Posts tagged Wikileaks

Open Mic September 2

16
1 year ago
by Logarchism.com in
Cover of

Mess­ing with the Bible?

Here are some tid­bits of news or other inter­est­ing items from this last week. (Go on, try some of the links.)

George W. Bush

So you think you can dance?

There have report­edly been sight­ings of the elu­sive Gad­hafi. Katia threat­ens the Gulf, while Eric Can­tor threat­ens vic­tims of Irene. Mitt Rom­ney has decided to run against Rick Perry. George Bush says, despite the kiss-​​and-​​tell book, he’s still BFF with Dick Cheney.  Speak­ing of Jar­Jar and Emperor Pal­pa­tine, George Lucas tin­kers once again with Star Wars. Wik­iLeaks claims they got hacked (OMG! do peo­ple do that?) Humans have been around much longer than some peo­ple think. Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 is still claim­ing vic­tims.

And on that note, we are about a week away from the tenth anniver­sary of that tragic day. We will have a series of arti­cles over the next week dis­cussing the day itself, and its impact on us in the fol­low­ing decade. There’s also going to be a debate among the Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates on Wednes­day, fol­lowed on Thurs­day by Pres­i­dent Obama’s announce­ment to Con­gress and the Amer­i­can pub­lic of his plan to address the chronic high unem­ploy­ment in the United States. All in all, we will have much to discuss.

But there are some sto­ries we won’t com­ment on.

Don’t see an arti­cle on a par­tic­u­lar topic, but want to talk about it some­where? This is Open Mic. Talk about what­ever you want, but stay respectful.

We cre­ate a new Open Mic every week to give a clean slate, but feel free to add to this topic at any time.

Related arti­cles

Leaky Week

1
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

I’ve writ­ten before about the var­i­ous machi­na­tions of Wik­iLeaks. The lat­est round is par­tic­u­larly troubling.

This week, Wik­iLeaks released a new round of diplo­matic cables. This time, they included infor­ma­tion iden­ti­fy­ing cit­i­zens of var­i­ous coun­tries, whose activ­i­ties place them at risk of impris­on­ment as polit­i­cal dissidents.

The orga­ni­za­tion pro­claims its inno­cence, alleg­ing (in a thinly-​​veiled man­ner) that The New York Times was respon­si­ble for dis­trib­ut­ing the unredacted data. But this doesn’t pass the smell test. If Wik­iLeaks is in pos­ses­sion of the unredacted data, and dis­trib­uted it to the Times, then Wik­iLeaks is respon­si­ble for dis­trib­ut­ing the data. This doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily absolve the Times of all respon­si­bil­ity, but Wik­iLeaks doesn’t earn a halo.

(more…)

When Hackers Attack

1
2 years ago
by Michael Weiss in

Denial of Ser­vice: Priceless?

Update: 12⁄9 4:40PM PST

Last week, a grow­ing num­ber of attack­ers worked to pre­vent access to Wik­iLeaks, pri­mar­ily through var­i­ous forms of denial of ser­vice attacks. But, as I men­tioned in an ear­lier arti­cle, there is a sig­nif­i­cant sub­cul­ture of free infor­ma­tion among those in the com­puter secu­rity com­mu­nity.

The free infor­ma­tion peo­ple began to fight back this week. (more…)

Assange’s Cryptic Behavior

1
2 years ago
by Michael Weiss in
WarGames

Image via Wikipedia

Wik­iLeaks is a new con­cept to the global stage, though hardly new to peo­ple who have been involved in com­puter secu­rity for a while. This arti­cle does a very good job of boil­ing down the essence of the site.

The ques­tion keeps aris­ing, why do peo­ple do this? The answers are var­ied, but money is among the least-​​likely rea­sons. Pfc. Man­ning was a clas­sic “dis­grun­tled employee” case. Oth­ers may be tra­di­tional whistle-​​blowers. Still oth­ers may be work­ing for com­pet­ing com­pa­nies or for­eign gov­ern­ments. In all cases, there is rea­son to release the infor­ma­tion only if it is more valu­able to the leaker if the infor­ma­tion is pub­lic than if it is pri­vately held by the leaker.

But there’s more to the equa­tion than this. Why does Julian Assange do this? To get a sense of the answer, one needs to look at his past. He was born in 1971, and so was among the first gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who could have used a com­puter in the home. WarGames was writ­ten about peo­ple like him, who had the nor­mal curios­ity of a teenager, cou­pled with a knack for cryp­tog­ra­phy.

This inter­est in cryp­tog­ra­phy is impor­tant. It appears that there is a high con­cen­tra­tion of peo­ple within the cryp­tog­ra­phy com­mu­nity that have Asperger Syn­drome. Such peo­ple tend to be intel­li­gent, in part because one of the symp­toms is an intense focus on things that they can study alone; but they also have an inabil­ity to empathize. It also tends to breed unre­al­is­tic hubris, as a side effect of years of expe­ri­ence in out­smart­ing oth­ers, cou­pled with the inabil­ity to see social warn­ing signs because of the lack of empa­thy. This could help to explain why he seems to be unable to under­stand the degree to which his actions are putting him­self at risk.

Fur­ther­more, there is a sub­stan­tial “free­dom” sub­com­mu­nity within the broader com­puter tech­nol­ogy world. The fun­da­men­tal tenets of this sub­com­mu­nity are that soft­ware and infor­ma­tion should be freely avail­able, with­out profit motive. It was this group that pro­duced Linux and other open-​​source soft­ware. The Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion is a more for­mal and refined man­i­fes­ta­tion of an aspect of this phi­los­o­phy. In a less for­mal and more raw fash­ion, so is Hack­tivismo.

When you put these pieces together, it becomes much eas­ier to under­stand Assange’s moti­va­tions. It’s not that he wants to bring the United States down. Rather the free-​​information phi­los­o­phy is more impor­tant to him. A lack of empa­thy and abil­ity to see the big­ger pic­ture leads to this behav­ior. It should be easy to under­stand this if you look at it through the lens of an individual’s per­sonal polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy. We see this sort of behav­ior on this very site all the time.

It’s hard to say what will hap­pen if he loses his life over this. Per­haps some­one else will fill the void; there is cer­tainly no short­age of peo­ple who share his phi­los­o­phy and men­tal state. It wouldn’t be hard to imag­ine one who would con­sider Assange a mar­tyr, and would take up the man­tle in his honor.

Related Arti­cles

It’s Worse than You Think

2
2 years ago
by Michael Weiss in
Logo used by Wikileaks

Image via Wikipedia

Update: Novem­ber 30, 10:40AM PST

There’s plenty of talk about the infor­ma­tion recently released by Wik­ileaks. But there’s more infor­ma­tion there than is gen­er­ally being reported.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of our infra­struc­ture to cyber­at­tacks. Do you think Wik­ileaks is the only orga­ni­za­tion to have obtained clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion with­out autho­riza­tion? (more…)

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