Anonymous attacks (Catch All)

[Cannoneer No. 4]

At what point are kinetics on the table?

No sooner than Inaugaration Day, 2013, and probably not then. Do you want to give them martyrs?

. . . the US Gov't has a duty to vigorously find and defeat this threat.

But does .gov have the talents, resources and permission to successfully engage and defeat Anonymous? NSA probably does, but what should they quit doing to reprioritize Anonymous to the head of line?

This is a direct threat to the sovereignty of the US. These hackers constitute a clear and present danger and need to be dealt with rather rapidly and rather aggressively. They are terrorists. No different then Al Qaeda.

U. S. sovereignty isn't directly threatened. The PERSEC of a senior civil servant and of a serving Marine are directly threatened. Harrassment is not terrorism. Anonymous is very different from Al Qaeda. Anonymous is not a monolithic, organized organization. Some are bad, some are good, some bad Anons are good some days, mosts Anons are low skilled cannon fodder but some have real skills. Not prudent to ignore them, but not a good idea to make more out of them than they really are.

[Brett Patron]

No sooner than Inaugaration Day, 2013, and probably not then. Do you want to give them martyrs?

Yes. Number one qualification for martyrdom is death. That's a good start.

U. S. sovereignty isn't directly threatened. The PERSEC of a senior civil servant and of a serving Marine are directly threatened. Harrassment is not terrorism. Anonymous is very different from Al Qaeda. Anonymous is not a monolithic, organized organization. Some are bad, some are good, some bad Anons are good some days, mosts Anons are low skilled cannon fodder but some have real skills. Not prudent to ignore them, but not a good idea to make more out of them than they really are.

Cannot agree with you here at all. These people are threatened directly because of the work they do at the behest of the Government. The threats and actions against them are in direct response to the exercise of their job. This is classic terroristic action. Cow someone into not doing what they should be doing by direct or indirect threat. Terrorists, however they manifest their evil, should be dealt with harshly and without mercy.

"Anonymous" has to show they are a force for good. I put them in the same category as "moderate Islam". We've heard of it, and people claim they are, but they never seem to have much to say against the bad actors.

If Cyberspace is truly to be treated as a discreet warfighting function, we cannot pussy-foot around with these caveats and differences.

So, Smersh Spionem (Smersh hacker-em?) to folks like this.

[selil]

currently there is no ladder of force that can be applied to cyber space. as a war fighting and law enforcement function you need to identify the threat (specifically) and use only the force necessary to subdue the suspect or adversary (or risk perfidy and prosecutorial issues). as such jumping straight to kinetics (of any type) likely sounds good to pundits but fails the test for actual governance and law enforcement. since there is no ladder of force an incremental policy starting with the least and working up towards a substantial exercise of prejudicial and nation-state power is a more likely course of action. of course there are a lot assumptions as to the group anonymous and their goals and motivations. there is also an under-lying assumption that they are not a state sponsored group. i'm not sure why if you add cyber state-sponsored gets tossed under the bus so quickly.

[Cannoneer No. 4]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41972190...ence-security/

“It’s a guerrilla cyberwar — that’s what I call it,” said Barrett Brown, 29, who calls himself a senior strategist and “propagandist” for Anonymous. He added: “It’s sort of an unconventional, asymmetrical act of warfare that we’ve involved in. And we didn’t necessarily start it. I mean, this fire has been burning.”

“Our people break laws, just like all people break laws,” he added. “When we break laws, we do it in the service of civil disobedience. We do so ethically. We do it against targets that have asked for it.”

Asked about the group’s capabilities, he said, “Well, they keep increasing, but I can tell you that our capabilities are such that, we can, for instance, go into the servers of a federal contracting company … take those servers down, delete backups, take all internal emails, take documents, shut down the websites of the owners of those companies, take everything from those websites, ruin the lives of people who have done it wrong … harass them, make sure they’ll never work again in this particular industry.

“We can expose people. We can go to the media with things, we can give them scoops. We can give them information about companies and their wrongdoing. We can organize protests —anywhere across the globe. We can get the attention of the national conversation if we need to.”

Brown is employing PSYOP and Morale Operations while claiming to be a propagandist and strategist of a group of Irregular Computer Network Attackers, seemingly confident that lawfare will protect him from any .gov attempts to prosecute him.