As we slowly slip-slide down the slope that leads to increasing government control of the Internet, with politicians demanding an Internet kill switch and the ability to yank whole domains out of DNS on the say-so of the Attorney-General (or his friends in the MPAA and RIAA), the FBI has offered us another glimpse of what the brave new cyber-policed future holds for us, with a raid on service provider DigitalOne. The guardians of law and order on the electronic frontier apparently showed up with a warrant and proceeded to impound machinery, seizing, according to the New York Times, “three enclosures” worth of servers. Among the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire were DigitalOne themselves, the excellent pinboard.in bookmarking service, Instapaper and Curbed Network. Pinboard and Instapaper were able to stay online, but Curbed seems to be definitively down. None of those named are thought to be targets of the FBI raid.
The actual targets are unknown at this time, but the rumor mill says that the operation was probably aimed at Internet bad-boys-of-the-week, LulzSec. If so, it’s a predictable response to the recent burst of grand-standing by the top-hatted japesters. Just as Osama bin Laden and his homicidal pals are part of the reason we can’t fly from Dallas to Chicago without having the TSA put their blue-gloved hands in places that are usually off-limits to all but our very closest friends, scofflaw attention-seekers doing it for the lulz furnish ample pretexts for legislation and police actions designed to impose some law and order on the anarchic ‘net. If your children ask you why we can’t have nice things on the Internet any more, remember to thank the hackers (along with the spammers, the music downloaders and other solid citizens) for creating the moral outrage among the legislating classes needed to make Joe Lieberman’s American Networking Authority for the Legislative Restriction of Antisocial Persons and Environments (ANAL-RAPE) Act, 2014, a reality.
I don’t know what redress the average citizen has when the Man decides that it’s in the public interest to grab everything that draws power within an eighteen-foot radius of a suspected malefactor. Those who’ve been taken down by the FBI’s IRL denial-of-service attack may be faced with significant costs and/or loss of revenue, but I somehow doubt they’ll be getting a check and an apologetic note on Bureau stationery for their trouble. Probably the best they can hope for is to get their servers back in a few weeks.
The mood of the moment among the powers-that-be is that the Internet Must Be Controlled. While our leaders pay lip-service to the role of the Internet in mobilizing the people of North Africa and the Middle East to throw off the chains of tyranny, they view the properties of the Internet that made that possible - freedom from central control, anonymity, privacy of communication - as deeply undesirable. As state control of the Internet becomes more entrenched, we can expect to see more innocents ‘inconvenienced’ by over-zealous enforcement. Today’s raid is not so much an aberration as a model for what may become commonplace.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine your servers being loaded into the back of a police van … forever.
