By Danny Schechter
Last Monday a new sign was draped in New York's Times Square. Where the smile of a young Finnish maiden advertising Nokia cell phones once flapped, there were now just two words on black: BUY.COM.
The next day, three miles to the south on Wall Street, Buy.com was, itself, being bought as its IPO brought in yet more millions for yet another big time e-commerce portal on a Web that is rapidly turning into a shopping mall. Remarkably enough, it turned out that Buy.com has been doing quite a bit of buying itself; shelling out over $80 million in the last year alone just to bring in customers, often at $10 a pop.
Later that day, with the champagne still corked, Buy.com was making news for another reason: the site had an unwelcome visitor who wasn't there for the discount coupon. The shopping portal experienced a hit of 800 megabytes of data per second, more than 24 times the normal flow. From l:50 to 5 p.m., Buy.com was temporarily out of business along with other top e-commerce portals. The euphemistic description of what happened: "a denial of service problem."
We are now witnessing the first battle of the first Internet war of the new century. The New York Post referred to the hack attacks as the "computer geeks' war on the world's biggest web sites." The newspaper called the unknown perpetrators "e-thugs," "cyber brats" and "hi-tech hooligans." For the sites affected, it was no joke. AntiOnline, a business publication monitoring all this, reported that "the attacks of the week of Feb. 6, 2000 cost the victims some $1.2 billion."
The FBI was soon on the case, and the rush to judgment and arrests was on. By week's end a computer at the University of California in Santa Barbara — the southern California town where a Bank of America branch was burned to the ground in '60s anti-war protests — was identified as being a cog in the plot, although it was not clear if the university's machine was simply used like an electronic chess piece. Now, CNN reports, investigators have moved across the Atlantic to Germany where new suspects are suspected. The probe has gone global! The trail is still hot. By Tuesday there were reports that the G-Men were ready to question three suspects.
As this click and mouse game continues, media reports are avoiding several crucial dimensions of this "crime" and its possible consequences. By implying that the attacks are the work of vandals or hooligans, media reports tacitly dismiss the possibility that these actions have any intended purpose. The unsupported assumption is that they are cyber joyrides, inspired by the thrill of power, rather than driven by fiscal, political or even malicious intent. London's Guardian newspaper suggested that the attacks were the work of "script kiddies" — teenagers using downloaded programs to attack computers in ways that they don't understand and can't control. For them it is Abbie Hoffman's "revolution for the hell of it" gone digi-wild.
But, so far, the media and the cyber cops have admittedly few leads on the crimes, so what makes them so sure that it's just high-tech hijinks? What about motive? That's the first thing detectives look for in trying to catch bad guys. Who would want to take on the e-commerce world, and why? Few reporters asked or sought to answer that question, although the assumption seems to be that the motivation is (vaguely) political. Top U.S.-cop Attorney General Janet Reno said of the attacks, "They appear to be intended to disrupt legitimate electronic commerce." So why aren't the reporters asking the question, Who would want to disrupt this commerce? Or perhaps, Who might disagree with the Attorney General that this commerce is indeed "legitimate"?
In one Internet posting on the Progressive Sociologists Network, there was this speculation: "If one is a revolutionary, this information overload is a good way to attack capitalism in general and/or an exploding branch of it. One could not persuade thousands of revolutionaries to sit-in at Macy's, Meijer's or Harrods, but one could program thousands of innocent computers to do so."
But is it a conscious political act? 2600 News, "The Hacker Quarterly," well respected in that community, denies its readers are involved: "So far, the corporate media has [sic] done a very bad job covering this story, blaming hackers and in the next sentence admitting they have no idea who's behind it. Since the ability to run a program (which is all this is) does not require any hacking skills, claiming that hackers are behind it indicates some sort of knowledge of the motives and people involved. This could be the work of someone who lost their life savings to electronic commerce. Or maybe it's the work of communists. It could even be corporate America itself! After all, who would be better served by a further denigration of the hacker image with more restrictions on individual liberties?" I am amused that even hackers worry about their image.
Conspiracy buffs and some privacy advocates go even further. Wired.com reported that privacy advocate Jim Warren is offering the theory that the U.S. government staged the attacks to shore up their proposals for expanding government power to monitor electronic transmissions. "What better way to 'prove' the need for massively expanded government surveillance and create a frenzy of support for it?" says Warren. "It's a disturbing coincidence that immediately after the Clinton administration declares war on cyber terrorism ... suddenly we have a continuous cascade of denial-of-service attacks on the highest-of-the high on the Internet." Who can say if these events were connected?
Actions produce reactions, and in some cases they can be worse than the crime that prompted it. It is true that national security bureaucracies need — and sometimes exaggerate or invent — threats to justify the expansion of their own power. Already the major electronic commerce businesses are lobbying the government to "do something" — anything — which, in turn, may lead to the passage of draconian laws that, in the guise of responding to this "crisis," could create a dangerous but well-funded bureaucracy of even more sophisticated and aggressive computer cops. It sounds like the Central Intelligence Agency may be spawning another CIA — the Computer Intelligence Agency, if it hasn't already done so. The White House is proposing the formation of a new cyber security center.
And that is likely to have political impacts. It is already around the world. The KGB is back in action in Russia with a new Internet surveillance program. (See "New KGB Takes Internet By SORM" in Mother Jones for a detailed story.) In China, sites are being systematically censored. MediaChannel.org appears to be banned there already. This week the Armenian Foreign Ministry accused Azerbaijani computer hackers of violating human rights — the right of access to information — for their part in a successful effort to block Internet sites that serve as disseminators of Armenian news and information.... etc., etc. You can see a pattern emerging, fed by paranoia, greed and self-interest.
Don't say it can't or won't happen here.
As market values drive the Internet boom, we no longer hear about the information superhighway. All the talk is about IPOs and online marketing and retailing. Private groups are busy mining data. Increasingly sophisticated "Web auditing tools" are generating tons of information about computer users. Meanwhile, a newspaper called Computer User is drooling over the coming of the "e-commerce cash cow." It reports that, according to Forrester Research, $20 billion worth of shopping took place on the Web last year. And that is with only 1 percent of retail sales online. By 2004, shopping online is expected to climb to 7 percent of all retail sales or $184 billion. That's a lot of money. And a lot of people who want to keep the Internet free for their Free Market.
As dot.coms dominate the net, dot.com thinking dominates the media coverage. The values and social impacts projected by all this are rarely discussed, much less questioned. One doesn't have to support sabotage of specific sites — and I don't — to recognize that the potential of the Web as an informational and educational environment is being sabotaged every day by those who only care about their spreadsheets. That's hacking, too.
Whether vandals, hackers, or anti-e-commerce activists are found to be responsible for the recent spate of attacks, a larger Net war may be on the horizon. England's Guardian reports on a new Pentagon-commissioned study predicting more online conflict. "The Rand Institute — a leading U.S. government-funded think tank with close links to the White House — has argued that the information revolution is shifting power away from nation states towards new non-governmental alliances and networks of civil organizations...."
"'Netwar' refers to information-related conflict at a grand level between nation or societies," says John Arquilla, one of the Rand report's authors. "It means trying to disrupt or damage what a target population knows, or thinks it knows, about itself and the world around it. A social netwar may focus on changing public or elite opinion, or both... It may involve diplomacy, propaganda and psychological campaigns, battles for public opinion and for media access and coverage.'"
Arquilla's theory suggests governments will be paying close attention to the dot.orgs of the Web, which are the non-profit, non-governmental sites. But while the U.S. Pentagon may secretly fear the dot.orgs, they are almost invisible on the U.S. media radar screen. There is little evidence that the dot.com world, and the fawning press, care one wit about dot.org sites like ours and/or the democratic potential of the Internet, much less fear them or plan to set up a counter-attack for control of the public consciousness. Already there is e-mail traffic about the possible emergence of an "Internet II", an "Internet For The Inner-Circle Elites": colleges, transnational corporations, global financiers, high-high-tech (aerospace & weapons industry), and government or quasi-government types. I don't know how real this is, but in a digitally divided world, the gaps on the Web mirror and reinforce deeper gaps in society.
Lets hope that the all the journalists who are busy hyping the Internet gold rush in their ad-flush trade magazines will take a deeper and more reflective look at these trends and start reporting on those of us struggling to use the Internet to deepen democratic discourse.
Blowing up or shutting down commercial sites will not help this cause. Strengthening non-profit sites might.
- Danny Schechter, "The News Dissector," is the Founder and Executive Editor of the Media Channel and author of News Dissector (Electron Press, February).
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