By Nate Anderson
A decade after Chris "Commander X" Doyon skipped out on a federal hacking charge and fled the country, the long arm of US law enforcement this week stretched out its hand and plucked him from Mexico City, where he had claimed political asylum. Doyon now faces all of the original charges for coordinating a 2010 High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) DDoS attack on servers belonging to Santa Cruz, California, plus a serious new charge for jumping bail.
This has been a surprising turn of events for the homeless hacktivist, who spent his years first in Canada and then in Mexico issuing press releases, hanging out on Twitter, writing a self-published memoir, appearing in documentaries, and meeting up with journalists like me - all without apparent response from the US government.
This obvious witch hunt was thought up by the same impotent bureaucrats who brought us the sideshow of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy, and it's just the beginning of lots of intimidation and morality plays that are the Democrat's payback to the Internet's major players - payback for helping to elect Joe Biden.
The fact is that the Internet, and American data processing in general, are both frighteningly vulnerable to attacks by knowledgeable and well-supported bad actors, both foreign and domestic. The fact is that the major Internet players don't have any idea how to stop it, and they aren't willing to suffer the losses which the major redesign of every Internet protocol would require.
The fact is that every bit of security now in use on the Internet was an add-on that has been nailed to the frames of protocols and procedures that are over forty years old, and even the most well-planned and well-thought-out efforts to keep the net safe from attack have foundered on the rocks in the average users' head.
For now, our Effa-bee-eye and Secret Service PR teems are swinging into action, decisively demonstrating to every child with an above-average IQ that Uncle Sam is a vidictive and vicious copy of the Wizard of Oz: ready, willing, and able to demand that we all ignore the man behind the curtain.
Bill Horne Moderator