Big ups to Evgeny Morozov for penning this oft-lauded piece for Slate, “An Army of Ones and Zeroes: How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar.” (Not to toot my own horn, but I played a small role in this piece, in that Evgeny asked me who to contact at Slate for the piece, and he took care of the rest.)
He writes:
I had a much simpler research objective: to test how much damage someone like me, who is quite aloof from the Kremlin physically and politically, could inflict upon Georgia’s Web infrastructure, acting entirely on my own and using only a laptop and an Internet connection. If I succeeded, that would somewhat contradict the widely shared assumption—at least in most of the Western media—that the Kremlin is managing this cyberwarfare in a centralized fashion. My mission, if successful, would show that the field is open to anyone with a grudge against Georgia, regardless of their exact relationship with state authorities.
Of course, the fact that Estonia is providing technical expertise and web hosting to Georgia after having gone through similar attacks last year by legions of anonymous Russian hackers definitely piques my interest.
