For a very interesting treatment of the conditions of war in the internet age you might read Phil Agre's essay "Imagining the Next War: Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy." It is written 14 September 2001. A short excerpt: "The danger of "total war" against the spectre named Osama bin Laden, then, is that it will reinforce the worst tendencies in our society, and that far from preserving the conditions of democracy it will undermine the cultural and institutional foundations upon which democracy rests. It will be war without end, without boundaries, without even a coherent conception of itself save as the expression of an impulse to vengeance." http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2001/RRE.Imagining.the.Next.W.html Best, Charlie

-----Original Message----- From: air-l-admin@aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin@aoir.org] On Behalf Of Frank Thomas Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 9:51 AM To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] Denial of Service attack against al Jazeera

According to the German newsservice de. internet.com Ayman Arrashid, systems administrator of Horizons Media & Information Services, the webhost of Al-Jazeera in Qatar, said that that a denial of service attack started Tueday (local time) so that the English language websites of al Jazeera could not be reached. The server is located in the US and France. Arrashid said that after having analysed the data he thinks that the attack started in the US.

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Here's more info of off nettime:

From [undercurrents on http://bbs.thing.net] aljazeera in english

I actually heard an interesting news report tonight on Pacifica by the host of the hacker hour called OFF THE HOOK. he said that as soon as the al-jazeera site in English went up, known hackers started receiving emails from people begging them to hack into it and take it down. most of the emails came from hotmail addresses, but the hackers were able to trace many of them .mil addresses, which means US military is urging hackers to engage in the same "cyberterrorism" they want to make illegal. Coco

DNS attacks are not NEW. It is surprising that the Al-Jazeera ISP and web admins did not anticipate this kind of a response. Especially given the barrage of denunciations they have received in the US media and by US politicians. There are *known* ways to overcome DNS. They should have been smarter about it. K Guillaume Latzko-Toth wrote:

Thank you Frank for this follow-up. I hope that some investigation will be done just like when the website of eBay and co. were attacked. I would not be surprised to learn that this DoS was the fact of an individual "hacker" motivated by sheer hatred. Paradoxically, the difficulty of controlling the Internet is like a double-edged weapon: it can make happen the blooming of blogs, but in a context of high-scale misinformation/desinformation and manipulation of public opinion, it can also generate self-justice behaviors, the "cyber-Rambo" syndrome.

Guillaume

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