Re: Wired For Warfare - TIME SPECIAL REPORT

[carmin <carmin@pixelyze.com>]

[: hacktivism :]

"Using a JavaScript tool called FloodNet,..."
I love it!  Floodnet uses Java not Javascript! LOL!!! I doubt the writer
even knows that javascript is NOT the same as Java.

Miss Information, disinformation, lies, and myths; be as plain and as clear
as you can and truth will distort itself, creating media viruses which spawn
new spores!  Perfect, pure perfection.  LOL!!!

osea gui

rdom@thing.net wrote:

> [: hacktivism :]
>
> TIME SPECIAL REPORT/THE COMMUNICATIONS
>                     REVOLUTION/ LANGUAGES OF TECHNOLOGY
>                     OCTOBER 11, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 15
> http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,32558,00.html
>
> Wired For Warfare
>
>                     Rebels and dissenters are using the
>                     power of the Net to harass and attack
>                     their more powerful foes
>
>                     BY TIM MCGIRK/MEXICO CITY
>
>                     In the Chiapas jungles of southern Mexico during
>                     the mid-1990s, Zapatista guerrillas--fighting for
>                     the rights of Mayan peasants--evolved a new
>                     method of conflict: "cyberwar." A mode of battle
>                     that involves the Internet and other forms of
>                     telecommunication, cyberwar, or Netwar, is
>                     employed with increasing frequency by rebels,
>                     terrorists and governments around the world. A
>                     Netwar can be pure propaganda, recognition that
>                     modern conflicts are won as much by capturing
>                     headlines as by capturing territory. But a Netwar
>                     can have more dangerous applications when
>                     computer viruses or electronic jamming are used
>                     to disable an enemy's defenses, as both Serb
>                     and NATO hackers proved in Kosovo by
>                     unleashing barrages of propaganda and
>                     attempting to bring down each others'
>                     telecommunications systems.
>
>                     When they rebelled in 1994, the poorly armed
>                     Zapatistas were no match for the Mexican army
>                     in Chiapas. But their spokesman,
>                     Subcomandante Marcos, is an agile media
>                     manipulator. A renegade college professor who
>                     hides his face in a ski mask, Marcos titled his
>                     Ph.D. dissertation The Power of the Word. In the
>                     battle for public sympathy, he knows his laptop
>                     is a more effective weapon than an AK-47
>                     Kalashnikov rifle. Using a network of universities,
>                     churches and non-governmental organizations
>                     (NGOs) in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada--all
>                     linked through the Internet--Marcos mobilized
>                     international pressure to make the government
>                     cease its assaults against the Zapatistas. When
>                     the Mexican army declared in December 1994
>                     that it had surrounded the 12,000 rebels, Marcos
>                     dispatched news that the Zapatistas had slipped
>                     out of the trap and conquered dozens of villages.
>                     It wasn't true, but according to cyberwar
>                     specialists the Zapatistas' disinformation
>                     campaign caused enough confusion to help
>                     touch off a run on the peso, plunging Mexico into
>                     recession.
>
>                     The Zapatistas' tactics also attracted the
>                     attention of military strategists. The U.S. Army,
>                     for one, sponsored a 1998 study on the group's
>                     tactics by the Rand think-tank. "Marcos is not a
>                     computer geek," says John Arquilla, a defense
>                     information expert at the U.S. Naval
>                     Postgraduate School in Monterey and co-author
>                     of the Rand report The Zapatista Social Netwar in
>                     Mexico. "He's more committed to the idea of info
>                     revolution."
>
>                     That revolution is spreading. These days missiles
>                     are not only tipped with warheads but with video
>                     cameras; television and radio deliver war news as
>                     it happens; and alleged eyewitness accounts of
>                     battles and massacres appear on the Internet,
>                     quickly finding their way into other media. What
>                     matters in today's combat, says Arquilla, "is
>                     whose story wins." Not surprising, then, that 12
>                     of the 30 terrorist organizations identified by the
>                     U.S. State Department have their own websites.
>                     Armies are also entering this digital arena.
>                     Sweden's leading military college recently
>                     graduated several infowar specialists, and the
>                     American military academy West Point is
>                     expected to add cybercombat to its curriculum.
>
>                     In Netwar, governments are often at a
>                     disadvantage against rebel groups or terrorists.
>                     Since they are hierarchies, governments are
>                     digital sitting ducks, easy prey for electronic
>                     attacks. Groups like the Zapatistas and Burmese
>                     dissidents fighting the military regime in
>                     Rangoon, on the other hand, use swarms of
>                     loosely organized "hacktivists" to strike at
>                     governmental computer networks. The hackers
>                     strike, then swiftly disperse into cyberspace. The
>                     rebels' electronic battle station is seldom inside
>                     the country they are targeting, and tracing it back
>                     through the Net can be like trying to find the door
>                     in a hall of mirrors. The Zapatistas' first
> websites,
>                     for example, were based in the U.S., while
>                     Colombia's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC)
>                     guerrillas are in Europe, and Serb Net
>                     propagandists relied on sympathizers in Eastern
>                     Europe during the Kosovo crisis.
>
>                     One of the most novel weapons in the Zapatistas'
>                     digital arsenal is the Electronic Disturbance
>                     Theater, which operates out of New York City.
>                     These Net activists specialize in virtual sit-ins.
>                     Using a JavaScript tool called FloodNet, the
>                     group organizes thousands of online protesters to
>                     invade a Mexican government website with up to
>                     600,000 hits a minute, normally bringing it to a
>                     grinding halt. "We're not into blowing people up or
>                     hacking sites," says one of the Theater's
>                     founders, Ricardo Dominguez. "We just want to
>                     create a small force field that will disturb the
>                     pace of power." He predicts that soon peasant
>                     farmers in Chiapas will be able to protect
>                     themselves from assaults by security forces with
>                     "wireless video uploads" that can secretly record
>                     incidents of police or army brutality and transmit
>                     live on the Internet. According to Dominguez, this
>                     would enable viewers to circulate the faces and
>                     badge numbers of assailants to human rights
>                     groups.
>
>                     The art of Netwar is rapidly advancing. Cyberwar
>                     is "in its early stages," says the U.S. Naval
>                     Postgraduate School's Arquilla, "but it's the
>                     harbinger of a new kind of warfare." According to
>                     Dorothy Denning, a professor of computer
>                     science at Georgetown University, the Kosovo
>                     conflict was "the first war fought on the Internet."
>
>                     Air strikes targeted television and radio stations
>                     controlled by the Serbs, but NATO deliberately
>                     spared the four Internet servers in Yugoslavia
>                     from its bombardments. The aim was to let
>                     Yugoslavs tap into news on the conflict free from
>                     Serb censorship. But this ploy backfired. The
>                     Yugoslav government seized control of the
>                     servers and used them to pour out pro-Serb
>                     propaganda. Their aim, nearly successful, was to
>                     weaken the resolve of NATO countries.
>
>                     No challenge to NATO's domination of the skies,
>                     the Serbs held their own in the Internet trenches.
>                     Serb hackers also used the servers and satellite
>                     links left intact by NATO to break into
>                     government and industry computers belonging to
>                     members of the alliance, disrupting services and
>                     defacing websites. NATO hackers did the same
>                     to Serb sites. Serb computer experts also lobbed
>                     "e-mail bombs" at U.S. government facilities,
>                     clogging the systems.
>
>                     Digital sabotage is rife in Asia, too. In the week
>                     after the results of East Timor's referendum on
>                     independence were announced, the Department
>                     of Foreign Affairs received hundreds of e-mail
>                     "letter bombs" designed to disable government
>                     computers. "Without a firewall, [the e-mail] would
>                     have contaminated the system," says a source
>                     within the department. In Taiwan and China,
>                     supporters and opponents of Taiwan's bid for
>                     statehood regularly hack into and deface each
>                     other's websites.
>
>                     Some Netwar experts concede the limitations of
>                     this kind of combat. Jamming governmental
>                     websites may be a nuisance to the Mexicans, for
>                     example, but it is unlikely to scare the
>                     administration into surrendering to the
>                     Zapatistas. Nevertheless, argues Georgetown's
>                     Denning, "An electronic petition with a million
>                     signatures may influence policy more than an
>                     attack that disrupts emergency services."
>
>                     Others, like Zapatista activist Dominguez, view
>                     cyberwar as a more civilized alternative to
>                     blood-and-guts fighting. "I'd much rather see
>                     extremists take down an Internet server than go
>                     around killing people," he says. For the
>                     Zapatistas, fighting a Netwar may have saved
>                     them from extermination, winning the rebels
>                     widespread international support. Marcos often
>                     compares himself to the cartoon character
>                     Speedy Gonzalez. Like this quick-witted mouse,
>                     Marcos used the Internet to run rings around his
>                     bigger foes. His comrades in other countries may
>                     well follow his lead.
>
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