US military war games imagine pro-online gambling hackers

The future leaders of the US military apparently believe that hacker collectives will target state governments’ critical infrastructure unless these government legalize online gambling.

According to a new Common Dreams report, a 2016 war game conducted by students and faculty from the US military’s war colleges envisioned a scenario in which the hacker collective known as Anonymous targeted state governments it deemed insufficiently receptive to the concept of legal online gambling.

Specifically, the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program crafted a revisionist history in which Anonymous was declared a terrorist organization following a make-believe 2015 attack on Louisiana’s power grid using software tools similar to the Stuxnet worm that the Israeli and US governments (allegedly) used to destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in 2010.

In this alternative history, Anonymous singled out Louisiana for cyber-terror after the state government failed to lift restrictions on online gambling. The pretend cyber-attack resulted in a lack of electricity to retirement homes, rendering air conditioning inoperable, leading to the deaths of 15 senior citizens.