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Militant Electronic Piracy

Militant Electronic Piracy:

Non-Violent Insurgency Tactics Against the American Corporate State

Written by Kevin Flaherty



http://www.cryptogon.com

Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards.



So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.



Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.



-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

my revolutionary deeds are not as obvious as yours

i contribute to the core of a technological war

that exists where no eyes can see



-Anonymous (Female) Hacker/Pirate



DISCLAIMER



This essay is an examination of an emerging form of asymmetric warfare; a look at the situation on the ground. Taken out of context, the following material might appear to some as a, “terrorist operations manual.” It isn't. Operational information has been intentionally excluded.



I've never advocated violence or breaking the law, but I know that those facts don't matter under a system of overt fascism. Even so, I'm stating, clearly and emphatically, that what follows is intended for educational use only.



Hopefully, this disclaimer will be remembered if an attempt is made to pull my words out of context. This file includes a GPG signature; proof that this disclaimer was included at the time of publication. Any attempt to modify the content of this message will cause the electronic signature verification scheme to fail and provide evidence of tampering.



INTRODUCTION



The germ of this essay was a Wired article about electronic piracy called, “The Shadow Internet.”1 The following Cryptogon analysis will focus on the nature of insurgency in the U.S. and critical national security aspects of electronic piracy that the article failed to address.



The Wired article does not mention that there is now a strong ideological motivation driving some actors in the piracy scene. Back in the 1980s, piracy was mostly for the fun of it, as the article indicates. Now, though, some militant anarchists see piracy as a way of bankrupting corporations and view their activities as a form of warfare against corporations and the governments that serve them. The supporting material for this statement is available on the Internet. I will not provide direct links to information related to the operational aspects of militant electronic piracy because doing so could subject me to criminal prosecution.2



This analysis will use the term “militant electronic piracy” to refer to the high level, massive theft and distribution of copyrighted material for purposes of politico-economic warfare. This may be viewed in stark contrast to the more ubiquitous activity of “file trading,” where individuals use peer-to-peer software to download music, movies and software for free. Casual file traders ascribe no political motivation whatsoever to their actions. “The American Corporate State,” (ACS) refers to the existing power structure in the U.S. This system is characterized by the fascist convergence of corporate and government interests.3



In order to understand the national security implications of militant electronic piracy, an examination of conventional insurgency against the American Corporate State is necessary.



THE NATURE OF ARMED INSURGENCY AGAINST THE ACS



Any violent insurgency against the ACS is sure to fail and will only serve to enhance the state's power. The major flaw of violent insurgencies, both cell based (Weathermen Underground, Black Panthers, Aryan Nations etc.) and leaderless (Earth Liberation Front, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, etc.) is that they are attempting to attack the system using the same tactics the ACS has already mastered: terror and psychological operations. The ACS attained primacy through the effective application of terror and psychological operations. Therefore, it has far more skill and experience in the use of these tactics than any upstart could ever hope to attain.4 This makes the ACS impervious to traditional insurgency tactics.



- Political Activism and the ACS Counterinsurgency Apparatus



The ACS employs a full time counterinsurgency infrastructure with resources that are unimaginable to most would be insurgents. Quite simply, violent insurgents have no idea of just how powerful the foe actually is. Violent insurgents typically start out as peaceful, idealistic, political activists. Whether or not political activists know it, even with very mundane levels of political activity, they are engaging in low intensity conflict with the ACS.



The U.S. military classifies political activism as “low intensity conflict.” The scale of warfare (in terms of intensity) begins with individuals distributing anti-government handbills and public gatherings with anti-government/anti-corporate themes. In the middle of the conflict intensity scale are what the military refers to as Operations Other than War; an example would be the situation the U.S. is facing in Iraq. At the upper right hand side of the graph is global thermonuclear war. What is important to remember is that the military is concerned with ALL points along this scale because they represent different types of threats to the ACS.



Making distinctions between civilian law enforcement and military forces, and foreign and domestic intelligence services is no longer necessary. After September 11, 2001, all national security assets would be brought to bare against any U.S. insurgency movement. Additionally, the U.S. military established NORTHCOM which designated the U.S. as an active military operational area. Crimes involving the loss of corporate profits will increasingly be treated as acts of terrorism and could garner anything from a local law enforcement response to activation of regular military forces.



Most of what is commonly referred to as “political activism” is viewed by the corporate state's counterinsurgency apparatus as a useful and necessary component of political control.



Letters-to-the-editor...

Calls-to-elected-representatives...

Waving banners...

“Third” party political activities...

Taking beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas from riot police in free speech zones...



Political activism amounts to an utterly useless waste of time, in terms of tangible power, which is all the ACS understands. Political activism is a cruel guise that is sold to people who are dissatisfied, but who have no concept of the nature of tangible power. Counterinsurgency teams routinely monitor these activities, attend the meetings, join the groups and take on leadership roles in the organizations.



It's only a matter of time before some individuals determine that political activism is a honeypot that accomplishes nothing and wastes their time. The corporate state knows that some small percentage of the peaceful, idealistic, political activists will eventually figure out the game. At this point, the clued-in activists will probably do one of two things; drop out or move to escalate the struggle in other ways.



If the clued-in activist drops his or her political activities, the ACS wins.



But what if the clued-in activist refuses to give up the struggle? Feeling powerless, desperation could set in and these individuals might become increasingly radicalized. Because the corporate state's counterinsurgency operatives have infiltrated most political activism groups, the radicalized members will be easily identified, monitored and eventually compromised/turned, arrested or executed. The ACS wins again.



- ACS Full-Spectrum PSYOP Dominance



The ACS wields the most powerful weapon of political control the world has ever seen: the mass media. This is the corporate state's trump card against leaderless resistance movements which are impossible to infiltrate and compromise by counter-insurgency teams. The appearance of legitimacy is all that matters in a low intensity conflict, and the ACS, with the corporate media running continuous propaganda and perception management campaigns, represents the final solution to what the public will view as legitimate.5



All anti-corporate/anti-government political activism will be portrayed by the ACS as lunatic muckraking and a potential hotbed of terrorism. All violent insurgency activities will be portrayed as terrorist acts. (Some criminal activity is now considered terrorism by the ACS.) The behavior of the ACS will be represented as just, measured and prudent, regardless of the ghastly nature of its atrocities. The general population will be bombarded with images, sound bites and articles about the threats posed by the “terrorists.” In other words, the population, rather then fearing the state and its continuous cryptofascist operations and more overt international war crimes and economic exploitation, will come to view the insurgents as a threat and the ACS as their savior. The ACS can punctuate the point by unleashing false flag terror incidents on the population while conveniently blaming any organization it wishes, including other states.6 The general population will respond by supporting: foreign wars, the diminution of individual rights, and legislation and funding that adds to the power of the corporate state.



Some simple analogies might help to clarify the realities facing an armed insurgency in the United States.



Could a 5 year old beat a university mathematics professor in a mathematics contest?



Could an ape beat a grand champion at chess?



Could a high school basketball team beat the Los Angeles Lakers at basketball?



Could an armed insurgency overthrow the American Corporate State?



The obvious answer to all of these questions is: NO.



Some insurgents, having determined that terror and psyops will obviously fail against the ACS, sought out other means of attacking this extremely powerful foe.



MILITANT ELECTRONIC PIRACY: MILITARY-STYLE DAMAGE WITH NON-VIOLENT TACTICS



High level electronic piracy (massive intellectual property theft and distribution) has the potential to inflict "military-style" damage to the American Corporate State.



What does military-style damage mean in this context?



- Bankrupt ACS



The ACS is quite literally bankrupt, yet it continues to function do to an increasing flow of foreign capital that serves to finance its unimaginable levels of debt.7 If an insurgency was able to slow the flow of capital to corporations, by any means, the revenue loss could eventually cause reverberations throughout the economy that would be catastrophic for the ACS and the wider system of institutionalized theft commonly referred to as “global capitalism.” According to Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the Business Software Alliance, “Software piracy continues to be a major challenge for economies worldwide. From Algeria to New Zealand, Canada to China, piracy deprives local governments of tax revenue, costs jobs throughout the technology supply chain and cripples the local, in-country software industry.”8



If any non-violent insurgency could cause serious and sustained economic damage to major components of the ACS, the resulting chaos might resemble the results of a strategic military attack, complete with infrastructure breakdown, food shortages and the collapse of government authority. This is not to say that militant electronic piracy would be the primary cause of the collapse of the ACS. Piracy might, however, serve as the straw, or one of several straws, the breaks the camel's back.



- Casual Downloaders Unknowingly Assist Insurgency



In the most simple terms, the less money individuals spend, the faster the collapse of the ACS will occur. The ubiquity of peer-to-peer file trading tools provides non-technical computer users point-and-click access to massive amounts of music, movies and software. The militant electronic pirates are intelligent. They know most people are lazy and will never---willingly---do anything to fight the status quo, in terms of tangible power.



Do casual downloaders think they are throwing Molotov cocktails at a TimeWarner building or blowing up a Walmart each time they download music or movies from the Internet for free? No, the average p2p user isn't thinking along these lines. But every legitimate purchase that isn't made as a result of electronic piracy drives another nail into the coffin of the American Corporate State. At what point does electronic piracy move from being an annoyance for profit hungry corporations to a national security matter?



- Militant Electronic Piracy Operations



Militant electronic piracy operations may be carried out by anti-corporate computer experts in any geographic location on the planet. Whereas armed insurgents face physical and public relations impossibilities of using political violence successfully, militant electronic pirates, on the other hand, can more effectively control the battle space using security hardened software tools (all of which are available for free). On the Internet, militant electronic pirates possess capabilities that are more congruent to the corporate state than the most sophisticated armed insurgency group could ever hope to attain in the conventional military sphere.



By using electronic piracy as a mode of attack, pirates are able to inflict tens of billions of dollars worth of damages per year against the ACS.9 This is an astonishing proof of the validity of this mode of attack versus violent operations. Violent insurgency groups, such as the Earth Liberation Front, have only managed to inflict tens of million dollars worth of damage to the ACS over their entire lifetimes.



Additionally, pirates do tangible damage to the ACS with little to fear in the way of a public relations backlash. The ACS has had difficulty in generating public concern for the losses of maniacal corporations, primarily because no unpleasant spin---such as news video of anti-corporate rioting and chaos---is possible. Militant electronic piracy represents a silent, continuous and costly attack on the ACS. Contrast this to violent insurgency tactics, which amount only to symbolic pinpricks against the ACS and are accompanied by wholly untenable public relations consequences.



Militant electronic pirates enjoy the benefits of being able to conduct their operations in a virtual battlefield. Stealth is obtainable through the use of encryption and other techniques that are not suitable for discussion in an essay of this type. As a result, authorities face great difficulty in trying to interdict high level pirates. According to a recent Associated Press article:

The groups are typically very hierarchical, with tiers of leadership, said John Malcolm, head of the Motion Picture Association of America's antipiracy unit.



"There are many of them out there, highly organized, very clandestine," Malcolm said. "They're tough nuts to crack."



Authorities don't have a fix on how many groups exist.



"There are a lot of similarities with the drug war," said David Israelite, chairman of the U.S. Justice Department's Intellectual Property Task Force. "You never really are going to eliminate the problem, but what you hope to do is stop its growth."10

With the continuous increase in the use of broadband Internet connections, the base of the piracy pyramid---the casual downloaders---will only continue to grow in size. New peer-to-peer filetrading tools and specialized firewalls (all available for free) increasingly protect users at the base of the pyramid from ACS interdiction efforts. A small number of insurgent seed nodes can, in a very short period of time, spread files further down toward the ever expanding (and well defended) base of the pyramid, causing an unstoppable flood of shared files. It's not clear which task would be more daunting for the ACS: attempting to apprehend tens of millions of individual downloaders, or attempting to take down a loose network of several thousand hard-core, militant pirates with computer skills that are commensurate with intelligence agency information warfare experts.



- Just Kids Having Fun?



The assertion in some media (the Wired article, for example) that high level electronic piracy is just-a-bunch-of-kids-out-for-a-good-time is ludicrous. Without a doubt, at the lower levels, a horde of generally clueless users is just looking for free music, movies and software. But at the node level and above, things are much more interesting. It's difficult to imagine individuals taking on different multi-billion dollar industries (represented by RIAA-Music, MPAA-Movies, BSA-Software), the mercenaries hired by these industries (Overpeer, etc.) and the U.S. Government just for the fun of it. The ACS is dedicating increasing energy to thwarting high level electronic piracy. The U.S. Department of Justice agent above compared electronic piracy to the drug war! Clearly, it's not all fun and games for high level electronic pirates. It's war.



THE ACS RESPONSE



The ACS will become increasingly reckless as it nears the abyss of economic collapse. It will lash out against enemies, real and perceived, in expected and unexpected ways. As for the pirates, they're already classified as terrorists.11 They should expect the ACS to escalate the operations against them.



Expect a legislated, “national security” justification for Microsoft's long awaited (and dreaded) Digital Rights Management scheme, codenamed Longhorn. Microsoft will tout Longhorn as the solution to piracy and other “terrorist” uses of computers and the Internet. Besides turning each computer into a tamper proof vending machine (this will mean The End of general purpose computing), Longhorn will provide an astonishing surveillance capability to ACS law enforcement, intelligence and military organizations. Those who refuse to use Longhorn will increasingly find themselves locked out of networks. The goal will be to apply maximum surveillance and control to “trusted” users on the Internet.



CONCLUSION



Militant electronic pirates can successfully obtain military-style results from their activities.12 An insurgency based on militant electronic piracy is viable (and preferable to violent tactics) for several reasons. Militant electronic pirates cause orders of magnitude greater damage to the ACS than violent insurgencies. And they do so while avoiding much of the impossible-to-manage public relations disaster that surrounds violent tactics. Pirates use a virtual battlespace for most of their activities; they can attack and maneuver without too much fear of being physically apprehended by authorities. Militant electronic piracy takes advantage of the massive force multiplication effect of tens of millions of low level cadres (casual downloaders) who don't even understand the implications of what they're doing.



With a foe as powerful as the ACS, violent insurgents face an impossible struggle. Militant electronic piracy offers a much more viable and effective mode of combat to insurgents, both as groups and as individuals.



Notes:

1The Shadow Internet, by Jeff Howe, Wired, Issue 13.01, 1/2005, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html

2It might be useful to think of militant electronic piracy as a more extreme form of hacktivism. In any event, the following page about hacktivism describes the philosophical underpinnings of what is driving militant pirates without providing operational information: http://www.thehacktivist.com/hacktivism.php

3Hundreds of books and thousands of Internet sites have documented this process. When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten is probably the best single volume treatment of the subject.

4Low Intensity Warfare represents a nexus of insurgency, counterinsurgency and psychological operations. Detailing this massive area of inquiry is far beyond the scope of this essay. Some useful materials are: U.S. Army Field Manual FM 100-20, Military Operations in Low Intensity Conflict, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/100-20/index.html; documents on the Information Warfare PSYOP site, http://www.iwar.org.uk/psyops; and Low-intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping by General Sir Frank Kitson.

5Mindwar by U.S. Army Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Aquino.

6The Hidden Face of Terrorism: The Dark Side of Social Engineering, from Antiquity to September 11 by Paul David Collins and Fake Terror: The Road to Dictatorship, http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/9-11/FakeTerror.html

7Trouble Ahead-Trouble Behind: Restructuring the Global Economy, a New Marshall Plan by Chris P. Dialynas, http://www.pimco.com/LeftNav/Latest%20Publications/2004/Dialynas%20Paper.htm

9Ibid. The Business Software Alliance claims that 36% of installed software worldwide is pirated, accounting for a loss to corporations of $29 billion in 2003. Also in 2003, the music industry estimated that it lost $4.3 billion per year do to piracy. The film industry estimated their losses at about $4 billion. See: Calif. Government Condemns Online Music, Film Piracy, AP, 4/2/2003, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2003-04-02-calif-piracy_x.htm

10Covert Online Groups Behind Bulk of Bootlegged Movies, Music, Software, by Alex Veiga, Associated Press, 1/3/05, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2973771

11There are several stories on this. The following Google search yields hundreds of entries related to online piracy and terrorism: (software OR music OR movie) piracy terrorism

12To what end? It appears that the goal is to collapse the system, not replace it with a different system.