All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Have you heard of Stratfor? They provide "strategic intelligence" on global business, economic, security and geopolitical affairs. In short, they are a security think-tank catering to powerful Imperial interests. If you visit Stratfor's website today, this is what you'll see—

If you had gone there right after Anonymous hacked them, you would have seen this—

The Los Angeles Times story reads Hackers claim to steal security think tank Stratfor's client list, but you can be sure that hackers did steal Stratfor's client list. In fact they did more than that. Zerohedge posted a few of the tweets announcing the hack. Here's one—

• #AnonSanta just told us: "Currently rm -rf'n targets and shredding logs" #LulzXmas #Antisec

On a server running some variant of the UNIX operating system, the command rm -rf recursively removes  every file on the system relative to the position from which it is issued regardless of file permissions. If you are logged in as "root" (the superuser) and you issue this command at the top of the file system (at slash "/"), every file on the system is removed—your data disks have been wiped clean. That's what happened (with regard to Anonymous targets) to Stratfor, apparently after Anonymous stole Stratfor's proprietary database. Further messages at Hacker News reveal that they also wiped out Stratfor's mail server and its backups too.

• // SO SAD WE RM'D YOUR MAIL SERVER AND ALL BACKUPS, FRANK
  

"Frank" is Stratfor's IT manager Frank Ginac. 

When I saw the zerohedge story, I was reminded that I had just received an e-mail containing John Mauldin's latest Outside The Box newsletter featuring an insipid excerpt from Stratfor CEO George Friedman's latest book The Unintended Empire. Here's Mauldin pimping for Friedman and some twaddle from George himself (highlighted in blue).

A new year is almost upon us, so now seems like a perfect time to step back from the (many) crises at hand and take stock of the big picture. According to my friend & fellow thinker George Friedman, the big picture of the next 10 years is this: America will dominate, and the American president will have to figure out how to act as global emperor without admitting that's what he is.

George's newest book, The Next Decade, comes out in paperback in January; and he's graciously agreed to let me send you the first chapter, which backs up the bold statements above. We don't always agree, but I have to give George credit. He's an expert at constructing an argument.

If the first chapter whets your appetite, you can get a free copy of the book when you subscribe to STRATFOR, a geopolitical intelligence company founded and led by George. It is the publication to read if you're interested in foreign affairs. Plus, OTB readers can get a hefty discount.

The American president is the most important political leader in the world. The reason is simple: he governs a nation whose economic and military policies shape the lives of people in every country on every continent. The president can and does order invasions, embargos, and sanctions. The economic policies he shapes will resonate in billions of lives, perhaps over many generations. During the next decade, who the president is and what he (or she) chooses to do will often affect the lives of non-Americans more than the decisions of their own governments...

The American president's unique status and influence are not derived from conquest, design, or divine ordination but ipso facto are the result of the United States being the only global military power in the world.

The U.S. economy is also more than three times the size of the next largest sovereign economy. These realities give the United States power that is disproportionate to its population, to its size, or, for that matter, to what many might consider just or prudent. But the United States didn't intend to become an empire. This unintentional arrangement was a consequence of events, few of them under American control.

Certainly there was talk of empire before this. Between Manifest Destiny and the Spanish American War, the nineteenth century was filled with visions of empire that were remarkably modest compared to what has emerged. The empire I am talking about has little to do with those earlier thoughts. Indeed, my argument is that the latest version emerged without planning or intention...

George goes on to expound upon how America should fulfill its incidental Imperial calling.

In my DOTE essay Thinking Outside The Box, I used Mauldin and Friedman's mindless, self-serving nonsense to illustrate what inside the box thinking looks like. You can see that George's big theme is America as an unintended empire. Unintended? You know, as in we didn't mean to do it! It all just happened! Sorry about the assassinations, the globalized economic exploitation, the screwing of American workers, the bullying militarism, the financial predators, abu Ghraib, the outright theft, those genocides in the early days, the wars & massacres and the predator drones—those were merely unfortunate accidents!

I've got some news for John Mauldin and his "friend and fellow thinker" George Friedman: consciousness is like a set of Russian matryoshka (nested) dolls. Like most people, John and George are not remotely aware that a much larger view of the human world envelopes their own view. They both live in a teensy-weensy mental box within which they defend the status quo, apologize for the Empire and feather their own nests.

Outside Mauldin and Friedman's self-serving midget box, outside their severely constrained thinking, there's a bigger box. And outside this second box, there's yet another box. And outside that box, that's where I live, looking in at them. (As did the late George Carlin.) Mauldin quaintly refers to his views as "the big picture." There is a Big Picture, but like so many others, Mauldin is inside it, a small, almost invisible figure at the bottom left of the frame.

Terminal cluelessness  and complicit immorality are not crimes—sometimes I think they ought to be—but unqualified support for the Empire and its evil machinations is viewed as a crime by many, including the hackers at Anonymous, who just announced that they have already donated a million dollars to charitable causes from the booty they stole from Stratfor.

I do not condone hacking—period. I myself was hacked when I owned and maintained some UNIX servers running my own software. I felt like I had been violated because I had been.

On the other hand, that was purely malicious hacking—I had built a search engine for kids and some other related things. That wasn't strategic, politically-motivated hacking. I wasn't selling security advice to the Air Force like Stratfor does. I have mixed feelings about all this. I'm sure you're aware that "good" hacking can turn into evil hacking in a heartbeat. Who will guard the guardians? Or the hacktivists? Power corrupts. Abolute power corrupts absolutely—Lord Acton.

Here's what Anonymous told Stratfor when they hacked them—

• Merry #LulzXmas to everyone http://imagebin.org/190224 Stratfor rooted. All your base are belong to us. <3 #Anonymous

Despite my mixed feelings, it is in the spirit of anonymous charitable giving, in the spirit of Robin Hood, that I leave you with videos below.

Note — The second video includes Charlie Chaplin's speech from The Great Dictator, which I have quoted myself.

 

 

 

Comments

[Shawn]

Having worked with code/software all my adult life (25+ years) I feel some empathy for the hackers. Hell, at this point in time if I had the skills I would be all over it. I've always been white hat though - my loss. I don't think the Anonymous folks are going to be wasting much time taking down mom and pop type operations. As you know, that is usually reserved for the kiddie-scripters.

If they took down GS, I could die in peace.