Info War Pt MMCVII

J.R. Dunn postulated about using Julian Assange as a patsy to peddle mis-information in American Thinker.

Any number of methods exist for manipulating Assange and his organization -- send WikiLeaks fake files, locate their archives and insert new files, manipulate e-mails and other messages, and others that even my nasty imagination would miss without specialized training. As for the purpose -- that's not difficult to envision. A message implying that certain jihadi leaders are on the payroll. That a critical North Korean officer is a Western agent. That certain things that Osama, the mullahs, or Dear Leader wanted done were not done, or were botched in the doing.

Well it seems Pakistan is doing it if we are to believe this article. Naturally the phony cables paint their arch-rival India in a negative light. While it seems these cables will be disproved, who is to say some of the 250,000 cables Assange says he has have not already been compromised? After all he is screaming about his internal leaks so he is not very smart when it comes to security or intrigue.

Welcome to the very murky world of online information. Trust but verify has been the by-word of many for years due to previous manipulations of data. On the one hand we see nation-state actors akin to Public Security Section 9 waging cyber-war[Stuxnet] while those fighting for Julian Assange are an odd collection of free-lance hackers that bring to mind comparisons to the Individual Eleven[Anonymous]. The battlelines in this war go far beyond the physical but will have an impact on many battlefields including the physical.

I now have a nostalgic urge to go read The Adolescence of P-1, Snowcrash, The Cuckoo's Egg, and Takedown. The simpler days of computer security and hacking. Assange reminds me of Mitnick is some ways, both loners with no real understanding of the tools they used for their larceny and that lack of understanding ultimately brought them down.