Was this a state-sponsored attack against Cryptocomb?

John Young is one of my heroes. In many ways he is the prototype WikiLeaks – less showy, less flamboyant, but as honest as a summer’s day in the Arctic is long. He’s like an old-fashioned editor before the money-men took over: publish and be damned, so long as it is true.

Jester is a pain in the backside. Jester is a self-righteous, self-proclaimed, self-promoting hacktivist for good.

Jester doesn’t seem to like the truth. He doesn’t seem to like government sins made public. He seems to think that American and other allied soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and other theatres of war to protect the western politicians, regardless of how corrupt, or deceitful they may be. He seems to want to be the arbiter of what we are allowed to know. In short, he wants to defend a way of life that isn’t worth defending.

Needless to say, Jester doesn’t like John Young or his websites. He says that Cryptocomb leaked to Fox News the true name of the Navy SEAL who has authored a book due to be published next month on the killing of Osama bin Laden. Cryptocomb says, “The suggestion that Cryptocomb leaked a story to Fox News is simply crazy.” One is an inveterate liar and self-aggrandizing distorter of the truth, and the other is Cryptocomb. The Fox News story, incidentally, is here: Fox News Outs The Navy SEAL Who Wrote An Anonymous Book On The Bin Laden Raid.

But, true to character, Jester took the law into his own self-righteous hands and launched a successful denial of service attack on Cryptocomb. He tweeted:

Jester claims and justifies attack

A quick check on Cryptocomb did indeed show problems:

Tango down Cryptocomb

I’ll come back to that comment later. But then Jester tweets:

Jester claims victory

and Cryptocomb is back up. The only indication of any removed file from Cryptocomb that I can find is “th3j35t3r takes down Cryptocomb”. It’s gone. Can’t even find it on Google cache. Lucky I took a quick, sadly partial screenshot earlier:

file removed from Cryptocomb

I cannot be certain that this is the file that Jester refers to. It looks possible, and could be used to justify his second tweet; but it’s certainly not a file leaking a SEAL name to Fox News. Is this a victory for Jester? Well he’d certainly like us to think so; but it’s pretty meaningless either way since Cryptocomb still links to the full Fox News expose.

Let’s go back to Cryptocomb’s earlier comment. State sponsored attack? Well I’ve often wondered. Earlier today in the UK it became known that an arrested Facebook troll is actually a serving policeman. The victim commented, “When [Olympic diver] Tom Daley was trolled, within 24 hours someone was traced and arrested.” For her it took nine months and a high court judgement. On Tuesday the FBI arrested at least the ninth alleged member/associate of LulzSec. It seems self-evident that when law enforcement decides it wants or need to catch someone, it can and will. Consequently, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that the FBI is turning a blind eye to the antics of Jester. And if that’s the case, no amount of plausible deniability can change the fact that this was indeed a state sponsored attack by collusion if not direction.