Dirty Tricks Division
This morning’s news featured an article on a curious problem in Estonia. Somebody—it’s not clear who, although fingers are pointing to Moscow—is sabotaging government websites by overloading their capacity to respond to requests. Whoever is doing it isn’t just some punk hacker; according to the Estonian minister of defense, overloading the websites requires millions of hits within a single second. That takes a lot of computing power, a lot more than a lone wolf vandal can afford. The attacks are a large, well-funded program of sabotage.
Typically, only governments can afford that kind of cash, which is part of the reason Russia is the target of unofficial blame, but there are other candidates. Widespread sabotage, or just the threat of sabotage, has been part of blackmail attempts from organized crime in several countries: “Pay us, or we’ll crash your business’s website.” A canny terrorist-revolutionary group might calculate it does more harm with these kind of tricks than with bus-station bombings. But groups like this have every reason to step forward and claim responsibility, and they’re not. This feels a lot like a dirty government trick. The necessary budget, the limited range of candidates who would benefit, and a resurgence of Russian bully tactics make Moscow a likely choice to blame.
The whole incident puts me in mind of Frederick Pohl’s The Cool War, a novel in which nuclear weapons in particular, and the massive destruction of war generally, had reduced national conflict to a program of general sabotage: whatever you can muck up in another country—any country—must be good for you, if only because it makes it harder for him to afford his programs to muck up your country. The protagonist is drafted into a covert ops division and taught to puncture tires, to use fake credit cards, to litter, because every time someone is late to work, every bank error, every worker hired to clean up a needless mess is a hit to the enemy’s productivity.
This sleazy little race to the bottom sounds very mild, almost pleasant, compared to outright war, but it’s also insidious: it targets everyone indiscriminately, there’s little incentive to stop because the costs are less visible, and denies the idea that a neighbor getting richer isn’t always a bad thing.
Economies bootstrap themselves, and in a global economy, every step upward anywhere is an opportunity for you to better your own life. There may be specific losers—an increase in Ethiopian coffee production is bad news for Colombian coffee farmers—but for every loser, there’s a winner, like coffee plants and coffee drinkers. Tightly targeted sabotage against specific targets for specific purposes is wicked, but it makes a selfish sort of sense. Sabotage on general principles is a sleazy race to the bottom, and, in the long run, counterproductive.
Whoever is screwing up the Estonian government is attacking too broad a target for the results to be predictable; quite possibly, they’ll get just the opposite of what they really want. It bothers me to think that the methods are so successful. Somebody, somewhere, is noting how effective the sabotage is as sabotage, without giving proper consideration to whether it’s actually achieving its intended object, and thinking to himself, “Yeah, that’s the ticket! We ought to do that, too.”