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New Technology for Digital Democracy
Votester, A New Tool for Digital Democracy and Digital Demonstrations
by Anonymous
The Problem: Free-speech and right to assemble are threatened
Peaceful public assembly, free-speech and even civil-disobedience are essential to maintaining the balance of democracy in the USA and worldwide. Yet as recent public demonstrations have shown us (for example those against war, the IMF and the World Bank) in our modern-day society it is increasingly difficult, ineffective, and even dangerous for citizens to exercise their democratic rights to assembly and free-speech.
- Many nations do not allow open public dissent at all, and the penalties for participating in demonstrations are severe. In several cases, international governing and policy-making bodies have deliberately selected such nations for their meetings, in order to prevent demonstrations.
- Even in democratic nations such as the USA, peaceful demonstrators are often violently harassed, attacked, detained, arrested and imprisoned by police.
- The police are more organized and equipped than ever before with tear gasses, irritant sprays, stun guns, rubber bullets, water cannons, body armor, etc.
- Demonstrators can now be arrested and prosecuted as "domestic terrorists" if they participate in civil disobedience or their actions are deemed a threat to "national security."
- The mainstream media provides only scant, token coverage of large public protests and civil unrest, often whitewashing out incidents of police brutality, human rights violations, and violations of the right to free-speech and assembly.
- An increasingly large percentage of the world population (especially in developed nations) is over the age of 50 and cannot safely participate in public demonstrations due to the physical fragility and health risks associated with aging. They simply cannot risk getting beaten up by the police. In other words, the majority of citizens cannot safely assemble and demonstrate.
The Solution: Votester, a new tool for Digital Democracy
What is needed is a new technology that enables all citizens to safely and peacefully assemble, exercise their rights to free speech, and perform civil disobedience if necessary. This can be accomplished using an innovative application of open-source, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology on the Internet, which we call "Votester." Votester does not exist yet. It is the hope of the authors that one or more groups of technologists reading this document will be inspired to create versions of it and make them freely available to the general public.
Votester enables peers to automatically send recurring email messages and/or HTTP requests to a set of addresses associated with a digital demonstration. The rate at which messages/requests are sent by each peer to each address is determined by either (a) a function of the number of people in the digital demonstration, or (b) the peer-owner's individual preferences.
The Votester function mentioned in (a) increases the number of messages and requests sent per peer, per unit time, proportionally as the number of peers in the digital demonstration increases. In other words, the number of parties endorsing a digital demonstration is used as an implicit measure of its legitimacy and thus allows for the digital demonstration to be "louder." This prevents Votester from being used to harass individuals on a small-scale, while still enabling it to be used for large-scale protests. As the number of peers in a digital demonstration increases, the number of email messages and http requests received per unit of time by the targets of the demonstration can become large enough their organizations and IT infrastructures are overloaded. For small digital demonstrations, Votester results in the equivalent of letter-writing campaigns. For large digital demonstrations - such as demonstrations that attract hundreds of thousands or millions of participants, Votester results in significant inconvenience or even denial-of-service for the targeted addresses.
For example, to protest the policies of the World Bank and the IMF, parties could run copies of Votester on their personal computers around the Internet. They could join a group called "World Bank and IMF demonstration." Members of this group would all receive a set of email formletters, email addresses and HTTP addresses. These might include addresses for the World Bank, IMF, politicians, corporations and even media organizations. Their peers would periodically send out the email formletter(s) to each address, and/or issue HTTP requests to any URLs included in the demonstration as well. The rate at which their peers send out messages and requests is determined as a function of the number of participants in the demonstration group: If more peers participate, each peer is allowed to send more messages per unit/time. For small scale demonstrations each peer might only send the email message once per week, but for large demonstrations each peer might send the email message once per day or even once per hour.
Votester provides a number of additional useful features to users:
- Peers report their activity to other peers in the digital demonstration, thus all peers can see the statistics of demonstrations that are taking place. Relevant statistics are included in email messages sent by peers for particular demonstrations. For example, an email protesting a policy includes information about the protest, stats about the number of peers involved in the protest and the number of messages sent by them.
- Peers also provide a directory of current and proposed protests, and a means for users to join protests, leave protests, post messages to discussion groups, propose new protests to the community, manage protests they start, and send announcements to protest-participants.
- Votester peers may send email messages via their owner's email accounts and/or via built-in sendmail capabilities and/or via public email servers on the network.
- Votester peers have dynamic IP addresses that change each time they are launched.
Benefits of Votester
It's legal. In the USA democratic system, it is not illegal for a citizen to send an email containing their opinion on an important issue to others in the society. Even if they send their email more than once, this is legal. It is also not illegal for a citizen to visit a Web page repeatedly. Since each Votester peer only sends a few messages (such as once per day, or once per hour, etc.) no individual peer can be considered to be engaging in illegal harassment, hacking, denial of service, etc. Rather it is only the totally decentralized, emergent activity of the entire group that results in large volumes of messages and requests being received by target addresses. Therefore no individual is liable. (Please Note: We are not lawyers and the legality of these claims still needs to be evaluated and established by professional lawyers, and no doubt they will be challenged by governments and others if and when Votester is deployed.)
It's non-violent. However annoying Votester may be it is not comparable to violent demonstrations in which property is damaged and/or humans are injured. Votester demonstrations are peaceful, they are simply email and HTTP campaigns. All that is exchanged is information.
It's safe. Participants in digital demonstrations are not physically at risk. They can make their opinions known without getting beaten up, tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, etc. They can also protest without getting arrested.
It's effective. Digital demonstrations get noticed - they may actually cause enough inconvenience to target addresses that they can't help but notice them. They also cannot effectively be blocked by the police, so they last longer and can accomplish their objectives with fewer obstacles.
It's open. Anyone can participate in Votester demonstrations, including people who for reasons such as age, disability, ethnicity, economic status, etc. would not feel safe participating in physical demonstrations, or simply do not have the time or money to travel to a remote location and risk several days of detention etc.
It's unstoppable. Digital demonstrations are hard to block. Since messages come from dynamic IP addresses all over the network, targets have no effective way to shield themselves from them. They cannot anticipate the IP addresses that messages will be received from, and even if they block particular addresses, new parties are always joining and the IP addresses of participants change dynamically.
Conclusions
It is our hope that someone reading this will be inspired enough to create an implementation of Votester, and that they will release it as a free, open-source tool for the public. We believe that creating Votester will be an interesting project in its own right - for it presents a number of technical, social and user-interface design challenges that are worth solving. In particular, in order for Votester to succeed, it must provide strong anonymity protection to users, it must also facilitate a sense of community such that users can easily locate and participate in demonstrations of interest to them, finally it must be immune to attempts at hacking or misusing it so that it cannot be used for harassment by small groups and it cannot be blocked or manipulated by various parties.
This is so easy to filter.
The PTB don't need to send out the police to deal with the demonstration, they just turn off their mail server for the duration and continue ruling the owrld.
...or does this sound like a Distributed.net-style of spam? I am not kidding. Maybe it's necessary in some countries to get the message across, but are we sure this is the only option? The potential for abuse here is utterly insane...
Class testers.VOTester
How to Download YouTube Videos
What if somebody hacks into votester's security protocols and (ab)uses thousands of systems to Ddos/spam the hell out of whoever they don't like?
Really, this looks like you are knowingly installing a Ddos zombie on your box, which is just waiting to be cracked and abused.
Not trolling.... sincerely worried.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
"none have proven to be perfect"
More like, not worked. The first step to making a political point is to show up. And calling this a "digital demonstrations" doesn't make it any less a DDOS.
1 Alpha 7
Live to be Moderated
I still prefer the old-fashioned way of protest & dissent. Barring the risk of being arrested, I still enjoy breaking windows, destruction of property and other acts of wanton destruction/violence (all in the name of [place cause here], of course).
On first reading, this seems like it would be less effective than the flooding demonstration found in the slideshow from the link up top. The slideshow details basically a flood attack designed to essentially produce the "slashdot effect" to the website--this method just floods them with emails.
The /. method has the problem that the more bandwidth the target has, the less effective it is (and with demonstrations, it's likely we're going up against bigger purses). This e-mail deal seems way too easy to block and therefore does not solve the outstanding complications of the other.
I applaud their efforts (and to some extent success--consider Lufthansa), but since we're not anonymous in the digital world like we are in public, I think it'd take radical approaches to be effective. Of course, with the DMCA and it's broad verbiage, at what point is a digital demonstration an illegal digital riot? Imagine a few boxen on a webserver designed to filter out repeated protest e-mails--if the implementation mentioned above were improved enough to get past these filters, would that be breaking a security system?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Free voting at the press of a button? Sounds utopian and egalitarian, but that couldn't be farther from the truth.
With electronic democracy, public apathy would skyrocket. It might have some interest at first, but soon enough people just would click yes to boring bill HR13213 no matter what it contained just to get voting out of the way! How often do YOU really think and mull over the issue when you click that poll over to the right on slashdot? CowboyNeal for President? That would be "cool," but in all seriousness, that's probably what would happen if voting restrictions were relaxed.
A voting system that actually works requires voting qualifications. If we let the trolls mod slashdot, it would go right down the drain. When the Founding Fathers set up our government, only the richest 10% of white men could vote due to property qualifications and so forth -- we're not a "democracy" -- we're a Republic. Soon, it was extended to more white men, then eventually women could vote, and eventually nonwhites were allowed to officially vote without any harassment.
Nowadays, the only roadblock to voting is registering and showing up, and people could care less. Most high schoolers and even college students cannot even distinguish between Republican and Democrat political views, and about half of all voters practically vote randomly when they're at the ballot box!
Are people like that fit to run the country because they're entitled to? Absolutely not! People that ignorant should not be allowed to vote, and ever since we removed all restrictions, this country has turned into a cesspool welfare state -- though we're still not as bad as Europe or Canada.
Forget easy access to voting -- something should be done to make it HARDER to vote. Heinlein didn't have a bad idea with military service requirements to vote, but that's not entirely practical -- instead, we should re-instate a poll tax of $400. If you aren't willing to pay hard cash for your rights to vote, then you shouldn't be able to vote. I honestly don't want apathists running the government anymore.
In DC yesterday, 639 people were arrested, mostly before any damage could be done (there are suspicions a broken Citibank window and smoke bombs nearby were done by infiltrators since the cops just went and arrested everyone after herding them into that area). The police have been talking all week about "preemptive arrests" - Dept. of Precrime, anyone?
In the UK today, up to 400 000 people (SkyTV estimate) marched against war with Iraq, with very little police harassment, aside from one attempt to keep the marches from joining up and some shoving. Very few arrests.
Funny how it's easier to demonstrate in a monarchy than in the country that broke from the monarchy over "freedom".
Whatever. You'd be tracked down and your ass would be history. The government would have a little talk with your ISP and you would lose access. For some turds, that is worse than getting thrown into jail with Bubba. Then again, you wouldn't have access in jail either. In any event, you'd be hunted as a cyber terrorist and you'd get your ass kicked. It wouldn't be private or secret, although you know that, don't you. So, you'd hand your ass out on a line because you would be part of a collective of terrorists. At least in this climate. This is kind of the same reason Cringley is full of pig shit. You'll never reach the tipping point. Gotta run. Otherwise I'd say other stupid shit that makes sense to most of you. By the way, Slashdot tracks all this crap. They will tell the government and you'll go to jail and meet Bubba and little Bubba and Bubba's friend.
So the whole idea is to use up all the bandwidth available by some company you don't like, or crash their servers by sending too many people to their Web site, costing them potentially thousands of dollars?
No, I don't see a lawsuit coming...
Yea, God forbid we have a disorganized police that will fire real guns randomly into the crowd, instead of using non-lethal methods.
What a fuckin idiot.
Having a place for people to BMC(bitch moan and complain) Is useless as many such places already exist. The form of protest is not what should be changed, but rather the government's which are inhibiting ones right to assemble. Sitting in secret and BMC'ing is not going to accomplish anything. OTOH if a system was devised to assist people in better organizing protests and increase protester turnout, change might occur. 500 or 1000 people rallying is a nuisance, 100,000 people rallying is a cause for alarm. If the government constantly has to call in the national guard to control assemblies, it is going to get expensive both in terms of money and in that countries international standing.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
What gets more press for your cause, e-mailing the IMF or trying to shut-down DC by sitting in the streets? It doesn't matter what you delieve in (right, left, whatever), effort and personal sacrifice gets the word out, sitting at home on your ass does not.
The author is basically asking for help in writing a P2P spamming and DDoS tool. Leaving aside the legality of this action (which it quite possible is not, particularly as laws start to come down hard on spammers), it begs the question of whether or not there is any place for a "demonstration" when it comes to digital democracy. If you want to demostrate online then I would suggest that you start by demonstrating a bit of responsibility by recongnizing that just because you disagree with someone does not give you the right to silence them -- this "tool" is nothing more than a tool for a few disaffected mobs to silence those whom they disagree with rather than actually participating in the political processes that have been established to deal with these grievances.
I would suggest that the authors stop wasting time working on a thinly disguised DDoS tool and instead actually try to see how political speech and democratic ideals can actually fit together. The past few years have seen the emergence of weblogs, community forums, indymedia, and a host of other digital tools for helping people build communities of discussion and distribute ideas and information that can be used to educate and inform. I would suggest that people actually interested in digital democracy seek out these tools and help to make them better.
There is nothin more immature than a child proclaiming that if people will not listen to what he has to say then he will scream and throw a temper tantrum so that no one else can have a conversation. Grow up!
I find that these types of demonstrations are going to be getting alot of people in trouble if they lack the ability to cover their tracks.
I met Max (hey Max nice job getting slashdoted!) at Defcon 10 and he has some interesting ideas (and code) to achieve this goal. Many people will attack this and call it "leftist destruction" and "a simple DOS (or ddos)." The fact remains that we lack a clear cut manner of (effective) protest in our world.
Even in America (TM) we have lost our rights to free speech. We have areas for protest inside a fence, a free speech zone even. People being shot. Protesters and their phantoms of lost liberty have become the evil of the world. In other parts of the world we have people killed for speaking out.
I personally know Tibetian monks that China would like to kill for simply speaking out against the state.
We as a whole cannot let this type of totalitarian behavoir exsist unchecked. Be it corperate, government, private citizen. We as a whole (planet) are letting the world fall back into the clutches of fascism under the guise of "freedom."
This is where the internet comes in.
Countries, corperations and the common man all rely in someway or another every day on the net. With the tools that Max doesn't provide it (could) allow some of the tech savvy (but not tech savvy enough to write their own tools) to fight back.
This is a non violent means of accomplishing this goal, that really sets it apart from the rest. No police will even shoot a protester on accident. Imagine that.
However this type of protest is not recognized as a proper form of policial/economic protest.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Virtual "demonstration"...
Sounds more like virtual destruction to me. Whilst there are certainly a lot of things the World Bank and IMF have done that on afterthought seems stupid and contraproductive in terms of reducing poverty, you have to keep in mind that the idea that this is because these organisations are per definition "evil" is an *opinion*. You can say it out loud to anyone you want, write it on banners, cry it on the streets. But for god's sake, what we're dealing with here is essentially a DDOS attack on their servers, intended to disrupt their communications and whatnot. Whatever the cause, how tiny damage it ever causes, it is still a lot closer to terrorism (yes, I know the word has gotten a wee bit too strong lately, but try to get my real meaning here) than demonstration.
Just because no single person is to blame, it doesnt mean that it's right. The problem, if you are of a political alignment that makes you define it as such, is political and should be dealt with in a political way. Convince the rest of us - and there will be no "enemy" .
"Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand..." - James Randi
Maybe those suburban, wannabe-communists that "protested" in Washington D.C. the other day should stick to digital demonstrations instead of disrupting the lives of people that are actually producers.
More corruption of law enforcement and legal system.
Let me be blunt: you are spoiled. To even attempt a comparison between the timid crowd control at IMF meetings and -- oh, I don't know, the entirety of the civil rights and labor movements in the U.S.? -- is naive. To suggest that the current state of affairs is somehow worse is laughable.
Tell you what -- I'm going to start an counter technology to Votester. It'll be called Cluester. Instead of spamming [pick a boogeyman] with P2P email, it'll bombard pampered activists with copies of Zinn's "People's History of the U.S." And the more people who join in, the more copies we can send out.
Seriously. Some people need to be reminded there was a world before CNN.
P.S. - Don't get me wrong; I'm all for civil disobedience where appropriate. I plan to be down in D.C. along with everyone else for next month's march against the U.S.'s Iraq policy. And I recognize there clearly remain a great many opressive regimes throughout the world. But it just hurts my teeth when people don't recognize how far they've come as they survey the distance left to go.
Either that's a very click troll or you are one stupid fucker.
That is the lamest thing i have ever seen.
Ok i just can't read slashdot anymore.
That's it.
This article is just pathetic, that was really fucking sad. Ok it's just to embarrassing to read this site anymore.
I'd rather be busted reading a gay mens health magazine than these horrible "cyber activist freedom zine" sites like slashdot and "3l33t scr1pt k1dd13 d00dz" at 2600. I knew 2600 was total loser shit. Now i finally see slashdot is just as bad, maybe worse, i donno, i mean "Votetester" is fucking extremely fucking pathetic.
wow. i don't know where i got this idea that slashdot was kinda sorta respectable...i mean the stories about cartoons, the ads for mpaa movies, the stupid flamewars, etc. was all bad but i guess i didn't see the big picture of lameness until this article.
Maybe we should ship them all to Europe where they've been brainwashed into thinking that socialism is still a good thing.
DDoS IS FUCKING CENSORSHIP NOT FREE SPEECH YOU STUPID SHITS.
This has to be a government plot to discredit internet activism...i mean no one could really be that stupid? could they? *shudder*
People in third world countries most exploited by IMF and the WTO generally DON'T EVEN HAVE ELECTRICITY so how the fuck is this going to work?
get real you fuckin' pussies.
Oh great. So that ill-informed malcontents from all over the world can do some industrial strength complaining without straining their fat behinds. This is democracy at its worst.
Hi i'm a white suburban fuckwit who just came up with a totally X-treme way to Hack The Planet (tm) like we all use this over glorified e-mailbomber at the same time and like spam the man into giving us our rights!
My mom is getting mad at the high gas prices cuase it's starting to cost so much driving my little sister to her soccer games in our Ford Expedition so if we all get together and log on to AOL and run my totally X-treme Spamster e-mailbomber at the time we can make Iraq become a democracy and give us cheap oil and we can sell them McDonalds hamburgers!
I'm such a radical thinker! X-TREME D00D!
Anything other than each protester repeatedly hitting 'Reload' and/or 'Send' is DDOS and will be dismissed as such, even if nominally legal.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Oh, so it's not that you're against these maurauding hooligans getting in the way and denying people the right to work and put food on the table; you just think the poster isn't leftist enough for your tastes.
America has been a greater beacon of freedom and dissent than any other country on Earth, including Saddam Hussein's Iraq which you'll demonstrate for, but you won't demonstrate for your own country, your own fellow citizens, when maniacs kill 3000 of them in one day. No, you'll make excuses for them.
Idiot. I hope your "socialist utopia" arrives and bites you in the ass. You'll be begging for the good ol' days of free America then, but you'll have helped destroy it.
...
is an empty lie.
And if you don't believe a Welsh rock band, try a Harvard professor.
Wake up and smell the fucking coffee.
Really, if you want a "digital democracy", stop wasting time trying to shut down the corporate interests and work on software that the government could feel safe about using to let everyone voice their opinions at the polls.
My alma mater used a telnet (and now web-based) system to get more people involved in voting and it's translated into a 5-10% rise in voter turnout in the first few years.
Building a P2P-DDOS is going to do nothing but piss anyone who might have even been on your side off. Work smarter not louder.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Voting should be free.
And your comment about voting and breeding is fucked.
First we don't let the poor vote.
Then we don't let the black kids vote.
Fuck you.
I'm serious. This is completely ridiculous -- ever since JonKatz stopped posting, Michael has taken the reins of the "Putting Inane Bullshit On The Front Page" carriage and run with it.
In the name of everything that's holy, someone fire Michael. NOW.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
Who cares about the black kids? They probably want to use these DOS tools. Just like the poor.
Let them all hang.
No, this post has nothing to do with agoraphobia. However, it does relate to your most interesting comment about the right to vote. Your point is, I assume, that you'd really rather that votes only be cast, and counted, if they are backed by a true wish to make a difference.
... but it did happen. And it was shushed. People were beaten for complaining about what goes on. Are you surprised there's apathy?
... those are the people who will run our lives. If it takes electronic voting to reach out to those who think the system doesn't work, then do so! Make sure they know their vote matters, whatever it takes.
I can understand your frustration with the voting system. I think, though, that your feelings about it can be better channeled by looking at the following problems:
-Not everyone would have the money to vote. Not everyone is fit for military service. (etc.) Imposing any restriction besides registration would imply a class-level difference, between those who can afford to vote, and those who cannot. I'd really rather not live in a country where only the (even mildly) rich may vote -- the laws have an effect one everyone's lives. As such, I'd even rather children be allowed to vote. And tourists. And anyone else who (at least for a short while) must live under the laws of the land. If the jurisdiction of law is going to be based on land-borders, votes should also be defined purely by land-borders.
-It's not apathy that is the root of the problem. It's not that people don't care about the issues; it's that they've already made up their minds ahead of time. I come from a rather (D) family, by girlfriend from a quite staunch (R) family. In both cases, I've observed people who will go to the voting booth because they care about the issue, but would willingly 'vote down the line' (check the box at the top saying you agree with said party on all issues.) We need to educate people to care about issues rather than grand theories. I grew up in europe, where there are quite a few more parties available to vote for. Here, you rarely have more than two choices: and two choices cannot possibly represent, accurately, all the different combinations of voting preferences of the american people. But they do. Because people here refuse to deal with individual issues. And that, I think, is even worse than apathy.
-Not being able to distinguish between (D) and (R) shouldn't surprise you: in europe, they're both considered centrist movements, compared to all other available political parties. You don't see here campaigns by neo-nazies or communists. The anarchists are barely represented. Independent? What does that mean? So really, no, the two aren't that different. If you see them as radically different, then you just have an extremely narrow vision of the political spectrum. Open your eyes.
-Representation is a problem: would it have mattered if I had voted (D) in the last presidential elections? No, because the deciding factor wasn't the state I'm in -- only in Florida did every vote count (that is, obviously so.) If we had a more direct approach, where 'popular vote' were actually the vote that counted, perhaps people would be more inclined to vote, no?
-Apathy isn't surprising: consider slashdot. Most of us are pissed off that our congresscritters (what a fond name) won't listen to us. Shouldn't they be listening? If they're not, and our votes don't really matter, then we're not left with much but civil disobedience. And with recent laws, that's not nearly as safe as it used to be. Check around -- police violence is a problem, and it's stifling even our ability to hold protests outdoors. Check the videos available from indymedia, raisethefist, etc. of protests, say, at the presidential elections? I hadn't even seen those on television
I'm sure others can add to this list. I'm all for democracy -- fair democracy. Democracy in which people feel empowered to make a difference in how their country is run, how their lives will be changed by the powers that be. If they don't feel they have that, it's useless. Lobbyists, people like our families, who vote based on how their parents (and churches) vote
The poster obviously hasn't read a single sentence of the the slashdot story, just the headline. Groan.
The post goes on a rant about VOTING but the article is about digital protests.
As for Voteser, amusing idea. I doubt it would be successfull, and it's too similar to a DDOS. I give it a big thumbs down.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If you think going online and whining in some blog is going to bring about rapid change, you're pissing in the wind. The IMF protestors have one thing right - if you want attention you've got to break something. The Bolsheviks had it down even better - if you want real change you have to smash an entire system.
Of course you can shut down as much of the web as you want to. Governments can simply walk into NAPs with guns pointed and tell them to shut down...shut down the entire NAP or go to federal prison.
While Votester is certainly an interesting idea,(the name especially, inspires confidence) I propose utilizing 900 number technology to choose our political leaders, a la Big Brother or Total Request Live. The elections would more than pay for themselves through the small fee charged for every call, with any surplus given to the winner on a live television show. Frankly I can't see any negatives to the plan.
you can argue that freedom has actually been increasing for more people in the USA and the world.
Wage slavery isn't freedom...it's umm...slavery.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Civil Disobedience was never meant to be easy. The very definition of such an action is that it is not sanctioned nor permitted by law. If you don't like getting picked on for breaking laws you think are unfair, that's just tough.
we will have a way that wealthy people on broadband connections will have a way to spread their political views. At last we have reached an all inclusive democracy. Where do I sign up?
Honestly, people need to be proactive about their political views, not press a button.
"Votester"? What does this application have to do with voting?
I could see "Protester", and then you'd have an accurate, descriptive name which fulfills your Rob Schnider-esque desire to end every P2P app with "-ster".
ummm... appreciate the past. plan for the future.
Our digital world now has brought new 'rights' that earlier movements never thought would exist. To settle for the fact that we have alot of physical rights now because of past protesting, doesnt mean we should fight for our digital rights....or any rights left that are being stripped from us.
I'm sorry. I never buy the: it used to be worse bullshit. Or even better: it could be worse. Never settle.
a majority of the people that would use this technology would use it responsibly, but there would be that %15 that would use it just like another script kiddie DDOS tool, and ruin any chance of anyone else being taken seriously :
there's a lot of ways to facilitate change, but the one thing that they have in common is each person does a little, and the only way large changes come about is by a large number of people. this tool would put a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of a small number of people ( i can see it now
protest_leader : dammit, we only have 5 protesters
protester_1 : hey, let's just change the time unit from M to N
protest_leader: even better, let's up it to O
) and thus a DDOS happens, ruining the credubility of anyone participating in this form of civil protest.
if you want to change something w/ your digital means, use e-mail/web-pages/chat groups to organize, discuss, and plan. an anonymous spam/HTTP request shows little imagination and commitment.
better yet, go look up your local chapter of Food Not Bombs, which I used to do as a teenage punk rocker. it's a lot of fun, you get to cook great food, hang out, and make a social difference by giving good food to people that need it. or whatever other group satisfies your political/social idealogies.
and as nice as the thought of influencing society via negative ( punishment-oriented ) actions against what you percieve to be the offending member/group, it has a history of either being either detrimental to your cause or ( witness the history of Russia and Germany ) spiraling out of control and just becoming another form of control and power, to be fought against itself. sometimes the best thing you can do is to do something that might not be as immediately gratifying, but positively ( growth-oriented ) aligned that shows your opinion and might even cause a small change
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Quoth the anonymous one: You have exactly zero proof that this will be effective, and I have a few points you don't appear to have considered.
Protests and civil disobedience depend largely on appeals to the "good side" of human nature. GandhiThe Mahatma and his followers were successful by-and-large because the Brits couldn't justify their actions to the rest of the world. Modern mass media played a huge role in Gandhi's success. There was tremendous pressure from home and the rest of the world to stop the brutality of British colonial rule.
Now, some of this brutality was carefully provoked by Gandhi & Co. specifically to discredit the Brits in the eyes of their own citizens and the rest of the world. Much like the war in Vietnam, once the public saw what was happening they had little stomach for it.
So what am I ranting about? What we need to learn about this is that the problem with protest is how you spin it in the media. Gandhi knew this, and you should learn it. Unarmed young men getting beaten is a sympathetic image, and impossible to deny. The excuse of, "They walked into my club" (while true), doesn't work as well when the blood is on their faces, but your hands and uniforms.
Digitally, however, no one gets hurt. Great. But no-risk protests don't work because you only win if the public sympathizes with you, and who's going to sympathize with a bunch of P2P geeks mailbombing Congress? No one - you'll be called a group of anarchist, terrorist hackers trying to interfere with the duties of the government.
If you were getting the shit kicked out of you on the Capitol steps it wouldn't matter what they called you - you're the one doing the bleeding, so you're going to get the sympathy.
But your plan entails no bleeding. No risk at all, you say. If Gandhi's followers had all stayed home and written polite letters, even in great volume, they would have gotten nowhere. No risk, no reward.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
An increasingly large percentage of the world population (especially in developed nations) is over the age of 50 and cannot safely participate in public demonstrations due to the physical fragility and health risks associated with aging. They simply cannot risk getting beaten up by the police. In other words, the majority of citizens cannot safely assemble and demonstrate.
Are you kidding? The elderly are the ideal people to be on the front lines of a demonstration!
The real down side of using old people for protests
I dunno about virtual protests. Like Heinlein said, all authority derives from the threat of physical violence. Virtual sit-ins will just provide more impetus for government-mandated Palladium-like architectures on our PCs and on the network.
Fermat's other theorem: "I have a simple proof, but I can't write it down as I fear it's a DMCA violation to discuss it"
Are these the same minor causing 100% of all the looting/fires?
When you look at say a G8 summit you see 1000's of peaceful people then a few 100 who are storming around causing shit.
These same people then retaliate with shit like "The brick slipped from my hand into the mcdonalds... honest, I was protesting like civilized nations getting together!"
Hey, go get a fucking job you social-elite piece of shit. Not all of us can sit in our parents basement while thinking up ways to be "special".
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You seem to have neglected to mention my unlimited supply of moderation points, one of which I have just used to deep-six this swath of verbal chloroform into the -1 bin.
Nice try, pipsqueak.
-Michael Sims, Slashdot Editor
I think the idea has some merit actually, but would need to be carefully designed to avoid the risks and shortfalls noted in the comments above.
Look, what's the difference between a massive civil protest that shuts down traffic and business in a city and a denial of service attack on a network? Aren't they basically the same thing? So isn't this idea just the natural digital-era evolution of physical protests?
Also, did you notice that the writer is proposing an algorithm that seems to filter out abuse by ensuring that the number of messages sent is a function of the number of participants in a protest? So in other words, small protests don't end up sending enough messages to be DoS attacks. And if a protest actually is popular enough to get several hundred thousand people to join it, then hey isn't it probably important enough an issue to merit such an action? I think it depends on how the system is designed -- for example, if the algorithm was such that for small group protests 1 message per peer per day was sent, I don't think that would be a DoS attack at all.
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS IDEA AND A LETTER WRITING CAMPAIGN? If you don't like this idea, then you must not like letter writing campaigns either. I mean, aren't they basically equivalent?
To those against the idea: Don't you think technology should be applied to the political process so that the people have a chance to be heard in this age of mass-censorship, corporate media, and precrime police?
I know this proposal has the potential for abuse, but c'mon, is it really worse than people marching on the street and physically fighting with the police etc.? I think peaceful online protests are definitely more civilized and non-violent. Isn't that better for everyone?
If there's a large sit-down protest at an event or business, it attracts attention because everyone can see it, and it only inconveniences the target. This method would seem exactly the opposite. It inconveniences everyone, if the DDoS produces a significant drain on the network besides just the target; and it doesn't attract attention, because no one can walk past your email flood and ask you what you're doing and why you're doing it.
To quote Jim McCoy's comment,
Seems to me that the state-of-the-art in digital democracy is as a means for communication, organization, and education - not as an effective method of civil disobedience in itself, but as a means to effectively organize conventional methods of civil disobedience.
An much as we all like "cyberspace", meatspace has some useful properties as well, which allows us to do some things in reality that we can't easily do on the Internet. This plan attempts to mimic the real world in an entirely superficial--and therefore useless--way. I expect it's possible to duplicate something like the dynamic of a live protest on-line, but it will take much more infrastructure than this.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
...no individual peer can be considered to be engaging in illegal harassment, hacking, denial of service, etc. Rather it is only the totally decentralized..., ie a distributed denial of service. Wow. I didn't know thase were legal....
A *real* digital demonstration would be if a group of people each went home, wrote emails to their congresspersons, and sent them off. This would be legal, safe, open, and... probably not so effective. Dead trees are just harder to ignore than emails, and take more work to filter. This is all the more true if those emails are part of a DDOS attack.
In terms of resistance to government tampering, Publius or Free Haven would be a better way to get your ideas around if people would use them, which many people do.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Hey Micheal, I think it's great that Slashdot isn't afraid to post controversial articles, like this.
I am saddened by the situation in Washington D.C. -- the protests are not really effective. It was the same thing during the Gulf War. A lot of protest, but the government and big corporations didn't listen. And the media always seems to make these protests look like a bunch of hairy anarchist hippies. There's got to be a way for the average Joe's out there to be heard. Yes, they could send snail mail, and that works. But I think using email, if done right could be equally or more effective. After all, Working Assets has been doing this via Act For Change, quite effectively.
I *do* think Votester needs work though. Perhaps there should be more focus on simply polling the public in real-time, and less emphasis on automatic emailing etc. Perhaps users should manually click a button on their peers to send emails, to avoid this being considered as automated spam. Or they could simply vote their opinions and then download formletters to email in manually to a set of email addresses, or a mailing list address, provided by the network.
In any case, there's got to be a grassroots system for gathering opinions and making some noise -- one that enables anyone to participate. After all, how many people can easily get to Washington D.C. for a protest? Why should people's ability to protest be limited geographically? That isn't very democratic. The capital simply isn't equally close to everyone in the USA. I don't think it's fair to call someone "lazy" or "apathetic" because they can't afford to leave their job for a week to go down to DC and get arrested. There are a lot of working people in America who simply don't have that luxury! Votester at least is an idea in the right direction.
Now all of you techno-elitists out there who equate this idea with a DoS attack -- please explain why this is actually different from a sit-in or mail campaign? I think you all need to think a bit more deeply -- but then again, perhaps you guys also trust CNN for your news (in which case, you are so brainwashed that there's nothing I can do to help you!).
Once again Micheal, KUDOS, for having the courage to post this one. Even if it never gets implemented, it will get people thinking and perhaps lead to something truly useful someday. I hope so. Because our so-called "democracy" is almost dead and it needs all the help it can get.
You are exactly right. Michael hates free speech and so modded you accordingly.
This sounds like a good idea on the surface... some of the comments already out here mention the technical problems. However, someone has already devised an on-line system for taking back our rights...
:-)
Read Jim Bell's "Assassination Politics." It's a long document, but thought provoking (and gub'mint provoking) as all hell. Seriously, the author went to jail, and people who toy with implementation have ended up there too.
The premise is to hold an on-line death-of-some-public-figure/enemy-of-the-people prediction lottery using anonymous digital cash and lots of encryption. It reads like sci-fi, and gets you wondering on plausibility and morality.
Note to Gub'mint spies: I am not advocating that anyone set up and use the Assassination Politics system... blah blah blah Just thought I'd share a somewhat more extreme example of on-line activism systems.
Dude if you hang the workers who are the capitalists going to exploit?
Sure, it's not illegal, but just imagine how incriminating it would *look* (to "them" at least) just to have "Votester" installed...
There are many better forms of passive disobedience that get much more results
how about evading taxes,
ignoring copyrights,
blowing off patents,
using tax havens and other forms of
hiding assets,
get your perscriptions on the black market,
or from other countries that make illegal generics
keep your kids in home school or private school and out of the system
use lots of trade and barter whenever possible and never report it to anyone else, and buy anything like guns, pharmacuticals, that you can on the black market.
can you help smuggle or house an illegal aliean?
can you help supply guns to families in 3rd world countries that are having their freedom taken away?
You need to understand that others are trying to controll your life, and unless you are willing to take actions that destroy their power over you, you will be a slave.
Perhaps this is the problem, you are too willing to protest and make noise, but not willing enough to assert that controll that is rightfully yours.
C'mon, who amazing /.ers?
I see nothing wrong with a system that facilitates mass emailings from masses of people. Not too many each.
Sure make it secure, where it does take an individual to arrange for the email at a certain time. But what is wrong with this?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Democracy initially allows people the freedom to do stuff, as time goes on people take advantage by performing criminal acts to get money/whatever, the politicians pass laws (Marijuana) that the people can't change so these criminals are tolerated and nurtured. When the criminals become too powerful, the people all of a sudden want a restrictive Government, their freedoms are curtailed (so what if a police dog smells marijuana in my car, does that really give him the right to search?). In a restrictive democracy the people cannot freely protest against Government (at the WTO protests an unarmed student was SHOT AND KILLED) and so resentment builds until a civil war/coup occurs. Perhaps a corporate oligopoly led by Bill Gates and Linus would be more peaceful in the long term?
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
In a State with 10 million inhabitants, 2 million of which will "pay to vote" the probability of your vote making a difference = damn small
Therefore only stupid people will vote, and intelligent people will invest this $400 in the lottery which gives better odds.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
If anyone decides to build this, it would be good to find a different name for it.
The terms Votester and Vote-ster have been in use for a few years now, and refer to online vote-selling and/or vote-trading services/technologies. There are none currently in existence. But the term was coined to highlight the possibilities and dangers of large-scale vote-selling, or large-scale vote-trading, if voting systems (for public elections) are attached to the Internet.
I first heard Dr. David Jefferson, Chair of the Technical Committee for the California Internet Voting Task Force, use this term back in 2000. Here are links to show the term's usage to date .. National Workshop on Internet Voting (11 Oct 2000), B.K. DeLong's BrainStream (25 Oct 2000), BBC News (28 Oct 2000), David Jefferson Presentation (27 Aug 2001).
Perhaps using some combination of "protest", "protester", and "Napster" would produce a name more closely reflecting the technology this write-up is describing.
My point stands - you do not get real change by asking for it. You have to take it.
People ate well and indulged in excess long before market economies become dominant. Take a look at how the royals of Europe lived. Building Versailles didn't save the French crown...why would fiber optics necessarily reinforce your system?
I'll agree with you -- it's not as obvious as I may have seemed to think it is, that the electoral college has outlived its time. It's also not going away -- if I remember correctly, it'll take a 2/3 vote on the part of the states to change the system, and that would require the states who consider themselves beneficiary of the said system to give it up, which isn't likely.
... there's no guarantee, as I said, that the elected official will actually side with me on enough of the issues for me to be satisfied. Switzerland has had quite a few referendums (for the larger stuff, 'smaller' law is handled by elected officials) and I'd say I rather fancy that system. But as stated by the parent, not everyone cares (at all) to vote on individual issues. We'd have a lot lower turnout (my guess) at per-issue votes than at elections. But it's still more people voting than in the house and senate (if anyone cares.)
Balancing the voices of the voters is, I'll admit, a complex task. Your presentation quite accurate. Could we accept, perhaps, a system in which votes are cast with a value of '1' per person, but make sure that in cases such as rural states (no offense meant) the specific problems of the area will be taken into account? I think that's what our congress is for, and local government. On a national scale, I'd tend to think that a person is 'worth' a person, not otherwise. On the local scale, I'm very much for these people who would otherwise not be 'as represented' getting their way. But I'd rather not think that, because of the way the system is built, my vote only matters 3/4 as much as the vote of someone in [name another state.]
Then again, even if I do get the 'right' person elected, thanks to my well-counted vote
All considered, it doesn't matter -- they're not changing the system. Bah.
Ouch. I'd say that was personal. I wouldn't mind your skepticism (may I call it that?) if it weren't so darn hard to fake videos of (fairly, if not perfectly) calm protestors getting beaten for complaining about our last presidential elections.
... when you manage to describe it accurately, send me the completed pamphlet. I've always wanted to know what it is I believe (I'm sure my parents would like to as well!)
As to raisethefist, I'd remind you that your logic is quite a bit the same as that of the University of California, with the complaint about the link to the FARC? The argument is that by mentioning someone's point of view in your own argumentation, you are implicitely supporting theirs. I'd beg to disagree, but I really don't need to beg at all.
So, I have a party now? Neat! Always wanted one of those
G'day!
Maybe now would be a good time to build that bomb shelter I was thinking about...
[insert witty comment here]
I don't agree with this at all. Technical issues aside, it seems more as if the objective is to turn modern democracy into a online media web-poll. It's not that hard to demonstrate that nearly all of the people who pro-actively take part in public debate and make noise in the media are people who want to change something from whatever is already happening, whereas those who agree with the status quo have no reason to protest unless those other protesters really get up their nose.
It also stinks of laziness, which leads back to the same problem of inactivity. One of the biggest parts of democracy is that you're supposed to stand up for it. Claiming that you might get a finger broken is a poor excuse. It's true that active parcicipation in demonstrations doesn't always work, butbut if people can't even be bothered to leave their home to express their opinion, then maybe it's not worth taking notice of.
Making the whole participation process automated and easy is just encouraging people to get lazier and lazier. It encourages politicians to take less and less notice of it, and rightly so.
It's pointless to have a referendum on an issue that results in 95% of people wanting to change something, if 95% of people didn't turn out to vote.. and after a short time, that's what will happen. Naturally that 95% will be trying to claim victory in front of the mathematically challenged majority, but it still means that 95.4% of people either don't want a change or don't care. The whole exercise was meaningless.
This is the main reason that I don't sign petitions that are waved under my nose, and I don't send form letters that are identical to thousands of others. If and when I have an opinion to express, I'll put some effort in and express my opinion properly in my own words. It might not get read in detail, but at least it'll be visible as an opinion that took some effort to express.
Also, it mentions:
I don't think it will be a DDOS because it's not a software that looks for other machines and breaks their security and then every machine starts to send requests to the target system, it's just emailing and accessing by HTTP the target system once in a while.
This software should be limited to only send emails and requests once per day or once por hour, being once per hour the fastest, and NEVER once per minute or per second.
EHC
I partly agree with legLess ("no-risk protests don't work"). Voluntarily putting yourself at risk is a potent way of showing (1) your commitment to the cause, and (2) the brutality of the system you're protesting against. Where, that is, the system is clumsy enough to be visibly brutal.
In other cases, you can still show your commitment by making some demonstrable sacrifice. Take a day out and travel to join a demo. Everybody there (1) made an effort to get there, (2) is visible to the press and (3) has appeared in person to represent his/her views -- and so has accepted a degree of accountability.
Votester accomplishes none of these essential things. Furthermore, as legLess says, it looks a lot like petty vandalism and so is unlikely to attract sympathy.
The power of civil disobedience lies in attracting the support and sympathy of the wider population, not in being a nuisance to your target.
It's amazing how uncreative political protests have become in this country. Enter street, sit down, chain arms, repeat. Stay at home, mail letters, complain, repeat. Ever notice that neither of these involves going to statehouses and talking to or yelling at legislatures? They do let you into those things, and for free no less. Sure, you get arrested for disturbing the peace, but that's a lot more satisfying thing to have on your arrest record than parading without a permit.
The place where people should be focusing their efforts is at the mechanics of government, not venting at society. And yes, we need a clearer separation between protesters and revolutionaries so that thousands of homeowners and parents can have their voices safely heard without the risk of arrest, and thousands of fearless college students can have something truly positive to do that will land them in jail, rather than just throwing a concert.
-What else can you do? Write for papers! They really don't have any money to spend on content these days, and love to print long, interesting editorial pieces. With smaller, more specific papers you are almost guarenteed to be printed. That way, you will be read by far more people than by commenting on slashdot, and your piece will be cited by lazy high-school students for years to come.
-Give speeches. Most city council meetings have open-floor sections, and your council member is far more likely to have an ear of someone who has an ear of the president than you do.
-Get arrested for something memorable and dramatic, like being beaten by cops or hijacking the satellite TV video (but not audio) signal during the state-of-the-union address to display images of victims of american emperialist policies.
-Talk about these things with people you don't know, constantly. Talk to the people behind the counter at your supermarket, the people on the street, and generally being an information source for anyone and everyone who is willing to give you the benifit of 30 seconds. Discuss, don't give speeches.
-Send annonymous bomb tips. Shuts down just about anything, and fast. Just remember that you can and probably will be tracked down unless you cover your tracks meticulously.
-Cut out the middleman and get state referrandums passed. You need several thousand signatures to get something on the ballot, but just think of the voice that gives your cause. Did medical marajuana have a chance of being taken seriously before getting on the ballot in California? Not really, but now...
-Hang signs from freeways and billboards. (you can guess what state I'm in). No, it's not legal, and they will eventually be taken down. But they will be seen by literally thousands of people per hour on their way to work. And really, whose voice deserves the audience, one of frank political discussion or one urging the purchase of a AT&T wireless services?
Join Calperg, Massperg, the Christian Coalition, or any other organization that you believe is aligned with your political goals, and donate one night a week to bettering mankind. Campaign finance reform really needs people.
-Be creative! Why did these people join hands to shut down Washington when many of them could have parked their busses? 500 dollars isn't unheard of for a car that has just enough life left in it to drive to downtown. That wouldn't be as effective as, say, a leafletting campaign, but it would at least be more than throwing a concert in a park.
-Finally, stay goal focused. If you want to stop one nasty timber company from logging, you can chain yourself to their equipment and park a bulldozer in front of their gate. If you want to stop the spread of the timber industry in the northwest, you need to help draft and push through legislation in the logging towns that limits the company's powers to exert emminent capitalism. If you want to stop Wells Fargo Bank from exploiting the gullibility of elderly patrons you can either smash their windows down, or start up an education campaign that targets the aged, along with legislation that prohibits such arrangements.
If the protesters wanted to be truly effective at getting the message about IRAQ out, they would have hung a screen over downtown DC and played Apocolypse Now all day.
Just as a side note, I'm replying to this person not because their comment was wrong or incomplete, but because it was inspirational and needed an amen.
amen.
The ______ Agenda
Votester translates community sentiment into community action. I think it has the elements of a good idea.
It's a virtual sit-in. Isn't a physical sit-in a type of "denial of service" against an office or street, etc.? Those against Votester often seem to use the argument that only physical "bloody" protests make a difference. I would beg to differ. What matters to politicians is not whether people bleed, but how many of their constituents care about a cause.
Mass letter writing campaigns *do* get noticed and they do influence political decision-making. In fact many congressional reps. and other political offices systematically measure incoming email sentiment.Anything that potentially influences the re-electability matters to them. If 200,000 people participate in a Votester protest, and they profile themselves as to what districts they are in, then you can be CERTAIN that it will influence their politicians.
Unfortunately, to bring about change often requires some amount of disruption. The civil rights movement did it. The women's rights movement did it. The labor movement did it. Why should it be any different today?
People are more apathetic than ever unfortunately. I think a tool like Votester is necessary in this age of apathy. It makes it easier for people to get involved.
Like you say, you're not lawyers, and neither am I, but that's no excuse for being ignorant of basic law, especially when advocating an action based on it's legality, effectiveness and unstoppability.
IANAL, but the guys who write Black's Law Dictionary are. Read their definition of conspiracy. Specifically, it sounds like you are advocating "civil conspiracy":
"Civil conspiracy. The essence of a "civil conspiracy" is a concert or combination to defraud or cause other injury to person or property, which results in damage to the person or property of plaintiff." - Black's Law Dictionary
when you say:
"Since each Votester peer only sends a few messages (such as once per day, or once per hour, etc.) no individual peer can be considered to be engaging in illegal harassment, hacking, denial of service, etc. Rather it is only the totally decentralized, emergent activity of the entire group that results in large volumes of messages and requests being received by target addresses. Therefore no individual is liable." - Your proposal
Even if we keep rhw argument on your own terms, workers in the US have more social mobility, a better standard of living, and more opportunity than any people has in the history of the world.