I first started supporting national liberation struggles back in the 1960s when Vietnam was fighting for its freedom. In those days, there was little you could do to directly support their struggle beyond protesting it here, and organizing draft resistance to limit the US supply of cannon fodder, unless you were willing to travel to the region.
Today, things are different. Internet Technology (IT) has made a big difference in how wars are fought, and dominating that "battle space" can ultimately help determine who wins. There are two major fronts in this cyber war.
The first is the on-line propaganda war. This is the front I have been most involved in. It basically involves combating the mountain of misinformation posted on social media by Putin fanboys, trolls & bots with the truth. The fields of struggle are the popular social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger and Instagram, to name a few. While I try to use this blog constructively in that struggle, this post isn't about that front in the cyber wars.
The second front in the cyber war involves either gathering information from opposition Internet traffic, or shutting down opposition Internet traffic. This can be loosely defined as "hacking." That's what this post is about.
Both after the 2016 US election, and in the run up to Russia's war on Ukraine, much has been made of the Russian GRU cyber warfare capabilities, which has included hacking email accounts, and government websites, and then "leaking" the results, to shutting down major infrastructure like the Colonial Pipeline. To this I say:
Cyber war? Cyber war? We'll give Putin a cyber war he wasn't looking for!
The best hackers don't work for the GRU. They don't work for the US government, or any government, for that matter. They work for themselves. Governments don't pay enough.
During the Arab Spring, and Occupy Movements of 2011, a mysterious group that goes by the handle "Anonymous" showed what could be done by hacking MENA government websites, and gathering data, or posting counter-messages. They also helped activists maintain Internet access when authoritarian regimes tried to shut it down. They also created "Survival Guides" of useful information and techniques for those fighting tyranny on the ground. Since the Ukraine war broke out, they have been at it again.
Even Google got into this struggle in 2011. When Mubarak tried to shutdown Twitter in Egypt, Google engineers worked with Twitter to create a work-around that allowed anyone with telephone access to post a tweet. Google wrote on its official
blog, 31 January 2011:
Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection. ...More
Now Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Ukrainian government has created a way people around the world can support their struggle over the Internet. They call it the Ukrainian IT Army, and you can join!
Here are a few MSM articles that will tell you more about it from Wired, Venture Beat, and the Wall St. Journal.
Once logged into the app, search for "IT ARMY OF UKRAINE(English)," and join that channel. You will be joining over four thousand subscribers to this channel. Ukraine says there are over 390,000 involved in this effort already, both in Ukraine and elsewhere. The The channel description says:
This channel is for people who don't speak Russian and only speak English so we can translate videos audios and posts from original channel.
There is a 11-page pdf Getting Started Manual you can download once on Telegram.
There are also a lot of posts about dot ru websites being taken down, so there is likely much more going on below the surface, and while these activities aren't necessarily illegal, they are in opposition to powerful authoritarian actors that may not care much about your free speak rights. So there are a couple of other tools that are vital for this work.
Welcome to the dark web. Good luck.
Clay Claiborne
6 March 2022
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