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Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

It isn't, there's no point in doing that, not to mention how illegal that would be. The US govt doesn't need any more scandals of this nature (wiretapping is enough I think).

Also, whenever a government really wants to do something, they'll use any excuse that's available. For example; PATRIOT ACT, DMCA, Iraq Wars, etc. etc. For cyber-security, if none of this Anon or LulzSec stuff happened, it would be Russian or Chinese hackers that are infiltrating and by god we must protect Americans from those evil foreign hackers. Or they would rely on the terrorist excuse: the terrorists are losing in real life so they need to re-build support and attract younger people so why not hack some sites and gain new supporters that way? Beheadings and suicide bombings really fuck up the recruitment rate for terrorist organizations.

See how easy it is to come up with an excuse that the internet needs to be locked down?

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"It isn't, there's no point in doing that, not to mention how illegal that would be. The US govt doesn't need any more scandals of this nature (wiretapping is enough I think)."

Wiretapping scandal became public circa late 2005 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...

Random collection of additional federal political 'scandals' since 2005:

1) This goes from 2001 - 2008 so skip to 2006 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scand...

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scand...

Additional 'scandals' with solid link to US Government:

1) http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/gps/

2) http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110218/02143213163/more-h...

3) http://www.thenation.com/article/161057/wikileaks-haiti-let-...

4) http://www.ban.org/ban_news/2010/101022_caught_exporting.htm...

5) http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1026810/us-governme...

6) http://www.elizabethwatson.org/featured/wikileaks-reveals-a-...

Just some random examples I pulled in 5 minutes. I don't believe the argument "...not to mention illegal that would be." or "The US govt doesn't need any more scandals..." has any bearing whatsoever on their decision making process at the level of authority needed to authorize something as a false flag operation for various reasons.

You're right of course, but my main point is they don't need to do much in order to come up with an excuse to do something. I'm sure there are easier ways to get consent for locking down the internet than to create a false flag operation; just use something that already exists (copyright infringement, terrorism, porn, war on drugs, etc.)

They've tried all those things, and it's not moving along as fast as they'd like.

Since when has the government decided what to do based on need?

> not to mention how illegal that would be

Come on. Since when did that stop a government from doing something?

here's a thought: perhaps the fact that LulzSec is perpetrating this stuff rather than scarier alternatives like China or Russia will point out the absurdity of the situation rather than forcing heavy-handed legislation.

headlines like 'witty 19 year old college student breaks into CIA' is a lot less scary to the general public than 'chinese hackers exploit CIA website'.

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