Not surprisingly, a thumb-sucker from Nancy Scola of Persondal Democracy Forum, purporting to look like a "thoughtful" and "even-handed" discussion of the DDOS attack as a form of civil disobedience -- or not -- which ultimately ends up tacitly endorsing it by implying that the only argument against it is that it might force an overreaction from the U.S. "security state". On the way to admitting that the DDOS and 4chan thugs are untethered to communities of cause and social movements unlike the 1960s people who participated in sit-ins, Scola still ends up portraying so many endorsements of the practice as a legitimate tool that few will read to the fine print.
I have a comment in the queue:
The DDOS is not civil disobedience because it causes more destruction ultimately, silences free speech and freedom of association, and is not tethered to any social movement of conscience.
As I've written in completely debunking the false comparison to the 1960s sit-in, the people at the Woolworth's counter paid for items in the store first, didn't cause any loss of business, and didn't destroy any property. More importantly, they didn't silence the ability of the waiters and owners of the store to speak. In other university sit-ins, while students may have blocked traffic in a dean's office or in a park or even on a street, they did not silence others' speech or association or commerce in some kind of blanket way.
The explicit endorsement of the DDOS by NYS employee Noel Hildago, who is involved in the "open government innovatino" and openly calls for financial contributions to WikiLeaks and the use of the DDOS attack as a method, mean that I will be writing to my New York State Senator to obtain assurances that Noel and his comrades in the "Gov 2.0 movement" will not be subjecting the servers of our state or other organizations to DDOS attacks, and that he and his pro-WikiLeaks conspirators are not hacking into our private data on NY State Services to embarass politicians or critics they don't like. Indeed, Noel's extremist actions in endorsing violence and funding of organizations appearing to engage in criminal activity decidedly discredit the Gov 2.0 movement, which we thought didn't resort to crime and forceful tactics, and make it suspect indeed.
I believe that the DDOS has to be judged not by the perpetrators, who have every reason to minimize them, and not by the geek class, which has ever reason to downplade them to protect their tribe, but *by the victims*. Ask them whether they think the damage is so minimal or the loss trivial! News reports from the Guardian indicate that trade suffered due to these attacks; these sites lost business; they forced IT personnel to have to clean up after them. The patently bad-faith argument that such attacks help IT people to "strengthen" their sites can't be allowed to pass -- you can write an email about a security hole, you don't need to DDOS the site or hack it to make a point.
The idea that the DDOS is just a little inconvenience for a short period completely overlooks the actual history of 4chan and how it operates -- they attack maliciously again and again and again, and then try to tell their victims that if only they will stop criticizing them or reporting on their attacks, things will go better for them -- like a mafia. As someone who suffered continual attacks in the virtual world from these thugs for years until finally Linden Lab permanently banned their group and most of them , I can testify that in fact you suffer a great deal of loss financially if you operate an online business, and that keeping quiet about these attacks only incites more of them in the end. Only diligent documentation and abuse reporting, not merely security methods, can convince the cynical geeks who think "nothing can be done" to act.
I'm calling on Ken Lerer of the Huffington Post, and Ariana Huffington, editor of the Huffo who spoke at your PDF meeting, to challenge their new consultant, Christopher Poole, owner of the 4chan.org site, to condemn, prevent and punish DDOS attacks incited and organized on his site.
That's how it's got to work: calls from consumers, users, the generla public to make corporations willingly or tacitly inciting or encouraging or condoning these attacks to step up to stop them.
You're absolutely right to flag the problem of lack of connection to a social movement with an explicit cause of conscience -- these people from 4chan are just as likely to terrorize an 11-year-old girl with too many Youtubes or the parents of a dead child as they are to attack something they think is interfering with "net freedom" -- which they understand in fact to mean ending freedom for others. They are nihilistic and cynical; they are in a moral void and amoral.
You're hardly very moral yourself in making your own critique of them only contingent on fear that they may make a "war on terror" type of reaction from the U.S. government. Like the Taliban, they do not exist merely because people fight them; they have their own dynamics and ceasing the war against them is no insurance against their future attacks based on their own coercive and extremist worldview.
As for theories of change, in fact the hackers and DDOS perpetrators have one -- ask Mr. Hidalgo! -- *bringing themselves to power*. If they don't get their way, if their extremist vision of politics and "governance" can't go their direction, they are prepared to disable and destroy not only the music business, the media business, and other online businesses, but government as well, and create an anarchic system of darknets that only unaccountable and anonymous coders control. No thank you.
You're also disingenous in fretting about "militarization of the Internet" without condemning the DDOS attack as a method resolutely. Essentially, Sen. Lieberman filed a legitimate abuse report and a legitimate DMCA takedown notice to Amazon, in his capacity as an elected representative working on homeland security, about documents that were not WikiLeaks' own that constituted a known threat to national security -- and for that matter, international security. Amazon acted property by defining the storage of stolen classified government documents a violation of the TOS requirement to warrant that your files are your own. The portrayal of this as some kind of "undue pressure" on Amazon's freedom of expression and freedom of association is patently absurd; the real pressure came from the WikiLeaks dog-whistled DDOS attack by 4chan.
Once again, the brave people who sat in at the Woolworth's counters in fact bought items in the store first to show they were not disruptive and wished to pay for their lunch and achieve normalcy and civility for themselves in equality to others. DDOS attackers want to make the situation unequal, discriminating against the speech and association of others, in order to seek power. They are to be ruthlessly condemned.
As Malcolm Gladwell reminded people, the stakes of the real-life civil rights movement were far higher and real people were killed in its struggle, with great sacrifices made before it succeeded. In that sense, the war in cyberspace where only Internet usage and not actual real-world rights are at stake may seem more trivial.
But unlike the peaceful methods of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the DDOS attack has the potential to spread far and wide and is a gateway to far worse kinds of hacking and destruction of business and privacy as we saw with Gawker.com -- merely because they criticized 4chan. The ubiquity of the net and increasing dependence of people on it for everything from news to health to livlihood to democratic participation in government means that the DDOS and the 4chan style thugs can create an authoritarian Wired State worse than the authoritarian America they thought had to be WikiLeaked.
Prokofy Neva/
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
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