I would expect two kinds of people to cause trouble for alt.whistleblowers: amateurs and professionals. Amateur troublemakers may cause the most volume of trouble, and the largest signal-to-noise problem, but the more serious concern is what happens if there's enough signal in the noise to be a threat to professionals, whether governments, corporations, or criminals. If I were a professional who wanted to stop a group like this, and options like court orders, violence, or confiscation weren't appropriate, I'd consider a few approaches like the following: - Flooding - it's really not hard, even with automatic protections - if you can emulate, or abuse, all the neighboring anon-remailers, you may even force disconnects from them. - Crying wolf, and other disinformation - if there are enough bogus posts, people will stop reading the newsgroup, and the talk.bizzare crowd wil take over because they're the only ones who can handle the noise .. - Posting libel, slander, child pornography, calls for violence, bomb threats followed by real bombings, blackmail requests, photographs of local politicians in real or fake compromising situations, and enough other legally dangerous material that the moderator and/or people who carry the newsgroup wouldn't be able to take the heat. It's really not all that hard, if somebody's serious about it. Crypto-anarchy is a good thing, but governments and other bad guys can hide behind it just as effectively as anarchists can. .... and the last count I've heard on the radio was that 19 separate groups have called in to claim responsibility for the World Trade Center bombing; some even called 911, though presumably they used pay phones ... Bill Stewart, somewhere out in Cyberspace
If I were a professional who wanted to stop a group like this, and options like court orders, violence, or confiscation weren't appropriate, I'd consider a few approaches like the following:
- Flooding - it's really not hard, even with automatic protections -
True. But at least the source of the trouble would be hard to hide.
- Crying wolf, and other disinformation
Yes. This might be the hardest one, and the one I have been worrying about.
- Posting libel, slander, child pornography, calls for violence, bomb threats
We will have to accept the fact that we are sitting ducks. It all depends on how strong support we have.
It's really not all that hard, if somebody's serious about it. Crypto-anarchy is a good thing, but governments and other bad guys can hide behind it just as effectively as anarchists can.
True. And that's why we have to abide to the old banner "united we stand, divided we fall". We need to support each other, and have organisations such as EFF supporting our cause as well. In many ways our case (with whistleblowers) is very similar to organisations such as Amnesty International. Single groups and individuals are easy to silence, but a big enough, distributed enough and visible enough organization with good communications channels is much harder to shoot down. Hmm... Maybe we ought to get in touch with people like Amnesty and offer our services to them as well? Anyway, let me give you a hypotetical case. Let's say anon.penet.fi starts running alt.whistleblower, and some suitable US organisation decides to shut it down. They can do it by using international political pressure - something that would definitely be effective if it was something that was done silently by agreement between the Finnish and the US government agencies involved. But it would be impossible if the thing was exposed to international media. Similarily for cases of putting pressure to telephone/network companies, or trying to kill the server with stuff breaking local laws or something. Julf
participants (2)
-
Johan Helsingius -
wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com