The Anon's Low Orbit Ion Cannon

One of the interesting elements from the "Anonymous: We are Legion" documentary was the Anon's use of the DDOS software Low Orbit Ion Cannon which included the user's Internet Service Provider address in the multiple ISP addresses which denied service to the targeted websites. The software was developed by Praetox technologies but is now open source, hosted on several platforms.

LOIC was used as part of Project Chanology, when Anonymous as a movement emerged, in their actions against the Church of Scientology. The LOIC was used additionally in Operation Payback, in response to organizations' refusals to process donations to WikiLeaks.

That the LOIC logged the user's own IP meant that the perpetrators of the DDOS attacks could be easily identified by the FBI which led to a series of arrests. It brought home the virtual to that of reality and shifted the balance in favour of the authorities because Anon's actions had real life consequences, and as the first wave of perpetrators, it is possible that sentences handed down will be severe in order to deter further and more creative acts against organizations and governments. Some of the offenders are faced with maximum Federal punishments of 15-year jail sentences.

Anons have attacked the Church of Scientology, Mastercard, Visa, government websites amongst other entities and recently had a publicised fall out with WikiLeaks over its pay-per-view bar on new material, which was subsequently taken down. The political character of such a disparate movement is necessarily diffuse and hence the message becomes muddied. Anonymous have released a video decrying Obama's record but with a lack of viable alternatives. Criticism is one thing but offering solutions is something else entirely, and is the necessary next phase of a manifesto.

Hacktivism

Given the recent claim by Anonymous that they have outed the internet stalker of Amanda Todd, here's a brilliant documentary on the hacktivist collection.

NYT interactive timeline of Persia and US relations

Interactive timeline from the New York Times

Final report of the Iran Project on the character military conflict with Iran might assume.

Biddle, Friedman, Shapiro on The Surge

It's controversial, and arguments about it have spilled out on such sites as Kings of War, Line of Departure and Small Wars Journal, so it's worth commenting on when the august journal International Security leads with "Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?"

The narrative is by now familiar. From 2004 to mid 2007 Iraq was violent, then it became relatively calm. Relative calm is just that, relative. The authors do well to note that Iraq today "is no Garden of Eden". Operational execution of suicide bombing has increased in proficiency to the extent that detonations now invariably cause deaths between 50-100 people in the country. Police stations are still highly desirable targets.

So what of the surge? It draws argument because of the concatenation of circumstances and the various narratives at play. It was the start of population-centric coin en masse; FM 3-24 had been published in December 2006. So COIN doctrine was necessarily foregrounded in US policy circles as having reduced violence from 2007 onwards.

David H. Ucko wrote an article in PRISM, the NDU's journal in which he considered factors at play in the reduction of violence in Iraq in 2007, but this new article by Biddle et alia is by far the most comprehensive examination of the matter using declassified Significant Activity charts (SIGACTs) to provide a quantitative aspect to the analysis.

The conclusion? Quite mainstream. The surge itself is an insufficient explanation as to the violence reduction witnessed, rather it remains the most likely answer that it was a dynamic between the Awakening of tribal units coupled with the increase in manpower afforded the US military on the ground. Indeed, as regards academic debate on the influence of the surge, Biddle et alia decide that "Our analysis, however, suggests a mixed verdict." Which points to the problem of human variables and the insufficiency of current quantitative analysis to examine such variables. We can only try and Biddle at alia's article is the best attempt yet to assess the surge.