Yeah and we heard about DOD "honeypotting" the attack software. And I have no doubt DOD has retro-hacked version of the software up on torrent and posters out directing people to honeypot proxy servers and the works because that's exactly what I would do in any defense scenario be it personal, corporate or national.

If I was benign dictator (the only remotely conceivable path to leadership for me), I'd have a lively cyber security thing going. I'd be doing counterinfiltration out the wazoo because it's either in my character or training or both. Or blood. Being sneaky is totally the way to go in war.

Come to think of it, if I were benign dictator, I'd probably go with this idea of declaration of permanent war, not out of any mechanical aspiration but out of simple recognition that war exists between good and evil at all times so I'd probably declare permanent peace at the same time in a high act of official hypocrisy.

Anyways, there's really no good way for 99% of people to participate in an attack on US targets FROM INSIDE THE US. You can direct attacks on US targets from inside the US but the attack must come from outside.

Now with modern IDS technology (intrusion detection system), it's pretty easy to identify the profile or fingerprint of this software because it does one thing: flood particular addresses, and since all ISPs are now require to preserve logfiles for a period of time, and since we know NSA & ETC have back-doors into all the big routing nodes and are already taking down ALL OF THE DATA THEY CAN which we believe to be a lot (hello Google!), pretty much every skript kiddie that deployed this software in their basements and bedrooms are "but a few mouse clicks away" in some sense from being on the dreaded "list". We generally accept these data are statistically valuable to them at this time (because we generally accept that they are at best, at their very best and on their best day remotely as good as we are), but we generally accept that if they wanted to "drill down on a data point" they could probably do so if they weren't so incredibly inept.

In other words if I was benign dictator, if my cyber security apparatus COULDN'T do that, if at least I didn't know the CAPABILITY existed, somebody's head would roll. It's a point I'd have to make with some amusement. As a former network admin for high-profile clients, anytime and anyplace anyone has ever asked me about privacy, ho man, seriously? Privacy? Honey dolls, sit down. I'll say this once and I'll say this slowly. YOU HAVE ALL THE PRIVACY I GIVE YOU. AND NO MORE. ON ANY DAY AND AT ANY MOMENT.

That was back in the day, Windows 3.x was the big thing! People asked about encryption. I told them yeah and I'm thinking I've got a room full of AS-400 series "big iron", could I crack 64-bit by brute force is I put those babies to work all night long for a month? At the time I was thinking I could. Yup. If so ordered by my chain of command, I could have gotten your grandma's secret apple pie recipe at the time. What they have going now is no mean joke kittens. And we know who's writing certain specs at this point. We know what kind of capabilities are being written in.

WE KNOW BECAUSE "WE" KNEW THESE GUYS UP TO A FEW YEARS AGO, "WE" WENT TO SCHOOL WITH THEM. "WE" USED TO TALK.

It is with great regret that those of us on the list have no certificates, ribbons or shiny badges for them, we're letting the DHS boys handle our awards ceremonies. But lest ye think this is leading you into another "buy my book" or website where you can get your tactical bugout bag and long term storage food and run shrieking into the hills, you remain, for this time, comfortably statistical. So if you took part in this attack, you are just another moron at this time.

It's with some note that none of us on FP, posters, publishers or anybody really took part in or even commented about it. Just snooping around the movement online, I found us to be ham-strung once again: the propertarians waging a vicious battle in defense of private property rights with the predictable anti-corporatist retorts. But there you go. We got side-shifted into a discussion of corporate personhood and thus did not as a movement galvanize around the issue.

I think a more reasoned element existed on FP where we have so many scientifically, technically and (in a bow to the Frosterizer) numerate folks, we knew we were getting handed a dead fish, we could smell it through the wrapper. Remember capabilities? I know the capability of Facebook, I designed models like this in the early 1990's and tried to sell it to major record labels. I told them it's gonna be the new thing and if they didn't get on board they'd be lost and they told me to go soak my head in the East River. It's the DATA MINING CAPABILITY HERE, THE PREDICTIVE CAPABILITY HERE. THE TRENDS RESEARCH CAPABILITY HERE.

I tried to explain to these stone-age power brokers what power is and will be and they sat there and treated me like an asshole. Power now is truly information and perception and we have it now in realtime just like I and others saw. It's the honeypot children, we saw that if we GAVE this to you, we would OWN not your data specifically, we saw that you in yourselves were predictive if we owned your data GENERALLY and the systems implied would ultimately and naturally aggregate into the capability of specific "drill-down". Yup. Perhaps it's a "science gone wrong" story but from a technical side it goes like this:

We have found, as database engineers, a way to describe all data that we have encountered in a meaningful way. And it's not monolithic, it's actually a methodology and it ranges from the mundane to the esoteric. We call it the process of normalization. You, yourself use this type of normalization in your life. A hand written list of names of your best friends is a "flat vertical data form". A shopping list is a flat vertical form of data to us although in programming terms it might as well be serial.

A list of your best friends with their phone numbers next to each is a "flat database". A shopping list of items with the item price next to each item is a flat database. We call this "First Normal Form" (FNF) of data.

 So now it goes to "Second Normal Form" like your list of friends who might live in the same town, so in a way, you organize them locally and regionally by leaving off the area code for friends close to you and writing it down for fiends far away. In your head, you keep the area code but leave it out of your list, the data.

You have just attained 2NF by organizing your data such that redundant data fields are represented by other, more convenient means. And now your realize, now just because of the sheer number of people you want to keep track of, but you want more convenient ways of pre-populating fields when you enter a contact so you don't have to keep re-typing the same "my town" and "my area codes" so in a way you want separate lists of towns and area codes for all your new friends so it's easy and you are verging on what we call "Third Normal Form" of data (3NF) because if I was to database you, I'd just write a script to include your area code for every number that doesn't already have one. So you can see how you already use this type of methodology in your own life right now?

So now we're verging on 4NF where I create "lookup tables" in my database of your life, and while I'm at the job of creating a list of area codes you use and MIGHT use, I'll just include them all. And while I'm at it, I might as well include all area codes in the world plus their international prefixes, plus all 50 states with all towns and all zip codes because that's easy, it's all publicly available. It's a tiny amount of space on my server and it saves me trouble in the future, I don't have to add things one by one to your database.

Now comes facebook where you literally tell me what you like and why. From a database perspective, I don't want to know. I'm not going to read it. I want this data ORDINALIZED. Like in a poll. I don't want to store mounds of poetry in my database, I want DATA POINTS. So since I'm the guy that wanted to essentially build Facebook, I'd structure my offering of this cool place where you can do whatever you want into a place where you make CHOICES that I can TRACK. This or that wallpaper? This or that music? This or that show? And what are you talking about? What do you like? We knew what "going viral" was before the term came along. Many of us knew we would turn multiple media industries upside down with this near-predictive capabilty.

NOW APPLY SOME PREDICTIVE MODELS. Apply any freaking one you want, apply them all. With near-infinite computing capability at "their" disposal, shit man, know how I could, like "could" profile you or any person you know within an inch of your daily routine if I drilled down on you? Because I know how I'd build it. And so do lots and lots and lots of smarter people than me. And not just by persons so perverted as me who would really like to know how your wife looks when she takes a shower, it approaches the possibility, in some ways of answering, at least for a moment at any given time, what the hell we're thinking. Like as a species or as close a representative model as we have now, that the hell we're thinking.

And to anyone upon whom the profundity of this was not apparent at the time, well, WE KNEW EXACTLY WHAT WE WERE THINKING. And we knew perfectly well that while this opportunity of the net as being free and open would have the short term benefit, in the long term, we understood that this same system which subverted the old would easily be co-opted and verticalized like any other source of power. Like any other power, it can be a weapon or a boon. It really mostly depends on who's in control.

The net was not designed to be truly decentralized, it was meant to be resillient and redundant, but it is designed to be HIERARCHICAL. It recognizes certain human foibles in this regard and it was developed as a defensive weapons support system. It's SCALABLE. And in a certain fundamental level, the USA "owns" the internet. Whether or not a cyberwar for the "ownership" of the internet happens is not purely a matter of who "owns" traffic, because certain ethnolinguistic alternatives exist to the present "ownership" which comes down to DNS. China is presently working on a Simplified Mandarin charactarset DNS system. The intellectual property issues seem inconsequential when considering that if they don't like ours, they can have THEIR OWN DAMN DNS WITH TOTALLY DIFFERENT UNICODE OR UTF-8 OR ISO8852 DNS system! Whatever, doesn't matter.

Because everything you do, everything you say, everything you express, everything you are capable of expressing from there, we can express in forms of data DESCRIPTIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS. See, we have forms of normalization that aren't even really attainable under day-to-day conditions, in a way, our data model can describe THAT WHICH WE DO NOT NOW, because thanks to the mathematicians and the fact that computers are so handy with math, we can make just about any projection based on any model that can be derived with math. Which is handy because most mathematical models come written in math.

And now it's coming back to you in the form of recommended videos on Youtube and specific advertising for you on Google and more targetted ads in your snailmail and more people that know your name and where you go and who you hang out with and how many kids you have and what their names are and where they go to school.

And that's why nobody serious has ever used a Microsoft database to do anything because they slaved well into the present to solve problems IBM solved shortly after Hitler contracted them to do exactly what we're talking out here in WWII: data model a whole population. Where every single person will be a record in a database with certain profile and geolocation and historical data points. To call it Nazi technology is historically accurate. And like Nazi and other scientists, we fully realize our technology is just that, this capability is just that, it can be used for good or for evil and....well....that's pretty much happening now.

This whole business of Julian Assange and these leaks, there's something fishy about the whole deal. This whole thing has had flags from the get-go. Now that there's wild speculation from the far-left and right, Gods only know what's coming next on the ground, but some of us are tiring our eyeballs out trying to see this thing from afar.

So this thing wraps up with a "what we could have told you", and I'd offer it as some form of apology to the nascent activist community at-large: getting involved in stuff like this DDoS can have an impact on you. It can come right back on you. And part of the reason for this is that the systems, the protocols that the internet was designed with has certain tracking capabilities built into it because it freaking HAS TO, otherwise, how do you think your datastream finds it's way to you out of all the millions and billions of others on the planet? If a data packet can find you, so can a live body.

There are two ways around this that I'm personally aware of. One, as mentioned, is to be a confidence man (sneaky) like Oyate who travels from place to place and kind of works his way into and out of situations and the other is like his best friend Viet Nam Billy who practices invisibility and travels with Oyate and scores all the...fun stuff. Together they form an unlikely dynamic duo but in each case, these are strictly offline arts. Laugh because life is sweet, but kittens, I know and you know "they" can't do this without our consent and alternatives exist. Unplugging is one of them, being wise is another, not even I can database how to become invisible like Invisibilly my bro, a database can show at what temperature wood burns and the Youtube can "show" you how, but nobody will ever know how you know what wood at what moisture level when you wake up on the land, nobody will know what you keep personal if you do.

Oyate is out by the fire burning tobacco and singing for you. His best friend Invisibilly can't be far away. I think I'll go database them.