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Beyond the Beyond

Anonymous just has to brag in full detail about crushing their hapless enemies the lawyers

*If you always slow down to look at car-wrecks, boy is this the article for you.

*The common-wisdom on this latest ongoing Wikileaks cyberwar scandal is that (a) it’s not any major embarrassment for Washington power-players, just a bunch of dorky gunsels up for hire and (b) HBGary are comically incompetent as computer security experts. I’m inclined to think that (a) this is some plausibly-deniable Beltway skullduggery and it IS a big deal, with octopus-like tie-ins of Nixonian proportions and (b) this is about as “secure” as anybody’s secure system ever gets. They’re not incompetent. When you can social-engineer Nokia’s top security guy, there IS no “computer security.”

*The question now is, do people stumble over the truth here and just sort of dust themselves off and traipse away sideways — or are there more shoes to drop? The furious and deeply humiliated lawyers at HBGary ought to have enough federal clout to pursue their Anonymous harassers and nail them to the barn like corn-eating crows — after all, they claimed they know who they are, and that’s why they got savagely hacked in the first place.

*However — are HBGary gonna be able to carry out that revenge attack with their usual discretion — the shadowy obscurity with which they help deny climate change and break labor unions for the Chamber of Commerce? It’s like watching a shark fight a school of ink-squirting squids.

*Normally, one never sees a submarine struggle like this. If it does happen to surface, it gets cordially ignored, or ritually dismissed as a sea-monster story. But boy, this one sure is leaky.

*Leaky, leaky, leaky.

*Drip, drip, drip.