Open Letter to Huffpo's Ken Lerer Re: Moot and 4chan DDOS

Dear Mr. Lerer, I am writing to express my gravest concern about your hiring as a consultant of Christopher Poole or "Moot," the owner of the website 4chan.org, a website knowingly and deliberately engaged in incitement and coordination of DDOS attacks on other web sites.

I have openly called on the public to contact you to bring to your awareness the serious ethical breeches involved in your relationship with 4chan.org:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2010/12/how-companies-can-prevent-more-ddos-attacks-call-ariana-huffington-and-ken-lerer.html
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2010/12/major-media-white-washing-4chan-anonglobalpr-agitprop.html

As you surely know, 4chan.org, far from being any sort of merely benign "image exchange" is a website that incites, abets, and coordinates DDOS attacks on web sites disliked by the site's users, who remain unaccountable and anonymous. 4chan has been at the center of the coordination of DDOS attacks on Paypal, Mastercard, Amazon, Visa -- even gawker.com, which criticized 4chan for its thuggish methods, and then itself became a victim. This has been amply reported by the media and any cursory review of the site will confirm this.

As a frequent critic of this gang on my own blog, I've been targeted myself and lost both the use of my website at times and have had my online business in Second Life savaged by these miscreants, costing me real monetary losses. The only difference between me and thousands of other people harassed by these thugs (and told that if they are quiet they won't be attacked again) is that I speak out.

I believe it is a grave mistake to have hired this man merely because he represents somebody in touch with "the cutting edge" of Internet culture. Whatever the benefits of the "cool" and "street cred" you think you gain from this relationship, the down side of being associated with criminality offsets it. This cutting edge harms and bleeds -- it costs your peers in the media and business industry their website use when Poole's comrades DDOS their sites.

You need to take ownership of this fact yourself and decide to disassociate from it by severing your business ties with anyone who continues to incite and aid the use of the DDOS or any other type of hacking as a weapon.

It does absolutely no good for Moot or you to claim that Moot has no responsibility for these attacks, or that he doesn't know about them, or that he has banned those caught involved in them after the fact, or even that he "works with authorities" after the attacks. We all know full well that with the "Anonymous" status and the post-deed ban, little is done to really stake out an ethical position against the DDOS as a method. That's what needs to be done. Moot knows full well that his server records will indeed illustrate that his site is in fact inciting and abetting these attacks and it is a matter of record over and over again for years. He -- and you -- must take responsibility for these attacks.

If he refuses to make a credible public *condemnation* of these abusive and destructive methods of hacking and/or disabling others' sites, and refuses to terminate the accounts of those who use his site for this purpose, then you should sever your ties with him. Public denial is not sufficient; to set an ethical tone for all coders, he and you should be condemning the attacks and pledging to cease from aiding and abetting them through 4chan.

Excuses like "they'll only go on IRC" or "we can't stop them, they're anonymous" or "the DDOS isn't really so bad" are completely morally unacceptable: you need to stake out a responsible ethical position as a company that claims to have the public good in mind in your business.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state