Are We Engaged in CyberWar?
Go around the Interwebs and Boing Boing has a CyberWar guide:
“Keep you bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don’t retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.”
You can look at Survival and Evasion Guide (declassified information) in PDF is available here.
We were imaging a future cyber war with hackers behind both lines, crisscrossing server lines and attempting to read command and control. I don’t think anyone has imagined people much less ordinary, non-hacking people volunteering to be soldiers in a cyberwar,.
This is where: Anonymous Iran is:
How-to surf securely and avoid censorship: http://torir.org
This forum aims to be a secure and reliable way of communication for Iranians and friends. Use it to discuss what is happening in Iran. Post in the forum either anonymously as a guest, as a registered user, or login with your facebook-account. We are not a government agency, nor are we Iranian. We are simply the internet and we believe in free speech. Read here for more: http://iran.whyweprotest.net/keeping-your-anonymity-iran/29-people-thinking-iranian-government-site.html
This forum is backed by thepiratebay.org, Anonymous, and numerous other internet-friendly forces.
In a real war there are strategic and tactical objectives to deem a war, a success. If this is war, then new elections for the Iranian people would be enough. The way things are going, we may be seeing the first revolution that the Internet has purposely been used and the Iranian people get a fair, impartial and just Ayatollah.
If this is cyber war, will we see this like again or will governments be smarter next time around?
And man, Twitter has been awesome. It has been in China during the quake. It has been there for #bookblockade, #conass. It has been there for Obama. Now this is how Twitters wage a #hashtag war.
This is our world now… the world of twitter, facebook and youtube, powered by the electron and the switch, the beauty of the bandwidth. We make use of these services because they are dirt-cheap and simple. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias. You wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good. One thing for sure, you may stop an individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.
Oh, one more thing, Dear Bill Stone: don’t sell Twitter.
UPDATED: I forgot to mention that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Tehran is using Deep Packet Inspection, to monitor their Internet.
UPDATE 2: I got the whole cyber war thing via a RT from @ellisera on twitter.
UPDATE 3: i added it, after my post.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Cyber War is a reality. Gloria Arroyo and her cahoots hired CyberHackers to give you difficulties in posting your Web Blog
Post. Cyber Hackers are used to confuse you when you post your
Web Blog. They also send viruses, tracking cookies, trojan horses,etc… to your computer. They can make your computer crash.
If you dont have the neccessary protections. And, if you are not
aware of this Cyber Warfare tactics.
Gloria Arroyo and her cahoots also sent Infiltrators on all Cyber
Medias. They embeded themselves in the Cyber Media. To confuse the
Public. To give disinformations and misinformations. to promote their
political agendas. And to destroy opponents thru character assasinations.
You must be a good Cyber Warrior to understand this situation. It is
a new political warfare born out of the Information Technology.
It’s funny but this close encounters of the cyber kind via SMS and Twitter reminds of Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence:
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-S90Uch2as&feature=related
…And the Words of the Prophets are written on the
subway walls…no one dares…
Or…are they written in the Blogospheres? The new Prophets,
the FV Bloggers?
hope it’s not like the american idol voting where one supporter can text his/her choice as many times as he/she wants. one fan admitted she voted 50,000 times for her “idol”. to paraphrase tom cruise’s character in “valkrie”, a bad idea doesn’t necessarily become good just because it’s popular.
How apt.
I just can’t believe the raw information we are getting, links to blogs, first hand accounts, videos via cellphones… Even China had no way in controlling what information came out during that devastating earthquake they experienced months back, and Iran is realizing the same thing.
I think what individuals fail to see, is that social media, new media, citizen media, these are not the end-all be-all of the sparking of revolutions — they are tools of democracy, transparency, and information.
To make them out to be anything else would be foolish.
But to realize the power of this new democracy, to tie the hands of dictators, fascists, and oppressive regimes, is what we should all open our eyes to.
It is all about information, relaying that information for the world to see.
In any other time in our history, we would not be able to realize the full extent of the events on the ground, especially when governments clamp down on freedom of the press and freedom of information — the opposite is true, and Iran is such a perfect case of this.
Even when journalists, students, protesters, editors, and politicians are being jailed, it has not hindered the flow of information in getting out. Thus, a cyber war, the war to shape the perception of reality as tweeted and reported by those on the ground, I think we may also be witness to this scenario being played out.
agreed with everything you said, nick. but we should not lose sight of the fact that cyber technology can also be a tool for instant disinformation, hoaxes, put ons, demagoguery, set-ups, fakery and fraudulent simulations or fabrications. an analytical mind, capable of discerning and separating the chaff from the grain, the garbage from the useful, is necessary to make cyber information a formidable weapon for justice and righteousness.
so very true Ben.. Cocoy says in his article that such was the case, and individuals are being urged to also verify the tweets, and updates online.
Spot on here. GIGO is operative – garbage in, garbage out.
Yes Nick, This cyber war can cut both ways absent independent, multiple source confirmation of whatever information comes through the tweets, specially from twits masquerading as holders of legitimate information.
All revolutions need some form of spreading information. The French and American ones had town criers and gazettes. The 1896 Philippine one had the same plus two incendiary novels. The one that booted the Marcoses used at first, political jokes and rumors (Marcos was threatened enough. Remember when Marcos made rumor mongering an offence?), when photocopying became affordable, we had xerox journalism which is the precursor of viral spreading of information.
The revolution that kicked out Erap to the opposite side of the Pasig used text messaging. I am not surprised that all sorts of viral media, from blogs, tweets, youtube etc are being used to subvert the powers that be in Iran. This is cyber war and those being attacked have no vaccine against it. These information viruses are like HIV-AIDS. The lymphocytes that the powers that be have are destroyed and the contagion spreads.
am not surprised that all sorts of viral media, from blogs, tweets, youtube etc are being used to dumb down the Filipino electorate.
Just a quick reminder about the prelude to HR 1109 – Hayden Kho and Katrina Halili on new media, swallowed, chewed, regurgitated by the Pinoy blogosphere – :lol:
The medium is a double edged sword.
pfft bong, hayden kho’s and katrina halili’s sex vid? is it worst than say, True Blood on hbo? it’s nothing you know?
[...]Marocharim, in his posts The Slacker Effect and Mona Lisa Overdrive, questions the triumphalist tendencies of social media over the realm of the real. In a nutshell, he does not think that ‘cyberactivism’ is a substitute for agency in the real world. I will be the first to agree with him, but I do not think that agency in either world need be mutually exclusive.[...]