The Internet War

I was about to sit down to write about lulzsec and anony­mous when news came about that lulzsec is hang­ing its hat. How­ever, I believe things are far from over. This week, I look at how we got there and why I feel it’s far from over.

The begin­ning

In the early days of the com­put­ing rev­o­lu­tion, hack­ers and reg­u­lar com­puter users were often indis­tin­guish­able. Core to some of the early eth­i­cal tenets of the com­puter world was a cer­tain sense for mis­chief and rebel­lious­ness. In cer­tain case, some of the early pio­neers (Steve Jobs, for exam­ple) know­ingly broke the law. Oth­ers would reserve their pranks for the 1st of April. But one thing that was con­stant was an under­stand­ing that the com­puter indus­try (and later, the inter­net indus­try) was a bit more mis­chie­vous and more will­ing to take risks

As the inter­net became more pop­u­lar, the gen­eral pub­lic started bump­ing into some of those jokes and ille­gal acts. Early adopters under­stood them to be part of the cul­ture of the inter­net but as the main­stream came online, tol­er­ance for such events decreased and, as the net became a lit­tle more cor­po­rate, agree­ments regard­ing mis­chie­vous behav­ior that some­times skirted the edges of the law disappeared.

Where unruly went next

But the unruly behav­ior didn’t com­pletely dis­ap­pear and took dif­fer­ent forms.

On one side, rule-breaking was replaced with rule test­ing, result­ing in com­pa­nies like Nap­ster, that took on the whole copy­right régime and threw it under the bus, try­ing to build a busi­ness model based on what had been pre­vi­ously con­sid­ered ille­gal. Of course, as often hap­pens in those cases, they were sued in almost inex­is­tence. But the genie was out of the bot­tle and the bound­aries they broke were never truly re-established.

In other, darker cor­ners, some of the rule and law break­ing pro­fes­sion­al­ized itself. As the net became more main­stream, every­one includ­ing crim­i­nals came online. And the crim­i­nals saw some of the hack­ing as a lucra­tive line of busi­ness, get­ting into areas phish­ing, cor­po­rate break­ing and enter­ing, reselling infor­ma­tion or raid­ing finan­cial data. All those types of behav­iors were a cor­rup­tion of the orig­i­nal unruly approach and turned it into some­thing more sinister.

But yet another strand of the unruly behav­ior moved much far­ther, mutat­ing as it met cer­tain polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies. Attach­ing itself and merg­ing with ide­olo­gies rang­ing from lib­er­tar­i­an­ism to anar­chism, this strand became much more unpredictable.

The rise of hacktivists

In the early 80s, groups of hack­ers started get­ting together and bring more of an ideology-bent approach to their attacks. One such early orga­ni­za­tion, the Chaos Com­puter Club, high­lighted secu­rity issues in ger­man bank­ing sys­tem by hack­ing them in front of the media, tak­ing large amounts of money out, and then return­ing it at press con­fer­ences the next day.

As inter­net rule-breaking became its own ide­ol­ogy, more groups started appear­ing, tak­ing on bat­tles with more tra­di­tional play­ers online. Part inter­net com­mu­ni­ties, part memes, those groups were loosely formed, with par­tic­i­pants often not know­ing each oth­ers but lever­ag­ing online tools to orga­nize them­selves and select their targets.

In the early 21st cen­tury, a new group emerged from the 4Chan dis­cus­sion board: Anony­mous, an inter­net col­lec­tive orga­niz­ing rapid inter­net based pro­tect actions, often tak­ing the guise of denial of ser­vice attack, the prac­tice of tak­ing down web-based ser­vices by over­load­ing them. Some of their ini­tial efforts included increased actions in the con­tin­u­ing bat­tle between the inter­net and the church of sci­en­tol­ogy. But they were just get­ting started.

Wik­ileaks and the rise of Anonymous

The Wik­ileaks releases, and sub­se­quent attacks by gov­ern­ments which felt their rep­u­ta­tion had been sul­lied by the releases, gave Anony­mous a cause they would attach them­selves to. In ris­ing to wik­ileaks defense, the Anony­mous col­lec­tive started tak­ing on the web infra­struc­ture of orga­ni­za­tions that had hurt wik­ileaks and its abil­ity to oper­ate. Because many in the online com­mu­nity felt the Wik­ileaks cause to be just, the actions of Anony­mous were her­alded as a pos­i­tive counter-force to supra-legal approaches taken by oppo­nents of the leaks site.

Their efforts led to an increased online bat­tle between government-backed forces, cor­po­ra­tions who want to sell their ser­vices by demo­niz­ing groups like Wik­ileaks, and the Anony­mous col­lec­tive. For exam­ple, HBGary Fed­eral, a secu­rity com­pany that tar­geted Anony­mous and Wik­ileaks as the enemy, came to be a target.

A mil­lion lit­tle pieces

But as Anony­mous’ rep­u­ta­tion grew, so did dis­agree­ment within its ranks as to what to do and how to do it. At the same time, a num­ber of copy­cat orga­ni­za­tions started to emerge, bring­ing dif­fer­ent causes as jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for their efforts.

Over the last cou­ple of months, LulzSec estab­lished itself as a strong con­tender in the field, hack­ing such orga­ni­za­tions as Sony, the US Sen­ate, the CIA, the Brazil­ian president’s site, etc… grab­bing large amounts of infor­ma­tion with each attacks and releas­ing it online.

And this is where we stand today: the idea of heav­ily pub­li­cized online hack­ing exploit as a form of protest has taken hold and is prob­a­bly here to stay. And an idea is not some­thing one can destroy that easily.

Let’s roll back the tape a lit­tle bit on what hap­pened after Nap­ster was pretty much shut down by the music indus­try. The con­cept of online music shar­ing didn’t die with Nap­ster, it just took dif­fer­ent forms, and that’s some­thing the music indus­try never recov­ered from.

So orga­ni­za­tions like Anony­mous, LulzSec, and who­ever comes next are here to stay. Their insur­gent actions will prob­a­bly work as a coun­ter­bal­ance to many efforts by cor­po­ra­tions and gov­ern­ment to increase their con­trol of the inter­net. How­ever, their actions will also result in gov­ern­ments and cor­po­ra­tions using those efforts as an exam­ple of why there is a need for more cen­tral­ized con­trol of the internet.

So no mat­ter where you stand on their efforts (whether you applaud or con­demn them), the net result is that we are about to enter a long inter­net con­flict between online hack­tivists and estab­lished stakeholders.