Anonops #11: Stop ACTA

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Why Anonymous is interested to the Great Firewall of China?

The Chinese government is fomous for the high level of monitoring implemented on internet and in the specific on all the new social media, that is the moder form of censorship, a model that several countries all over the worls are taking for example. Nothing is changed, government plans to continue censoring social networking sites according the declarations of the Communist Party and State Council regarding China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) on cultural reform and development.

The outlook is very bad, they are violating human rights in this way being censorship used also for the purpose to persecute opponents of the government. The “Violated Freedom” is the new cyber threat as I wrote in an article some months ago.

What is worrying is that also in those countries where the level of monitoring / censorship is high we observe an high perception of corruption. Corruption and censorship, two sisters who walk hand in hand regardless of human rights.

Chinese government will increase regulation of domestic social networks and of other social media platforms including blogging, but it is only the beginning because it will also be implemented more restrictive measures to protect private information online and improving the country’s system assess to online security.

Obviously that a so oppressive policy is to the center of a heated debate, inevitable that groups like Anonymous hacktivist may be interested in planning their intervention because the Chinese government, this is the genesis of OpChina campaign. Anonymous hackers, a group named RevolutionSec, have attacked Chinese government websites on Wednesday 15th, posting the stolen data online.
The group has announced to have successfully breached a Chinese government trade site. Following the fashion of the moment the information was published on Pastebin and via the tweetter platform with the message “ ”Bring down the great firewall of China”.

More over 8,000 accounts have been compromised exposing the usernames and encrypted passwords.Are we assisting to a true call to arms of the several group linked to Anonymous?

According to experts, the group is determined to hack the “Great Firewall”, a term that indicates the project of Internet monitoring by the Beijing government called The Golden Shield. Thanks to this systems the chinese authorities are able to block the access to a number of websites accused of being opponents of the regime or to be outlaw.
The Chinese government on more than one occasion has been accused of having sponsored attacks made by hacking groups against foreign industries and governments with the dual intention of offending the cyber adversaries and steal sensitive information of varying utility.

While I understand the choice to attack what is the symbol par excellence of censorship, The Great Firewall, I am surprised that this happens at this historical moment. Why has not happened before? Why Anonymous has noticed the Great Firewall right now?

I illustrate some cases hoping that you can give me your point of view on the subject.

The escalation of Anonymus operations has somehow increased awareness of their skills and it has given the proof that the group wants to compare with more challenging objectives.
To this we add that the targets hit and the followed time line of the attacks has certainly provided great visibility to the group, visibility and consensus used to encourage the involvement of a critical mass to involve attacks.

Another hypothesis is that for some reason the group was directed against the cyber as part of a cyber strategy defined by Western governments. Hypothesis possible if one accepts that the structure may have been infiltrated in some way.

Third hypothesis is very plausible, Let’s think that someone is using the name Anonymous to conduct undercover operations and to be able to attack hostile governments like that of Beijing. Professing itself as members of Anonymous today means having huge acclaim and can count on a critical mass to recruit in cyber attacks. These operations may be used as diversions for further operations of western intelligence in the cyber space.

The mystery is dense but I believe that in the coming months we will have a clearer picture of the situation.

Pierluigi Paganini

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Computer spyware is newest weapon in Syrian conflict

(CNN) -- In Syria's cyberwar, the regime's supporters have deployed a new weapon against opposition activists -- computer viruses that spy on them, according to an IT specialist from a Syrian opposition group and a former international aid worker whose computer was infected.

A U.S.-based antivirus software maker, which analyzed one of the viruses at CNN's request, said that it was recently written for a specific cyberespionage campaign and that it passes information it robs from computers to a server at a government-owned telecommunications company in Syria.

Supporters of dictator Bashar al-Assad first steal the identities of opposition activists, then impersonate them in online chats, said software engineer Dlshad Othman. They gain the trust of other users, pass out Trojan horse viruses and encourage people to open them.

Once on the victim's computer, the malware sends information out to third parties.

Othman is an IT security "go-to-guy" for opposition activists. He resides outside of Syria for his own safety.

Since December, he has heard from dozens of opposition members who say their computers were infected. Two of them recently passed actual viruses to Othman and a colleague with whom he works. They checked them out.

"We have two malwares -- first one is really complex," Othman said via Skype chat. "It can hide itself more."

The U.S. analysis of one of the viruses -- the simpler one -- would appear to corroborate the time of its launch around the start of the year.

The virus has two parts, said Vikram Thakur, principal security response manager at Symantec Corporation, known to consumers for its Norton antivirus software. He said one of them points to December 6 and the other to January 16.

Thakur has dubbed the simpler virus "backdoor.breut."

It was the more complex virus that the former aid worker unwittingly downloaded during a chat. Since she travels to Syria, she has requested that CNN not name her for security reasons and instead refer to her as "Susan."

In one Syrian town, full-throated cries of defiance

To get a picture of the humanitarian needs on the ground in Syria, "Susan" contacted opposition members via the Internet. In January, she received a call via Skype from someone she believed was a regime opponent.

It was an imposter and a regime supporter, she claims.

"They called me actually and pretended that it's him -- this activist that I didn't know, because I'd been talking to him only two times and only in writing."

Days later, other opposition members told Susan and Othman that the activist she thought she had spoken with was in detention. Activists accuse government forces of coercing him to reveal his user name and identity and of then going online to impersonate him.

Othman says additional activists, who say they were detained and released, tell of being forced to turn over their passwords to Syrian authorities.

CNN cannot independently confirm the accusations, because the Syrian government strictly limits international media coverage within its borders.

Calls for Syrian government comment to a spokeswoman for al-Assad on Friday were not answered or did not go through. Friday is the weekly special day of prayer in the Muslim world.

The man chatting with Susan via Skype passed her a file. She recalled what he said to her to coax her to open it: "This makes sure that when you're talking to me, it's really me talking to you and not somebody else."

She clicked on the file. "It actually didn't do anything," she said in a baffled tone. "I didn't notice any change at all."

No graphics launched; no pop-up opened to announce to the user that the virus was being downloaded. The link appeared to be dead or defected, said Othman.

The second virus, backdoor.breut, which was e-mailed to him by an activist inside Syria for analysis, launched the same way. "Download, open, then nothing," Othman said.

It contains a fake Facebook logo and was passed off in a chat room as a Facebook security update, he said.

At CNN's request, Othman forwarded that virus to an IT security expert in California for an independent analysis.

Othman removed the more complex malware on Susan's computer but made an image of the infected hard drive beforehand. At more than 250 GB, it would have to be sent on an external hard drive by regular post -- snail mail -- for any independent scrutiny.

The U.S. expert confirmed the invisible nature of the backdoor.breut Trojan horse download.

"Nothing would actually show up," said Thakur. "The only thing that the Trojan actually does -- it copies itself into one of the temporary locations, but that would not be visible to the regular user."

The malware launches when the user reboots the computer.

The Syrian cyberactivist and the California IT security manager pointed out that the lack of fanfare during download helps to conceal the viruses from their victims.

"Most of them will say 'it's a damaged file,' and they will forget about it," Othman said.

Susan did just that.

She was not aware she had been hacked until she lost her Facebook and e-mail accounts a few days after clicking on the file.

"I didn't click on any kind of new link or something, so they must have known about the password," she said, referring to the loss of her Facebook account.

She handed over her laptop to Othman and his colleague, who told her that the Trojan horse had logged her key strokes, taken screen shots, rummaged through her folders. It hid the IP address it sent its information to, Othman said.

Othman found a screen shot the Trojan horse took of Susan's online banking home page. He told her to change all her passwords, Susan said.

"You don't want your money to be stolen by some of the Syrian security guys," she quipped.

The other virus -- backdoor.breut -- sends the information it pillages from infected computers to the IP address: 216.6.0.28 and does not hide this.

"We checked the IP address that our engineer referenced and can confirm that it belongs to the STE (Syrian Telecommunications Establishment)," a Symantec representative wrote to CNN. The STE is the government telecommunications company.

This does not necessarily mean that someone at STE is doing the hacking, Thakur stresses.

"Whether it's a home user behind that or it's actually a company or an organization, which has been allocated that IP address, we just have no insight from where we sit."

But the Syrian government has access to all activity through that server "absolutely without any doubt," Thakur said. Anyone not wanting the government to see what they are up to would not use that server.

Skilled Syrian opposition activists avoid government telecom servers when online.

The simple virus, backdoor.breut, acts like a bull in a china shop, Symantec's Thakur said.

"It did not look like it was written by any sophisticated hacker," he said after examining it. "It was just kind of put together -- slapstick functionality."

Simple malware is readily available for download on underground forums in the Internet. Hackers can repurpose it and hand it out. Othman believed the second software to be such an off-the-shelf product because of its amateurish construction, but the California expert disagrees.

"It's not something that somebody just went out there, copied code from an Internet website and just pasted it in. It was definitely coded for its current purpose."

The name "backdoor.breut" derives from the virus' behavior.

"We sort of took the word 'brute' just because of what it was actually doing and kind of changed a couple of characters to b-r-e-u-t," Thakur said.

"Brute -- meaning that it is using brute force -- it's just going in smash-and-grab -- I'm going to try to get anything that I can and get the hell out of there."

Backdoor.breut attempts to give the hacker remote control of the victim's computer, according to the analysis. It steals passwords and system information, downloads new programs, guides internal processes, logs keystrokes and takes shots with the webcam.

It also turns off antivirus notification, but that does not completely conceal it from detection. "Some of the good software can detect it in the same day," Thakur said.

The nature of its use may make backdoor.breut and other new Syrian malware hard to defend against. Antivirus makers need to know the virus to be able to assign it a signature and make the file detectible to block the download, according to Thakur.

The more widely a new virus spreads around the world, the more likely it is to land on an antivirus maker's radar. The smaller the region the virus is located in, the less likely virus vigilantes are to notice and combat it.

"Looking at this Trojan and the telemetry that we've gathered the last five or six days since we did the analysis, this is not targeting people across the complete globe. So, it could be days before some antiviruses actually create signatures for the file," Thakur said.

More complex antivirus software can detect malware that does not yet have a signature, because of how it behaves after infecting the computer, Thakur said. If the antivirus does not have this 'behavior' component, it may not defend against a new virus "for a substantial amount of time."

On a Facebook page named "Cyber Arabs," Othman warns activists of the danger of downloading the virus and reminds users to keep their antivirus software updated.

Download.com, CNET's software download website, offers antivirus software, some of which includes a "behavior" component and is free of charge.

But that is still no guarantee for not contracting a new Syrian cyberbug, "Susan" reminds.

"It was up-to-date," she said. "The problem is that they sent me a ... file, and I was totally stupid -- like, it's an EXE file -- and I opened it."

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Internet Freedom Fighters Build a Shadow Web

Governments and corporations have more control over the Internet than ever. Now digital activists want to build an alternative network that can never be blocked, filtered or shut down

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Just after midnight on January 28, 2011, the government of Egypt, rocked by three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through Facebook and other online social networks, did something unprecedented in the history of 21st-century telecommunications: it turned off the Internet. Exactly how it did this remains unclear, but the evidence suggests that five well-placed phone calls—one to each of the country’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs)—may have been all it took. At 12:12 a.m. Cairo time, network routing records show, the leading ISP, Telecom Egypt, began shutting down its customers’ connections to the rest of the Internet, and in the course of the next 13 minutes, four other providers followed suit. By 12:40 a.m. the operation was complete. An estimated 93 percent of the Egyptian Internet was now unreachable. When the sun rose the next morning, the protesters made their way to Tahrir Square in almost total digital darkness.

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The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system: every node should connect to many others. This design helped to make the system resistant to censorship or outside attack.
Yet in practice, most individual users exist at the edges of the network, connected to others only through their Internet service provider (ISP). Block this link, and Internet access disappears.
An alternative option is beginning to emerge in the form of wireless mesh networks, simple systems that connect end users to one another and automatically route around blocks and censors.
Yet any mesh network needs to hit a critical mass of users before it functions well; developers must convince potential users to trade off ease of use for added freedom and privacy.

twitter:

A3nigmus twitterde op zaterdag 18-02-2012 om 23:40:35 http://www.meldpuntoosteuropeanen.nl/ is TangoDown!!! #anonymous #pvv #wildershttp://t.co/Qjg8ecZ7 reageer retweet

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 02:28 schreef Nemephis het volgende:

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Hopelijk niet alleen een Paulus de dDos-kabouter-actie maar die hele server plunderen.

twitter:

YourAnonNews twitterde op zondag 19-02-2012 om 02:03:48 Follow the hashtag #AnonMeans on Twitter and find out what #Anonymous means to different people. It's amazing to read the responses. reageer retweet

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 09:42 schreef gogosweden het volgende:
interessant topic!

(verkapte TVP )

Anonymous Thinking Together - Awakening of Planetary Consciousness

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 02:22 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

twitter:

A3nigmus twitterde op zaterdag 18-02-2012 om 23:40:35 http://www.meldpuntoosteuropeanen.nl/ is TangoDown!!! #anonymous #pvv #wildershttp://t.co/Qjg8ecZ7 reageer retweet

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http://pastebin.com/qvB5zjvH

Dit weekeinde, heeft Anonymous een succesvolle aanval uitgevoerd op het Meldpunt Midden en Oost Europeanen. De eerste van velen.

Wij veroordelen Wilders en zijn xenofobe vriendenclubje, en we zullen er alles aan doen om vanaf nu elke vorm van vreemdelingenhaat tentoongespreid door de PVV te bestrijden.

Gelukkig staan we niet alleen, getuige de internationale ophef over deze verraderswebsite.

Een dringende oproep aan Geert Wilders:

Stop met deze haatzaaierij!

Je aanwezigheid in de Nederlandse politiek is niet langer gewenst.

Ons kleine landje is groot geworden door zijn betrekkingen met het buitenland. Al vele eeuwen zijn wij een handelaarsvolk, geroemd door onze (zaken)partners om onze vrije denken en onze open houding naar andersdenkenden.

Wat wij in eeuwenlang hard werken hebben opgebouwd, wordt nu door jouw populistisch gekrakeel in sneltreinvaart afgebroken.

Je verandert ons land in een bang, kortzichtig, Polen-verradend kippenhok met jou, als opper-kip-zonder-kop, voorop.

Wij, Anonymous, zeggen nu:

Het Is Genoeg!

Nu is het Carnaval, maar vanaf woensdag begint de Vastentijd; een tijd voor reflectie en bezinning. Tijd om orde op zaken te stellen. Tijd om te beseffen dat, als je beweert een Partij voor de Vrijheid te zijn, je ook voor Vrijheid moet staan! En niet alleen de vrijheid om je eigen haat de wereld in te kotsen.

Denk hier maar eens goed over na, als je deze dagen bij een Polonaise aansluit. Of klinkt "Polonaise" je ook al te Oost Europees in je oren?

Wij, Anonymous, waarschuwen ook Mark Rutte:

Als premier van Nederland dien je ten allen tijde in het belang van ons land en al haar inwoners te handelen.

Jij bent onze premier, Mark. Dus doe je mond open; spreek je uit tegen deze nieuwe, door Wilders veroorzaakte zweer op het aangezicht van Nederland. En laat zondebok Leers niet jouw vuile zaakjes oplossen, maar toon dat er ergens nog iets van een ruggegraat in je lijf zit.

Juist als VVD-er zou jij respect en bewondering moeten hebben voor het arbeidsethos van de honderdduizenden Oost-europeanen in ons land.

En mocht je alleen aan de centjes willen denken: deze groep mensen (MENSEN, ja!) levert een jaarlijkse bijdrage van 3 miljard euro aan onze economie. En nu er een internationale oproep is om Nederlandse goederen en bedrijven te boycotten, komt onze toch al wankele economie nog verder in gevaar.

Dus, Mark: laat zien dat je een vertegenwoordiger bent van het héle Nederlandse volk!

Wij, Anonymous, zullen de ontwikkelingen de komende tijd scherp in de gaten houden. dit Carnavalsoffensief is slechts het begin.

Zoals de Havenzangers al zongen:

"Het feest kan beginnen, want wij zijn binnen. We gaan er tegenaan.."

#VerwachtOns!

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 20:41 schreef YazooW het volgende:

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Statement van "anonymous", althans zo noemen/noemt ze/hij/zij zichzelf, is toch wel behoorlijk raar te noemen. Quotes als: Je aanwezigheid in de Nederlandse politiek is niet langer gewenst. kunnen gewoon niet. Anonymous heeft zich nooit, zover ik het weet, bezig gehouden met politiek.

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Natuurlijk zijn ze bezig met ACTA en heel de zooi, en dat is natuurlijk ook politiek beladen, maar ik heb ze nog nooit zo zien uitspreken over 1 bepaalde partij.

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Wat nog het meest rare van de gehele (anti Wilders) statement is dat het in gaat tegen waar anonymous eigenlijk voor staat, en dat zijn gewoon de basisrechten van de mens (recht van privacy, recht van leven etc etc etc). Het is mijn recht om een mening te hebben over een bepaalde politieke partij, en het is mijn recht om voor een politieke partij te kiezen. Door te stellen dat de partij van Wilders niet langer gewenst is in de Nederlandse politiek gaan ze, in mijn opinie, in tegen al de rechten waar ze vroeger voor stonden.

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Maar zoals in mijn eerste zin al te lezen viel, dit heeft niks met anonymous te maken, dit is gewoon 1 persoon die zich anonymous noemt om zo aan aandacht te komen.

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 20:58 schreef YazooW het volgende:
Ja ik snap wat je bedoelt te zeggen, het is voor mij ook lastig uit te leggen wat ik eigenlijk bedoel. Maar wat ik eigenlijk probeer te zeggen is dat de partij van Wilders, of je het er nou mee eens bent of niet, gewoon democratisch gekozen is door het volk. Ga je nu als "groepering" quotes erin gooien als: Je aanwezigheid in de Nederlandse politiek is niet langer gewenst. dan ga je in tegen alles waar anonymous voor staat, en dat is gewoon de vrijheid van de mens met alle rechten die daarbij horen, het is mijn recht om op de PVV te stemmen, wie is anonymous dan om te zeggen dat een partij als de PVV niet gewenst is de politiek? Daarmee zeggen ze toch eigenlijk dat ze scheit aan hebben aan alles en iedereen die op de PVV gestemd hebben?

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- Politieke partij zegt/doet iets
- Anonymous is het er niet mee eens en voert een aanval uit
- Brengt statement naar buiten waarin partij niet gewenst wordt genoemd.

Dit is nou gewoon het democratische systeem waarmee wij leven, soms zijn er politieke partijen die wel eens wat doen wat jij niet goedkeurt, tsja, pech gehad dan. Als je dan vervolgens zo'n partij gaat aanvallen en niet gewenst gaat noemen dan breng je het democratische systeem alleen maar in gevaar lijkt mij.

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Op zondag 19 februari 2012 21:30 schreef YazooW het volgende:
Maar ben jij dan van mening dat de PVV, net zoals de Tunesische regering ten val gebracht moet worden?

Anonymous Thinking Together - Awakening of Planetary Consciousness

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RCMP investigating threats to Vic Toews from Anonymous hacker group

OTTAWA - The RCMP is investigating "serious threats" against Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and his family, as popular blowback to the government's Internet surveillance bill continues to escalate.

Toews' spokesman Mike Patton said that the RCMP has been asked to investigate the threats. He described the threats as "serious."

"Threatening communications have been directed at the minister," he said. "These incidents have been reported to the proper authorities."

In a letter distributed to his Manitoba constituents this weekend, Toews says he has been the target of numerous threats since the firestorm over Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act erupted this week.

The bill would give police much broader powers to snoop on the online communications of Canadians. It has been met with fierce opposition from Internet privacy and civil rights groups, who say the bill would build a state surveillance system into Canada's Internet.

In his letter, Toews said he has already been attacked.

"These attacks, which have included criminal acts and threats of criminal acts against me and my family, have been referred to the police for investigation," Toews wrote.

Toews angered many observers when he said opponents of Bill C-30 were friends of child pornographers. Opposition to the bill became the most Tweeted about subject in Canada Thursday, and among some of the top trending subjects around the world.

While some Twitter users suggested the public "Tweet him to death," the social media response to Bill C-30 has been mostly peaceful, and does not include direct threats of violent action toward Toews or his family.

The hacker group Anonymous, however, has posted a video to YouTube in which threats are levelled against Toews. The video talks about an "Operation White North," which appears to be the name for Anonymous' campaign against Bill C-30.

"All this legislation does is give your corrupted government more power to control its citizens," the video says through a robotic voice. "Anonymous will not stand for this."

"We demand that you scrap the bill in its entirety and step down as safety minister," the video says. "We know all about you, Minister Toews."

"We told you to expect us," it continues. "We are legion, we do not forgive, we do not forget, we are here."

Read more: http://www.canada.com/new(...)y.html#ixzz1msCntQBp

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V for Vendetta: Comic vs. Film
^{US, March 18, 2006}

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The Wachowskis took the premise and general theme and adapted the story (and added some digging dialogue) to fit the modern world and point a finger at the Bush administration. This is not an admonition of war, but a clear condemnation of the Patriot Act. Liberals will cheer (and call this movie patriotic) and Bill O'Reilly will implode.

Both Moore and the Wachowskis avoid laying the blame on corrupt and over-reaching governments. For both the movie and the book, the guilt is laid on the public, for "knowing something is wrong with this country" and sitting on the couch doing nothing. The film alters the plot and involves the public, inspiring a nation towards possible revolution. Moore's V never goes so far. It, instead, focuses on V's attempts to inspire one person to carry on his legacy, with the implication that if he can inspire one, his ideals can inspire a nation.

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Op maandag 20 februari 2012 00:26 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
"Threats"

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VIDEO: Anonymous threatens Toews over Bill C-30

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“We know all about you, Mr. Toews, and during Operation White North we will release what we have unless you scrap this bill.”

Another individual that appears to be unaffiliated with Anonymous already published alleged details of the minister’s divorce on a Twitter account (@Vikileaks30).

Toews called for an investigation into the matter after the Ottawa Citizen reported that the posts were coming from an IP address linked to the House of Commons.

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Opinion: How Dangerous Does the Government Want the Internet to Be?

With the rising tide of internet surveillance and tough copyright laws, Drew Wilson comments on an infrequently discussed topic that really could be the elephant in the room in all of this. He then concludes that threatening the internet is a bad idea.

In the last several months, we’ve seen seemingly countless stories about broad internet surveillance and overreaching copyright laws. We’ve seen the relatively under-reported H.R. 1981 which is the latest US surveillance legislation. We’ve seen the spectacular rise and fall of SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act which was also a piece of US legislation aimed at bringing forth an unprecedented internet censorship regime under the guise of protecting the artists and protecting copyright. I, for one, am all too familiar with what it’s like, as an artist, to be censored by copyright. These actions are by far not an isolated case with what is going on in the world today.

In Canada, there is copyright reform bill known as Bill C-11 which contains the flawed digital locks provision. There’s even surveillance legislation known as Bill C-30 which has been heavily protested in Canada. In Europe, there’s also the disintegrating Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which is being dropped by a number of countries already. In addition, there’s new surveillance legislation which would log all communication and store it all for a year. There’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which has been known as the trade agreement that contains all the provisions that even the record labels failed to keep in ACTA (including the push for a global three strikes law). Really, the list keeps going on and on and on with examples of government and corporate attempts to reign in on personal freedoms that exist on the internet to this day.

But, with all of these attempts to control how people use the internet today, there’s been a well-documented push back to retain these freedoms over the years. There’s been countless protests in Canada over the copyright laws, there’s been the massive protests in Europe over ACTA (as we just mentioned), there’s been the rise of the global political party known as the Pirate Party, and there’s been numerous DDOS attacks and more made by the nebulous group known as Anonymous (just how many tango-downs have there been so far in the last few years anyway?). When one looks at all of these threats to the internet and free speech, it can be easy to understand why there has been such a push back in the first place. Is all of this the result of a completely ignorant corporate world? Possibly. Is the government completely ignorant about all of this? Depends on what part of the government you talk about.

I would argue that even the government, specifically, the NSA (National Security Agency), saw a glimmer of the elephant in the room. In 2010, there was a very heated debate over France’s HADOPI law which is essentially the infamous French Three Strikes Law. The idea is that you get accused of copyright infringement three times, you get disconnected from the internet. The law was morphed and changed numerous times, but that was the core original idea of it. As the debate raged, it turns out, the NSA was very nervous about it. A report surfaced that the NSA “yelled” at the French government saying that such a law could encourage more people to use better security that would, in turn, make their jobs of maintaining national security more difficult. Now, say what you will about congress critters going back in forth saying that they are not a “nerd”, but they need to pass SOPA, but with respect to the NSA on the HADOPI law, the US government really hit the nail on the head in all of this.

The only other glimmer I can recall seeing in regards to the elephant on the room was also in 2010 when the British record labels insisted on ramming through the Digital Economy Bill. In that case, British spies expressed concerns that their jobs would be made more difficult because of a potential encryption arms race thanks to such a piece of legislation. If you think that these are just empty words, take a look at one of the more recent TOR project blog posts where there’s been discussion of the development of Obfsproxy which is said to defeat Deep-Packet-Inspection employed by ISPs just to name one example.

So, what does all of this mean? I’ll just go back to what I’ve been referring to as the elephant in the room. Before any government wants to employ surveillance of any kind or copyright reforms that would stifle free speech, the government really needs to ask itself, “How dangerous do we want the internet to be?” If the government, regardless of country, wants the internet to be the most dangerous threat to its existence ever, then it should push through legislation that would heavily crack down on free speech and privacy as seen in the previous examples I mentioned above. Go ahead and put 8 year olds in prison for life for downloading the latest bad album through an unauthorized channel. Threaten everyone with unimaginable fines for downloading a bad quality cam film. Make sure every man, woman or child is being monitored for every single key stroke they make, every offhanded comment they make in their own personal podcast or every drunken rant they put on a YouTube video. Believe me, at this stage, the powers that be have made the internet angry and it’s already causing major headaches for them. Just imagine what will happen when the internet generally feels threatened. People merely got a very small taste with the blackout protests that protested SOPA. We’re talking encrypted communications that would take spooks centuries to decipher, alternate networks not controlled by traditional ISPs, hidden services that would likely never be traced to its original servers (let alone having the ability to track down those who started up such services in the first place), untraceable e-mail messages and things we today didn’t even think of.

Bottom line, you mess with the internet, the internet will mess back. Go ahead and brag you got the best in the business to take down the leaders and facilitators of defiance today, but you have an untold number of coders willing to piece together solutions that will constantly frustrate the best and brightest who are paid to stop any form of dissent against efforts to control the internet. This is the kind of war that is entirely possible if the governments around the world insist on trying to curtail any freedoms that even smells like a threat to deprecated business models or the political status quo.

If, however, the governments around the world want to simply stop all that is bad, rather than trample on personal freedoms in the process, they need to put the breaks on everything that even kind of looks like copyright and internet surveillance. Take a breather if need be. They are, after all, probably trying to deal with a crowd who is already angry at them anyway. If consultations have already occurred recently (say, within the last two years), look back on the expert opinions made by those who really know the internet well. If not, call for a consultation and involve everyone. I mean everyone. Not just the big lobbyists who have a stake in destroying the internet – everyone including people who want to preserve the internet and the general public. After a period of time and study, return with legislation that is surgical and precise. Clearly state that, for example, this surveillance legislation will only go after those who are dealing with, say, child pornography and that this surveillance is conducted under the explicit approval of the courts. If you have no intentional relationship with said content, your activities will go unmonitored and should anything about you be monitored accidentally, then it’ll be both in-admissible in court and destroyed quickly.

Can such an idea be improved on? Probably. I only say this as an example in part because going out in public and borderline saying that you have no idea what is in the very legislation you are pushing through or simply hanging up the phone in an interview when asked general questions about copyright legislation you are pushing for after giving a few confused sounding questions or even mumbling about not being a nerd during congress markups about SOPA makes it sound like legal precision and careful thought was never even considered. Heck, at the risk of stating the painfully obvious, it’s just downright embarrassing.

Bottom line, if a government does eventually get a grasp on this internet techno mumbo jumbo, that government, in this day and age, has a very simple choice: either it can have an internet it can live with or an internet that will be a continual threat. If it chooses to make the internet dangerous, attack it with sledge-hammer legislation we’ve already mentioned. If it chooses to not upset the internet, work with it. Crowd-sourcing can be workable. I think that reasonable and incremental solutions can be found in all of this.

When a given government is at the drawing board to draft such legislation, the ball is really in their court. In this day and age, threatening the internet is a bad idea.