podpolia

In reading the news this morning, I was quite curious about an AP news story about how the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a report “ripp[ing] the Bush administration” on their behavior during Hurricane Katrina. Problem was, after the first couple of paragraphs, the story was all about how the report was very critical of other parts of the government, particularly FEMA. This piqued my curiosity, so I looked up the Committee’s reports on Hurricane Katrina. It turns out that President Bush is mentioned only once in the investigation’s conclusions, and that mention is about his “unusual step” of declaring an emergency for the area in advance. In fact, President Bush and the White House appear rarely (if at all) in most of the Investigation Report… with the exception of an addendum by Senator Lieberman (who is the committee’s ranking member — its most powerful Democrat). I do not know if Lieberman’s “Additional Views” constitute an actual part of the report or not, but I do believe that it is fair to say that the report as a whole is no more than slightly critical in passing of President Bush, and even includes various good things that the administration did during the disaster. Lieberman’s addendum, though it may well contain some valid points, should be seen for what it is — a partisan addition to the report.
In fact, it appears that that is the way the story handled them. The placement of the paragraphs about Bush at the top of the article and the titling of the article for something that only receives a passing mention in the article’s body indicates that somewhere along the line at the AP, the story got spun. Whether this was a move to make the story more sensational (hearing about the failings of yet another government bureaucracy is less entertaining than hearing someone ripping the President), or with an intentional partisan twist (the Democrats are pushing to make Bush’s ‘failings’ during Hurricane Katrina a campaign issue) is something known only to whoever did it.

The protest planned by ‘Pro-immigration activists’ for May 1st may well make their point in the southwest and New York, as said activists plan to “close down” these cities, but I do not believe that this is going to help their cause. I rather suspect that such a massive protest will cause enough media attention and economic disruption that the response may be overwhelmingly negative. I do not believe that most Americans have a problem with illegal immigrants qua individuals, but with their apparent disregard for American law and custom (re entering the country illegally). With a group of people of this sort flexing their social/political muscles, I think that a large number of people will feel somewhat threatened by them.
Whether or not this view of illegal immigrants is justified, this protest (amounting to a small-scale economic attack on several cities) is likely to raise hackles across the country, and not just among those who already oppose illegal immigration. America tends to get fairly upset about economic interference, so going for a perceived weak spot like this is likely to stir up more trouble than the protesters imagine.

Well, now that I’ve had some time to snoop about the internet some looking up information, I seem to have learned some more about my good buddy Xoron who hacked my site the other day. It piqued my interest that I suddenly had 19 referrals from a “cyber-security.org”. Upon investigating, that particular domain seemed to be nothing but a shallow webpage cover for “cyber-warrior.org” — the site seemed to be in Turkish, but what really caught my attention was the large green star and crescent that made up the beginning of the cyber-warrior logo.
“Fair enough,” I thought. “Xoron must be a Turkish hacker who was showing off on this Turkish website.” Out of curiosity, however, I started searching the web for more sites that have been defaced by Xoron. Then I found this image on a Brazilian site that he had hacked. Whatever doubts I had before are now gone: I was targeted for my political (and possibly religious) views.
Whatever humor I could previously see in the whole incident is gone. I have no problem with hackers, and this particular hacker was not particularly nasty (he didn’t delete anything, just changed passwords, labels, etc) but I DO have a MAJOR issue with being targeted for my opinions. The way I look at it, this was an act of digital warfare, pure and simple.
At this point, I’m still undecided as to what exactly I want to do. I discovered that he violated the Terms of Service of the imageshack account used to host his pictures, and shall immediately send an email to imageshack.us to request that his account be terminated. The other web service he seems to be using is based in Turkey, so is unlikely to respond to my requests (in English instead of Turkish) to shut off his account there as well. However, I will be going through my site records and attempting to track Mr. Xoron down. What he did was illegal in this country, and I’m very curious to see if the Department of Justice would be interested in the matter.
In any event: let this be a lesson to you. If you have a blog, keep your security high. I consider myself to be rather a moderate (as far as American politics go), and I know that many people have far more extreme views than I do. You may be a target, but refuse to be a victim.

UPDATE 4/26/06 9.05PM: Turns out the hack was more sophisticated than I had thought.