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A website dedicated to naming ICE and Border Patrol employees is coming under a “prolonged and sophisticated” cyber attack after the Daily Beast revealed it planned to make public 4,500 names of federal immigration staff.
The founder of ICE List said the website was overwhelmed by malicious web traffic originating in Russia after the Beast reported that a huge cache of personal IDs had been leaked to the site by an alleged Department of Homeland Security whistleblower.
The Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) assault, which began on Tuesday evening and is still ongoing at the time of publication, saw a huge number of IPs simultaneously access the website of ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative.”
This has successfully overloaded the ICE List’s servers and is preventing people from accessing the site. The timing coincided with ICE List founder Dominick Skinner telling the Daily Beast he would make public the first tranche of names in the dataset, which was leaked following the shooting by an ICE agent of mom Renee Nicole Good.
It’s not entirely a stupid idea.
Block-chains are an append-only ledger where each block includes a cryptographic hash of the previous block, where new blocks are accepted by quorum across all independent nodes. The only way to fuck with the ledger to erase history would be to either exploit an undisclosed flaw in the cryptographic hash, or have enough nodes to convince the every other node that their version of history is wrong and that this fake version of history is the only truth.
Burning an undisclosed cryptographic vulnerability for this would be an extremely stupid (but plausible) idea that would make the vulnerability worthless to them in the future. Even if they didn’t have to burn a vulnerability to break the block-chain’s system of trust by rewriting history, they just proved that bitcoin is untrustworthy—which would immediately destroy its financial value.
What might actually be even better, though, is that multimillionaires, billionaires, and the United States government itself hold a bunch of cryptocurrency. The former for investment/tax evasion/laundering, and the latter in seized assets. On top of that, many criminals and hostile foreign governments hold Bitcoin, too.
Encoding the list in the Etherium or Bitcoin block-chains would make removing it extremely self-destructive for the fascists who don’t want the list to be public. It becomes a lose-lose situation for them.
A bittorrent magnet link or IPFS would be less wasteful, but they lack the self-destructive disincentive that would make them think twice about even trying to stop it.
There are much simpler ways to ensure data integrity without resorting to blockchain.
All we need to do is simply put this out as a torrent and provide a hash. That’s it. Easy.
At 51% attack cannot succeed if you’re not using blockchain to begin with. So why take the risk?
Except the 51% owner of the block chain can overwrite the ledger and billionaires and hostile governments have all of the computers to do it. This has already happened multiple times with smaller coins IIRC.
Block chain is essentially just the techbro version of capitalism (not an alternative, a recreation). If there are distributed companies and enough competition, the system works pretty well, but when everything centralizes as has inevitably happened everywhere, the rules all get thrown away.
Or you could just use a magnet link to circulate the torrent and use the DHT as your “block chain”. No need to add more moving parts…
Or do all of the above? It ain’t limited to one choice.
Entangling the destruction of the list with the destruction of cryptocurrency itself isn’t a bad thing either. If they impulsively destroy the value of bitcoin, they hurt the people whos opinions they actually care about: the 0.01%.