❊ Lebanon’s Hackageddon

If the Lebanese government needed a wake up call to start taking the internet seriously, it got a pretty loud one yesterday.

We have long made fun of how ugly, irrelevant and obsolete the Lebanese government’s websites were (take a look for example at this hideous eyesore). We have long known that this was indicative of how little the government understood the web. But yesterday’s orchestrated hacks on no less than 4 government websites, including that of the feared General Security, is nothing less than a spectacular humiliation to the Lebanese government and to the people.

Lebanese politicians, intellectuals and the media are bickering about old-school topics like power struggles and power failure. These are important matters, but politics of today’s world include other very important issues. People all over the world are having intense debates about internet privacy, about the government’s role in regulating the web, about online copyright protection, about how much companies like Facebook and Google should know about you. These topics are important to the Lebanese as well because of the world’s increasing interconnectedness, and yet our government is not interested in even learning the A-B-Cs of the web.

Caring about the web means that the government should wake up to the fact that websites are not just online brochures (and ugly ones to boot). They are the gateways to huge amounts of data and services that can benefit citizens and significantly increase the country’s productivity and cut waste and graft.

But they can also be the front of intelligence wars, and yesterday’s attacks shows how little we are prepared. If General Security, the intelligence body that handles petabytes of our personal data, had its website hacked so easily by a class warrior, how can we trust its stewardship of our personal data? The problem is, many people are still not interested in asking that question.