[conspiringguy]

Every time I hear about LulzSec, I say "Conspiracy Theory Time" before I read the HN comments page. Finally I have some worthy conspiracy which I think no one has posted before. It goes something like this.

Axioms:

1. Most of the geeks and internet privacy aware people in America hate the American government. If not hate, they at least despise them for most of their new internet policies.

2. Out of these people there are a lot of smart teenagers and young men/women. This is the age where most of the sociologists (I don't know if that is the correct term, just read it as parents or people who have PhDs and study this kind of things) believe that this is the age where they are most impressionable. And more so if the idea is rebellious, that too at the highest level.

3. Terrorists are not a bunch of fools who don't know how to use a dvd player. Most of the times they are capable of carrying out sophisticated internet attacks. Also they have strategists competent enough to take on US intelligence. (Not very sure of the last sentence but who am I to suck the fun out of this).

4. After 9/11 it has become increasingly hard for the terrorists to do bomb blasts or other such activities. Also suicide bombers make recruiting a pain.

5. Terrorists hate America.

Hypothesis:

The chief aim of terrorists is to make you people's (read American's) life miserable. They used to do it with short term impact plans like bombs. One bomb and america is terrorised for around a year or max for two. Make them hate their own government and they would be terrorised for life. Well terrorised is not a very good word for it, but pedestrian word for massive pain in the rear end of human body is not allowed on HN. So they devise a new scheme. They start riding on the current AnonSec wave. While AnonSec did it for a cause (the wikileaks thing) they would say they did it for the lulz. Now the group is supposed to be an all american group but anyone can be anyone on the internet. Also doing it for the lulz sounds more rebellious. So more and more rebellious and smart to some level kids join lulzSec. In some time they may have an army of them. Then they would really start acting up and randomly deface the government site. The cyber crime department (whatever it is called in US of A) is spread thin looking for these young brats who are doing all this DDoS attacks. They may do a real attack on american security then or just sit back and enjoy while americans fight each other in a kind of civil war. As an added bonus here, the government, under the fear of such acts, will make new laws restricting internet use. This will further annoy people and make new LulzSec recruits. So the terrorists groups have their very own "Vicious Cycle". At this point all the terrorists will go "Whoopie".

Refutations:

1. I don't know but I think the government sites are not hosted on the same server as the other high security services. So DDoSing them will be just an annoyance. But still people shiver at the headline "Hackers successfully take down CIA website".

2. Government cyber crime unit is not that small that they are spread thin with just few DDoS attacks. Someone will have to help me out here as I have no idea if this is right or wrong.

Please feel free to come up with more refutations.

[jb55]

Most of these arguments (and most other conspiracy theories) can be shot down as just another instance of the Conjunction fallacy/Occam's Razor. The probability of a single event is always greater or equal to the probability of both events: P(A) >= P(A&B) where event A is 'Rebellious hacker teens' and event A&B is 'Rebellious hacker teens recruited by terrorists'.

[premchai21]

While the latter is logically true, one has to be careful. It may be easy to erroneously interpret that as comparing “rebellious hacker teens not recruited by terrorists” and “rebellious hacker teens recruited by terrorists”, which pair has no such guaranteed monotonicity.

[conspiringguy]

I didn't understand shit about all the high level math/CS stuff you two just discussed. But what I do understand is this. Whenever there is a possibility of government or terrorist organisations gaining immensely from something more often than not one of them is involved. This can either be a false alarm operation or something done by terrorists. But apart from that there are many small ways they can be involved. Like the government will ignore such activities (not investigate it fully to their power) then let it grow to such large a proportion so that they can justify their new restrictive Internet act.

OTOH, the terrorists may not be involved initially but they may send in some of their cyber force to help organizations like LulzSec so that they can help american people take down their own infrastructure. We should not forget that AnonSec did take down many payment portals to some level.LulzSec took down sony also. What is stopping LulzSec to go full blown DDoS on payment portals? If Al-Quida or other cyber aware terrorist organisation gives them a botnet or two god knows what they might do.