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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Maybe people didn't like your use of the term "terrorism" for national security threats?

A common understanding is that terrorism is intended to frighten people or make them feel unsafe, while various official definitions of terrorism include the idea that it's intended to coercively achieve some particular political goal.

If attackers just intend to get money, they're probably well-described as extortionists (or in some cases, as you said, akin to pirates). If they just intend to damage a particular society without demanding anything from it or getting it to change its behavior, they might be saboteurs.

Attacks with these motives or that pretend to have these motives could still be considered national security threats (and taken very seriously), but maybe shouldn't be described specifically as terrorism.

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On the high seas of the Internet there is a thin line between pirates and state actors. There could even be "privateer" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer) attackers who work for a nation and for profit at the same time.

From the victim's perspective it matters less who is attacking you or why they are attacking you and much more what the results of the attack are, how you can mitigate and recover from the damage, and what needs to be done to prevent future attacks.

For the case of DarkSide and Colonial Pipeline, the attackers did not claim to have a political motive, but the resulting fuel shortages and panic buying might as well have been a form of terrorism.

Just causing terror doesn't make it terrorism. Causing terror as a means to further some political (or religious) goal would make it terrorism.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. That's literally the Oxford dictionary definition.

https://www.google.com/search?q=define+terrorism

FTFY: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define+terrorism+oxford

With that definition this is explicitly not terrorism, because it was for money not for political or religious reasons?

Yes. Its an important distinction because they are fundamentally different motives. If the motive is money, various strategies can drive up the cost until the behavior is no longer profitable and the bad actors stop. Religion and ideology are completely different beasts and most strategies that work on profiteers only entrench the others.

Just like how robbing a bank may cause terror to the people in the bank or the neighborhood but it was done for profit not politics.

Wealth is the primary means of expanding ones political influence. It’s a primitive tool like a talking stick to coerce all the other monkeys to do shit for you. Trying to gain money is absolutely political

I think you just defined yelling at someone over money to be terrorism.

You can make a reasonable argument that "nothing is apolitical" but but that's not the definition of political being used when people say what terrorism is.

You are correct; that is the consequence of taking the definition to its ultimate conclusion. Either our definition of terrorism is incomplete or our idea of money is.

You could call it unintentional terrorism I suppose. The timing with what's going on in Ukraine along with Putin's repeated threats makes it look political even if it wasn't. It's entirely possible they just happened to be a group of Russians who picked the wrong target at the wrong time. It's also entirely possible they were doing the Kremlin's work and just not announcing it publicly because that's not really how Putin plays the game.

I have to believe that played a role in the response they received as well.

Money is pure politics. The attacker becoming rich can legally be considered a political goal as the nature of money is political. If they endanger an entity or someone else’s resources to gain that political goal they are guilty of terrorism as they used fear to enact political change.

The mental gymnastics here are incredible.

I'm a frequent "everything is political" commenter myself, but since when is naked self interest through theft a political action?

These are the same types of people that claim "there are no good books" with a smirk on while suggesting books to read on white privilege after just telling you it's not his job to educate you on such matters even though he's literally being paid to sit there and educate you.

The insanity of it all is incomprehensible.

> Money is pure politics.

That only true when right is up and down is left.

Only if you're a Marxist and limit your world view to what you can see through that lens.

No, money is inherently political as a matter of observable fact. It is created by governments and its value is driven by taxation.

> It is created by governments and its value is driven by taxation.

How does taxation drive value? Which taxation? There are governments that don't charge income taxes, there are governments that don't charge property taxes, there are governments that don't charge sales taxes.

This idea comes from Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Most mainstream economists do not agree with it. But the MMT claim is that at base, people only need USD because it’s how taxes are denominated. The notion is that without the driving force of compelled taxation, no one would use USD or other sovereign currencies. MMT also claims, through similar logic, that a monetary sovereign can print an extreme amount of currency without causing inflation. Which MMT’ers use to justify massive government spending programs.

The idea isn't exclusive to MMT. Critics from across the spectrum recognize that taxation supports the USD. Buttresses such as legal tender laws, the petrodollar system and other barriers serve to support the USD.

Tally sticks are an early example of monetized debt as a taxation medium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

The words “extreme” and “massive” are subjective. MMT claims that the best way for a monetarily sovereign government to maintain aggregate spending at full employment levels is to hire anyone willing to work but who cannot find work in either the private sector or the permanent government sector.

Also note that the work of legal historians such as Christine Desan who are not affiliated with MMT economists concurs with this analysis.

Also note that most mainstream economists do actually agree with the tenets of MMT when individually stated but base their disagreement on a deliberate misreading/misstatement of MMT which they then proceed to criticise.

That taxation is sufficient to drive demand for a currency is not contentious, that it is necessary is unconfirmed.

Simply: money is what you use to pay your taxes.

There are many different types of taxation, but there is no currency that doesn’t derive its value from taxation. People call things like Bitcoin currency but until a sovereign runs their financial system of federal settlement payments on the Bitcoin blockchain it is only a commodity like gold or silver or corn.

I think Evil Corp falls under the definition of privateer:

>As noted in previous stories here, during times of conflict with Russia’s neighbors, Slavik was known to retool his crime machines to search for classified information on victim systems in regions of the world that were of strategic interest to the Russian government – particularly in Turkey and Ukraine.

>“Cybercriminals are recruited to Russia’s national cause through a mix of coercion, payments and appeals to patriotic sentiment,” reads a 2017 story from The Register on security firm Cybereason’s analysis of the Russian cybercrime scene. “Russia’s use of private contractors also has other benefits in helping to decrease overall operational costs, mitigating the risk of detection and gaining technical expertise that they cannot recruit directly into the government.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/inside-evil-corp-a-100m-...

>On the high seas of the Internet there is a thin line between pirates and state actors

maybe in as far as their capabilities go, but the important characteristic of a state actor is that retaliating against them is construed as a retaliation against the state that backs them. Darkside is very different to a state actor, as demonstrated here - retaliation has no significant geopolitical implications, so it can be swift and harsh.

Honestly I’d say any highly asymmetric violent or offensive action would lend many folks to trot out the T word.

They may have just intended to get money, but they definitely spread terror. I had to have like an hour long phone call with my mother on Monday explaining why she had to go to 4 gas stations before she could get any gas, and that no the pipeline was not going to explode.

From the satire site that shall not be named: "People in the Middle East head to bomb shelters after learning that Americans are experiencing gasoline shortages."

Could it perhaps have been the use of the word 'terrorism' in news reports that prompted her fear of the pipeline exploding?

Would the same apply for someone who physically took something essential to national security hostage and then demanded money?

Would that change if they, for example, demanded the release of prisoners of a specific political persuasion?

Terrorism has to have some ideological agenda, which is what makes it dangerous - I doubt you'll see suicide bombers for hire.

Not more than once, anyway.

Only the ones who are bad at it.

Money can certainly help influence someone to wear a bomb vest, they don't need to actually believe in the cause. There could be someone out there that specializes in finding people in vulnerable financial situations that wouldn't mind blowing themselves up if it meant that their family was well taken care of.

> Would that change if they, for example, demanded the release of prisoners of a specific political persuasion?

How would that not be classified as a political motive?

"Would that change if they, for example, demanded the release of prisoners of a specific political persuasion?"

Yes.

"Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentional violence to achieve political aims." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism

Can drug cartels engage in terrorism? That seems like a useful edge case. They are not ideological but maybe you could say they have political goals.

For sure, it’s about the goals of the attack. If to cause terror, terrorism. If to gain money or advantage, crime.

Control the language control everything. Good to hear from this clear mind.

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