Goldmark: Future threat -- E-distributors
When I try to imagine what the WikiLeaks team looked like working together, I conjure up something between a library and an old-fashioned newsroom. I envision lots of people bent over computers, masses of written or digitalized material piled in corners or overflowing on shelves -- and the insistent click-clack of keyboards as everybody works intently toward a common objective against a shared deadline.
Of course, that's all wrong -- it all happens in the virtual world. WikiLeakers probably don't even see each other, they just communicate, under aliases, on the computer or through mobile phones.
Now a group named Anonymous has been in the news. One of its members had purportedly been kidnapped. By shuffling around the Web I learned that apparently anyone who believes in the cause can intervene on behalf of Internet freedom, freedom of speech and related issues, and designate himself or herself as a member of Anonymous.
A video posted on YouTube in October by someone in a mask claiming to be from Anonymous, said that in Vera Cruz, Mexico, a member of Anonymous was kidnapped by the Mexican drug cartel known as Zeta. The video threatened that if the kidnapped Anonymous hacker were not freed, then Anonymous would make public the names and addresses of police officers, taxi drivers, journalists and others who cooperate with the Zeta drug cartel -- the implicit threat being that once these names are made public, the individuals will be arrested by the Mexican federal police or targeted by rival cartels.
On Friday, however, Anonymous called off the campaign, saying the kidnapped member had been released and that Zeta had threatened to kill 10 people for each name revealed.
Still, we are on fascinating new ground here. The basic pattern is an old one: vigilante justice. The rationale is self-help in the face of official indifference or incompetence. The threat is public disclosure of information. And the arena for all this is the Web -- where it is often difficult to verify what is real and what is not.
I try to put the following phenomena together in my imagination: WikiLeaks, Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous. And when I do, where I get to is this: Somewhere out there in cyberspace, waiting to be born or perhaps already germinating in embryonic form, is a group that will take international hacktivism to a whole new level.
They will try to gain access to the computers of financial institutions like banks, and the registers of government organizations involved in income support such as Social Security, and they'll take it upon themselves to redistribute a portion of the wealth that they say is being unfairly accumulated by the rich in our society.
Imagine a group of hackers that gets into the computers of Citibank and distributes 1 percent of the value of the largest individual accounts in the bank to the poorest recipients of Social Security or disability insurance. This would make Occupy Wall Street look like a high school essay contest in comparison.
I have no doubt that Citibank and other financial institutions have bristling and sophisticated safeguards installed to protect their computer systems. But there were safeguards that should have prevented WikiLeaks from obtaining the federal government's diplomatic cable systems. And it was no doubt hard for Anonymous to obtain the names of those who have been cooperating with a specific drug cartel in Mexico. So I wouldn't bet that the gang seeking to redistribute a little of what they consider "excess and unreasonably gained" wealth would not be able to get into somebody's computer system and do it.
And who knows -- maybe they'll call themselves Robin E-Hood.
Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.
