Hacktivism: The 21st Century Solution to Communications Disruption

My father went to Vietnam. As an ROTC member in college, he had no choice—serve or go to prison. Not being a fan of prison, he went. My father was also an electrical engineer and lifelong ham radio hobbyist. As a result, when he arrived in the hot, sweaty jungles of Vietnam he wasn’t sent to the front line, instead he was assigned to building the communications towers that would keep the US army and its allies connected throughout the war.

Every morning my father would get into a Jeep with several other soldiers and cross the field from their base to their towers. Every morning the Vietnamese soldiers would fire at him, non-stop. He would then spend the rest of the morning building the tower, fixing it and bringing it online, all under enemy fire. Once it was all up and running, he’d return in the Jeep, under fire, while other men protected the tower.

And each night, the Vietnamese would destroy the communications tower—which meant my father had to do it all over again the next day, and most days, of his time there.

The Army needed him, and at the end of his tour of duty, offered him enough money to buy a house at that time in CASH, if he’d stay another tour. He recently told me he laughed at them and said, “No way in hell. Get me out of here.”

His laughter wasn’t because he thought the situation was humorous. He knew statistically that the fact he’d survived being shot at every day while building those towers was an anomaly, and the chances were slim he’d continue to survive another year of duty.

Forty years later, we’re still fighting wars with countries all around the world. We may not be calling them the Syrian War, or Iraq War or Afghanistan War anymore. Instead it’s the “War Against Terror”, a never ending war reaching around the globe. Terrorist attacks can happen anywhere and while our institutions of war still desire to put boots on the ground like we did in Vietnam, the reality is that there are new ways to bring conflict to an end.

Today, in the 21^st century, an act of war can be committed anywhere, not just on enemy soil. And similarly, armies of terror can communicate, not through large radio towers that need to be guarded, but anywhere in the world, via the internet. Recruitment and planning of many terrorist acts are done online. Thus to take out their communications no longer requires men shooting at technicians as they work. Instead, it involves men and women, sitting behind a computer, hacking into cyberspace and disrupting communications, all while drinking coffee in their pajamas.

I think my Dad would agree that this is a huge improvement to what he, and many others, have suffered.

And who are the soldiers disrupting the communication in today’s War on Terror? I imagine the Armed Forces has a band of cyber-soldiers. The Feds do as well. But it turns out the hacktivist group, Anonymous, is the one waging the most interesting and perhaps effective, counter-terrorism attack of its kind. And it appears they’re having a lot more fun than my father did.

Seven days ago, they rickrolled the Islamic State. According to SF Gate, “The "hacktivist" group has been flooding all pro-Isis hashtags with countless videos of the red-headed bass-baritone, according to a recent tweet from the #OpParis account.

Anyone familiar with 1980s music videos knows how unsettling watching Astley sing and dance can be. In fact, as Dazed notes, tricking people to watch his "Never Gonna Give You Up" has been a staple of viruses, protests and other online pranks since 2007.”

Just in time for Thanksgiving the hacktivist group followed Islamic State recruitment to the dark web and gave them some good sexual advice. The Jerusalem Post reports: “…programmers from the hacking team GhostSec employed the weapon of mockery and overran a website linked to ISIS supporters with ads for the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra and the anti-depressant Prozac.”

Humor goes a long way. We don’t need more boots on the ground, we need more hackers to dedicate hours of their lives taking down the main methods of recruitment and information sharing. From Twitter to the dark web, coders are the new face of communications disruption.

As I already mentioned, I’m sure that the Pentagon and the Fed are already employing people in this arena. Yet many coders I talk to would rather do this work as vigilantes and renegades, than sign up to work for the government. In the case of the military, many don’t want the duty part. They aren’t soldiers in the old fashioned sense and pledging one’s life to the Armed Forces doesn’t look too attractive to most computer geniuses. If you’re the type of person who likes to work from home in your pajamas downing Red Bulls and playing video games in between hacks, a role in the Pentagon isn’t quite for you.

Computer oriented folks could take normal employment with the FBI. The recent cracking of the Silk Road by FederalAgent Chris Tarbell is a great inspirational story that should make any hacktivist consider a job with the government. I shared Tarbell’s story with my eldest son, in an attempt to lure him to consider a job in computer forensics. We opened up the Book of Majors by the Collegeboard and checked out the career description. Overall, the coursework was amazing. Not only do you study all things code and computers, but also criminal law, justice, investigation and forensic accounting and science. Unfortunately, according to this source, while job prospects are good—more than fifty percent of FBI cases will require a computer forensic expert—be aware that if you pursue this career, child pornography cases can be as much as SEVENTY percent of the work load for state level offices.

Seventy percent? No wonder our greatest minds aren’t interested in going the traditional route and working for the FBI or the police. Most of their cyber experts’ minds and souls are being destroyed chasing down the worst perverts in our society. While I applaud these folks and I’m so sorry that humans are so sick and twisted, it’s not surprising that many talented programmers would turn to hacking or hacktivism, rather than be cyber warriors in the employed sense.

Still, hacktivists give me hope. In the realm of anti-terror, they’re bringing their expertise and their humor to the situation. And several groups have also began fighting the cyberwar against child pornography and the slave trade. The internet may be amazing, but it also enables horrible people to do horrible things.

The good news is that while our technology makes planning terrorist attacks and the selling of human sex easier for the darker elements of humanity, the same technology makes it possible for many of our brightest minds to join together and fight, without ever having to leave the kitchen.

The Web of Life

    There is an old saying, so old in fact, that it's attributed to the ancient Egyptian mystics. It goes something like this, "As it is above, so it is below." Essentially, this statement points to a universal idiom that most modern people aren't  comfortable with: All things are linked together. What happens to me, happens to you. What happens to our families, is happening at a larger scale in our community. When one suffers, we all suffer, for all systems are woven together.

    In an HuffPost titled, "Your Brain is the Universe" by Deepak Chopra and several other modern day thinkers, put it this way,

"As is the smallest, so is the greatest has come full circle from ancient wisdom to modern science once we accept that every system is driven by feedback loops, homeostasis, and continuing self-organization. At this point, it is up to dissenters to prove that we aren't inhabiting a living universe, tied into it by the most fundamental characteristics of biological systems."

    It all comes down to one word: Interdependence. We're all linked, all one, bound by the web of life. This bothers the modern world, because everything from our healthcare to our economic system is based on the idea that we're separate, on our own, and in it for our own selfish needs. We've literally setup a thought system that traps us in our own cages, oblivious to the connections we share with the world, with each other and even with our own technological creations. We feel trapped, but essentially, the door to the prison of separation is wide open. We can walk out of the illusion anytime. The choice is up to us.

    One of my favorite modern thinkers, Charles Eisenstien, put it this way in his book Sacred Economics, "Having made nature into an adversary, or at best a pile of resources, it is no surprise that we manifest the same relationship of our bodies. The defining diseases of our time are the autoimmune diseases, the somatization of our self-other confusion. Just as the village, the forest, and the planet are inseparable parts of ourselves that we mistake as other, so our immune systems reject our own body tissues. What we do to the other, we do to ourselves, inescapably."

    Imagine it, as we cut out parts of nature in the name of progress, we get sicker as a people. When we destroy the land around us, we feel it in our very bodies, for these bodies are made from the same essence, the same set of elements. We are all one, tied together by the material building blocks of life.

    Much research has been dedicated to understanding this web of life. Our science, once set on compartmentalizing and individually naming everything in sight, has begun to see a bigger picture within our biology. Rather than running like a machine, nature operates more like a spider's web-when one strand is broken, the web starts to unravel. Our ecosystems are beginning to break down because we forgot this ancient truth that life is truly a web of interconnecting systems, each one dependent upon the other for survival.

    This web of life analogy isn't lost on me as I prepare to launch eHuman Dawn as an eBook, sending it out on the world wide web to readers that live all over the globe. Research for this novel, and the next two in the trilogy, has led me down many interdependent pathways. The physics of consciousness has revealed how interdependent molecules, waves and particles actually are. Researchers are beginning to postulate that our consciousness is woven throughout our bodies, having no central space to reside in, but rather existing in every cell, in ever piece of DNA, simultaneously talking to one another, sending data in an instant, to keep all parts of the body in synch. And when things aren't in synch, when some part of the glorious communication system shuts down, the illness is pretty obvious. We stop functioning in health.

    Does this elegant system of data transfer within the human body sound familiar? Does it mimic the world around us? Not just the natural world around us, but even our most powerful invention yet, the Internet, works this way. Data moves throughout the fiber optic network at the speed of light and travels across the globe to deliver information to millions simultaneously. There is no central place where the communication resides, rather devices by the millions embed themselves into the World Wide Web to share and receive data, perhaps not instantly, but quickly. There is nothing now we cannot know, for all data can be found, if only you ask the right question. It's no coincidence that we've given it the name World Wide Web. It's our creation, is it not? Therefore it lives and operates within our geometry.

    There's no denying it…the geometry of life, and data, is a web.

    When we use the World Wide Web and interact within its social structures, we might have the tendency to think we're alone, separated from the others by the iPhone in our hands, but in reality, we're not. What you use the Internet for affects me. What I do affects you. That we have some of the most beautiful ideas "floating" around out there alongside some of the most perverted, angry, and destructive impulses is natural. It's human nature to forget that we're all connected, and that everything we do is eventually revealed.

     But life systems seem to find a way of reminding us of our error.

     All forms of life tend towards abundance, and will create systems within its structure that expose secrets and lies. We call these the canaries in the coal mine. Nature gives warnings and hints when we've reached a place in the web of life that's broken and let's us know that the very fabric of that system is beginning to unravel. Though technically the Internet is not "life," it does have a life of its own and within the network, a system of checks and balances and a way to sound the alarm has come about.

Wikileaks is a perfect example of how all things on the internet can and will be exposed. Consider it a neural network not unlike our own, with its unique systems for monitoring health and wellness. We can call it evil and say our technology is separating our society and ruining us. Or we can see it as an organic system, created in the image and likeness of us. Our technology is as good, and as bad, as we are.

    Ecologists tell us that the plight of the polar bear just might be our plight. Using the axiom of "as above so below" the plight of the internet whistle blowers should also be of interest to us. Those who hack into the internet and make sure the web is functional, whole and clean, and report back to us when it's not, are essential to the health of the network. Their plight is our plight as well. They're the canaries in our technological coal mine. If we exterminate them, if we decide to make them criminals, then the consequences will be felt by all of us. They exist to guard the web of data that has become the fabric of modern society, just like organizations such as The Sierra Club exist to protect the natural web of life that provides us with our resources. The two are linked by the human mind.

    Nature created us in her image and likeness, and we created the internet in our image and likeness. Therefore it behooves humanity to protect them both, our data and our natural resources, so that we can live full, interdependent, human lives. After all, "as is above, so is below."