Memo To LulzSec--Quit Screwing With Our Lives!

Like many people around the world, the Geek regularly uses the CIA's website.  In particular, he employs the resources of the World Fact Book section of the site.  It is an excellent, short compass presentation of critical basic intelligence regarding every country in the world.  As such, the Agency provides a very useful service at no direct expense to numerous people who want quick, reliable information which is both accurate and endowed with genuine utility.

In a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack today, the adolescent cyberthugs of LulzSec took down cia.gov for more than an hour.  Other than giggles it is hard to see what the group believes they accomplished by this action.  Far more certain is the contention that the DDoS attack inconvenienced any number of journalists, academics, students, bloggers, and others who had a genuine need or desire to  avail themselves of the information that LulzSec in its infinite wisdom determined was unfit for public consumption presumably due to its source.

To the unenlightened critters of LulzSec and the similarly oriented Anonymous "hacktivist" collective, the Agency is an unmitigated evil, the spawn of imperialist secrecy and corporate greed.  The reality is far, far different.

Get a grip on this LulzSec!  The Agency exists to serve the public.  While secrecy surrounds it and is quite essential for much of what it does, the Agency can and always has made products which are available to the general public and quite useful to that public.

Get a grip on this too, you key pushing punks at LulzSec.  Many Agency tasks do not require covert or clandestine means.  Most, say eighty-five percent of all the raw catch the Agency uses, comes from open sources.  This means that much of the Agency's collated and analyzed product need not be classified--and isn't.  Did you get that, cyber-twits?  Much of what the hated CIA does is there for any and all to use.

The implication is the Agency is able to provide useful accurate information to the general public as well as the president or secretaries of defense or state.  The Agency is, in fact, our agency.  Recognizing this, the Agency has long made non-classified product available to the public at large.  Often this was done without charge even in the old days of paper and ink.  Now much of the open product is immediately accessible on the web.

This open presentation of product is a very real benefit to Americans and all those around the world who care to click their way to cia.gov.  The teenage fanatics at LulzSec are either unaware of the utility and usage of the Agency's site or are so blinded by whatsoever ideology propels these jejune and puerile minds that they don't give a damn.

Further these cretins are hypocritical to the max.  LulzSec, Anonymous and the like claim they are crusaders for openness, transparency, and an absence of secrets.  When they whack at the Agency as they did today with a DDoS, they are preventing open access to information by anyone, anywhere in the world, who has access to the web (and lives in a country which does not block sites like cia.gov.)  The fine group calling itself LulzSec by its act today has both indicted and convicted itself of hypocrisy in the first degree.

The Geek doesn't know what the punishment for hypocrisy in the first degree should be but as far as he personally is concerned, the idea of breaking a laptop or two over the heads of each and every member of LulzSec would be a fine place to start.  Usually the Geek is not given to wanting law enforcement to put the cuffs on people (he is too much of an anarchist at heart for that), but when a self-appointed bunch of cyber censors takes it upon itself to interfere with the free flow of information, he finds himself rooting for the cops and wishing very much to see each and every member of LulzSec doing the perp walk.