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Police Arrest Five Over Anonymous Attacks
nk497 writes "Five people have been arrested in the UK, accused of taking part in Anonymous' DDOS attacks in support of WikiLeaks. The five men — aged from 15 to 26 — are still being held by police for questioning. Met Police said the investigation was a collaborative effort between forces in the UK, EU and the US."
1. If they run a botnet or two, yes it might
2. And where does it say these 5 were all of them?
The protection this tool offered was designed around the fact that so many people were using it, it'd be impossible to arrest them all. This kinda falls down when there may be 500 Americans on it but just 10 Brits and you're one of the 10.
Also kinda ironic attacking people's freedom to do business with who they want in the name of protecting free speech.
So they sit on there arses while billions of pounds of financial cybercrimes are committed, trillions of spam sent, and then arrest some 15 year old for hurling a few packets in the name of free speech - fucking lame.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
... and as always, England Prevails!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
They're just kids. Counting the 16 year old they arrested in Holland this makes 6. It's disgusting, there are real crimes being committed out there and here the police are chasing down some misguided pranksters/activivsts.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Tell the small mom and pop site that uses PayPal to do its business that losing a day or two of income is just a "prank" and not a serious crime.
Age doesn't determine the drawing line between crime and prank.
And there is more than one type of cop in the world. Some go after murderers, some go after embezzlers and some go after cybercriminals.
They said it like that because on occasion, its the EU or US that issues the warrant and the UK just executes it. This states that they actually had a role in the investigation besides just executing the arrest warrant.
...accused of taking part in Anonymous' DDOS attacks in support of WikiLeaks.
Who is "Anonymous" and in what way does he or she possess "DDOS attacks in support of WikiLeaks"?
Anonymous is the name of the group that organized the DDOS attack. The apostrophe use is perfectly legitimate in this case.
Depends on how many machines they had in their control as well as the available bandwidth from each point of origin. Technically, it only takes one person to create a DDoS. And a very effective one at that.
Posting a link on slashdot often seems to do the job as well
Anonymous in this context is a proper noun ending with S. To end with es would be to change their name, to end in s's would look silly.
Too many people get worked up over apostrophes anyhow. When you get to complex situations all the rules start contradicting themselves and it all falls apart. Here's a grammatical puzzle.
You have a load of copies of Stephen King's It. Using just the title (plus the appropriate apostrophe suffix) what is the possessive case of all of these books as a collective (for example if you wanted to refer to all of their pages)?
Tell the small mom and pop site that uses PayPal to do its business that losing a day or two of income is just a "prank" and not a serious crime.
Try telling wikileaks that the government pressuring businesses to censor because it would be illegal for them to do it directly is fine and not a serious breach of the constitution.
And there is more than one type of cop in the world. Some go after murderers, some go after embezzlers and some go after cybercriminals.
And yet none of them go after the real perpetrators, it would seem.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Perhaps with enough publicity from this case, the "members" of Anonymous will realize that throwing a tantrum is not useful activism. Unfortunately, it's more likely that the various police involved will be targeted next, along with their supporters, families, and barbers.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
oh the poooooor mom and pop stores.
perhaps they'll be more inclined to instead do buisness with companies which don't attract such... oh hey there's the point of the protest like any other.
any kind of protest will disrupt buisnesses in the local area or which rely on those which are being disrupted.
Think they don't?
tell that to the poor mom and pop store off a road blocked during any big protest.
As far as I can tell, not one of these individuals can be charged under the Computer Misuse Act (but IANAL) - the DDOS was effectively reaslised across many individuals whose net effect was a DDOS. Further, surely they could claim that their action was simply an expression of their right to free assembly? Anyone any insights here?
...with your freedom to do business sooo curtailed by Bad, Bad Anonymous.
Look, man. I don't approve of Anonymous' methods, but there are Bad Guys so big and bad around there that I'll prefer to have other worries.
I, for one, will put up with any Anonymous, spammers, whatever if anyone manages to put down Monsanto (just to name one among legion).
I bet they think they're going to get a lot of information out of these boys/guys to find out who's the brain behind the operation!
Perhaps with enough publicity from this case, the "members" of the NAACP will realize that throwing a tantrum is not useful activism. Unfortunately, it's more likely that the various police involved will be targeted next, along with their supporters, families, and barbers.
--Obyron
Don't worry... we'll get just as upset if the police make false claims about the fallibility of their methods, arrest people who never had LOIC on their computers, arrest hundreds of people based on the same evidence, or start extorting settlements under the threat of an expensive court case with flimsy evidence.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Doing business with what type of companies? Companies answer to shareholders and have to do what they feel is best for the company. You don't know what kind of pressure they received from the government and what impact NOT blocking wikileak payments would have had on them. People can be activists - publicly traded for-profit companies cannot.
LOIC (Low Earth Ion Canon) has a catchy name, and has a cool cache among people who dont know much, but it floods the target with packets from your IP address, there is no external vector, so there is no way of hiding your IP address..
maybe the members of anonymous should have checked that
I was shocked when I found this out (Steve Gibson's "Security Now" podcast)
What did they think would happen?
This should be a strong warning to people who think of using LOIC.
Move along... there is no sig here.
And there is more than one type of cop in the world. Some go after murderers, some go after embezzlers and some go after cybercriminals.
Unfortunately they all get funneled through the same overworked legal system. So, even if there are separate people doing the investigating and arresting, the paperwork goes through the same channels amd the cases are heard by the same judges. Meanwhile, the perps are held in the same prisons, further taxing the system. It's all the same.
I don't know the answer for sure, would probably take an professor of English to give a concrete answer, I believe the answer is probably Its' though.
They should not have used a tool that made their identities so obvious. So nothing of value was lost.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Which is an argument which could be used for pretty much any deplorable act by any company.
Bopal? well they had to answer to shareholders(translation, make lots of money) and have to do what they feel is best for the company!
IBM helping a genocidal government?You don't know what kind of pressure they received !
etc etc etc
They need to be able to track down cyber criminals and bring them to justice. Hopefully they are sentenced to 10 years hard labor and never being able to have a computer again.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Best for the company within the law obviously. What PayPal did was not outside the law and didn't kill anybody.
well if it's work for the government then it's going to be considered as within the law by the government unless you get really unlucky and they want to shift the blame afterwards.
Great that as long as long as nobody is killed then anything is ok! right?
So I guess people also shouldn't protest about the warrentless wiretapping and the companies which helped and the government which afterwards declared the whole thing legal and gave the companies involved amnesty?
in the real world "oh we were able to make lots of money doing that" doesn't make all the protesters go away.
People can protest all they want. Did I ever say they couldn't? There is a step between protest and attack, though.
Would it be any different if a large group of people manually clicked refresh or something similar?
The intent would definetly be there.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
is getting a crowd of people together and sitting down blocking the entrance to a store an "attack"?
because that's pretty much what a DDoS in this context is.
That criminalizes DOS strategy then.
Nope, it's called "reason". If I want you to NOT kill my little daughter and I have a gun whilst you are near her armed, I will shoot you in the head.
Killing to preserve life.
It's kind of common in the armed forces and doesn't generally get called "hypocrisy". But go ahead and use it on the Army if you like.
Despite there being little to no evidence outside of innuendo wishful thinking of that ever happening, since when has it ever been a moral or legal right to commit a crime because someone that doesn't directly influence you committed one that didn't directly influence you?
Two wrongs don't make a Right. Three rights make a left however.
Maybe this is only perception and the level of stupidity associated with the crime. You see, most organized (or otherwise) criminals don't want their name associated with a crime nor do they want publicity about the crime. This is especially true if they want to repeat the offense.Some do, and they get caught. So they take steps to hide the entire fact that a crime has happened in the first place in order to be able to commit the crime again and again. What happened here is sort of a complete reversal. These idiots wanted the publicity because it served their purpose. So obviously, when you depart from the entire, I hope no one ever finds out about this line and go with the I hope everyone see this, you are going to attract more eyes to looking for who is behind it and hence more arrests and accusations to the more publicly known crimes.
Book them Dano.
Tell the small mom and pop site that relying on a single money transfer provider is asking for trouble.
Call it a learning experience. Don't rely on a single point of failure.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your comparison is off base because the NAACP doesn't break the law in their efforts.
A good comparison would be the Irish Republican Army. Sure they fought for their freedoms, but the methods they used were barbaric. Tossing a grenade at a funeral is outrageous, regardless of how you've been treated. Just like this anonymous attack is.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
Just an amendment, it was actually the UDA, a more extreme extension of those that were originally in the IRA.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
Actually, we do know what impact it could have on these companies. It's illegal to do business with criminals or criminal organizations when your business with them enables or conceals the criminal activity. This has been part of the standard organized crime legislation for years. So as soon as government officials started claiming Wikileak's actions violated US law, Whether they prosecuted or not, those companies had to evaluate if their business with them was in violation of the law or not. And seeing how most of the business done with wikileaks is done to the extend of allowing them to continue to operate in the ways the illegality was claimed, they were exposed to prosecution too.
Seriously, why resort to guessing what people are thinking and trying to assume it's the worse when you can just look at the laws already on the books. In the least, the US could prosecute companies who's business allows the claimed criminal activity to continue and even if they didn't prosecute wikileaks, those companies would have to prove that either their business didn't allow the activity to continue or prove wikileaks wasn't repeatedly violating the law. Either way, it's a lose lose situation for them.
Yes it is and those people would most likely be arrested.
for every one of people as such you arrest or attempt to repress, you generate thousands more of them in their image, by making them heroes as such in the others' eyes.
the time that people are suppressed by 'making an example of' any among them, are long past. 20-21st century generations become increasingly more rebellious as you attempt to repress them.
serves you right though. this is exactly what you should be doing.
Read radical news here
What happened here is sort of a complete reversal. These idiots wanted the publicity because it served their purpose.
Um, are you still talking about 'Anonymous' or is that a reference to the 2010 'Media Whore of the Year' winner, Julian Assange?
It also doesn't make the protesters accurate or informed. The telco's already had immunity from prosecution as the government always presented them a valid authority for the taps. The amnesty came in when protesters were trying to hook a loophole to get rich off the telcos by saying that even though the government pretended to have the lawful right and authority for the wire taps, because they lied, the telcos don't get immunity any more. It wasn't the telco's responsibility or duty under the then existing law to do anything but comply with a government request if it was presented according to existing statute. And in case you are wondering, that means presented with papers stating a legal authority either by warrant or one of the various means a warrant wasn't necessary exists and they had a right to the information sought. It doesn't mean whether or not those papers or means were legal or illegal.
Isn't the line: "ignorance of the law is no excuse"
if the telcos broke the law and opened themselves up to liability, even through what you call a loophole (ie the laws actually working) then they should have known they were exposing themselves as such.
They're the ones with the legal teams after all.
So they did something illegal(after someone, apparently without the authority to make it legal told them it was legal) at the governments request and then the government not only covered it's own ass but theirs as well.
That damn well does deserve protests.
Perhaps with enough publicity from this case, the "members" of Slashdot will realize that using a straw man argument is not useful activism. Unfortunately, it's more likely that the various police involved will be targeted next, along with their supporters, families, and farmers.
Are you trying to say that transparency of government is not an important enough topic to protest?
--Obyron
Or maybe they were idiots and were really easy to catch.
So they sit on there arses while billions of pounds of financial cybercrimes are committed, trillions of spam sent, and then arrest some 15 year old for hurling a few packets in the name of free speech - fucking lame.
Cops can multi-task.
Computer Crime News Releases - 2010
Here is the smallest of samplings:
E-mail threats to the Vice-President.
Five of sixteen U.S. defendants plead guilty for their role in "Lost Boy" child pornography ring
Theft of trade secrets from Goldman-Sachs
Operator of luxury eyeware website charged with cyberstalking, threats and fraud
Extradited hacker gets 10 years for first-ever hack into Internet phone networks.
Orange County man arrested on federal charges related to demands for sexually explicit videos from women and teenage girls. (Hacking into computers for purposes of extortion)
But the 5 were all "men". They can't catch the hordes of canny techno-geek women involved in this internet mayhem, huh?
and some go after cybercriminals.
So I assume that the "collaborative effort between forces in the UK, EU and the US" is also searching for the people behind the DDoS attacks on the Wikileaks site.
Right? Right? [crickets...]
lol.. I guess it could be both.
Anonymous picked very highly public targets and bragged about doing so for obvious reasons. The also came out claiming they don't exist and blah blah blah- hence the name. They were actively recruiting and doing a number of things like providing tools to participate in the public lashing of these companies.
since when has it ever been a moral or legal right to commit a crime because someone that doesn't directly influence you committed one that didn't directly influence you?
a great deal of the civil rights movement involved people commiting acts of civil disobedience (read: crimes) to protest things involving people they'd never met doing things to other people they'd never met.
Totally insulting to the freedom fighters of the Civil Rights movement. They were battling government; Anonymous is battling companies that refuse to do business with a *website*. More importantly, the activists of the Civil Rights movement knew the potential punishment for their actions and were more than willing (I dare say proud) to pay the price for the potential freedom gained. Every time a member of Anonymous gets arrested, the Internet lets out a collection WAAAH!! Lastly, they weren't ANONYMOUS (cowards).. they had the courage to put their face out there. Assange is definitely no MLK Jr.. on his best day, he's Farakhan on his worst day.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Well, no. There was no ignorance of the law. The law clearly stated that when the government or it's authorized representative request assistance, they wouldn't be liable for the assistance provided. The loophole isn't actually a loophole as it was never tested in court. That's what the immunity intended to do- shut down the possibility of it actually working as was the intent and purposed of the original law.
The telcos did not break the law. They provided the access and technical services they were required to by law. The government broke the law (or so it's claimed) and used the telcos and existing laws to do so. Punishing the telcos for following the laws they are required to follow simply does not make sense when the violation was someone else'. The loophole didn't actualy exist, it was a ploy to harass the telcos by costing them money and discover information about the government's actions.
No!. What part of this is so hard for you to understand? The only way the telcos did anything illegal is if the government came to them and said "we aren't allowed to do this, but will you let us anyways". If the government presented anything stating they had the authority, the telcos were absolved from any liability or prosecution because the law said specifically that they had to provide access and assistance to them. And the government did claim to have the authority to do it.
Fuck man. You are looking really hard to be pissed at something but you can't even get your facts straight when it's laid out right in front of you. I suggest you sit back and take a deep breath before even thinking about proceeding. The telcos did nothing illegal because they were required by law to give access and technical assistance to any valid government request. And the word valid does not have anything to do with the government being legal or not, it has to do with the paperwork presented to them.
You are trying to turn this into a cop in the middle of the intersection directing traffic and getting pissed off because the damn cars that passed through on the red light at the cops direction weren't cited for running a red light. That's how obviously wrong holding the telcos responsible and claiming they violated the law is.
So your claim is; I can make an allegation of criminal wrongdoing against any company or person I want, and that should create a situation where their partners will no longer do business with them, their financial institutions will withhold their funds, and their leaders will be subject to political scrutiny? Furthermore according to your comment, all international businesses associated with said company/person will imagine themselves to be under random foreign criminal law and cease business operations with the aforementioned? Allegations are allegations, were charges filed? Do we see a criminal case proceeding against wikileaks proper? Status Quo is dead you chump, big government knows it and you are an apologist for evil men.
"Well, no. There was no ignorance of the law. The law clearly stated that when the government or it's authorized representative request assistance, they wouldn't be liable for the assistance provided.
riiiight.
They weren't breaking the law yet it still still required that they *change* the law to make it so that they weren't breaking the law.
"They provided the access and technical services they were required to by law. The government broke the law (or so it's claimed) and used the telcos and existing laws to do so. "
So they didn't break the law... yet they needed a change to the law and an amnesty to make it so that they weren't breaking the law.
that's called breaking the law.
"The loophole didn't actualy exist"
ok, so this "loophole" which required an amnesty and a change to the law to close not only didn't actually mean they were breaking the law but it also didn't exist. they just changed the law and declared the amnesty for fun.
"If the government presented anything stating they had the authority, the telcos were absolved from any liability or prosecution because the law said specifically that they had to provide access and assistance to them. And the government did claim to have the authority to do it."
Still, going only on your own statements here.
So they didn't do anything wrong yet they required a change to the law and an amnesty to protect them from prosecution for certainly not breaking the law due to a loophole in the law which didn't exist.
great. good we've got that settled.
I'm genuinely curious now, this loophole (which didn't exist) which required a change of the law and an amnesty to protect the companies which didn't need protecting: how, exactly, did it fail to prevent people suing the telcos for helping the government to violate their constitutional rights in this case?
If a significant amount of online protesters using LOIC were at public wi-fi access points, the ones utilizing DHCP, where rotating IP addresses were assigned --- as opposed to those places with static or frozen IP assigned address --- they can only conceivably track back to the public place, not the individual online activists and protesters. Always -- when possible -- avail yourself of those public access points. And a thousand thanks to everyone involved.
This is why you don't just blindly do what people tell you to do. An attack like this could have easily have been pulled off in a manner where the people doing it would actually stay, you know, anonymous. Instead you have one guy that knows how to code up a sloppy DDOS app, and a bunch of lemmings that will use it on their networks, without any idea what its actually doing, or how to mask their identity.
Try reading some predatory legislation passed in America (should you be American, or whatever country you be a citizen of) and predatory jurisprudence handed down.
When one equates justifiable protest with a "tantrum" one has displayed their true colors -- and yours are the colors of the demonic one.
The Social Singularity occurred when the transnational corporate class assumed almost mythic power over the rest of us --- and the Social Singularity Pushback is Wikileaks. Grow a brain, dood!
there is so much wrong with your godawful posts but lets start with the 2 worst bits.
1:
non-violent political protest, in this case sending a lot of packets to keep a server from being able to communicate=! violent armed terrorism.
2:
the UDA is not "a more extreme extension of those that were originally in the IRA.".
The UDA is the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist group. they are the enemies of the IRA.
What crime? All they did is allow their browser to be redirected to a specific publicly-accessible site. No security was broken. All that happened is that the bandwidth became so chocked as to be unusable, which is something that happens everyday to some site that slash-dot redirects to.
Your comparison is off base because the NAACP doesn't break the law in their efforts.
A good comparison would be the Irish Republican Army. Sure they fought for their freedoms, but the methods they used were barbaric. Tossing a grenade at a funeral is outrageous, regardless of how you've been treated. Just like this anonymous attack is.
Now you're the one whose comparisons are way off base. Anonymous didn't kill anybody. They didn't even get anybody hurt.
And the other part of your assessment is wrong, too. Look at the history of the NAACP, and you'll find they've been breaking unjust laws since 1909, and getting arrested, beaten, and/or lynched because of it. Dining with white people, trying to vote, drinking from the white's water fountain, not sitting at the back of the bus; these were all broken laws.
Of course now that I see your username, I realize I have been trolled. Nicely done!
Enough of the romanticism.
Plenty of people at political protests cover their faces.
Sometimes with good cause.
The boston tea party involved people in disguise protesting a trivial tax.
If mastercard had just cut off some random website then nobody would care, when that site is a journalistic entity which one of the worlds largest governments is trying to shut down and the governmnet in question is enlisting the "voluntary" help of the company in question there's good reason to care and it's not surprising it attracted some ire.
No, because a claim by nfc_Death is not very credible. When the claim is made by the people with the power to arrest you, it's a lot more credible.
The DOJ has an active investigation.
Yes, clearly all small businesses need dozens of credit card processors.
There's this thing called "intent".
Trivial?
sure, everything except the tax on tea was removed.
the tea tax was only left as a token to assert "the right of taxing the Americans" and wasn't terribly high.
Which particular documents are you referring to?
If they are US government documents, then you are incorrect. The US cannot hold copyright on the work product of US employees performing their official duties. While exemptions exist (eg USPS, postage stamps), much of the works leaked by wikileaks would not be covered.
This doesn't cover state governments, foreign governments, or private corporations. But as I understand it, it IS the US government documents and media that we're talking about here.
I am in favor of the IPv6 allocation idea, but that's another issue entirely...
Assuming no prior criminal history, bail is a very likely option. Without further evidence, acquittal is likely.
Perhaps you've forgotten the early days of the copyright-infringement lawsuits, where the evidence was taken at face value, mostly because it came out of actual investigation. Timestamps were checked against logs, and the endeavor was small enough that humans could check the evidence for sanity. When the process became more widespread is when accuracy rapidly fell off.
There's also various other changes that have helped reduce the inaccuracy as well, especially within the past few years. Wireless encryption is much more common, public access terminals are more carefully locked down, and every defense lawyer worth his salt knows what mistakes to look for.
Quite simply, nobody complains because this doesn't look like a scam.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Are you just spouting things at the top of your mind just because you think it's coy or something? I mean seriously, you took nothing I said for it's face value and in turn attempted to restate it with your already incorrect beliefs.
Why don't you read up on the law at the time and the situation, the things those suing them were saying instead of making wild stabs based on nothing but guesses based around your mis-perceptional of the situation? Seriously, they actually admitted in an interview that the ACLU lawsuit was more about getting information on what the government was doing then punishing the telcos because they didn't think they would win against them. The immunity clause was there to stop the harassment of the telcos in an attempt to get information about the government's supposedly secrete operations.
They didn't change the law. Well they did but they didn't change the already existing immunity from prosecution or liability. What they changed was the way the immunity kicked in. Before, the telco would have to show up in court and say "here is the authorization, I have complete immunity from liability. The court would enter it into evidence and dismiss the case. The amnesty law said that those cases can't even go to court in the first place, unless there is evidence the telcos didn't act within the law. Again, learn a little about this crap before showing the world your ignorance.
Do you need a Qtip? The loophole was nothing but a means to get the telcos into court for discovery to find out what the government was doing. The EFF even said "the lawsuits were one of the few means available for the public to gain important information about the underpinnings of the wiretapping program, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without court warrants on the international communications of Americans suspected of links to Al Qaeda. "
The intent was never to punish the telelecoms, it was to damage the government and they weaseled a process in order to do so. This is what congress stopped with the amnesty clause and it was only constitutional because it was already there which is what the ACLU and EFF found out when they attempted to appeal the dismissal of their suits.
And you are ignoring the very content of those statements in favor of imposing your incorrect views on them. Try reading what was said again and this time, do it without the presumption that you are right. Because you are not and you will find that you are either a useful idiot allowing the system to be manipulated or severely misinformed.
This has already been explained before. Yes, the way they got immunity was to go to court, present their evidence, and state they have an affirmative defense. This however also put them in violation of existing law about disclosing the NSA warrants which made it difficult to do so. But the entire purpose, as stated by the popular rights groups, was not to punish the telecoms, but to gather information
would it have been so hard to simply state that middle paragraph about the reason the amnesty was put in place rather than just being smug and getting more smug every post?
And after all that it still sounds like a damned good thing to protest about: changing the law to hide illegal activities on behalf of the government when people take the governments contractors to court for helping to violate their rights.
So the idea is to hurt PayPal's customers so they'll go elsewhere? All this time, I admired the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its positive impact for civil rights. I didn't realize until now that they had the wrong idea. They should have been *bombing* the buses in order to terrorize the public into avoiding using them.
Nor can I. Believe me, I'd love to. Fucking unicorns.
Actually, I stated it in reply to your first response to me. I guess I incorrectly assumed that you knew more about the situation then you did and didn't do it clearly enough.
and I'm not sure it's a good thing to protest. I mean after all, it was changed in order to keep classified information classified. Perhaps protesting over classifying information that could show blatant violations of the law and constitutional violations by the government for little more reason then that would be completely appropriate.
As for taking the contractors to court, we as the public are not supposed to know about these interactions until such time either a case is made against someone or it is determined that one can't be made. Even then, it's more of a need to know thing for anything more then X taps happened and Y companies helped. The problem with what was happening is that it was an ongoing and active issue, some with and some without merit, some proper and probably some that were improper. The public has a right and perhaps an obligation to know if their government is abusing the laws or systems set up to help enforce the laws. But they don't have a right to look into my checking account to see if I received any illicit government payment and they don't have the right to break the law or find loopholes in a vein attempt to ignore the law in order to find out. That would be little different then the government illegally spying on your international phone calls in order to catch the chance that you might be up to no good.
Yes, and the only successful portions of those movements involved breaking laws that punished people for something others were allowed to do. IE, get to the back of the damn buss.
There is a hug difference in violating a law that targets a subset of people because of race or gender (whatever that isn't a choice) and violating the same laws that everyone is supposed to follow. That says we aren't going to take it any more. Violating a law that everyone has to follow just says you are a lawless ass who shouldn't be paid any attention outside of locking you away.
I'd argue that they everyone has every right to find every loophole they can, any organisation which can afford a legal team and a team of accountants will exploit every loophole they can find, should all the ordinary people lack that same right?
Loopholes are after all just a euphamism for "we fucked up writing that" or worse "I don't like what you're doing". exploiting one is perfectly legal.
You speak as if you think there's significant doubt about whether the illegal wiretapping ever actually took place?
and again with the idiotic violence comparisons bullshit and hyperbole.
in the context of busses it would be equivilent to horde of people sitting on the busses and refusing to get off so that for the day so lots of regular customers cannot use them, would be late and would be less inclined to rely on the bus service in future.
Intent to do what Jeff? You need to show an actus rea before you try to analyze mens rea. There is no legal right to have unchoked bandwidth, thus choking it isn't a breach of any legal duty.
It's not about the violence. It's about it being not ok to target the bus company's passengers when your beef is with the bus company. I think you're overly fixated on violence vs nonviolence here. The former is not categorically wrong and the latter is not automatically justifiable.
*any* large protest will disupt the buisnesses nearby and the people who are using the facilities suffering protests.
Cars won't be able to get down the streets, people end up late for work and generally get pissed off. that's with *any* large normal protest.
And with football games for that matter. It's beside the point. In the examples, you're giving, the denial of service is a consequence and not the *aim*. Sites are brought down via slashdotting all the time, but the intent is not to bring the website down. Clogging the highways and doing collateral damage to area businesses is not the intent of your typical large protest.
Furthermore, I read your earlier post as condoning the strategy of *targeting* the business's customers as a way of hurting the business. Not that it was unfortunate collateral damage for which we should feel regret, but that it was calculated damage that indicates a job well done.
Of course protesters aim to disrupt things.
That's a big aspect of effective protests.
Only a couply of years back truck drivers protested raised fuel taxes here by rolling round and around a few small sections of busy road to disrupt traffic and slow everything down with signs all over their trucks.
Yet it was a legit protest.
If you disrupt people doing buisness with a protest you by nececity disrupt both the cusomers and the providers.
One side effect of this is that it encourages people to go with providers who don't attract so much public outrage and hence disruption which only makes the protest more effective.
Wow....don't ever give someone legal advice when it matters.
The relevant laws bar disrupting access to another's web site. So yes, there is a legal right to "unchoked bandwidth" in that intentionally DDoSing a website is illegal.
And to go back to your parent post, "All I did was go to this website" is quite the moronic defense. Because the prosecution then asks "Why did you go there?" At which point you have to either come up with a ridiculous lie, or admit you were breaking the law.
Of course protesters aim to disrupt things. That's a big aspect of effective protests.
Only a couply of years back truck drivers protested raised fuel taxes here by rolling round and around a few small sections of busy road to disrupt traffic and slow everything down with signs all over their trucks. Yet it was a legit protest.
They protested high fuel by driving their vehicles around for no other purpose than to protest? And they inconvenienced other drivers. And for this to be analogous, they must also have been intentionally inconveniencing those drivers as a way of blackmailing them into the cause, which it doesn't sound like they were doing. Also, if you were just looking for an example of a protest that you would say targeted the incidental bystanders, look no further than the topic of this thread. Even if the trucking one *were* a good example, it just takes us into pointlessly throwing real world examples back and forth, which ultimately proves nothing.
And finally, you keep using the term "legit" to describe protests. I'm not sure what you mean by that.
If you disrupt people doing buisness with a protest you by nececity disrupt both the cusomers and the providers. One side effect of this is that it encourages people to go with providers who don't attract so much public outrage and hence disruption which only makes the protest more effective.
The *difference* is that you are callous to the collateral damage and, in fact, seem to see it as a positive thing. I never said that collateral damage could be utterly avoided, but I *did* say that we should not make innocent people our targets. I mean, your answer to the hypothetical mom and pop who lost a day of business was not "Sorry, that was not our intent, but it's a necessary consequence of our pursuit of this worthy cause." It was "Good, maybe you won't do business with them in the future."
Well i might have been wrong but you're an asshole. I can get the right facts, but you'll still be an asshole.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
Why would I say "Sorry" to anyone?
I didn't take part in the DDoS in any way. Last time I checked I have no obligation to appologise to people I've never harmed.
As for the meaning of Legitimate protest?It's pretty much an open debate.
http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/2011/01/27/what-makes-a-protest-legitimate/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/kingsnorth-six-environmental-activists
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/okbcwf/message/5458
Why would I say "Sorry" to anyone? I didn't take part in the DDoS in any way. Last time I checked I have no obligation to appologise to people I've never harmed.
Ugh. Let's cut through the BS. Do you think they should regret collateral damage or do you think they should embrace and pursue it? That's all this is about. If the former, we are not in disagreement and I misunderstood you earlier. If the latter, then *that's* where we disagree.
As for the meaning of Legitimate protest?It's pretty much an open debate.
http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/2011/01/27/what-makes-a-protest-legitimate/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/kingsnorth-six-environmental-activists
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/okbcwf/message/5458
Actually, I wasn't asking what makes a protest legitimate. I was asking what it means to you to say that a protest is legitimate.
A three-country super alliance manages to catch five kids. Way to go.
This doesn't cover everything, there's got knows how many ways to protest issues and things which people have every right to protest about and if I came up with a simplistic definition and claimed it covered everything you'd either quickly jump in with an example of reasonable legitimate political protest which it doesn't cover or compltely insane things which it does.
But 2 ways to get easy check marks:
That they're protesting a serious political/social issue: check: a powerful government and multinational corporations putting pressure on a journalistic organisation etc.
That they're doing it with the minimal violence, though as stated earlier there can be cases where violence is justified, it's just a lot harder to justify than non-violent actions.
As for the first question: regret it but not cripple their protests for the sake of avoiding it and in practical terms it does make the protest itself more effective.
Ok, then I withdraw my original objection. The second part (avoiding it), is a separate point we can debate, but if you think it's not appropriate to intentionally target innocent third parties to achieve your objectives, then we don't disagree.
The burden of proof isn't on the defendant's, they don't have to offer any testimony. (and you're claiming to know what is and isn't good legal advice) As long is it turns out these men were only redirecting their own machines, there's simply no evidence they did anything wrong. Access was not disrupted, just made very slow. The was no DNS spoofing, no redirections, no cutting of cables, which is what some other prosecutions have been for. They just accessed what was made publicly available in a manner that the host machine was configured to accept. That and any given machine was only a small fraction of any blockage. All you need to make the defense is a couple expert witnesses or even just a through cross-examination of the prosecutions expert witnesses.
So you're seriously arguing that this will occur:
Prosecutor: Why did you go to that web site?
Defendant: I dunno.
Jury: Not guilty!!
Yeah, not so much with the effective defense. Substitute "I plead the 5th" instead of "I dunno" and you'll get the same result. Yes, juries are supposed to not treat pleading the 5th as an admission of guilt, but juries are also not idiots.
The problem you seem to be having is not understanding that "made very slow" is disrupting, and against the relevant law.
So, a real-world shopkeeper should not be bothered if you stand in the door to his shop, preventing customers from entering or exiting the store? That shopkeeper provided a publicly available door, after all. It's not your fault that by standing in it you are blocking his customers. Clearly, the shopkeeper should have not provided a door for your to block.
Except that the defendant directed their machine to take part in the DDoS by going to that particular web site.
Saying what? That directing your computer to a site which is launching a DDoS attack somehow makes you not part of the DDoS attack?
You're an idiot. In a criminal trial doesn't have to take the stand, and in most criminal trials they don't. The defendant is presumed innocent, and has nothing to prove.
The relevant law mentions unauthorized access, and there isn't any evidence that the access was unauthorized. They connected to the machines on a publicly accessible network in a manner that they were setup to be accessed. This creates the presumption the access was authorized. (You and I are both accessing /. in the same way)None of these settings were disrupted or changed. And beyond that there simply no precedent in case law against it.
For a real life example look at some of the protests involving Canadian farmers. They all got in their tractors and drove up and down the highways. None of them were arrested though blocking traffic is illegal. Driving any of those tractors on that road was legal individually, even though the aggregate result would have been illegal for one person to do. Real life protests often cut off access to stores and streets, yet I've never seen the same penalty applied to someone marching in a protest, even and unauthorized one that would have been applied had a single person done it.
If a shopkeep has an open door, the presumption is that anyone walking into that door is authorized to do so. If 500 people enter making it impossible for anyone to shop they haven't done anything illegal. The shopkeep can ask them to leave, and as the admin of a site can put up IP blocks. In addition people picket stores all the time, often making access a bit more difficult.
That the computer was configured to accept public access, and that the connection did not exceed the scope of that configuration.