Archive for the ‘Anonymous’ Category
The First Violent Crisis of Globalization has Ended – the Next One is Emerging
The first crisis of globalization
Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has referred to the financial crisis of 2008 as the ‘first crisis of globalization’. This is a great descriptive applied to the wrong problem. Al-Qaeda was the first crisis of modern globalization. Financial crashes have previously infected inter-connected markets, but never before has a non-state group been able to set the global security agenda. Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden were able to do this by applying a mixture of medieval religious ideology and guerilla warfare to the dominant tools of globalization. Al-Qaeda seemingly understood the strengths, weakness and opportunities of globalization and exploited them for increasingly empty violent aims. The use of adaptive financial tools in the form of hawala banking, co-opting the apparatus of failed states and most spectacularly both weaponizing and de-stabilizing one of the primary drivers of globalization, in the form of civil aviation, allowed al-Qaeda to strike internationally. Al-Qaeda also virtualized itself and quickly moved into the new media space opened up by the explosion of the Internet but this also exposed its weakness as the Arab Spring has bloomed. Information wants to be free and al-Qaeda is poisoned by freedom. Al-Qaeda has been described as innovative and it certainly was the first movement out of the gate to exploit the conditions the world moved toward following the end of the Cold War. However, this particular crisis should now be regarded as closed. The United States and its western allies have formed effective tools to respond to threats such as al-Qaeda. Building new military systems and emphasizing technology, information use, surveillance systems and Special Forces have proven to be an effective doctrinal response — and are also appropriately what finally put an end to al-Qaeda’s leader. Read the rest of this entry »
The Lulz takes on North Korea
As a one-time student of the cold war, pondering the potential causes of a global nuclear war was something of a Sunday afternoon past-time. The historic classic is of course the Cuban missile crisis but equally important were the series of near misses based on the faulty reading of radar early-warning systems when flocks of birds flew over the Artic Circle, or overly aggressive NATO military exercises feeding Soviet anxieties. With the recent North Korean provocations, sadly this subject is back in vogue. In some ways, although there are no clear diplomatic solutions to the North Korean danger, it does play to traditional intellectual strengths the US has in the field of geo-political nuclear strategy – a relief from the messy world of non-state actors, insurgency and cyber-militias. However, there may be a new element in all of this that could act as the proverbial flock of geese: cyber-pranksters.
North Korea is famously a closed society, which hasn’t registered or used its Internet domain designation (.kp). However, it does have a ‘government’ website operated by theKorean Friendship Association hosted in Spain. Over the past month the loose affiliation of hackers, pranksters and griefers operating under the ‘Anonymous‘ theme have reportedly organized two Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)attacks against this site – knocking it offline for 90mins at a time. Would this be seen as western provocation by North Korea? Who knows, but it does raise the question of how uncontrolled or accidental cyber-warfare could have unintended consequences, a new factor in an old dynamic. Unlike nuclear technology the ability to conduct cyber-warfare is not the sole preserve of states. Individuals, or loosely affiliated groups of individuals operating on a trans-national basis can replicate some if not all of a nations capability. The image-boards, which are the home point for these ‘Anonymous’ cyber attacks operate collaborative wiki’s to organize and co-ordinate their attacks — this enables them to harness the power of the crowd. The targets vary substantially from YouTube to Club Penguin, therefore interest in overt political statements are more the exception than the norm. Clearly there is much more to say on the ‘Anonymous’ and ‘Chan’ phenomena but for now it is interesting to note this new factor in an all too familiar stand-off.
Communism or Lulz?
PDF’s of Insurgency Wiki relating to North Korea and 888Chan message board on the same subject.
