Monday, May 14, 2012

Anonymous: We Have Access to Every Secret Government Database

Anonymous: We Have Access to Every Secret Government Database

Anonymous has been meek and quiet since the great Sabu treachery, failing to even threaten much of anything. But in a new interview, one of the group's last remaining leaders says Anon has a nuclear card up its sleeve.

Christopher "Commander X" Doyon, whose name is public because he's been busted for hacking a California government website, sat for an interview with the National Post. The exchange circles mostly around Doyon's exile in Canada, where he's hoping to dodge the wrath of American feds. But he ends on one particularly ominous and/or laughable note:

Q. What's next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It's a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn't hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

On the face of it, this is an absurd claim. "Every classified database in the U.S. government" is an outrageously ambitious catch, almost surely too vast to be possible—did someone from literally every government agency sell out to Anonymous? All of them? Even one cache would be a huge feat—see Cablegate—but all of them? It reeks of a tall tale, particularly from an organization with a serious credibility problem (remember when they said they were going to end Mexican drug cartels? Right).

But Doyon's lesser point, that the next great Anonymous coup would be an inside job, is entirely plausible:

The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don't run anything anymore. It's the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that.

Commander X is right: it's amazingly easy for anyone with access to powerful data to spread that data around. So while Anon likely isn't sitting on the collective knowledge of every secret filing cabinet in the United States government, they could have their mitts on some of them. And that alone still makes them dangerous as hell. [National Post]

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