My name is Frank Ascapone. I am director of operations at CQI cloud providers. We provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) level cloud services for companies around the world.
This week in Washington D.C. there is a major battle within the federal government about whether to fund the government in exchange for defunding Obamacare. This is a battle to death between democrats and republicans.
Long before the republicans took to the stage and shutdown our federal government, they set into motion another piece of the puzzle that would help support their cause, by exploiting an aspect of the technology community that goes largely un-talked about in the mainstream--libertarianism.
I'm a devout libertarian and believe in the individual, small government and more importantly, the power of market force. In this case it was market pressures in play. Certain individuals associated with the GOP leaders approached me last year, and encouraged me to win the bid for hosting of the Healthcare.gov website--at all costs. Pretty much they would make it worth my while if I got the contract.
Long story short. I won the contract, and here we are at launch date for the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare), and my role has become a reality. For some reason the Healthcare.gov website isn't performing as expected?? It worked during initial tests, but under a load we are seeing "strange" network activity that is preventing users from signing up.
This is my doing. I wrote a complex algorithm that blasts noise across the network in bursts. Not quite a denial of service (DOS) attack, but generating a large of amount of competing traffic that will cause most requests / responses to fail, and leaving many other attempts painfully slow.
I carefully architected this so it would be untraceable by our logs, making sure that Obamacare would not be a success, and american citizens would be so frustrated they would never get behind the program.
I really don't give a shit whether people have healthcare or not. What I do care about is that my business is a success, and while I don't agree with everything my GOP partners stand for. We can find affinity in the power of markets, and in this case, network forces.
