Azelma wrote:
My question is, what are they accomplishing?
When they hack into sites and take them down for a few days for "teh lulz" are they really causing any significant change?
Terrorism serves a definite purpose.
First, it arouses controversy. It making a stir, and that's a start. People start thinking, talking. It undermines authority and that is something that can snowball surprisingly rapidly. There are many, many historical examples of this; almost all successful revolutions begin with small challenges to authority that gradually ratchet up.
Challenging the capacity of authority to maintain internal security stretches its resources and taxes its mandate ever thinner. Every asset must be protected; every face must be questioned; every decision, every program, every effort, becomes ever more ponderous.
Quote:
Think of an insecure autocratic state...like a pipe really prone to leaks. So in an effort to isolate individual leaks to keep the entire pipe safe, you create a series of safety valves, redundant transfers, troughs to collect leaked fluid, and hire a staff to maintain it. But the leaks keep becoming more frequent. So you have to add even more valves and more redundancy.
But every valve you add slows the flow, is itself inherently leaky because a valve is by its very nature a discontinuity in the pipe, and every time your staff stops to service the pipe, they have to shut down the flow, leak some more fluid so they can do their work.
And of course you have to vet the staff, make sure they're not in on it. Then you have to vet the vetters. And every member of the staff has an incentive to use this whole system for his own advantage. The bigger the system gets, the more unwieldy it becomes, the more prone to abuse it becomes, the bigger it has to become to compensate for its own faults.
After a while, you spend so much effort on keeping this leaky pipe system working, it doesn't even do whatever it is it's designed to do.
In the long term, having to defend against constant threats to security divides state from people and impedes the capacity of the state to service the status quo, precipitating political upheaval. The word
stasis in ancient Greek is often used to mean "political upheaval" for this very reason.
Case examples: Fall of the Wall, Egyptian Spring, Iran 1979, pre-Balfour Judaea
Azelma wrote:
Are they doing anything other than trolling the employees who then have to work to get everything back up and running again?
What a ludicrous argument. It's remarks like this that really make you out to be a pussy.
"In war, one attacks one's enemies."
Employees? Getting paid to perform a task instantly makes one the object of sympathy?
So would you say that US forces should take off their boots and tread on eggshells when they storm Saddam's palace, God forbid the housekeepers should be overly taxed cleaning up the mud and broken furniture? Is the labor and expense of rebuilding German and Japanese cities shattered in a war is somehow a count against the efforts to defeat those who the
reason for the war?
Never mind of course that in those examples and virtually all others, people actually got shot. This is the most bloodless, benign sort of warfare imaginable yet you're talking about the human cost like it's the Rape of Belgium or Nanjing or something.
So why even make such a ludicrous argument, Azelma?
Why, causally, does it occur to you to feel sympathy for the poor employees who must tend to the blood and carnage on mutilated servers and defaced software?
