CyberWars

Photo courtesy of altemark
Reading the latest news about Project Chanology, defined as a digital assault on the Church of Scientology, I amazed how people are using the Internet to spread their message. Here you have a site YouTube that lets people upload videos of anything they want. What a great creative outlet, I even admit I am one of the YouTube junkies. I mean, just the other day USA Today had a story about YouTube hooking up with World economic forum:

“What is different is the venue. The forum is not easy to attend and not cheap, either, but by linking up with YouTube, the forum is providing numerous clips of its sessions and speeches for all to see, hear and comment on.”

Through YouTube people have access to information they did not before, of course that can be said about the Internet in general. Now you find out YouTube is being used to instigate a cyberwar. It started when a video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology was uploaded to YouTube. Parodies of the video were soon made (My Favorite). Anyway, the Church of Scientology steps in and claims copyright infringements and pressures YouTube to remove the video.

Once the video is removed, a group named “Anonymous” posts a video declaring cyberwar against the Church of Scientology because “campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent and your litigious nature. All of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed.".

Anonymous has been successful in knocking out the Scientology website, they accomplished this using a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). Linuxhaxor.net has a good article on how the attack is being performed and how to participate.

This is just the latest in a list of cyber attacks that will be written about in the history books. Cyberspace has no boundaries, allowing people to accomplish anything they want. Who makes the judgment call to say that the Church of Scientology is bad and should not be allowed to pull videos that shows them in a bad light, well in cyberspace anybody can and actually have the power to attack. Of course if you are claiming free speech then that means everybody has free speech even if you don’t like them.

Establishments need to recognize, once it’s out there it’s there and you just have to wait for it to pass (Gawker.com still has the video posted). Establishments should realize that tactics that work in the real world do not necessary translate to the cyber world.

Note: CyberWar, Frontline has done an excellent program on the history of cyberwar and what it means to America. I highly suggest watching it.