As
Rich says, this is just one of the costs of doing dissident journalism.
If we were back in the days of the Revolution, printing Tom Paine’s
pamphlets or publishing a dissident newspaper, King George would have
sent in his dragoons to trash the place and destroy the printing press.
Nowadays, they send in hacker-wankers to root around like plague rats
with their code infections and their poison droppings, to suppress the
unfettered, unfiltered spread of information about the wicked deeds of
the high and mighty. Maybe small sites like Empire Burlesque are test
cases: low-hanging fruit, easy to pick off without anyone noticing
while refining your techniques and your deep cover modes for taking
down the bigger fish later on.
Again,
we don’t know the exact provenance of our attacks — although we’re
working on that — but one thing is certain: this kind of assault on
free expression will be a growing problem in the blogosphere, and not
just for writers in, say, China and Iran. Governments, corporations,
criminal enterprises, political parties, religious sects, terrorist
groups and all kinds of powerful factions who want to escape scrutiny
and mask their dirty deals will turn increasingly to hackers to take
down their critics, in increasingly sophisticated and insidious ways.
The age-old battle between truth and power will go on. And Empire
Burlesque will keep fighting the good fight, despite all attempts to
silence it.
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