When hacking is an act of war. Guccifer extradited to US.

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By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

We all know that the US capitalist class has a policy. This policy allows the US military industrial complex to take out any individual or group of individuals that even think of harming US corporate interests no matter where they are in the world.  These assassinations are normally carried out by unmanned drones that are necessary to avoid the loss of US lives as US capitalism’s global violence is not really popular with its own citizenry. But at least their attention won’t be unduly affected if their sons and daughters aren’t killed and the media can keep us occupied and the news censored or presented in such a way that we feel threatened enough to stay put.

The US bourgeois is the most violent of all of them and have the military might to prove it. But there is a problem.  The cyber warriors, those dissenters, a mixture of anarchist, libertarian, socialist leaning types (it’s hard for me to define their actual political character) are making it difficult for the ruling class to get on with business.

One of their main enemies is Julian Assange and Wikileaks. This organization has tapped in to their private conversations revealing their phony diplomacy for what it really is, a whole system of lies and deceit.  But capitalism cannot exist without lies and deceit. It is built on lies and deceit.  From the history books they publish to the media they control they construct a world that serves their interests.

Modern history, which is a history of the daily struggle between the oppressed classes and the class that has state power in its hands, a struggle that breaks out periodically in open violent clashes and at times a change in how society is structured, appears as a series of events and dates unconnected to each other until we arrive at the present, the end of civilization as Francis Fukuyama once told us.

Their politicians that we elect every four or so years cannot possibly tell us the truth, that they are continuing to take back from the working class all that we have won over a century or more, that their mass murder in foreign lands is all about profit and plunder as opposed to the defense of freedom and other such nonsense. Who would bother to vote at all? In fact this is what happens as more and more people withdraw from the process, we know they’re lying but many people attribute this to personality traits, to character flaws, this too is part of their lies and deceit.  We are not supposed to think in terms of a social system, a system of production except when we talk about the collapse of Stalinism. Then they refer this monstrous system as a failure of the “communist” system. When capitalism fails the word "crony" is placed in front of it.

But the hackers and cyber warriors are a problem.  A social system that functions through lies and deception cannot allow organizations like Wikileaks and individuals like Assange, Manning and Snowden to do what they did, we have already commented on this. But it is Wikileaks and Assange that is the biggest threat. 

And while Assange is not a socialist as far as I can tell, it is not hyperbole to compare his

situation to that of Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution who was hounded by

Stalin and eventually murdered by a Stalinist assassin. Assange has been given asylum in Ecuador but is being prevented from leaving that country’s embassy in London by the British government under pressure from the US. There is no doubt that the US would assassinate Assange at the first opportunity. US politicians have made that known publicly.

So what we have termed a cyber class war is being fought and socialists in particular must recognize the importance of this.  In May of this year, Mike Rounds, a Republican Senator from South Dakota writing in the Wall Street Journal called for policies to deal with, “a new type of warfare in cyberspace…” and that it is, “…emerging as a top threat to America.”

Rounds calls for the policies presently in place for responding to a military attack to be “broadened to include the cyber domain.” He wants to define a cyber attack as “An act of war” . “I think that would be extremely helpful.”, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency says of the suggestion.

Rounds has introduced the Cyber Act of War that will require the government to define what constitutes and act of war. We know the danger in this as a man on a camel in Yemen can apparently be declaring war on the US merely by thinking about how nice it would be if the US government would stop interfering in his county’s affairs.

I see that the hacker Guccifer, who allegedly hacked in to Hillary Clinton’s account as well as the Bush family Colin Powell and others and allegedly shared the information with the public has been identified and sentenced to four plus year in prison. His name is Marcel Lazar and he was extradited from Romania by the US. He was a cab driver with no connection to the Russians from what I understand. We have to ask: Is Kissinger to be extradited to Vietnam for his mass murder there: Bush to Iraq, Obama, Rumsfeld Cheney, et al to Afghanistan?

The NSA spies on the rest of us at will. We are hounded through every sort of media by companies that want to sell us their services and other crap. Facebook complies data on us and personal profiles. Companies find out about our likes and dislikes through social media and communicate with us whether we like it or not.

Naturally, myself along with most people reading this would believe in a person’s right to privacy. I for one am not interested in the consensual sex lives, or goings on between private individuals. But that’s not what bothers them. What bothers them and why Assange and Wikileaks is such a threat is that the class nature of society is exposed from beneath the cloak of obscurity that hides it. What we already believe in the abstract becomes social fact and when this happens it increases the likelihood that people will act on it.