Cryptogon is a long-time favorite of mine when it comes to conspiracy news blogs. The site’s author scours the web for truly dark and disturbing bits of news about the decline of free society.

A couple days ago though, Kevin posted something even more interesting than usual. According to his server logs, he’s been getting some really unusual hits on his website. Being in the conspiracy camp, he of course is offering the possibility that this is some kind of intentional attack on his website to bring it down quietly. You can read more about it here. Kevin writes:

Hosts from all over the place are crawling every page on Cryptogon in an automated manner, at semi regular intervals. Did the NSA user from earlier today order his zombie army to lock and load after he meandered around Cryptogon?

Who knows…

The client running on each of the hosts shows up in the log only as Java 1.4.1 or Java 1.5.0. There is no way this activity is due to run-of-the-mill webpage archiving robots. You might see one of those, every once in a while. But over and over again, from different hosts in quick succession, all reporting Java?

I don’t think so.

This smells like a DDOS hit to me.

There are some other technical details available in his post, for anyone who knows about such things. A DDOS attack is basically when a bunch of computers are orchestrated together to flood a server with data and knock it offline.

A lot of conspiracy bloggers seem to monitor visitors to their site very closely, and will often mention how frequently military, defense or other government IP addresses are noted. It’s almost like having these visitors acts as some kind of proof or credibility that the dangers being pointed out on their site are real. I’m not sure what to make of it all myself. Part of me sort of believes that these really are nefarious visitors, keeping tabs on intellectual dissidents. Part of me believes it’s a coincidence - and that these are simple regular people at work doing Google searches, like you or I. Another part of me thinks worrying about government attacks on your website leads only to a useless spiral of paranoia.

Realistically though, I wonder what kind of techniques a covert government information-control agency would really employ. Would they use temporary tricks like DDOS attacks and lurking around on your site? Or would they simply contact your ISP, pull the plug and toss your ass in jail? What’s your take on all this - does Cryptogon (and sites like it) really have anything to be worried about? And perhaps the most important question of all when it comes to conspiracy theory - how do you know when you’ve gone too far, and how do you know when you haven’t gone far enough?