Yahoohack.Gov

The Internet indeed is a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of conspiracy theories. Remember the hacker attacks on popular websites like Amazon, Yahoo and eBay recently? Guess who’s being held responsible for those - the US government. In a widely circulated post to an e-mail list, civil rights advocate Jim Warren has floated the theory that the Clinton administration itself staged the attacks to bolster proposals to greatly expand government powers of surveillance. The clinching evidence: Clinton designated electronic "law enforcement" a top priority and allocated $240 million for wiretapping purposes in his budget and within days the National Security Agency’s main spy computers experienced inexplicable crashes, followed by attempts to cripple Internet commerce with attacks on key websites by unknown hackers and disruptions in the Midwest and the glitches experienced in the Concentric Networks’ otherwise very reliable mail servers. Jim Warren’s logic: "What better way to prove the need for massively expanded government surveillance and create a frenzy of support for it?" The Men in Black definitely have their own way of striding into cyberspace, it seems.