WikiLeaks stole from me...no lie

I recently had a bit of my digital identity stolen. A credit card and other info was taken by the folks who sold their info to WikiLeaks. I know who took it because that particular account was used only for one purpose, to pay my annual subscription to Stratfor.com, an account I use for intelligence research to make my novels sound like I know what I'm talking about. While my credit card company noticed the highly unusual activity instantly and I was safe because they declined more than $1000 of purchases made thousands of miles from my home on a day when I did other bank activity in my home town, I nonetheless have a bad taste in my mouth from this.

No...deep in my soul.

About Wikileaks, Anonymous, YesMen and any other anarchist groups. Ya know, being a Linux guy, an open source kind of soul who has even given my books away free as podcasts and whose been a shareware/collective commons/opensource proponent for about twenty years, I want to believe something good can come of it all. But at the same time, being an IT professional and having to deal with stupid petty DOS attacks constantly, mingled with the real hackers and terrorists trying to steal serious data things occasionally, and being a former military guy in my forties whose come face to face with real, and at times  physically violent, evil at times I don't trust a whole lot of what idealists, especially young inexperienced idealists, say anymore.

One thing I think a lot of these hackers don't understand, is that some of the folks they piss off may be of the kind I've worked with in the military or have otherwise encountered in other times in my life who are involved in enterprises of the less than legal kind...the kind that actually deal with issues by leaving broken and/or dead bodies behind. What are these computer geeks going to do when they run into the ex-Marine whose beloved wife has a heart attack when she learns their entire life savings has been stolen by hackers who got back at government corruption by skimming his retirement account after he spent twenty years protecting his country from terrorists with bombs who prefer to forcefully marry twelve year olds. Even worse what are they going to do when they hit that one in a million corporate head who actually turns out to be a real life mafioso who sends Mr. Sixfeetfullofmuscles with a gun and a prepaid contract to deal with people who hurt him?

I don't think they'll be able to SUDO rm -rf ~/.bash_history themselves to invisibility when that laser dot shows up on their forehead.

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