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British Government Embraces Cyberwarfare
from Another Day in the Empire
Entered into the database on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 @ 15:24:05 MST


 

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In the case a blog like this angers somebody in the British government, a grocery list of so-called anti-terror recommendations from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) are working their way through Parliament. “[The] evolving nature of the current threat from international terrorism demands that those charged with countering the threat have the tools they need to do the job. Often there is a need to intervene and disrupt at an early stage those who are intent on terrorist activity in order to protect the public. Clearly our legislation must reflect the importance of such disruptive action,” said Ken Jones, chairman of the ACPO Terrorism and Allied Matters Committee.

In other words, the British government wants to launch denial of service attacks against web servers, since this is the only way to attack a web server short of breaking down doors and snatching computers, more often than not impossible since web site hosting is an international affair. Launching such attacks “has significant benefits for counterterrorism and overlaps with other police priorities namely domestic extremism and paedophilia,” explains the ACPO. In other words, the Brits want to attack other behavior they consider socially unacceptable, citing pedophilia, the standard booga-booga canard.

However, if history is any lesson, governments use such powers to attack their political enemies first and foremost. In the United States, the FBI (and CIA) used Operation COINTELPRO to destroy dissent and wreck the lives (including the termination of life) of individual dissidents, often considered terrorists by the state. It should be noted here that “al-Qaeda” (al-CIA-duh) does not use public traveled websites to plot terrorist attacks, but rather the internet serves as an announcement medium claiming responsibility for terrorist attacks, usually in message forums, accessed by any number of people more or less anonymously. It would make little sense to attack these sites (in fact, such sites are invaluable to the state as they build their “al-Qaeda” cover stories for terrorist attacks pulled off by intelligence operatives).

More likely, as Parliament will now pass whatever police state measure that comes down the pike in the wake of the London bombings (one of the primary reasons the attacks occurred), we can expect mysterious denial of service attacks on sites critical of the British government.