Anonymous hacks Australian Government in response to Internet censorship | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous hacks Australian Government in response to Internet censorship

smh.com.au

58 pointsgo37pi46 comments

I thinks its only a matter of time before Anonymous gets labelled a terrorist organisation to increase the counter measures / invasive laws that can be used against them.

Disrupting Goverment sites and services would be considered as an attack as per the Australian Terrorism definition:

(e) seriously interferes with, seriously disrupts, or destroys, an electronic system including, but not limited to

(i) an information system; or

(ii) a telecommunications system; or

(iii) a financial system; or

(iv) a system used for the delivery of essential government services; or

(v) a system used for, or by, an essential public utility; or

(vi) a system used for, or by, a transport system.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/slaa200245...

No doubt, but the government has thus far proven itself inept with respect to technology let alone counter measures and risk mitigation.

A political assault is far more likely: "Anonymous are terrorists, therefore all who protest against government censorship are terrorists or supporters of terrorism."

Given we've already been declared pedophiles or supporters of pedophilia this is a bow barely drawn.

It wouldn't make any difference. Anonymous isn't a set group of hackers, it's quite literally anyone and everyone that wants to get involved at any moment for any cause whether for fun, such as sabotaging Time's most influential people list, to objecting en-mass to outlandish proposals such as these censorship laws.

Labelling Anonymous as terrorists is essentially labelling the general public as terrorists.

I feel it would. Imagine a script kiddie in Australia decides to join the DDOS attack on the government site.

He is easily traced by IP, and the Australian Federal Police come to visit.

His new 'rights', now that he is part of a terror group include:

Being held for up to nine days in detention without being formally charged.

Warrantless searches

The seizure of any objects associated with the terrorist act (this is quite a wide open definition, basically anything you own is up for grabs)

Also the AFP have some quite invasive computer techniques that are used to go wandering through your system before they knock on the door.

> He is easily traced by IP

I have a feeling that a group of people calling themselves 'anonymous' have probably heard of torproject.org

Wouldn't using an encrypted onion routed network put a bit of a pinch on the amount of DDOS traffic one could push? Not to mention that there is probably an upper bound to the amount of traffic any given exit-node is willing to allow for. How many exit nodes restrict outbound connections to common ports?

I'm wasn't suggesting that they'd use Tor itself for the DDoS, only that through it they can hide their traces.

AFAIK anons don't have access to botnets and such, they flood from their own computers. Their sheer number makes it 'distributed'.

Like when they modified the Times most influential person ranking, it was just a lot of people running an auto-voter on their machine.

Well, in this case anon is the botnet.

It's different, and that's the point I wanted to make. A botnet owner could use tor to hide his own computer's address, and let the bots flood freely. Even if a few were traced, he doesn't care. Tor gives him privacy (for his master computer) without compromising his attack potential.

A 4chan poster can't do the same thing. He's attacking from his own computer. Either he attacks through tor (slow) or he doesn't (unsafe). Hence why I thought the post above does not make sense for anon's case: he can't hide his traces without channelling the attack through Tor itself.

Quite the opposite. The journalist idea of "Anonymous" is very different from the insider idea of Anonymous. In the simplest terms, Anonymous is anyone, really. It's not limited to 4chan users (there are other chans, and the users sometimes overlap). 4chan itself is just a convenient place to recruit people to perform an attack and later use as a scapegoat.
As an example, the anti-Scientology protests were reported under the catch-all banner of Anonymous, but the people organizing it and hitting the streets were also from rival forums such as Something Awful. Funny enough, the protest movement is completely different from (and at odds with) the original catalyst: other Anons DDoSing Scientology websites for using the DMCA to take down a video on YouTube. As someone mentioned earlier in the comments, one core motivation is trolling, or "lulz," so under this so-large-its-useless umbrella term "Anonymous," there are groups sabotaging one another just because it's funny.

The core people organizing* these DDoS attacks come and go, but they are a dedicated few who have the time and skills to design such programs to distribute to the masses. As in the Time magazine hack, it was respectably sophisticated (this article does it justice: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-ha...). And yes, this core group does have botnets, as well as excellent social engineering skills to motivate *channers to download and execute their software.

I love watching people and organizations of all varieties underestimate just how tenaciously annoying they can be.

Anon's preferred tool are the array of open HTTP proxies available. They provide relatively weak anonymity, but in scale it works well enough. LEAs have to subpoena the proxy owner and their ISP for logs, usually the owner has very poor logging anyway, often they're based in a foreign jurisdiction... There just aren't the resources available to go after them in any real numbers. They can (and do) go after a couple of people to make an example of them, but they always seem to pick on the low-hanging fruit who didn't go through a proxy.

Your list makes me feel a little sad. In Japan you can be searched or held for up to one month without being charged - no need for even a terrorism excuse. Heck, according to the laws I could be banned from the country for forgetting my ID card at home. I hope Australia and the US don't go further down that slope.

Useless. They wouldn't find anything on the kid's computer, in all likelihood he clicked a link on an anonymously created website that ran a script from his browser. Once he's released all he need do is post his story on a blog and he'll be international news within a month.

They'll find something/anything they can on the kid's computer to charge him with a crime. Maybe a thumbnail of a kiddie porn image in his web cache because he happened to click the wrong link or view the wrong page?

Can you name the US Anonymous member that was imprisoned for a year and fined $37,500 for DDoS ing the Scientology website ?

I can. Can anyone name all the others that weren't?

So I guess Anonymous is more like a "brand name" for unconnected groups that perform terrorist actions and have a loosely shared ideology, rather than the title of any distinct, traditional faction having a centralised control and command. Yet it does seem that governments and certain sections of the media like to perpetuate the idea that there is a single shadowy entity called "Anonymous" responsible for all these actions. Anyone know the arabic word for anonymous?

No offense, but you dilute the term 'terrorism' when you use it so wantonly. The point of attacks like this is to be generally annoying, disruptive, and maybe embarrassing (to government officials in this case).

TERRORism is about using terror to affect an outcome. Suicide-bombing is a terror attack. Kidnapping people and beheading them is a terror attack. Running around with a bunch of AK-47s, holding small villages hostage (raping,murdering,etc) is terrorism. Crap like this barely registers.

It would be like punching mist. Hell, if someone gets in jail for being part of anonymous (or, more accurately, for participating in a DDoS advocated by people under the banner of anonymous, or even more likely for having their wifi used by someone to participate in such a DDoS), it will just make all the others more angry. Fighting them would be like fighting tor, or bittorrent; highly distributed, highly decentralized, with no real command structure, and no allegiance to any single website (if one goes down or is monitored, they can always move elsewhere). It's not even an organization, in the old sense; you might as well say that slashdot or HN are organizations[1]. On the upside? Most of them, most of the time, don't care - except when someone makes them angry, they seem fairly passive, more interested in their own amusement than anything else (yes, I occasionally lurk on 4chan) - and even then, there are probably only a few thousand who actually participate in things like this [not that I have actual numbers to support this, but still - someone who's more interested could start lurking on IRC channels mentioned in image macros (such as the one in the article) and keep track of how many unique individuals show up].

Or you could always kill them off by destroying anonymity in the internet - force everyone to use their real names everywhere, to provide concrete linkages to real personalities. That's the only way to stop people from taking advantage of anonymity.

I'm sorry that this turned into a rant; it was originally going to be a lot shorter. I just kept on thinking of things to add, you see ... and I haven't ranted for a while.

[1] Lots of like-minded people, who read content on sites, post content, and occasionally take action/respond to that content, when it means something to them, or is so easy that there's no reason not to.

I'm not wishing to argue that labeling Anonymous as a terrorist orgainsation would be a good thing (it would be monumentally retarded, which is why I also think there's a good chance it will happen at some point, I have little faith in government common sense these days) but this problem of how to handle these distributed non-orgnaisations that we see today is quite relevant to the way governments were/are trying to handle terrorism. I remember watching a documentary - I think it was called The Power of Nightmares - that stated amongst other things that after 9/11 the US Government basically began using laws originally designed to combat organised crime (Mafia et al) and applying them to these new, relatively flat, loosely organised and decentralised groups with very little success, primarily because there was no command structure similar what they had been used to dealing with.

Governments are still wrestling with what to do about this issue I think. It seems that the best solution they have so far come up with is reducing civil liberty and surveilling everyone. Not ideal from my POV.

Not to mention that as the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Kudos for watching The Power of Nightmares, but did you miss the part where they pointed out [b]that these organizations are largely fictional and used as a tool by governments to appear more necessary than they are[/b]? The government isn't working on how to deal with fictional "flat, loosely organized and decentralized groups", it's working on how to make it look like we need government protection from the ultimate boogie man.

No, I watched it all, just a long time ago and had forgotten most of it, to be honest. But I had not forgotten the overall thrust of the programme.

To try and clarify my view a bit, IMO the terrorist "groups" we hear about today are more like Anonymous than they are like the fictional villainous organisations one might see in a James Bond movie, i.e. they're not even really organisations at all, they're just individuals or tiny groups, barely associated with each other at best, who happen to have similar positions on certain issues. But I wanted to make this point without sounding like I thought Anonymous should be branded as terrorists, because I don't.

I get that after 9/11, the entire western world's governments went well overboard, amazingly allowing the military industrial complex to write their own cheques, using scare tactics to allow this to continue. I knew this full well long before I saw The Power of Nightmares. Before I say what else I have to say, I again don't wish my position to be misconstrued, I'm not advocating for the usual government policies, I'm aware of how insignificant the threat of terrorism is when compared to other threats of the day that face our society and I usually find myself pretty firmly on the social-libertarian side of just about any debate. As you say: "these organizations are largely fictional" (emphasis added) and I totally agree. I cannot reconcile any view that we do not need some degree of vigilance when it comes to (the no doubt few and far between) individuals and small groups that are out there and do wish to perpetrate terrorist acts.

So following on from this, yes, terrorism is an overinflated menace and it continues to be overinflated for numerous reasons, most of which revolve around certain areas of government and private industry partners who have vested interests in keeping the public scared in order to maintain power and profit. But some part of the overreaction to terrorism does come from a place of honestly thinking they're doing the right thing, misguided though they may be. Some very small part of the usual government reaction to terrorism is - in my mind - sanctioned and required because terrorism while a largely overinflated boogie man, does none the less still exist. I don't wish to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Yes it was, by Adam Curtis. Watch his other stuff too. The Trap is particularly good.

"It would be like punching mist."

Or, as Anonymous likes to put it -

"Trolling /b/ is like pissing into an ocean of piss"

/b/tards only have two real motivations, lulz and rage. The only intelligent response is to ignore them and hope they'll go away. It's like a bully who is stronger than you, anything you do in response will only enrage them or gratify them. The basic skillset anon has is the ability to hide behind proxies and withstand disruptions to their preferred comms channels. They're not particularly good at either, but their sheer numbers more than make up for it. Anon is just good enough at hiding to make it very laborious to hunt them down. When LEA resources are already completely inadequate to deal with terrorism and paedophilia, anon just isn't on the hit list. As regards deterrent, there are a number of /b/tards currently being prosecuted for their involvement in raids, but nobody really gives a shit. Most /b/tards just view them as dumbfucks who shouldn't have been so stupid as to get caught.

The most amusing element of this story is how seriously it's being taken. That's because no one in the media discussing it knows or understands who these "/b/tards" are.

To see someone call them the "internet superheroes" is hilarious. If that is at all an accurate description, this is probably what their costume looks like:

http://bayimg.com/NAKiIaaCf

>It would be like punching mist.

Ask Dmitriy Guzner his opinion on that, though you'll have to wait until he's released from prison. You might help him with his $37,500 fine too.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/scientology_ddos_gui... http://www.scribd.com/doc/23263853/Dmitriy-Guzner-Sentencing...

Yeah. One person.

> if someone gets in jail for being part of anonymous ....

one is all it takes apparently

To me anon is like the guys from fight club. If someone starts fighting them seriously, it's only a matter of time before they get cornered in a bathroom and given the whole "we are everyone..don't fuck with us" speech

They may have the whole 'we are everyone' thing going on, but there is no mastermind or organization. There are countless ideas such as this floated, but the only ones that actually happen are the ones that get a critical mass of people interested enough in them to participate and recruit others to participate.

Besides, the whole "we are everyone, don't fuck with us" thing was unrealistic. Do you really think that a government official wouldn't just notify the authorities in such a case?

I disagree. The list you mention is part of the definition of "terrorist act". The definition of "terrorist act" starts by saying:

terrorist act" means an action or threat of action where: (a) the action falls within subsection (2) and does not fall within subsection (2A)...

The list of things you cite is from subsection (2). However, subsection (2A) reads: (2A) Action falls within this subsection if it: (a) is advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action; and (b) is not intended: (i) to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person; or (ii) to cause a person's death; or (iii) to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action; or (iv) to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.

It's pretty clear to me that this sort of action falls within both subsection (2) (as you pointed out) and subsection (2A). The latter means it wouldn't be within the definition of "terrorist act".

As an expat Aussie, the direction the government has taken has saddened, but not shocked me. This is a country famous for having what the Register used to call 'The world's biggest Luddite' Richard Alston appointed as Minister of the Digital Economy. There has been a change of government since those times, but not much seems to have changed.

While the idea of censoring certain content types like child porn may be seen as a good things, the issue is that the Net could become a tool of the government. The laws could extend to discrimination of minority groups - and Australia would become like China.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/feb2008/gb2008...

This article points out that questions remain: there is a lack of detail on what will constitute illegal content, how decisions will be made, and how the filtering technology itself will work. It also said Australia is not the only Western democratic country to look at web filtering - Scandinavia and UK have web filtering. The Oz govt just failed to stem the tide of outrage and bad press.

I'm also against getting rid of anonymity on the net, ie forcing everyone to use their full name, for the simple reason that some rogue governments in some countries are persecuting groups and the internet can be a powerful tool for them. Imagine if Mandela and the ANC had the net in the 50s.

It's a hugely sticky issue though.

This is so awesome. It's like I'm living in near future cyberpunk novel. With vigilante hacker groups fighting the evil and oppressive corpora^H^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment.

I was just thinking about Google v. China and PayPal v. India.

This kind of stuff is not necessarily new: think of the banana republics, the royal charter companies, Hearst and the Spanish-American War, and so on. Heck, the Boston Tea Party is comparable: a trollish, grandstanding intervention in government business.

What seems new is just how open it is: that Google, for example, appeals directly to the public when it argues with China. A hundred years ago, similar things might have happened, but I think only a few thousand people would have had such a clear view as everyone who reads a general-interest news site does now. It’s a lot harder to idealize power plays with our post-Watergate (if that’s the line) popular love of reliable muckraking.

William Gibson's prescience continues to frighten me. Unless the causality goes the other way, then it frightens me even more.

"Chaos, Mr. Who," Lupus Yonderboy said. "That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick."

Or, in the parlance of our times, they do it for the lulz.

http://www.aph.gov.au/

The Parliament of Australia site is down.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore

whilst i agree with their protesting of our governments unnecessary proposals on censoring australia, their methods are not helping.

a ddos attack on the government only gives the government more ammunition to paint the average protester as a criminal or someone who is trying to harm the government. a peaceful protest is far more effective.

The notion that peaceful protest is always better than violent protest is simply historically bankrupt. There's a time and a place for both. To be honest, what they're doing, at least by revolutionary terms, might as well be considered "peaceful protest."

the issue i have is that the government will tell the uniformed voting public that 'we', (those who protest these moves), are trying to harm the government through these hacking attempts.

to mrs and mrs family voter, this makes those who protest look bad and can sway their opinions on the censorship.

I understand, but I question the effectiveness of the prior peaceful protests in fighting the legislation in the first place. They obviously didn't go over too well.

It's possible that Anonymous' muckery could stir up discussion about this topic that otherwise would not have existed as the average Australian lapsed back into complacency. It's also possible their attacks will end up being counter-productive. Either way, I have to admire their reckless vigilantism against censorship, and can only imagine the LuLz being generated in the formal setting of Australia's bureaucracy.

If they DDOS'd the server by massive amounts of complaints I'd consider it different. However, a straight out attack isn't going to do anything.

Is there anyone on the net who thinks this filter is a good idea? Pretty much the only people who do are the ones who don't even use the Web, and just keep shouting that it's inherently evil. Oh, and the ones with the government contract to implement the filter.

When no one will listen to the people who will actually be affected by this, what other options are left?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/01/2433845.htm?si...

This is probably the only article I've read that is pro-filter.

"Oh, and the ones with the government contract to implement the filter."

The government body ACMA will maintain a list of blacklisted websites (which already occurs, although pointless at this stage). I understand it will be the responsibility of the individual ISPs to choose how to block those websites.

> a peaceful protest is far more effective

Voting for these people would seem a good protest -- http://www.pirateparty.org.au/

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