What I think About (2) LulzSec and Stuxnet

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

Stuxnet: I feel 99.99% certain Stuxnet a weapon of war jointly created by the United States and Israel, specifically for attacking Iraq, but applicable for countless other targets, the most important of which would be generalized terror. In other words, I think Stuxnet was constructed to attack Iraq, (something it has done very effectively), but more, it exists to be exploited randomly by hackers in the hopes that they will cause vast chaos to much of the world in general. I am saying that Stuxnet is a deliberate weapon of terror, aimed at the planet as a whole.

http://vimeo.com/25118844?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews (this video is AWESOME about the topic)

I am equally certain that LulzSec is, if not the creators of Stuxnet, definitely employed by at least the United States, if not other nations, and that it is not in any way made up of ordinary people save for some few fools who may jump on and pretend to be part of it. I am saying that the true LulzSec is a government creation with the purpose of creating chaos specifically targeted to corporations and companies, especially those in the media, especially that media which would affect the younger, more influential buying-and-purchasing public, 18-35 year old mostly males, all for the purpose of terror.

Why?

For one ultimate goal: to make it politically and socially acceptable, even necessary, to regulate and control, dominate and throttle, the very concept of the internet. To make the internet so scary to the wallet and the person, that the idea of being anonymous, of having free speech and private communication and transfer of files should become no longer acceptable by anyone. The goal is to eliminate the threat of true, free, private, worldwide communication, and especially the ability to reveal and discuss what goes on in the world. To stop rebellion and thought and whistleblowing and sedition. And, of course, to clamp down utterly on uncontrolled, untaxed, sometimes even illegal, truly free trade and commerce.

How do things like horrific virii and government hackers pretending to be rebellious nerds accomplish this?

By raiding the passwords and identities of voting-age influential demographics and scaring them into coming to the notion that if something drastic is not done, their game accounts and bank accounts and personal identities will all be in frightening danger. That the unregulated, free internet will inevitably bring down civilization itself, with viruses able to shut down, well, anything. The lights, heat, transportation, everything. Gotta be safe. Gotta be secure. Gotta beg the governments to step in and lock everything up nice and tight and safe.

Goodby dissent.

Note that LulzSec has not attacked any government, has not revealed any terrible secrets about the US or anyone else. No, it attacks PayPal and Xbox and Sony. The things young men really care about. Note that Stuxnet was made to do so much more than just messing up Iraq's nuclear program; it can be used by anyone to shut down just about anything. Anything whoever created it originally allows, anyway.

And all this as many governments, especially that of the United States, are trying to ram through severe and totalitarian laws that threaten to turn the internet from free and open, into totally, completely controlled and monitored. Censored. Watched. Locked up tight.

It may be, as more people than myself recognize the pattern that LulzSec follows, that this group may make a token appearance of attacking Big Bad Government, in order to seem hip, in order to appear more 'real'. I predict that if this even happens, what will be revealed or done will have zero real impact, unlike, say, Wikileaks. Or even some of the acts of Anonymous. It will be for spectacle, not substance.

A government group smart enough to construct Stuxnet would not be so blind as to just allow the existence of what amounts to an open-source superweapon unless it had a reason. I have given that reason, I think.

And as for LulzSec. Lulz Security. Christ. This is the name old, rigid, establishment men trying to seem like politically radical geeks would give to a fake hacker group. It smells even before one considers what it actually does, and has accomplished.

I think we, meaning the world, are being set up for total internet control, being programmed to want total internet control, to desire it, to fear not having it, by the wealthy, the powerful and the corporate, by which I mean Rich Men.

And, sadly, I think it will probably end up working, in time.

[Idiot Glee]

And as for LulzSec. Lulz Security. Christ. This is the name old, rigid, establishment men trying to seem like politically radical geeks would give to a fake hacker group. It smells even before one considers what it actually does, and has accomplished.

Jennifer, I hate to make you feel old, but you're more than a generation removed from these people. LulzSec is EXACTLY the kind of dumb name a group like this would come up with. Look at the names of Anonymous ops, Bradical, Chanology, Leakspin, etc. These are geeky puns, hacked together words, and self consciously not too serious. Each generation builds its own little slice of language, and every generation before has trouble understanding it.

Next... If these were agent provacateurs, then the foreign nations and companies affected by them (who would not be in on or bound to uphold American subterfuge) would investigate and find that. And if they were false flags, would they go after private FBI associated security firms?

http://gawker.com/5808517/lulzsec-hacke ... affiliates

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

Next... If these were agent provacateurs, then the foreign nations and companies affected by them (who would not be in on or bound to uphold American subterfuge) would investigate and find that. And if they were false flags, would they go after private FBI associated security firms?

http://gawker.com/5808517/lulzsec-hacke ... affiliates

That part, I can respond to. Yes, they would. I know this from personal knowledge, not just from books or speculation. Well, personal in the sense of 'by way of my father', not me personally.

The agencies of the US are often at odds with each other, and some are engaged in quite serious power struggles relative to each other. The FBI has lost almost all of its access and relevancy and has been diminished to an almost laughable state; they are not happy with this at all. Picking on them is like kicking a small dog - it looks impressive to other small dogs, but means nothing to the man with the boot. A perfect theater to put on the performance of 'we are radical, legitimate hackers'.

As for hacks to other nations, it depends on the nation. The serious nations, which is to say the ones who matter in the world, that is one thing - but the unimportant nations, the majority of them (Greece, Italy, Poland, most of Europe, all of South America, Australia, Canada, and so on) are fair game. More than this it is especially to their advantage, or rather to the advantage of their governments and regimes - the free communication of the internet is of great threat to them as well, and if they get hacked, in the end, it is all good, because it serves the ultimate purpose.

Indeed, it would be no big thing to have The Pentagon in the US hacked, or any other scary, impressive thing, because if the people doing it are on the payroll, nothing truly vital will ever be released, but it can still be made to appear as a Very Big Deal.

Come to think of it, they can hack anyone, and anything for this reason, to create any degree of paranoia they want. They control what gets released, so it does not matter.

But do not imagine that the US is one big happy family of agencies. Infighting began the moment they started, and has never let up. The CIA is far more relevant than the FBI, and has more power and vastly more money, most from very... shady... sources (read the War On Drugs and control of Afghanistan), they enjoy baiting the poor, sad FBI. And the CIA is itself the butt-boy of other powers. These monkeys love their hierarchies. They also love trashing each other.

Perhaps you are right that I am out of touch with the names groups use. I can accept this, despite the fact that I have been constantly online and part of the internet since it started; basically my entire adult career has ended up being internet in some form or another (my previous, youthful career as a game designer being an utter failure). I've never NOT been wired, at least since the internet has existed. But hey, I admit I don't hang out at 4Chan, or peruse the halls of the Black, White, and Red Hats, or spend much time worrying about Zero Day stuff. Not my personal interest sphere.

That said, LulzSec smells to me, and the name smells, and their actions definitely smell. By which I mean they seem very much like some front group for a bunch of establishment, corporate jarheads, corporate military goons. Name or not.

[Idiot Glee]

But if it's inter agency rivalry, then the FBI would push back.

If they're government, and if they are fighting each other, the FBI tracing back LulzSec as a (lets say) CIA job would get the CIA screwed. This is the kind of thing that makes the papers because of "leaks". Deep Throat was FBI after all.

Even if, in your hypothetical, the FBI is a small dog—they still have teeth.

Addendum:

I should probably go into why I am so doubtful of LulzSec* as false flag. These hacker groups often claim to be, and frankly often are anarchist in nature. Among anarchists (the term is originally Mao's, but anarchists are quite eclectic) the "prairie fire" idea is really common.

The idea is this: Prairie grass is the old oppressive order, and a single revolutionary spark can cause it to go up in a revolutionary conflagration. Anarchists of a certain stripe (never generalize anarchists, they never agree to agree to anything) are enthralled with this idea, and want to put it in action.

Now I disagree with them, and it's for this reason that I disdain "prairie fire" ideology (to stretch the metaphor a wee bit): After the oppressive grass is removed, what holds the topsoil down? What keeps the topsoil from catching the wind and causing destructive dust storms? Once the old order is gone, in other words, what order is built to replace it?

Prairie fire is something teens and twenty somethings think is cool, it's a dumb short sighted thing—like teens and twenty somethings. And there are always ample short sighted kids out there who wanna raise some hell, and they're much more common than you think. These are lonely people who latch on to ideology for social connections and a feeling of personal fulfillment.**

There is always a supply of dumb kids willing to do dumb things for barely thought out political reasons. There are even more when it's hard to find a job, and right now youth unemployment is high. There is little if any need for agent provocateurs when there are so many willing lunatics around. Emma Goldman thought Leon Czolgosz was an agent provocateur until he shot McKinley***, put a couple million bored kids in a country, and sooner or later one of them will make a revolution.

The left is full of crazy idiots, and they're simply the most likely explanation for LulzSec. I don't totally discount false flag as a possibility, I just think human stupidity is likelier than massive conspiracy.****

* btw, anyone else keep typo-ing LulzSex? Weird right?
** True Believers to use Eric Hoffer's term.
*** No Teddy Roosevelt conspiracy theories, please, that is a bridge too weird.
**** AKA Hanlon's Razor

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

Anarchists....

Anarchy, as a political ideal, is as foolish and naive to me as is Communism or Democracy. More foolish and naive, actually, and more immediately dangerous.

All three of these political paradigms seem to be based on a common false belief, a belief proven wrong by the entire history of humankind - that human beings will naturally tend to work towards their own common best interest.

For Communism, this belief manifests as the notion that people will work, happily, for the benefit of the mass of humanity, out of a common valuing of that humanity. This has been proven wrong in every large scale attempt at Communism, because, in the end, if there is nothing in work that is directly benefiting the worker themselves, work stops. Only gunpoint can keep it going, and even then, the work is slow and poor.

For Democracy, the belief manifests as the notion that people will submerge their own personal issues for the greater good of all, and that given equal votes, the average of all votes will ultimately represent reason, goodwill, and mutual benefit for all. In reality, people vote only out of their own selfish interests, or personal terrors and hatreds, and endless controls and limits and structures must be created to break the tyranny of a cruel majority, flatten out the extremes and otherwise strip power away from the very people supposedly to be trusted with it.

The greatest delusion of all, though is Anarchy. Anarchy is intimately predicated on the notion of the common good will and reasonableness of Man, and assumes that free of rules or governance, humankind would naturally settle into an agreeable give and take moderated by innate justice. In reality, of course, petty chieftains, dire mobs, violent groups and rival gangs wage endless war for whatever is available, with nothing being produced, and all hope of peace being destroyed. This, in opposition to the arbitrary assumptions of the Anarchist, is the natural state of Man, tribal, fierce, warlike, territorial, the animal that he really is, the animal that he always was for the past million years prior to agriculture... and the large-scale violent gang called governance.

Basically, I don't see humans as being capable of enlightened self interest on any large scale. On a very small scale, say under a hundred people in a group, sure. It is possible. It is definitely possible the smaller the group, but even at the size of a single family, enlightened self interest is far from certain.

Humans are just plain fucked in the head.

Or so I think.

[Coda]

I, for one, take LulzSec at its word. I don't think it's political. If it were political, it would be hitting political targets, and hitting them with more than just brute-force DDoS attacks.

No, if it's anyone beyond just some punk 20-somethings, it's some hotshots actually IN the security industry, tired of the constant bickering and downplaying that plagues their industry. Someone reveals a security threat, the first thing that happens is that the spin doctors try to make people believe that it doesn't exist, or that it doesn't affect their day-to-day lives. LulzSec is confronting that head-on. Their goal is not damage, it is not money, it is not fame... it is to EMBARRASS as many people as possible, to show them that the little lies we tell ourselves aren't protecting us at all.

And if there IS a government conspiracy going on, LulzSec's reason for existence is to be running interference for more covert ops going on. Give one group notoriety so that people start pointing fingers, make them make a big show of less-important targets to distract them away from the real jobs being done by a completely unrelated agency. (That way, if LulzSec DOES get caught, they don't know what they're covering up, so they couldn't talk if they wanted to.)

But Occam's Razor doesn't seem to bear out the conspiracy theory, and the smokescreen would work even better if LulzSec WERE a completely unaffiliated entity. If there's a government cyberterrorism agency out there, they'll be taking advantage of LulzSec's publicity to get stuff done without arousing too much attention, but they're not going to be controlling LulzSec. People operating under a government agency would be following protocols even if they're making a show of chaos. That's not LulzSec's MO. I mean, seriously, they were taking phone calls asking for targets to DDoS with their "Lulz Cannon". That's some balls.

So yeah, I think it IS a couple of 20-something techno-anarchist punks. It doesn't take a lifetime to learn this stuff, and some of the best hackers in history have been teenagers. They're way too good at this generation's lingo to be older than about 35. Heck, *I'm* too old to really use it, and I'm 29 -- but my wife is 25 and she speaks it fluently (though chooses not to except as a literary technique).

[Coda]

Well, I'm going to revise my statement. LulzSec IS getting political and it IS targeting political targets now. But I don't think that changes anything -- I still think they're idealistic techno-anarchists operating above the law because it's too hard to operate effectively WITHIN it.

[Idiot Glee]

They aren't government.

Oh hell no they are NOT government. Governments do a lot of crazy things, but not releasing home addresses.

[Brilliand]

I mean, seriously, they were taking phone calls asking for targets to DDoS with their "Lulz Cannon". That's some balls.

If they're putting much emphasis on DDoS, then I don't think they're disgruntled security professionals. It isn't possible to immunize against a DDoS - you just need to bring enough resources into play that the attackers can't jam all the lines at once, at least for long. I'd think they would only do things that other security professionals could actually stop, if that were the case. (Of course DDoS attacks ultimately come from viruses infecting the computers of ordinary people, but that's rather indirect.)

[Coda]

The group as a whole never put a whole lot of emphasis on DDoS. They focused primarily on stealing data. They just got really bold after a few successes and just decided to play a few pranks.

It's sort of interesting to look back on this now that you bring it back up. After LulzSec went quiet... the world, ultimately, didn't change.