The hacker of Harry Potter case explains himself: a conversation with a social engineer.

Noticiasdot.com has been able to talk to the group that created the fake which succeed to cheat the media and make doubt thousands of fans of Harry Potter novel.

Lea este texto en castellano

Álvaro Martínez Majado -- Translated by Eduard Gamonal -- Some days ago we published that the Harry Potter hack was a fake. It looks like this is being corroborated.

Noticiasdot.com has been able to speak to Luther Blisset, the hacker (or rather a group of people) who, with a believable story, mentioning the religion, and an e-mail sent to the media and to a Spy Agency from Israel, succeed in making the world believe their wrong information about the new release of Harry Potter in the media: They assured that they knew the end of the next book of Harry Potter, which has not been published yet.

Can we believe now that what they say in this interview is true? That's our question to Luther Blisset. Noticiasdot.com carried out all possible verifications and concluded that everything is consistent. Indeed, Luther Blisset browses the Net with Tor. That corresponds with what we said in the previous article about this topic. In addition, Noticiasdot.com has received some information which has not appeared in the media yet and that hadn't been able to be checked over. One of them is the fact that the e-mail announcing the fake was sent from goharrygo at linuxmail dot org to several media (BBC, International Herald Tribune and The Register, to mention some of them) and to an intelligence agency from Israel, willing to make the investigators believe that the hacker had that citizenship.

Without delay, we present the interview:

Good morning, Mr. Luther Blisset. We know nothing about you, and we assume that you will not say anything, isn't it?

Nothing that can reveal any kind of evidence about our true identities. It could be a risky hobby to make psyop!

At least, please, tell us: Who's Gabriel?

Gabriel was chosen because it's the name of an Archangel and the recipe of the psychological included:

  • Religions because it's something that can make people do unusual things. And the Pope is so popular!
  • Hackers, because high tech crimes and hackers are always in the interest of the media
  • Undeniable news, because if it's undeniable no one can say that's not true

Who, other than an Archangel, would be the best choice to provide useful services to the religious community and to the Pope?

Make the news appealing, make the network of mass media, bloggers, online news, rss feed, chatters talk about that and gain authority every time someone talk about that.

How do we know that you invented this character?

Do you have any concrete demostration that god exists?

In your communications you use the pronoun "we". Are you an organized group?

We are a group of persons, each one with it's own knowledge and passion in information security at differents levels. We are from 13 to 48 years old.

Shall we match you with any political movement? Do you have religious or political motivation?

We do not represent any political movement other than the worldwide community involved in freedom of speech, anti-censorship strictly committed to the open source philosophy with a passion for global matters, economics, social issues and technology.

We want people to think about the risks of information pollution and mass media manipulation because one day you can give up convinced of living in a democracy only because the television and newspaper say that.

New technologies came up in our life too quickly and people are now prepared to estimate and evaluate the risks related with the society change.
From post-industrial we moved to Information Society based on Knowledge economy and you should ask your self, how many people know about that quick society changes?

In your communications you emphasize the importance of people being concerned of the manipulation we can suffer as a society. Would you comment your worries about it?

How many people you know that never had doubts regarding the Iraqi war motivation or regarding the real danger of terrorism?
We meet a lot of them, every day. Are the most common people you can meet around.
Do you think that controls at airport are really useful or are just a way to make people think that now the situation is under control?

Manipulating the public opinion (for the "public" or for the "private" interests) it's against human rights. Today's power is represented by who control and produce information, and not by who produce and use conventional weapons.

Governments and multinationals fight mainly with information, the battlefield are the media and the war is now.

It is curious that a simple message post in a mailing list or sended to the media caused a major outcry. Has any other mean of communication tried to contact you to check out the information?

No one checked the information. All the media reported exactly what they required to make the news.
For example no one got the fact that we put an anti-islamic advertising at the bottom of the message post.

However please think that the authority of a news is what it make the news true. No the fact that it's true in the real world.
We worked on enhancing the authority of our fake news, and we got success.

Do mass media really have that influence?

First of all consider Russia, China and even the democratic USA as the biggest mass media corrupted systems.
Then let me make you reflect on what could have happened if we applied our effort to reveal some highly sensitive details on some USA politician related to the intelligence service headquarters seized by Hamas in the Palestinian Gaza strip news?

Secrets and undeniable information, critical geopolitical situation, a war in place in the middle east... The recipe would certainly give nasty results for the cake!

The address goharrygo at linuxmail dot org has an automatic reply configure...

Which is the typical mistake that killers do in fictions? Coming back to the place of the crime and be observed by the investigators.
When we made the first post we burned the anonymous email account goharrygo configuring an automatic reply because we still didn't know the result of the psyop.
What if the Interpol or international authorities started and investigation on the issue and started monitoring that email?

Why Harry Potter?

Because it's a matter of interest in most countries in the world and obviously because of the upcoming release of the book.
They are probably pushing a lot of money in marketing activity. Why not use their effort in making people talk about that to amplify the magnitude of our message?

Has it been surprising that Bloomsbury Publishing hadn't said anything?

At first we was wondering if they are not saying anything because all their computers was under investigation for the theft.
Then we realized that all that talking about the Harry Potter theft it's for them free marketing, but we don't know if they was in pain or not regarding the risks that the book would be spreaded to the internet before its release.

We asked them to make a public donation to EFF and TOR project for the advertising that we made for them for free.

Don't you regret not making profit from the magnificient advertising campaing you made?

Are you joking? It's immoral and unethical to do that kind of fake news.
Even if aggressive marketing companies work on that marketing activities (marketing people call military psychological operation guerrilla marketing) it does not mean that everyone is willing to do that for money.

How can we be sure that this new movement is not a fake?

You can't. We had to leave a pgp signature in the first message post.

We can report something else that media did not understood.
We put an secret service, war and intelligence Israel website's email ([email protected]) in the carbon copy list of email receiving the message to make people think that the hacker was from Israel.

Eventually, Mr. Luther Blisset, to say good bye: doutbless, you have entered in the information flow. Do you wish broadcasting any other message related to fragiliy of the Information Society?

Please always identify the opinion of the media giving the information you are interested in.
There's always an opinion and this change the way you perceive the reality.

Learn to compare different version of informations from different sources,learn to use open source intelligence methodologies and tools while looking for the information you need.
This will make you more free and will let you understand better the environment around you, the information society.

Make use of user-rating and collaborative filtering systems.

We want to add that this experience allowed us to learn a lot about behaviours on how information expand across the world on different media on different timezones, the relevance of the authority of the information for the news diffusion and how this can effectively faked.
We found blogs very important to enhance the news authority, putting the right comments in the right highly rated blogs helped.

Finally the information society should be alerted, we are already discussing about subjects and items of the next psychological operation.
Will be done within this year, something regarding public companies listed on stock markets or something related to geopolitics and war.
Be prepared.

Thank you very much.

p.s. We are joking, we will never give fake information on public companies or on governments relationships. This is something for professional psyops made every day by stock market riders and governments only!

LINKS
We want to provide some other useful links:
- Harry Potter PSYOP announcement - http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.harry-potter/...5a0c2f
- Psychological operation and black propaganda - http://www.psywar.org/
- Psychological Operation links - http://www.psywarrior.com/links.html
- Alzarqawi PSYOP and the Pentagon - http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=...2446
- PsyOP TV, marketing company to Persuade, Change, Influence - http://www.psyop.tv

This text can be distributed under the terms of the license: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Spain