Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow recently tweeted that the world is seeing its first ever infowar, and that “WikiLeaks is the battleground”.
The pressure being brought to bear on WikiLeaks, through fair means and foul by powerful governments around the world speaks volumes that cannot be ignored about the state of modern warfare.
We won’t be dropping our guns and decommissioning warplanes tomorrow - but we, as a race, have emerged blinking owlishly into a new era of combat. One which, for the most part, most Australians haven’t a hope in hell of understanding past this simple premise: People with computers are fighting in cyberspace.
It may sound a bit far-fetched, but this is a very real fight, with real-world consequences. As John Perry Barlow points out, it’s a war - and it’s the first, honest-to-God, out-in-the-open information war the world has ever seen. The stuff of science fiction made real. We have entered a new phase of combat, where nation states are engaging with individuals as equals.
On the one side of the fight are those that want information to be free - regardless of the impact it may (but probably won’t) have on other individuals. On the other, there are those that want it kept secret. It’s not a new paradigm by any stretch of the imagination - but the dynamic of the battle between these two groups, and the internal dynamics of the two sides themselves, is something that the world has never had to come to grips with before.
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For the luddites, think of it this way. The governments and corporations are what they are - strong, heavily armed and well-defended. Anonymous are like the rabble of Palestinian kids we see throwing rocks at soldiers, occasionally getting accurate and giving a man in a uniform a bit of a boo-boo. DDoS attacks are, at their most effective, a nuisance. Cyber sabre rattling, and nothing more.
The point is that they are fighting, and with every weapon at their admittedly quite meagre disposal.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/42010.html