Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Dissent vs. Desecration:
Grey Eagle And The Enemy

Courtesy of the Rott is this infuriating example of how some dissenters can go overboard and ruin the efforts of a servicewoman trying to honour her fallen comrades by executing a DOS attack.

(For the non-geeks: DOS is an acronym for "denial of service".)

Grey Eagle is the soldier sister in question and an author of a milblog detailing her experiences while on deployment. More on that later - she's on my "Roll Call" to your left. If it were anyone else, this incident would've been brushed off as an isolated incident - and even that would be just plain wrong in all meanings of the word.

The Rott's Web-Tsar, the Almighty Opinionated Orator Darth Misha, said...

Such classy little wastes of perfectly good protoplasm, our Lefty “Friends”, aren’t they?

Always bleating about freedom of speech, unless the speech in question happens to be speech with which they disagree, in which case they’ll happily do anything, including the commission of a felony (yes, you purulent prickwarts, hacking into private property is a felony. Never thought about that, did you? You may have plenty of time for doing just that some day in the future if you keep it up.), in order to make sure that anybody disagreeing with them is shut up.
As always, Misha has a way with words and seldom shows any mercy in dispensing them.

The problem is that in the name of dissent, there are certain people who are willing to inflict more damage to the innocent and their own cause by vandalising someone else's private property. Grey Eagle's milblog, like the Rott and Y-2-D, is private property. In spite of offering a point of view that not everyone is willing to accept, the milblog is not harming anyone. By executing a DOS, the Enemy has lowered itself to the level of the enemies against whom Grey Eagle is fighting.

Of course, the self-proclaimed "peace activists" can't do all that on their own, nor could they make a living off their "activism". During the Vietnam War, the Soviet KGB and GRU (military intelligence) had enough resources to fund the "activists" and provide disinformation. Amazingly, that kind of tactic worked - no weapons were used in defeating the US. Former Warsaw Pact spymaster Ion Mihai Pacepa wrote about this tactic in a National Review article...

KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and "news reports" about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world.

[...] Many "Ban-the-Bomb" and anti-nuclear movements were KGB-funded operations, too. I can no longer look at a petition for world peace or other supposedly noble cause, particularly of the anti-American variety, without thinking to myself, "KGB."
I wouldn't be too surprised if the current batch of resistors have some extra "help" in their endeavours.

But back to Grey Eagle's site.

There's one section of her site that really touched me.

It was her tribute to the fallen servicewomen in the War On Terror.

It was pretty heartwrenching to see faces of women from all walks of life - students, mothers, daughters, sisters - women who made the supreme sacrifice to safeguard our freedoms and to help others attain the security that we North Americans take for granted too many times.

That alone is reason enough to respect a person's own cyberspace.

Nuff said. Out.

UPDATE (21:07 AST): I've underestimated the extent of Grey Eagle's pWn-ing...

Just to explain, as it seems to be a big question. When I add a new soldier to the tributes script/program it prints to the website "you have been hacked....Bush lied..." no matter what I type. So while it does not seem to have affected what I previously did, I cannot add anymore soldiers to my tribute. I can delete, but not add. But there have been many offers to fix or rebuild the website, which I hope to accept their offers and never have this happen again.
The Enemy shows neither mercy nor compassion: this female soldier deserves better. Support her.

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