GEEKS VERSUS CYBER MAGICIANS

Joanna Walewska
GEEKS VERSUS
CYBER MAGICIANS
*22*/,1*7+(%,*%527+(5
Psychology: a New Kind of SIGDEV (PNKS) and The
Art of Deception. Training for a New Generation
of Online Covert Operations (AOD)1, two presentations among the documents leaked by
Edward Snowden, motivated me to google
the Big Brother, although the investigative
report by journalists Glenn Greenwald and
Laura Poitras revealed a lot about these materials already. They were developed by the
American National Security Agency (NSA)
and the British intelligence bureau, the
Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), in connection with a wide-ranging
campaign developed by the two agencies,
aimed at influencing not only Julian Assange
but also all those supporting WikiLeaks, The
1
See: G. Greenwald, How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet
to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
(accessed on 5 August 2014).
Pirate Bay portal and hacktivist groups such
as Anonymous. The goal of the campaign was
to point to Anonymous and WikiLeaks as
“malicious foreign actors,” which would
facilitate placing them under a broad
electronic surveillance, better still, without
the need to exclude American citizens. Both
documents are in the format of PowerPoint
presentations; GCHQ presented the first
of the two at the “SIGDEV Conference,”
or the meeting of the so-called “Five Eyes
Agreement, ”whose signatories – USA, Great
Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
– meet annually to share their successes and
challenges pertaining to electronic surveillance.
One of the components of the presentation,
which generated the most interest on the
part of the journalists, was the information
of how the ANTICRISIS GIRL system opera-
tes (adjusted to the needs of Piwik2 program
used for Internet monitoring). It reads IP
addresses of thousands of Internet users
accessing WikiLeaks daily, which made it
possible to match them to actual persons
seeking information on the Iraq war, as
well as (potentially) trying to pass secret
information to the organisation Assange
had founded. Squeaky Dolphin is another
system, the operation of which the said
presentation demonstrates: it facilitates
monitoring of users’ activity in social media
such as YouTube, Facebook, and Blogger.
Obviously these reports caused rightful
concern among the experts on Internet
privacy issues, who pointed out that, should
intelligence operation target not a particular person suspected of practices threatening public safety, but the whole websites,
then surely among the users of the latter
there will be innocent people who will be
2
autoportret 3 [46] 2014 | 96
See: http://pl.piwik.org/ (accessed on 5 August 2014).
We want to build Cyber Magicans.
targeted by the agencies purely because of
their reading habits.
When I found out about the existence of
the two programs, initially I felt the wave
of righteous indignation sweeping through
me, and even a certain anxiety whispering
in my ear, that I am probably among those
people targeted by the great intelligence
agencies. It wasn’t the awareness of the
existence of software such as ANTICRISIS
GIRL and Squeaky Dolphin that inclined
me to go on googling for hours. Above all, I
was struck by the extremely conventional
format of the presentation. On one hand,
it contained secret information, quite a
bit of newspeak and acronyms, so breaking
through it all required some effort. On
the other hand, it was bewildering, with
its run-of-the-mill formula, resembling a
recipe for “death by PowerPoint”: graphics
of questionable quality, seemingly sophisticated, but in fact rather banal diagrams,
a collection of random images and cartoons, several slogans and two dry “jokes” to
sweeten the pill. My attention was drawn to
one of the first slides, featuring an illusionist with playing cards, and underneath,
the caption: We want to build Cyber Magicians! To me, magicians were the least likely
association with the army of geeks employed by contemporary intelligence agencies to
fight their wars in cyberspace; however, in
this context, the term “art of deception”
introduced in one of the presentations
seemed logical.
Both presentations begin with slides containing a series of diagrams, which map the
field of social studies. After two centuries
of a rather tempestuous relationship of
anthropology and ethnography with the
military, now, in the beginning of 21st
century – on the frontlines of battle against
terrorism, in contact with cultures of Iraq
and Afghanistan, alien and exotic as they
autoportret 3 [46] 2014 | 97
are from the point of view of American or
British soldiers – the need became plain
to seek advice and assistance of ethnographers, bringing about what is described as
“a cultural turn.” Ironically enough, the
introduction of software called the Human
Terrain System happened at the time when
the anthropological milieu rejected this
type of cooperation as a non-ethical and
undesirable breach of independence in the
area of knowledge they are pursuing.
During World War I there were instances of
ethnographers working as spies. This was
unconditionally condemned by Franz Boas,
who called this kind of activity “prostituting science” in his publication in “The
Nation.” However, already during World
War II, the two most famous students of
Boas’s, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict,
considered it their duty as citizens to work
for the United States government which,
incidentally, was the occasion for one of
the most widely read books in the history of
anthropology to come about, the Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Although Benedict’s
methods were criticised – mostly because
she used prisoners of war and Americans of
Japanese origin detained in camps as her
informants – she still improved the image
of an anthropologist working for the army.
During the Vietnam War, Gerald Hickey tried
to persuade his superiors that knowledge of
Vietnamese culture would be the key to ending the war, and although his recommendations for the US Army, included in the report
commissioned by ARPA, remained unheard,
in 1967 it was decided that the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Supports (CORDS) program should be launched in
order to gain the hearts and minds of South
Vietnamese people. The program was deemed
relatively successful, although it has been
stressed that its introduction came far too
late. In the end, two incidents of 1970s were
decisive for the image of anthropology: the
exposure of the “Camelot” program, aimed at
identifying the factors which could lead to
a civil war in Chile, and the so-called “Thai
scandal” pertaining to the involvement of social scientists in the program of anti-partisan
activities in Thailand.
Despite the reservations, small teams consisting of anthropologists, linguists, sociologists,
historians, political scientists, and psychologists, have been pursuing their field research
for over a decade now within the framework
of the Human Terrain System, and therefore
they were included in both presentations.
What caught my attention is the fact that the
AOD document focuses in particular on the
field of social science in which anthropology
and psychology converge, dealing with such
issues as deception and influence. This worried me – the more so as one of the following
slides mentions such persons as: Jean-Robert
Houdin, who helped quench the Algerian
uprising of 1856 on behalf of Napoleon III,
heir to an illustrious family of magicians
Jasper Maskelyne, known for his occupation
with camouflage during World War II, and
John Mullholand, who was developing a
clandestine MKULTRA program for the CIA in
1950s, aimed at combating Soviet techniques
of mind control and counteracting brainwash
interrogation techniques.
Now I was really beginning to get into the
seemingly boring training session for IT
geeks. Truly you cannot use a .ppt presentation if you have not prepared it yourself. I
managed to recognize several photos rather
quickly, for example the one featuring four
American soldiers of 23rd Headquarters
Special Troops (Ghost Army) carrying a tank
(more about that in a moment); others were
taken out of context, which made it impossible for me to read their meaning quickly. The
Big Brother, backed by the Squeaky Dolphin
and ANTICRISIS GIRL, knows everything
about me. Now I am beginning to google the
Big Brother, albeit without much hope of
success. To my surprise, google image search
proves very effective; perhaps the content of
the training program is top secret, but the
presentation prepared for its purposes turns
out to be the product of the remix culture. I
upload the images one by one, and the browser reveals a variety of contexts – all I have to
do is choose the correct one.
HOW TO WIN WORLD WAR II?
The scene we see in the picture took place
in June 1944, shortly after the transfer of
the so-called Ghost Army with all its equipment to the shores of Normandy, where – as
predicted – one of the last, decisive battles
of World War II was about to take place. The
soldiers belonging to the Ghost Army origi-
autoportret 3 [46] 2014 | 98
nated mostly from the Engineer Camouflage
Battalion, famous for, among other things,
effectively hiding the whole big factory of
B-26 Marauder bombers in Baltimore. Others
were recruited mostly from the art schools
of New York and Philadelphia. An invisible
army, versed in the art of illusion, deceit and
misinformation, comprised three units. The
first, specialising in the art of camouflage,
consisted of soldiers who, after the war, went
on to have successful careers in the arts; its
task was to create rubber models (dummies)
of tanks, armoured cars, guns, planes, and
even soldiers, which from the perspective
of aerial intelligence looked like a military
grouping. During the breaks between military operations, lasting for days or for weeks
at a time, their task was also to target and
misinform foreign agents, therefore they often stitched uniforms, falsified the colours of
other units, and thus disguised, sat in cafés
on corners, where they sang songs, wooed
English or French girls, and disseminated
false information on the plans of the Allied
Forces.
Another unit consisted of sound engineers
who, together with the engineers of Bell laboratories, experimented for several weeks at
Fort Knox, testing multichannel recordings,
wire recorders, and mobile recording studios,
in order to record the sounds of military
operations in battlefield conditions. That set
of sounds was then mixed and later transmitted using massive speakers, which reinforced
the illusion of the show, staged ever so often
for the benefit of the enemy. While they were
performing the tasks, which the command
assigned to them, they felt as if they were
building theatre or movie sets – with only
one difference: the decorations had to be
removed before the guests, tempted by the
posters, have arrived.
Already during World War I, the air force
intelligence played a very important part in
obtaining information about enemy movements, and special units were developed to
create camouflage that would prevent, or
at least impede destroying strategic objects
from the air. Still, the Allies were aware that
Germany obtained 70% of their information
from radio intelligence; in fact, they rather
admired German skills in this matter. This is
why, as a part of the Ghost Army, a unit was
created composed of the best radio engineers,
whose task was to follow the patterns of
radio practices typical for the Allied Forces,
and thereby transmit false information.
When at the end of March 1945, German
Army sent reconnaissance planes in order
to assess the concentration of Allied Forces
along the Rhine river, the last natural barrier
which separated them from Berlin, what
the pilots saw confirmed their belief in that
the information they had obtained through
radio intelligence was correct. It seemed that
the Allies sent two divisions to the area –
30 thousand soldiers and convoys of tanks,
artillery, and armoured trucks. Additionally,
numerous traces of tracked vehicles were
seen (made using bulldozers), most of which,
they were led to believe, must have been hiding behind the trees, along with the trucks
and landing strips.
Ghost Army tactics was based on reversing the logics of the camouflage art: it was
about making something visible, but not too
visible – so that it would not appear suspicious, and reveal something, only in order to
divert attention from the things that really
mattered. It should be noted that the battles
of that invisible army were above all psychological warfare, and therefore the theatre
of military operations was transported into
the ether. Despite the fact that their area of
operations was to some extent intangible,
they needed to rely on the same strategies to
gain advantage as in the actual battlefield:
mimicry, camouflage and purposeful leading
the enemy by the nose.
GEEKS’ WEAPON
Conducting cyber warfare requires redefining
the concept of the theatre of war, because
we no longer deal with operations contained
within a geographically determined space.
As a result, governments of most countries,
which engage in this type of activity, employ
experts who are able to adapt to this broader
reality. At the turn of 2008 and 2009, American and Israeli governments developed
malware called Stuxnet, aimed at bombing
the operation of the information system of an
Iranian nuclear power plant. The key aspect
of the whole operation was installing the
software on computers without an Internet
connection, which was possible via infecting
portable memory discs used by the power
plant’s employees. Then, the computer worm
took over control of the machines, destroying
the centrifuge for enriching uranium, and
therefore paralysing the uranium enrichment
program conducted at Natanz, as the engineers were unable to detect the malware. At
the beginning of 2011, the Anonymous group
shared the source code of the computer virus
on the Internet, which gave rise to suspicions
that its creators were among the organisation’s members. These rumours were soon
proven false, as one year later, representatives
of President Obama’s administration confirmed that the US government was responsible for the creation of the virus. Actually,
already when the rumour of the alleged
responsibility of Anonymous was first circulated, security experts were openly sceptical.
They argued that the organisation lacked both
the human and the financial capital, which
autoportret 3 [46] 2014 | 99
would allow it to engage in this sort of longterm, strategic operations, requiring in fact
military-grade resources. In order to describe
the Anonymous’ mode of operation, we might
recall the distinction drawn by Eric Raymond,
who likened a decentralised, collective, and
pseudo-anarchistic model of developing software such as Linux, and many other projects
based on the open source philosophy, to a
bazaar:
I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs
programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or
small bands of mages working in splendid isolation,
with no beta to be released before its time.
Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open
to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise. No
quiet, reverent cathedral-building here – rather,
the Linux community seemed to resemble a great
babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches […], out of which a coherent and stable system
could seemingly emerge only by a succession of
miracles.
The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and
work well, came as a distinct shock.3
Anonymous derive from 4chan.org, an Internet platform of the imageboard type, which
guarantees anonymity of its users (in order to
access it, logging in is not necessary), where
the posts appear in threads on the wall, yet afterwards they are not recorded in the archive
but they disappear, pushed out by the entries
of other users. 4chan has many sections, but
the /b/ rules, which by itself is not subject to
3
Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on
Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Beijing–
Cambridge–Farnham: O’Reilly, 2001, p. 21–22.
any rules: you can upload anything there
(barring child pornography), the opportunity, which the users happily and busily take.
The main occupation of the Anonymous
members in the early days was trolling for
“lulz”; only since 2008 have they become
social activists for the freedom of speech on
the Internet (free speech is non-negotiable).
Their first target was the Churchof Scientology, which waged a real battle against
Internet users who shared, on their websites,
the famous Tom Cruise video, which the
church believed illegal. Despite attempted
intervention on the part of the church,
the film in which the actor explained the
principles of scientology soon went viral.
The issues of the freedom of speech and of
access to information were themes of such
actions as the “Operation Titstorm,” aimed at
blocking access to the website of Australian
government (via DDoS4), who wanted to censor pornography, or for instance the protests
against the introduction of ACTA. In December 2010, AnonOps was founded, an organisation whose members used botnets5 and Low
Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC)6 software in order to
4
I quote the Wikipedia definition: DDoS (Distributed
Denial of Service) attack is an attempt to make a machine
or network resource unavailable to its intended users,
by consuming all its available resources, while the attack itself originates from many computers at the same
time. For those interested to learn more, I recommend
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media
and Human Rights Sites, Berkman Center for Internet and
Society, Harvard University, http://cyber.law.harvard.
edu/publications/2010/DDoS_Independent_Media_and_
Human_Rights (Accessed on 5 August 2014).
5
I quote the Wikipedia definition: Botnet – a group of
computers infected with malicious software (malware)
unbeknownst to the user, allowing the botnet’s operator
to remotely control all computers within it. The control
allows for sending spam messages and other attacks
using the infected computers. http://pl.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Botnet_%28bezpiecze%C5%84stwo_komputerowe%29 (Accessed on 5 August 2014)
6
See the definition and the links to materials collected
by the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_
Orbit_Ion_Cannon. (Accessed on 5 August 2014).
paralyse websites of such companies as PayPal, MasterCard and Visa, as a “punishment”
for blocking payments to WikiLeaks account.
The operation ended with arrests of fourteen
persons in June 2011, however, within several
weeks, a few thousands new members have
joined the movement. Also making available
the Stuxnet code was a repercussion of an
action aimed at supporting Julian Assange,
as Anonymous accessed the code by attacking
the HBGary company. The attack on the servers took place after the company’s president,
Aaron Barr stated that his firm managed to
verify the identities of major Anonymous activists, and that they were inclined to make
the list available to the FBI. The main victim
of the action was Barr himself (his private
correspondence was published online; wholesale amounts of pizza were ordered for home
delivery on his behalf, for which he had to
pay; his mailbox was attacked with spam,
etc.), however, it has also been proven that
the company he represented, the firm which
operated in the sector of public safety, was
moreover involved in the action of passing
false documents to Wikileaks in order to
discredit that organisation. Furthermore,
malware was found on the servers, which,
shared online, undermined the company’s
reputation.
At the next stage of the movement’s development, some of its members aided and
supported the protesters during the Arab
Spring, as well as 15-M movement in Spain,
or Occupy in USA. However, despite the fact
that Anonymous came to be regarded as
politically involved cyber activists, obviously not all its members became “activists”
overnight. In response to the AnonOps
activity, for instance, the LulzSec fraction
was established, whose members agued for
returning to the roots of the movement, that
is trolling and joking in the /b/ section of
autoportret 3 [46] 2014 | 100
4chan.org. Therefore, although in popular
perception Anonymous seems a monolith, we
should realise that its members are not only
activists. If one identifies with Anonymous,
it does not automatically follow that she or
he is a hacker, because not all the persons
involved in the movement can encode. Some
edit video materials, write manifestoes, or
translate texts, others remain the masters of
trolling and nothing besides.
The tactics applied by Anonymous are often
called “weapon of the geek” in contrast with
“weapons of the weak” – the term coined by
James Scott to denote local sabotage operations and actions of civil disobedience, often
unnoticed by the media, and undertaken by
economically marginalised groups. Such a
group is typically decentralised and its operation chaotic, so if the actions it undertakes
sometimes bring measurable results, it is
probably a case of blind luck. However, it is
exactly these borderline-illegal, transgressive practices and unpredictable manner of
operation, that constitute the most powerful
weapon of the Anonymous and lead to their
being perceived as threat. The following saying became the Anonymous motto: “We are
not your private army.”
TO SPEND A HALF-HOUR IN THE
WONDERLAND OF DISCOVERY
World War I is considered the first modern
war of total character, in the whole history,
as it set down a new paradigm of mass-scale,
technological, and therefore also depersonalised and democratic killing. As Paul K.
Saint-Amour has noted, it was also the most
optical of wars in the history of mankind;
observation and reconnaissance was not
just the issue of a few single units sent on
foot behind the enemy lines to scout, but it
became an operational sphere of a vast, mil-
itary and technological network, in which
“semiautomated aerial cameras obtained
photographic coverage of the entire front,
and the photomosaic maps compiled from
this coverage were reproduced through industrialized techniques and widely disseminated; observers in airplanes and balloons
reported by Morse lamp and later by wireless telegraph.”7 The use of planes, which
unlike balloons made it possible to navigate
and provided a stable enough platform for
the cameras attached to them, facilitated
photographic documentation. Then, out of
photographic fragments, photomosaic maps
were developed, which were a much more
realistic representation of the “theatre of
war” than even the most perfect of maps
developed using traditional techniques –
the photomosaic was real, while maps were
seen as interpretations of reality. Therefore,
units were formed, composed of first class
experts trained to read aerial photographs;
their task was to distinguish between camouflage and reality. However, the space seen
from a bird’s-eye-view perspective looks
quite different, as vertical seeing heavily
distorts the image, and in itself constitutes a camouflage of sorts; and so people
learned to read and recognize the distortions in photographs, resulting from engine
vibrations, changes in altitude and angle,
changing weather conditions, imperfections
of lenses and shutters, or defects occurring
in the process of creating a photomosaic,
among other factors.
It turned out that the remedy was invented
nearly 80 years earlier: an optical instrument, which was not only a rather popular
toy in bourgeois homes of the 19th century,
7
P.K. Saint-Amour, “Modernist Reconaissance,” Modernism/modernity, Vol. 10, No. 2, April 2003, p. 349–380, here
p. 354.
but also a “philosophical instrument” of
a kind. The appearance of the stereoscope
– as this was the device in question – energised studies of perception and abolished
the epistemological paradigm of geometrical
optics, prevalent since the beginning of
the 19th century; the paradigm, which was
replaced by the theory of subjective seeing
based on the assumption that perceived
images do nor relate to facts, nor do they
mirror reality, as they are mediated in
the physiologically grounded apparatus of
human perception. For those who mastered
the skill of using the distorting image of the
stereoscope, the latter also became a farmacon, helping to interpret the distorted photographic maps, and very soon, there were
troops of experts-cyborgs, their eyes almost
permanently glued to their optical toys.
Although the stereoscope seemed easy
to use, child’s play, in fact to operate it
required many hours’ training. Thanks to
its application, the time spent studying the
photographic maps was de facto a journey
inside one’s own childhood; retreating into
the times, when this ludic, almost magical
instrument allowed the viewer to submerge
for a moment into a hallucinatory world,
protected with a curtain, which was impenetrable by reality.
In his text, Saint-Amour quotes the recollections of Constance Babington-Smith who describes her first experience with stereoscope
during Wold War II. She writes that her job
required the childish ability to see what’s
on the other side, through the looking glass:
I stood [the stereoscope] above a pair of prints
as I had seen some of the others doing. I could
see two images, not one, and there really did not
seem much point. It was much simpler to work
with an ordinary magnifying glass. I edged the
autoportret 3 [46] 2014 | 101
two prints backward and forward a bit—still two
images; and then suddenly the thing happened,
the images fused, and the buildings in the photograph shot up toward me so that I almost drew
back. It was the same sort of feeling of triumph
and wonder that I remember long ago when I
first stayed up on a bicycle without someone
holding on behind. From then on interpretation was much easier. 8
Ursula Powys-Lybbe remembers the training
in new modes of perception, exploring space, and searching for people and objects, in
a similar way:
That childish thrill was felt by everyone who, for
the first time, managed to shuffle a stereo pair of
aerial photographs into the correct position in
the viewer. It might have taken a little time, and
you felt convinced that something was wrong
with your eyes, and you strained your muscles
and tried squinting and then magic! Shapes in
plan were transformed into real-life ships or
churches or bridges. You begged for more prints,
and like the child with its new plaything, you
spent a half-hour in a wonderland of discovery.9
The moment of clarity, when the two images suddenly overlap and become one, and
previously shapeless blotches change into
churches, bridges, and estates, could evoke
childhood memories, but when it became
the domain of an expert versed in deciphering aerial maps, the reality put a stop to
the hallucination. At that very moment,
when colourful blotches overlapped and
– to the stereoscope’s operator’s surprise
– an object emerged, that object became a
potential target to be destroyed. This is the
end of a fairy tale.
8
9
Quote after P.K. Saint-Amour, op. cit., p. 365.
Ibidem, p. 367.
GAMING POSSIBLE WORLDS,
OR THEATRE OF WAR WITHOUT
BORDERS
I come from a small town. I was raised by
my mother, who worked as a teacher at a
state school in Missoula, Montana. We could
barely make ends meet, so I did not travel
much as a child, to the neighbouring state
at the most.
Or let me put it another way. I come from
Elko, Nevada. When I turned twenty, I
decided to go to the university, but soon I
realised that would mean paying back the
debt for as long as I live.
As a child, I used to watch TV and play
computer games. You may laugh, but I was
moulded not by the Faulkner’s novels, but
games, because in games, the bad guys are
always killed by the good.
In 2005, I began studies at the State University in Montana, but the fees were finishing
me off. One day I came across the Air Force
Recruitment Office, and I signed the papers.
Or let me put it another way. I remember
when in 2007 my buddies and I went to a
convention, and there was this guy who
was encouraging people to join the Army. I
thought that maybe this was not such a bad
idea.
Soon they sent me to Lackland Air Force
Base in Texas, for training conducted in the
framework of the Warrior Week. They told
us we would be like James Bond: it would
be our task to deliver information, necessary for the mission to get accomplished.
Frankly, to be a drone operator seemed
quite an interesting job. It is like playing
video games, but unfortunately you always
play on one level only. Every morning, we
had to show up at the airport; a bus came,
which took us to an unmarked plane. That’s
how we got to the base. The room I worked
in didn’t resemble a regular office; it was a
size of a race-car interior, dark, with computer monitors for the only source of light.
Usually we stared at the screen for hours,
and nothing happened. I saw every detail,
colour of his clothes, his hair, and the guy
was not aware of this, he did not know that
autoportret 3 [46] 2014 | 102
this was happening.
I remember our first operation, when we
were ordered to attack. That was in Afghanistan, at night. Soldiers on the ground
asked for air support. The missile hit a
group of men, who all died on the spot but
one, his leg ripped off above the knee. He
fell to the ground. I saw him move; I don’t
know if he was saying anything, but if he
did, he must have been cursing at me. After
some fifteen minutes he stopped moving,
everything went dead, but we were told to
wait until the morning in order to estimate
the losses.
Or let me put it another way. During one
operation, we were shooting at an empty
building on the hill. Suddenly I saw a small
figure on the screen, so I asked the commander if this was not a child. The response
was, it was a dog. I am still not certain. I
asked the chaplain. He said it was our duty
to fight the enemy.
After work, we return to the airfield, I get
on the plane, and go back home. The same
thing every day10.
“I AM NOT TRYING TO IMPRESS YOU,
BUT I’M BATMAN”
(1, PNKS)
In February 2012, “Wall Street Journal” published an article about the NSA declaring Anon
as posing threat to national security, because
– as the Agency experts supposed – over the
following year or two they might initiate a
series of cyber attacks, which would lead to
destabilising the security system of the State.
Independent experts as well as the members
of the group themselves rejected NSA’s claims,
calling them a fear campaign; yet as the
documents Snowden revealed tell us, this did
not stop the Agency or its British counterpart
from unleashing a cyber war. Both presentations testify to the fact that the bureaucratic
machine started running at full speed – after
all, in order to accomplish the mission of
breaking Anonymous, new personnel was
needed that had to be trained first. Since the
two presentations were made public11, much
has been written about technical aspects and
results of JTRIG actions against Anonymous
and LulzSec, but little consideration was
devoted to their theoretical base. The analysis
of the latter reveals the identity of “soldiers”
recruited to fight in the cyber war. It is no
secret that links between the Army and the
entertainment industry are now stronger than
10
The text is apocryphal; for more information I
recommend studying the recollections of drone pilots,
interviewed by Tonja Hessen Schei in her documentary
The Drone, as well as Matthew Power for “GQ” Magazine:
Confessions of a Drone Warrior, http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination
(Accessed on 5 August 2014).
11
As well as three others, developed jointly by Greenwald
and NBC News, describing them in the series of articles
titled Dirty Tricks: http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/
edward-snowden-interview/exclusive-snowden-docs-showbritish-spies-used-sex-dirty-tricks-n23091 (Accessed on 5
August 2014)
ever before. Let us take for example the game
of America’s Army, which used to serve as a recruitment tool; but there are many more other
instances. Military activities using drones, or
those conducted on the Internet, require special skills, which cannot be taught. Therefore,
the recruiters tend to seek persons who had
never known the world without the Internet,
the generation raised on computer games and
shaped by axiological order embedded therein.
No wonder that intelligence agencies often
recruit their employees during world’s biggest
hacker conferences or gaming conventions.
Slide no. 26 of PNKS: “Squeaky Dolphin.
Can SigDev (signal development) help us
understand and shape the Human Terrain?”
Considering that the “Human Terrain System”
software was created to provide knowledge on
foreign cultures to soldiers taking part in military operations (sometimes called stabilization
missions) abroad, it appears that the Anonymous group is perceived in the same category
as a foreign culture, while the Internet is an
unknown territory, where we must send a new
generation of soldiers. It is not enough to be
able to encode; after all, the “black hat” hackers are merely a small part of the Anonymous. Anyway, sooner or later we will catch those
who break the law, their foot will slip, and we
will put them in jail. But, our goal is to game
them all. We need cyber magicians.
It seems that when they were beginning the
action of “figuring out” the organisation, the
intelligence services were aware of ideological
disputes among its different fractions, and
wanted to use these differences as a tool for
breaking up the group. The penultimate slide
(48, PNKS) titled “Identifying and Exploiting
fracture points” exhibits a diagram, on which
factors such as shared opposition (common
enemy), shared ideology and common beliefs
are the categories that push a group together,
autoportret 3 [46] 2014 | 103
while personal power (influential individuals), pre-existing cleavages, competition and
ideological differences are shown as the things
that pull a group apart.
In order to break-up the group, two complementary strategies were planned. The first
was aimed at destroying the reputations
of targeted individuals. This entailed such
activities as “false flag operations” which
signifies placing materials in the Internet
falsely attributed to the victim of the attack,
or such materials as might compromise him
or her. There were cases where agents set up
blogs of alleged victims of the persons whom
they wished to discredit; they contacted their
relatives and friends, informing them of sexual affairs in which their targets were allegedly
involved. They also used provocation, aimed
at eliciting behaviour within the law’s grey
area – this was linked, among other things,
to accessing the list of contacts, which made
DDoS attacks possible. These attacks probably
targeted the key persons, or these members of
the Anonymous, who enjoyed opinion-forming
status among their peers.
The other strategy entailed the application of
all possible theories of deception and influence, in order to manipulate the discourse and
activism on the Internet to such extent that
targeted persons would start destroying one
another. It seems that the goal was to provoke
those members of the Anonymous, who did
not break the law, but whose actions were
deemed threatening. We find theoretical background for such actions described in slide (24,
PNKS) titled “Gambits of deception,” which
contains an exhaustive list of techniques such
as: control attention (mask/mimic), sense-making12, as well as techniques for steering affect
12
Sensemaking is a term coined by Karl Weick to describe
the proces in which social actors, trying to understand re-
and behaviour. Another noteworthy slide
featured in the presentation is slide number
(27, PNKS) titled “10 principles of Influence.”
It seems to combine the six principles of influence laid out in Robert Cialdini’s book, a many
years’ bestseller in the field of marketing,
with the seven principles of influence proposed by Frank Stajano and Paul Wilson in their
article on online fraud, in which the authors
revised Cialdini’s principles. It is terrifying
to think that NSA and GCHQ agents acquired
such knowledge!
But this is not the end, as roughly in the
middle of the presentation we find slide (21,
PNKS), with a reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Conjurer (also known as The Magician).
I type the title of the painting in a search
engine and here is what I get: a Wikipedia entry, an article at a website dedicated to Bosch,
a fragment of a book on Bosch from Google
Books, and a link to the article in The Guardian titled Sleights of hand, sleights of mind.13 It
is probably a coincidence, because as we well
know, Uncle Google does not choose the best
content for us, but such content, which could
potentially interest us. What is more, every
now and then, Google change their search
algorithm, so I cannot be absolutely sure what
the author of the presentation had it mind;
but even if it were a coincidence, it would
have been too beautiful for me to deny myself
the pleasure of writing about it. The article
in The Guardian concerns the research by a
ality, create shared, abstract models, built on earlier, even
fragmentary beliefs on reality, and then, they identify
with these models, accepting them as reality. Given as an
example is the strategy used by general Sir Edmund Allenby at the turn of winter and early spring of 1917, against
the army commanded by general von Kressenstein. It
went down in history under the name of Haversack Ruse.
Compare Andrew W. Eddowes, The Haversack Ruse, and British
Deception Operations in Palestine During World War I, Newport:
RI: The Naval War College, 1994.
13
http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2011/oct/14/1 (Accessed on 5 August 2014).
couple of neurologists, Susan Martinez-Conde
and Stephen Macknik of Visual Neuroscience
Laboratory at Barrow Neurological Institute
in Phoenix, Arizona, who decided to study
the ways by which magicians trick our brain.
To that end, they invented a new discipline
of science – the neuromagic. Martinez-Conde
claims that magicians have long known how
to “hack” our mental processes, which allows
them to manipulate the attention and awareness of their audience. The key is covering
one illusion with another layer of illusion
(“change blindness”), as a result of which
the senses are bombarded with an amount
of stimuli too large for our brain to process
simultaneously. I think that JTRIG specialists
might have availed themselves of the conclusions drawn by neuromagic experts, because
one of the following slides (23, PNKS) proclaims that people are inclined to direct their
attention to wherever they expect something
interesting to happen: “We are biased to see/
hear/feel/smell/taste what we strongly expect
to see/hear/feel/smell/taste.” Is this not the
reason why we are inclined to believe the
coin to disappear from the magician’s hand,
although our common sense tells us that this
is impossible?
The key word, which in my opinion binds all
these strategies and methods together, is the
mimicry, quoted in the presentation leaked by
Snowden. On slide 42, mimicry has been defined as adoption of specific social traits by the
communicator from the other participant(s).
Following the definition is the fundamental
question: Can I game this? It seems that the
agents tasked with figuring out Anonymous
were ordered to adopt the main strategies of
their target’s operation, which they eagerly
did. It remains an open question, whether the
JTRIG cyber magicians succeeded in hacking the minds of the people of Anonymous?
Arguably, the answer should be negative, as
you cannot simulate something, which is pure
chaos, consisting of many different beliefs,
personality traits, and attitudes. However, as
Jacques Lacan has written:
Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct
from what might be called an itself that is behind.
The effect of mimicry is camouflage. It is not a
question of harmonizing with the background, but
against a mottled background, of becoming mottled
- exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced
in human warfare.14
Theatre of cyber war. Trolls trolling the trolls.
Yet what is paradoxical, the latter are an
international group of anarchist Internet
activists, while the first are the employees of
national security agencies, who call this procedure “magic.”
14
J. Lacan, „The Line and Light”, Of the Gaze, quote after:
H. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of
Colonial Discourse”, October, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1984, p. 125.