Tuesday, July 5, 2011

"Anonymous" "Lulzsec" and what this all means for us.

I've noted with a keen sense of fascination the "Rise Of The Hacker" within the last year. From the massive leaks of classified U.S. documents and diplomatic cables by Wikileaks, the outing of the Reuters news employees gunned down in Iraq by overzealous troops, and now the steamroller of defacements and information dumps from Anonymous and Lulzsec, it is clear we are transitioning into an interesting era of the net.

Part of the reason why this interests me is from my own personal history. I was a "hacker" back in the day, but this was a "back in the day" when no one really cared. Back then it was all about "War Dialing", exploiting the occasional SSH connection to get into cool BBS's you otherwise couldn't get in to, or making trolls behave in IRC chat rooms (oh how I miss eggdrop wars). I've been on the internet in one way shape or form for 24 years now, so when I say "back" I mean back. :)

For most of the open history of the internet (and I'm not referring to it's progenitor way back in the 60's arpanet when it was really a Department Of Defense project) this place we all love was about as free a realm of inquiry as one could imagine. And along with this freedom it has to be said that it's equally been a messy place. This duality dovetails nicely though with my (and most scholars) understanding of what is implied by the word Liberty. Free expression and liberty are concepts rarely experienced without grief, or at least lots of noise, but this is as it should be.

The internet as we know it has been sort of an anarchic capitalist free for all, and this is clearly what helped the net grow into the juggernaut of absolute necessity it has become today. Problems arise however, when this brand of social and economic politics comes across incompatible systems. The root of the problem today is that the internet itself is not compatible with how much of the world works. This isn't necessarily a bad thing however. As free as we think we are, our society is full of "walled gardens" and disenfranchising socio-economic systems.

So as free as we think we are, as citizens of the most free country in the world, we are not as free as our virtual counterparts on the net. Note how in other countries where even the basic freedoms we take for granted in the U.S. are a pipe dream, the freedom of the net has fostered avenues of expression and change heretofore impossible. One need only pay attention to the news and notice how key and critical a tool the internet has been in the revolutionary fervor in the middle east. When one pays attention to the details however, one realizes that there is something even more fundamental taking place.

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were especially telling because of the true nature of their source. Unlike past bloody uprisings in the region in the last couple of centuries, these were about more basic and fundamental things. Past revolutions in the region were largely about power struggles and ideology, and though there is certainly an ideological underpinning to be had here the real driving force has been something much simpler, that being the need to ameliorate human suffering. Egyptians were rebelling largely because they were hungry and broke and tired of being hungry and broke. Politics, religion, economics, these were all sideline issues when compared to the simple fact that people suffering got tired of suffering.

One of my guiding moral principles is this. Anyone, anywhere and for any reason suffering needlessly is reason enough for me to reexamine my own convictions. Granted, I do have rather well thought out conceptual beliefs when it comes to how I choose to see the world, and I'm the sort of person who will gladly state and debate those beliefs with anyone. The difference is that I've decided it is vital to set aside the potential pettiness of philosophy if it gets in the way of me being able to genuinely care about other people and their plight.

We live in a global community. Concepts like borders are becoming more meaningless by the day, and will one day be utterly meaningless. As scary as this thought might be to some, it is clearly an inevitable outcome. Real human suffering is taking place pretty much everywhere one cares to look, and even so in our own great country. From corporations and governments treating our privacy liberty and freedoms as secondary concerns, to real actual daily suffering by an increasingly larger percentage of our own population, these are legitimate concerns. Ones that are not going away without action.

There is a certain duality to the activities of Anonymous and Lulzsec, which dovetails nicely with the general hacker ethos I've come to know well in the last few decades. Granted it is clear that some of what they do is for street cred and "lulz", but even the motivations worthy of little more than a kindergarten playground fight have deeper and more fundamental meanings behind them.

When Lulzsec hacked the ever loving daylights out of Sony they did indeed expose millions of people during their breach of Sony's security. But they exposed what they did publicly, and did so because this was the only real avenue available to them to point out Sony's shockingly bad security. More to the point they exposed how (and how easily) they did what they did. In this light it is clear that Sony was not taking it's customers security, safety, and privacy seriously. It cost Sony a pretty penny too, with writeoffs for fixing their own stupidity approaching $200 Million U.S. the last time I checked.

GOOD! Sony should have fixed this crap in the first place. SQL injection exploits that any first year security student (or 12 year old with motivation) could have pulled off in their sleep should never have even been possible, had Sony actually cared about protecting and serving it's customers.

We make the mistake of placing too much trust in established systems of accountability, because we are under several mistaken impressions. We assume that we as customers of Sony truly matter to Sony and simply do not want to face the reality that their concern basically ends once our credit card transaction has processed. We assume that there is oversight, but the reality is that oversight is poor to nonexistent. Moreover, given that so many businesses are multinational conglomerates, oversight is often either difficult or impossible at the level of government. We assume that there is transparency and accountability, but we have a government driven by money and it's influence. With the Supreme Court deciding that the 14th Amendment extends citizen-like status to corporations, is it any wonder that our representative government seems to cater to business and not the electorate? It's like that old adage about the Police. The Police are here to protect us, but who protects us from the police.

The very freedom and power of the internet becomes today perhaps the most powerful lever for change. Oversight and accountability at the level of the individual becomes possible. Though it is difficult to have secrecy and privacy online, this goes both ways much to the chagrin of corporations and governments. As we've seen with Anonymous, Lulzsec, Wikileaks, and now a growing grassroots hacking effort globally, secrets can become public knowledge instantly, and in a manner that won't easily go away.

At the end of the day, even if their tactics do not mesh with what is legal, what these groups are doing is not only right and just, it is necessary.

No comments:

Post a Comment