NATO: Anonymous will be "infiltrated" and "persecuted"

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization contains the combined military might of 28 member countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. All three of those nations, and the United States, possess huge armies, nuclear weapons, and are committed to Article Five of NATO's charter:

"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked."

What the alliance worries about most these days is not an "armed attack," but a cyberattack on its network servers, or the infrastructure of any of its member countries, furthermore WikLeaks and Anonymous get top billing as visible threats to NATO's efforts to control its information perimeters.A big chunk of the assessment is devoted to the activities of Anonymous, most notably its denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Amazon.com for shutting down financial and server space services to WikiLeaks. Next comes the Anonymous assault on HBGary Federal, which had been planning some methods to take down WikiLeaks and expose Anonymous. It didn't turn out that way, of course. Instead, Anonymous penetrated the security company, erasing data, publishing e-mails, and wrecking its website.


"Certain hostile acts conducted through cyberspace could compel actions under the commitments we have with our military treaty partners," says a White House strategy report published in mid-May. "When warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would any other threat to our country."