that the US is more deserving of a restraining order
than a special relationship.
On this side of the Atlantic a recent
government report on what it insists on calling "cyber" security, names
hacktivism explicitly as a threat to national security. Yet nowhere is
it made clear in the objectives of that report what the Ministry of
Defence or Home Office are actually supposed to do about it. The
omission may be sinister or merely incompetent. But as the Nato and MoD
leaks highlight the porous nature of our online defences, taxpayers are
entitled to ask what we are getting for the £650m the
national cyber security programme costs. Or maybe not – after all, the lion's share of the spending is going to GCHQ and is secret. For now.
I have pointed out before
that if people feel that the usual democratic routes are pointless they
will find means of direct action and protest. Many balk at Anonymous's
apparent disregard for the potential human collateral in their methods –
but there is no denying that its mix of satire and activism is a
powerful combination.
As I am writing this, Stratfor's website
reads: "Stratfor Global Intelligence. As you may know, an unauthorised
party illegally obtained and disclosed personally identifiable
information … of some of our subscribers." It looks laughably
unintelligent. In one fell swoop it exposes an uncomfortable truth that
cyber-security experts would have us pay through the nose to ignore: as
long as western governments fail to live up to their ideals and ours,
there will always remain those who are equally determined and able to
expose their secrets and embarrass those in power. The lulz just got
serious.
