NWO Hackers: The Covert War Against Antiwar.com

A covert army of pro-establishment hackers has emerged dedicated to harassing, disrupting, and intimidating on-line opponents of US and NATO-backed "humanitarian" operations in the former Yugoslavia. Antiwar.com, a bipartisan, libertarian-oriented Web site providing critical news and commentary for those opposed to US military entanglements overseas, has become a digital flashpoint for this clandestine ground war.

On July 30th 2000, the site experienced a nearly lethal cyber-invasion by a trio of prowling information warriors who gained access to Antiwar's Internet Service Provider (ISP) and proceeded to dislocate the site

I don't know who was doing it but protest.net was also getting attacked when we were doing a lot of organizing aginst the US/NATO war against Yugoslavia. We had a top quality colo service, above.net, at the time and we traced the attacks back to the former Yugoslavia. Dunno who was doing it. We blocked them and evenually they went a way. I suspect that a lot of other sites also suffered the same fate. Between the denial of service attacks and random death threats that I got for a while, it got a little harry. Nothing much came of it and they went away.

I personally concluded that it was just some script kiddie hacker teens and nothing really serious. They got bored and went away. Maybe someday we'll see some cyberwar type stuff happening, but it's not happening yet by any means.

In Solidarity,

Rabble

Well Im aware that there wree many shut downs of regular Serb sites, or they had their information replaced with pro-Albanian messages.

I think most of the attacks come from Europe where hackers tend to be much more political. (Unlike the US ones who take over the Pentagon site and write crap like "M1sT3r n0 Go0d w4S h3RE!!!")

The real danger comes from the mix of these elements:

* The ECHELON legal strategy, in which foreign spies from "friendly" countries (e.g. among UK/US/CA/AU/NZ) are called upon to do illegal things for the locals, and receive effective impunity.

* The deliberate solicitation of "back doors" in widely used programs that allows spies access. The most famous of these is the _NSAKey alternate software certification in Microsoft, but the Aureate/Radiate spyware included in "freeware" programs as detailed on www.grc.com (under "ShieldsUP") is possibly more dangerous; Microsoft Word's ID-number tagged documents and macro-based back doors allowing documents to be mailed at a spy's request is also a major player - there are many others. Solicitation of these by the Australian government was accidentally admitted in an improperly censored version of a report now archived on www.efa.org.au.

* The acceptance of "hackers", "spammers", and denial of service attacks as something that software vendors SOMEHOW seem helpless to stop by their own means, and the reliance on law enforcement --- which may ultimately be behind the attacks when they are political!!! --- as the only option to "protect" people from them.

* The targeting of independent hackers and juvenile delinquent types as serious criminals, in order to prevent them from revealing major security weaknesses (e.g. the Melissa virus author), and possibly to recruit them as informers and provocateurs, continuing to "hack" for the spies but with the plausible deniability that they are still just juvenile delinquents.

* The willingness of courts to accept electronic "proof" of crimes or participation in disastrous financial transactions, especially censorship violations e.g. child pornography or participation in money laundering, as incontrovertible, when such proof can be manufactured by aforementioned hackers. Even worse, when such proof relies on keys held by "trusted" third parties --- who have turned them over to the spy agencies, which can then plant "incontrovertible" proof of crimes and transactions at their whim.

* The ability of the NSA and other spy organizations to spin off commercially viable front organizations, using them to gather money, using improperly gained information to foster their growth, using inside information to manipulate stocks to their favor, using the money they make to broadly subsidize spy friendly and spy controlled companies over any free market competition. The degree to which this is currently done is in dispute, but do you trust them not to?

* The use of intercepted and hacked information to blackmail major corporations, specific officials therein, or petty political office holders e.g. members of congress into following the spies' agenda, or simply to hinder the success of their ventures by communicating odd bits to competitors.

* The general acceptance by each nation's civilian leadership (to the degree it exists) that because all the others have such spy networks and are using them to "their" advantage, that their own nation must also tolerate such behavior - even though the spies are likely to be more interested in gaining more authority, power, and wealth than anything else.

Of course, there are non-Internet factors which make all of these yet more dangerous, but I'm sure that you can see how any two of these add up to be much worse than any one individually. And so on. In case you fear I've digressed, I should simply refer your attention back to the hacked political sites: is the damage really only that they were temporarily disrupted? Or have spy programs been installed deep in the ISP, are user lists now being gone over and cross referenced in large databases, are experts trying to use this information to decide how best to infiltrate and destroy the movement the organization is a part of, will the "hacking" of the site be used as cover to brush off any observed spying as not really political and serious in nature? I would think these things are true.