The famous Woolworth lunch-counter sit-in was achieved peacefully, without disrupting traffic or losing business (the demonstrators even bought items in the store, where they were allowed to make purchases unlike the counter, where they were discriminated) -- and no goatse particle spam textures or machinery-disabling hacks were used in the process.
God bless Andrew Keen (@ajkeen), the "anti-Christ" of Silicon Valley, known for taking on all the "thought leaders" of "free" in his book The Cult of the Amateur (and I hope he does another one soon).
Alone among the Silicon Valley Influencers, he has stepped up to criticize the DDOS tactics -- and the agenda -- of Anonymous -- and WikiLeaks itself. I'm far from always in agreement with Keen -- I've debated him and he's blocked and unblocked me on Twitter, and I find his "Net Neutrality" apologia in fact inconsistent with his supposed views on Freetardia -- which I think in fact are starting to erode under the bombardment he faces. But no matter. He's done the right thing here -- almost perfectly.
The Washington Post, whose young reporters can't contain their enthusiasm as they report breathlessly and uncritically on these miscreants, do far worse -- in general major media has whitewashed Anonymous.
I say "almost perfect" about Keen -- because regretably, after I read it a second time, I saw what unfortunately he did, perhaps unwittingly -- he only helped reinforce the staple of Anonymous agitprop this week that claims the DDOS is "like" a 1960s-style sit-in, even if he assesses it critically.
As someone who actually lived in the 1960s and witnessed some of these events, I will beg to differ. My first demonstrations were at the age of 13, when our entire junior high school came to school in blue jeans -- which were not allowed for girls in those days -- and simultaneously walked out of the school at a prearranged moment (achieved even without cell phones and the Internet), and sat on the lawn. After a time, we returned to classes -- and then we were allowed to wear the pants from that time on. I went to my first demonstration against the war in Vietnam at 14, organized by the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rochester, NY. (I've been to many more demonstrations, pickets, sit-ins, etc. in my life, but the only time I've ever been arrested was at a seminar in an apartment in Moscow with about 50 other people.)
I was too young to take part in the lunch-counter protests -- Keen, who is British, seems to be conflating two kinds of actions that took place in different historical times -- in the early 1960s, people "sat in" at lunch counters to protest their refusal to serve blacks. Both blacks and whites "sat in" by going to the counter and ordering lunch and sitting despite the rules against serving blacks. But that "sit in" at a counter eating lunch -- itself not an illegal action because it merely involved sitting in a seat at a counter -- and possibly facing expulsion or even arrest even so -- is different than the "sit-in" that involved, say, occupying the dean's office unlawfully and sitting down in it in a university, or marching to a park and massively sitting down in it which might even involve disrupting traffic, or going to, say, an army base or a consulate, and chaining yourself to a fence (yet another tactic) and sitting in.
(It's worth pointing out one more thing people don't recall -- lunch counters were ubiquitous in department stores in those days, usually towards the back of a large floor display area or to the side against the wall -- you just don't see that kind of in-store counter, not in a separate restaurant, in stores these days, where layouts have changed dramatically in the last 50 years.)
As the current agitprop of Anon is an attempt to get you to think that the DDOS attack isn't serious, is trivial, and doesn't "really" cause harm, they are busy trying to compare themselves to more noble and conscientious demonstrators such as those who staged sit-ins against racism and for civil rights, and those who staged sit-ins against the war.
But the idea that the DDOS attack is "like" a sit-in in the 1960s is wrong in at least 7 ways, and can only be invoked as a fake meme by those who didn't actually see how this worked in the 1960s or who is willing to attribute good faith to these miscreants, which is misplaced:
1. people paid for their lunches when they sat in at the lunch counter -- they didn't disrupt or disable business; their purpose was to try to force a "business-as-usual" approach against an unjust rule discriminating against blacks
2. when students and others staged sit-ins at universities or in parks, etc. they may have disrupted traffic, but at some point, precisely because their cause was one of conscience, and they used the tactics of non-violent civil disobedience, when the police came, they went limp (hence the notion of sitting rather than standing or marching) and allowed themselves to be taken away -- you can't arrest Anonymous because they're invisible, although ultimately some do get arrested because they are not invincible
3. as much as this technique became popular, it wasn't that hugely widespread, in all restaurants or in all universities all the time -- it couldn't spread with viral speed to thousands of places the way the botnets and use of LOIC etc can spread with DDOS today
4. the sit-ins, while they might have cost businesses or polices time or money were nowhere near the cost in business to sites today -- if a business has a site down for hours or even days, they lose thousands of dollars, and the staff time and overtime involved in deterrence and clean-up and mitigation also has to be factored in.
5. again, the sit-in was non-violent -- it wasn't coercive -- it may have made a point or disrupted, but it didn't completely disable or destroy a site -- as someone who has been victimized by these people, I know they can hold your site hostage even for days on end while they bombard you with fake visits or obscene spam.
6. The DDOS is not the movement of conscience and peace that the civil disobedience movement was. The script kiddies who take part in these attacks often have no other objective than merely coming along for a joyride and vandalizing with no sense of higher purpose, "for the lulz" or laughs as they themselves say.
7. The civil disobedience for the sake of civil rights or anti-war activism had objectives that demonstrators wished to achieve through Congress and government -- they wanted them to enforce laws and stop war. But Assange and the WikiLeaks anarchists are like the Weathermen in that they wish to cripple and disable the US and use the 'open' gambit in fact to close it -- "the worse, the better". The Anon have some vague utopian idea of an endlessly anarchic Internet that includes awful uncivil ideas that profoundly harm the freedom of others -- this ranges from trade in child porn to horribly cruel pranks even against the parents of dead children and campaigns to harass other people and make their lives miserable. For example, the collectively plot to bombard legal judicial and lawyers' office sites just doing their jobs because they don't like their clients i.e. record companies or the prosecutors of Assange. That goes far beyond the 1960s sit-in except for its extreme wing that actually bombed targets like policemen.
In fact these lovely "free speech" fighters think nothing of disabling for days the blogs or virtual world sites of people they don't like who express criticism of *them* or merely *report accurately on their criminal activities*. I know because I've been targeted by them at secondthoughts.typepad.com and on my properties in Second Life: right now, for example, for five days straight in Baileya (coincidence?) my rental properties are deluged with the infamous chat spam well known in SL that says "Terror will rain down on the unfit gods and those they govern until the end of days" -- forcing several tenants to move out. The Lindens have remained dysfunctional. Nobody can find the prims (likely on a no-show neighbour's land) spamming this stuff, and so it disables normal business on the sim.
As for the much larger realm of the DDOS attacks on "the real life Internet" of commercial sites like Paypal -- where people make their living!!! -- this latest one-two punch -- first bombard websites that refuse to store stolen government documents or pay for anarchist cooperatives with DDOS attacks, then swing around and claim they are changing their tactics to one of peaceful "discussion of the cables" (which also in fact involves a spam directive and the use of misleading tags to confuse) -- is merely the latest in a long sting of Eddie Haskell sort of tactics. PayPal and Amazon don't buy these arguments; their geeks and people in charge of technology see it for the crime it is. (Naturally I do have to wonder whether the notorious Benjamin Duranske, the tekkie-turned-attorney and singularist transhumanist who believed in taking the law into his own hands and denouncing pyramid schemes and causing runs on the bank in SL, who is now a lawyer at PayPal, is doing the right thing on this; either he did, or somebody else did, because they don't process WikiLeaks payments anymore.)
The Washington Post, like others celebrating Anon vicariously neglect to report out the back story: The hacker of Sarah Palin's email -- one of the Anonymous who was also associated with WikiLeaks -- was sentenced to *one year in jail for hacking*.
There's another Anonym gambit I also heard yesterday from some of the lovely technologists at the Personal Democracy Forum is to tell everyone with withering know-it-all glee that these DDOS attacks "aren't hacks". They are trying to preserve the meaning of hack, despite their anarchist and destructive hacker culture, as some positive thing, and define it only very narrowly and technically. But of course it is a hack in the broader understanding, a disabling of the normal functioning of a site. The precise technical steps -- whether they involve "downloading legal and public software" like LOIC or actually burrowing into a system by defeating its sentries -- don't matter so much as the spirit in which this is done: to disrupt and disable and even permanently shut down.
(BTW, CNN has a really annoying technique now of interspersing with one person's opinion piece the links to different opinions in ways that look like sub-headers to that person's article -- but aren't.)
Keen is most bothered by the anonymity of Anonymous -- he believes that if they were named, instead of Coldblood, "Blair, Richmond, McNeil and McCain" as in the famous 1960 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, it would all be better and they'd all be more accountable. In some sense, he is right -- but in fact some of the Anonymous aren't so anonymous, and knowing their names wouldn't mean anything if they are just some helpdesker in Seattle. What's more operative is their tactics and belief system -- or nihilism, as I would call it -- which for Keen accounts for their anonymity:
So why won't Anonymous take responsibility for their actions? The difference lies in their politics -- or, more accurately, their lack of politics. While the civil rights activists in Greensboro wanted Woolworth to change their whites-only lunch counter policy (rather than simply burn down the store), Anonymous has no political goals beyond destroying or disabling the websites of its enemies.
Because Anonymous regards large companies like Mastercard or Visa as necessarily corrupt, its tactics and strategy are inevitably destructive. The Anons have no interest in compromise, discussion or engagement with their opponents. Thus, as the Anon fellow-traveler Coldblood told the BBC, Anonymous is in a "state of war" against all opponents of WikiLeaks.
Keen also had a put-down for John Perry Barlow -- whom I call an "aging hippie" and "Gramps" with whom I've had quite the Twitfight recently -- he's even called my profile picture "unflattering" and called me the "Howling Crone of Second Life" (lol!) -- I've retorted that like Dolores Claiborne, I aint' doing no beauty pageants today -- I've confronted him with his awful cheerleading of the skiddies with his tweets like "I am @Anonops" -- i.e. he's with the DDOS actions in spirit, most defintely" and his only after-the-fact disclaimers about the DDOS as a tactic.
"The first serious infowar is now engaged, The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops," co-founder of the EFF John Perry Barlow (http://twitter.com/JPBARLOW) tweeted last week. Barlow might be right to suggest that Anonymous has a mission -- metaphorically, at least.
Much of the American government's excessive reaction to WikiLeaks is very troubling. But serious digital activists like Barlow need to temper their language. The irresponsible warriors of Anonymous, with their destructive hatred of the American government and American corporations, discredit the defenders of WikiLeaks. As Barlow himself tweeted on Wednesday: "Sorry, but I don't support DDoSing Mastercard.com. You can't defend The Right to Know by shutting someone up."
Indeed -- but even though @jpbarlow is very late to the party and not in fact very vocal with that point -- he first agitated the footsoldiers -- we're going to hear a lot more of erosion of the morality and legality of these ideas.
That's because in their zeal to defend Assange from what they see as unfair policies and tactics of the U.S. government, we're going to get a lot of legal Fisking and even lawfare, as this discussion indicates on Opinio Juris.
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