[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.