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Anonymous Files Petition To Make DDoS Legal Form of Protest
hypnosec writes "Anonymous has filed a petition with the U.S. Government asking the Obama administration to make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a legal form of protest. Anonymous has argued that because of advancements in internet technology, there is a need for new ways of protest. The hacking collective doesn't consider DDoS as a form of attack and equates it to hitting the 'refresh' button on a webpage. Comparing these attacks to the 'occupy' protests, Anonymous notes that instead of people occupying an area, it is their computers occupying a website for a particular period of time."
I think I could agree that hitting refresh over and over again on a website would be a valid form of protest. But wouldn't having a program do it for you be like using mannequins to occupy wallstreet?
The whole idea of the traditional protest is that people had to stand in a particular area to create problems for wherever they were standing. The limiting factor is that it requires people's time.
Having a fleet of computers continually access a site does not occupy people's time, but rather is an automated process, which is not a form of individual protest. I would imagine that having people hit websites manually, and pressing the refresh button cannot be classed as a DDos attack, and if it were, then they would likely be protected by the right to protest.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Unlike conventional protests, the protesting packets in a ddos are not your property.
I am in a state of super-position. Attempting to quantify me causes me to collapse to an observable state in this reality. I am Anonymous Quantum.
So we're going to a form of protest to whoever can afford to allocate them most IP addresses to something?
This site claims to hate censorship, but it fawns over a group that protests against people it doesn't like by crashing their websites so that nobody can hear their free speech.
I work for a small hosting/cloud provider, and from experience, I can say that this is a form of attack. It can't be controlled is the worst problem, and it starts affecting many other people who are not involved in the 'protest', who just happen to be on the same shared server, cloud, or data center. Also, as for any argument that such an outcome would be the point of a 'protest', to raise awareness, but the problem is that most people affected by it wouldn't know anything about the source of the attack. Overall, a dDoS should not be a protected option in any form or for any reason. It is way too blunt, and as we build more onto the Web, it can become dangerous or even life-threatening to allow these attacks. It could be the same as allowing people to attack power stations or plants, which is certainly a crime(bordering on terrorism in this day).
I think Anonymous is missing the concept a bit here. You can protest a business with a sign and megaphone, but you are not allowed to stop people from patronising that business. Very rare is it that a DDoS doesn't affect somebodies business. Most often, it affects somebody not even related to who the attacker is intending. If you want to protest, there are non disruptive methods to use, DDoS shouldn't be one of them.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Nope. It's akin to a union strike or a mob of protesters having a sit-in and handcuffing themselves together to DENY ACCESS to some location. That's denial of service. It makes the people in control of that location, and sometimes the clients who are dependent upon it, very angry, sometimes violently so. The whole point of denial-of-access protests is that they DO have a social cost that forces people to take notice.
I hope, and expect, that the petition will be denied. What it means is that any entity with sufficient knowledge and resources (individual or corporation) would be permitted to flood the net with DDoS packets.
If such activity were legalized, by the same principle so would automatically-generated petitions. So would spam. So would noise pollution. It sets an extremely toxic precedent.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I also filed a petition - that I be recognized as the Queen of England. I think mine will be approved just before the one approving DDoSs.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If only a pissed off 16 year old could single handedly occupy a building in a legal way (ie without weapons), then the comparison would perhaps be valid. Talk about half baked idea...
"It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage"... Only if you, not a program, can click refresh in excess of at say 500 times per minute, non stop for 24 hours and get a couple thousand of your buddies to join in. Good luck with that.
If you legalize DDOS as protest, is it going to be ok for companies to DDOS their competitors, sites they don't like, sites posting negative stories about them etc?
DDOS: It lets you censor anyone who spends less on servers than you.
Sure, its not always corporate folks, but if you let people do something disruptive, big money is going to be spent to abuse it. I may reluctantly go along with money=speech, but money=right to censor others is too far.
Just link them to an article on Slashdot and watch their server buckle under the load, I believe it's called the Slashdot effect, or simply being 'Slashdotted'
Generally, you can't occupy private property. Protests need to be on public property. So how about this. You can only ddos .gov sites. Let's see how far that flies.
So let's accept rape as a form of protest. It's just a way of occupying a vagina for a short period of time.
Many good reasons that this is a bad idea already listed. However I would also note that in my quaint notion of how the Federal government is supposed to work, the Executive Branch doesn't make the laws, so asking the Obama Administration to make this legal doesn't even make sense. They can write their Congressman, except, oops, they are all trying to remain Anonymous.
If the internet were to be protected as a free speech right, then DDOS attacks are in fact detrimental towards that 'right'. The point is, everybody has a right to their opinions, right or wrong. When you start placing criterias against that. Then, who gets to say what 'can' and 'can't' be said? Censorship via DDOS is wrong. Better have an alternate site and build a case towards boycotting whatever/whoever your intended target based on actual proof and a viable and honest justification of your efforts. Promote your efforts towards facts and truth. Let that be the downfall of your target.
... I had a website that was so popular that it would be a target of Anonymous.
And then I would get out on the porch and bellow, "Get off my lawn!"
This would be the first time in a couple of years where I have seen complete and total unanimity in a Slashdot discussion with a non-trivial number of posts. (At least, posts I can view.)
And to confirm: Yes, this is an insanely stupid idea.
s/speech/expression/g as needed. I'm not sure what the case law says, and I don't really care. Morally and ethically, shouting someone down is not speech, it's denying them their right to speak. It's insane to hide behind freedom of speech when you're doing that. It's also depressingly common.
That is the fucking point!
Protest are meant to cause damage. They can damage a business by blocking and discouraging people from shopping there. "Don't shop at ABC, they hate this thing" They can damage a reputation or public image. "Boycot ABC, they use children to make their product and it causes cancer!"
I think your confusing a hippy love in with actual protesting.
Hmmm... I don't see any fawning going on here at all. Anonymous has done some worthy things, but I don't remember anybody on Slashdot arguing that their DDoS attacks should be legal. That's not to say that they haven't had some worthy targets... but that is different from approval of their methods.
A denial of service attack carried out by an individual or small group is indeed hacking and therefor is a federal crime. But if thousands of angry people unite and just start hitting the refresh button in their browsers over and over again to express their discontent, I don't call that hacking; I call that protesting. Its a mass public demonstration of objection. Yes, its often more likely that they're using some kind of program like LOIC, but so what? If it weren't automated, would that make the person participating any less disgusted by the entity they are protesting against? Or any less willing to take some kind of action to participate, even if its manual instead of automated?
Yes, its destructive. Its meant to be. Its meant to get people to take notice. No different from throwing garbage at a referee who made a bad call at a sporting event. If you don't wanna get trash thrown at you, then quit being a douchebag!
Guy Fawkes kiddies take a regular beating on /. It must suck to go to jail for using DDoS tools that you don't even understand.
DDoS isn't analogous to Occupy Wall Street. It would be if the protestors denied the public usage of the business offices of private firms. As the buildings are private property, so are servers, and the fact that some customer may not want me to use either in no way validates that they should be able to make me unable to.
Aside from that, once you cross the line from public space and mechanisms, it opens all sorts of clearly-unacceptable parallels. Perhaps CEO's of industrial enterprises can protest their sense of excessive taxes by removing their company's filtration systems, and "DDoS-ing" the surrounding public of breathable air?
By the way, I'm posting AC. Does this make me fully as qualified to speak for "Anonymous" as the unspecified association of the petition filers does?
So long as the anon-tards are ok with me blocking them in their houses with a fleet of ROVs. Same basic deal as what they are talking about: Using a ton of automatically controlled systems to deny access. If they aren't ok with it being done to them, in the real world, then why should we be ok with them doing it to others on computers?
The other thing about DDoS attacks is they almost always involve breaking the law anyhow, by using botnets. Unless you legally have access to 100% of the systems you are using AND the ToS of the providers allows you to generate traffic of the levels you do, then you are already in the wrong. Exploiting systems and using them for a botnet is not legal and it should be extremely obvious why.
These morons don't want a legit protest, because next to nobody agrees with them and they are lazy. If they went out for a physical protest, they'd get like 20 people to show up for one day and it'd be ignored. So they want to use sleazy, illegal, tactics to try and amplify their voice.
It also ignores the fundamental point of a protest. A protest is NOT to disrupt activity, particularly not to have just a couple people do so. It is to show large scale support or opposition for something. It is to let the public, and the government, know that a lot of people want something. It is impressive by its size.
If 250k people show up in a park and protest something, that is impressive, that is something to be noticed, respected. The large number of people makes it noteworthy. If I rent out a shitload of video and sound equipment so I can broadcast myself all over a park, and protest alone, that doesn't make it noteworthy, other than as to what an egomaniac I am.
They don't want freedom, they want tyranny, where they get to be the tyrants. A large segment of the public refusing to do business with a company because of their policies is freedom in its fullest. A small group of people shutting down a company's ability to do business because they don't like it is not.
...and are often convicted. It's kind of part of the deal. In most cases, if your protest doesn't break any laws, then it's not newsworthy. If DDoS were legalized, then we would just have a crappy, unstable internet. We would all be used to that and the fact that somebody DDoSed somebody else would be completely un-newsworthy. Political DDoSers would then necessarily move on to some other activity to get media attention. So this petition is pointless if not laughable. QED.
They broke their own rules and started using all kinds of blackhat tactics instead of just DoS. With all the illegal activities they participate in, they are not in a position to negotiate this.
Not that I agree with it. If you choose civil disobedience as your weapon, don't cry when the cops take you away.
Making web sites inaccessible by spreading viruses into unsuspecting people's computers and using them without consent is most assuredly nothing at all like going out and personally spending your time and energy sitting on a sidewalk. Furthermore, protests cannot block right of access - when they do, they become illegal (for all the obvious and proper reasons) and the people involved will be arrested.
Sitting in the shadows, directing armies of confiscated computers while taking no personal risk yourself is not protest.
A form of "protest" where you don't even have to go put on any clothes, go outside, meet people, or do anything else that might inconvenience you, while still choking major infrastructure and inconveniencing everyone else.
You give people choice, with reasonable rules, you have a chance that people will play in your game. There gotta be some compromise, taken as granted, but telling people to f**k off doesn't bring us anywhere.
That I would live to see the day that our nation would declare war on "terrorism" or that petitions signed "anonymous" would be taken seriously.
I think we've all heard far more convoluted reasoning used by the DHS, GOP, NRA, etc.
When you protest in the real world you are there you are visible and you are subject to scorn and arrest if you break a law. Hiding behind an anonymous DDOS attack is not a bold act worthy of the same kind of respect. There is a place for protest in cyber space. Perhaps the we need a protest DNS service where each domain name has a protest zone where people can set up protest pages associated with existing domains. Add a protest switch to web browsers. When it is on each time you visit a site being protested you are faced with the protest page that you can click through. The protesters have to pay for their own bandwidth and would not disrupt the site being protested so no laws are broken. The protest site is subject to the same kind of problems real protesters are such as being ignored or sued if the protest commits liable. It would also give an easier forum to publicize grievances. Not being able to get to a site does nothing to explain why you think people should not go there. A DDOS attack is more like kidnapping someone or burning down their business than protesting.
Most left-leaning political action is a form of bullying. Note: I said "action" not "speech".
There's a pattern here. A true liberal would be for more free speech and more openness; a true liberal would setup lots of web sites advancing his ideas, start businesses that out-compete the businesses he hates (using his apparently obviously superior liberal policies and beliefs). The left-wing jerk, on the other hand, apparently has nothing positive to contribute to society and only feels "validated" when he screws with other people and their stuff. At this rate, the left-leaning jerks of this generation are going to end up with the left-wing jerks of earlier generations always ended-up .... with bombings .... and then jail time
I disagree. The DDoS is not preventing anybody to enter. It just slows the entering down (connection timeout can occur). It is more a kin to producing a line of peoples to create artificial traffic into a business. Normal customer are not prevented in any direct form from entering. Yes, they may loose their place in line due to bio-needs :=)
Freedom to assemble and protest only extends so far. Once you begin to disrupt the normal course of business or government, you are breaking the law. If you wish to compare it to a regular protest, then it would be like the protesters physically preventing an employee from entering the business. You can stand outside and shout all you want, but you still have to allow the business to operate.
DDoS is not the same as physical protest. Physical protest means making people aware of something, and potentially depriving them of business. DDoS means customers/users have no idea what's going on, you're depriving them of business, AND you're costing them bandwidth, which isn't free. It's the equivalent to strongarming any customer who walks near the store, and having a guy on the inside regularly pulling a dollar out of the cash register.
If DDoS is deemed legal, then spam will then also become legal.
to sign a petition?
DDoSs can DAMAGE systems.
Then the system is already fucking broken.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I could actually see DDOS being considered legal. The problem that groups like anonymous would run into is their ability to execute a DDOS attack without first infecting enough machines with their malware to form a large botnet. That's the hurdle they will face, but something tells me the "hackers" themselves don't have the proper bandwidth at their homes to do any sort of meaningful DDOS as a single host. I'd say they are welcome to try though.
Shouting is a form of protest, how do you feel about a megaphone?
How would you feel about Opera's automatic page refresh option?
Hitting the key with some kind of mechanism for easy repetition?
If you believe a healthy society should have a way for people to demonstrate, to protest, you got to accept that this can only be done if they can be an inconvenience to someone. If all protests had to be done in some remote field where nobody is bothered by it, protests would be meaningless.
One of the best ways to create a repressive society is to get the plebs to suppress themselves. The company store is an oldie but goodie, get the workers to buy on credit all they want, then when they want to protest... that is just fine, just collect their due payments as per agreement. The houses for votes scandals was based on this, house owners are tied to their mortgage and so less likely to protest because they might miss a payment, neither can they move freely to a different area to chase jobs. Car ownership? The same, you need that car and it needs paying whether you are working or not. So you better make sure no strikes close the gates and keep those Saudi's happy by letting them run their sandy North-Korea with zero hassle so the petrol keeps coming. Just see how on occasion the Saudi's lower the oil price JUST before they are going to execute a child just to remind the west what the deal is. You get the petrol, we get to do whatever we want.
It is the UN trying to say freedom of speech can't mean saying stuff that upsets someone. No my dear Nazi, it means EXACTLY that, you do NOT need freedom of speech to say things that don't upset anyone. I can go to north-korea and Saudi Arabia and say "kittens are cute" and most likely nothing will happen to me. It is saying in the American South that gay marriage should be a basic right that you need freedom of speech protection. And MORE then just from the state (see top gear episode, the ONLY time the team was attacked by the locals) because that is a shameless US cop out.
Protesters are a hassle, so is a free society. It has always been clear that the easiest society to live in would be that of a benevolent dictator such as the fictional Patrician of Ankh-Morpork in the Discworld series. Pity such a person is so fucking rare as to be non-existent.
See how often fascism is excused by making the trains run on time. Sure, OTHER people might disappear for saying the wrong thing but my train is on time so that is allright then.
Freedom is messy, a hassle and inconvenient when others exercise theirs. Deal with it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Are you really saying that a denial of service attack is not simply a temporary disruption of service? That the two are somehow totally different things? I fail to see how so.
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
This is from apiece called "Letter from a Birmingham Jail". It was called that because he wrote it while in a Birmingham Jail for protesting. Oh well there goes my positive karma.
I am not against protests... In fact I highly respect someone for sacrificing their time and comfort, or sacrificing their health and freedom, for a worthy cause. It convinces ME that they really believe in their cause and maybe I and others should listen. Yeah real people can shut down service to a store or whatever by protesting in the way and forcing people to see them. But a single person can shut down a store in other ways too like with bomb threats. Do the ends justify the means? Is a DDoS attack really like protest at all!?? I don't think so. I don't see any human connection and what does it force people to see? Why should I pay attention to them when they do it in comfort and out of public view. If they can do it easily with no sacrifice of their own that I can see how can i tell if they are protesting or pranking?
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen". - Winston Churchill
Just like companies.
I think your confusing a hippy love in with actual protesting.
No, I think your confusing picketing with protesting. It's ok though, just don't confuse rioting with civil disobedience.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The Internet cancer.
Fucking read it.
I certainly do not hope it becomes legit, as there definitly is a big difference to pushing the refresh button or using a doss script..
Using a webpage as intended (namely for machine-human interaction) should be allowed.
Writing programs which, withing the acceptable limits (honoring robots.txt and similar things) do an automated access for a purpose like searching etc. is obviuously also no problem
Using a program, which, with the *will* of the stupid lemmig (AKA Scriptkiddie/Anonymous follower) in front of the machine performs requests in a way which are not aligned with the intended puporse of the protocol, should obviously lead to criminal and civil persecution of the lemming (and its puppet master).
Writing a program which does such things against the will of the user is obviously criminal.
So, you fucking anonymous asshats: Yes - iff you collect millions of people who agree with you and they agree to personally load specific resources of a certain provider by manual interactions on the weppage, then yes, you are welciome to take down any webpage you like. But having a few hundred people who are mad that "can i haz the pornz for free" is not workign any more or that some company does not engage in activities which are considered illegal, or to support a alleged rapist, who claims to love free speach, but then buddies up with dictators?
Democracy works by gaining enough support, not by other things.
Allowing DDoS as political protest would also allow Amazon to DDos any webpage they dont like - if it has political claims. It would allow the all kind of opressive gouvernemnts ot do "political protests" agains oppositions webpages, and they could not even be tracked.
> I'm actually developing the website for a company that is booking passenger space on cargo ships to bring over 200-500 men and women with tourist visas from Jakarta, Mumbai, and Abidjan who have agreed to do the job in exchange for free room and board (which might be a tent in Times Square and two bowls of soup each day) until their visas expire. The owner claims that several organizations have signed contracts to employ his services to protest issues ranging from crime and poverty to offshore outsourcing, illegal immigration, and exploitation of workers. How they're going to get back home I have no idea.
Being a good patriot, I have submitted your comment and web link into the US Immigration Services citizen's report web form, asking them to do something about it. Therefore I think:
- Said cargo-ship boatload of people from Jakarta, Mumbai and Abidjan will never get their tourist visas in the first place or the ship will encounter a typhoon en-route and sink (cue music played by angels on a HAARP). You see, it is a crucial aspect of the US Constitution and the Monroe Doctrine that the US be free from foreign influence in its continental matters.
BTW, last time we had like 20 guys on tourist visas from Saudi Arabia and things did not turn out too great on that 9/11 occasion. We say that shall not happen ever again and that is why FBI, CIA, INS and the TSA stands ever vigilant!
- The FBI will come to your door, possibly with an arrest warrant concerning the abetting of foreign agents into entering the USA, which may qualify as capital treason. Heaven forbid the poor US taxpayers will have to fund your lifelong vacation in Florence (not the Arno, but ADX).
They do have a point.
Legally, I believe the main point is whether these are 10,000 people demonstrating, or 10 people and a botnet. The issue then becomes determining the difference.
I do agree that a DDoS is a kind of blockade the way you could do in RL by getting a couple thousand people to stand around, say, some corporate HQ, blocking roads and exits. But the difference is that in the RL, you really need a few thousand people. On the Internet, a bunch of jerks with a botnet can do it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Protestors may only protest on private property in the US when allowed by the property owner. As long as the owner of the web site has a way to tell the people that are doing the DOS attack to 'get off their web page', and can turn around and jail them for trespassing if they don't, I fully support this.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
So... I hate almost everything Obama does, should I be able to join a distributed knife attack on him?
so might a DDoS...... i.e. for those who want to participate in this protest trhen give permission or use you computer at this given time and directed at a given site in making automated requests.
Other option is to suppress the use of signs and bull horns and the use of such locations and times for physical "being there" protest.
Their weapon: the comma.
Even meatspace protests are illegal if the impede a company's ability to operate. You can stand outside of a bank with a sign, you cannot block its entrance. DDOS is the equivalent of blocking the entrance to the bank, not merely standing outside of it and shouting.
Protests are not meant to cause damage, they are meant to cause awareness. That's why there are legal restrictions to protest, like having to be on public property, etc. "Blocking and discouraging people from shopping" at a business are two very different things. I think you are confusing a protest with a riot.
Just to play Devil's Advocate for a second... Many of these anti-ddos arguments could be said about the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sit-in
A sit-in directly denies that space to potential patrons similarly to the way a ddos of a bank denies customers the opportunity to pay their mortgage. Would you also villify the brave souls daring to protest during the 1950s and 60s?
In a protest, people can see the signs carried by the protestors or at least speak with them to find out what it is they're protesting. And while people may be harassed on their way in or out of a place of business, they can still access that business. With DDoS, there are no signs to read and nobody to speak with. In fact, by means of botnets, many involved in the protest may not know it and likely would not want their computer involved in such activities. Plus, to the people attempting to conduct business with the protested, it isn't obvious that the site is being attacked. A DDoS'd server may look like that site is having an otherwise simple connection problem.
In RL people who do blocades are arrested and charged with crimes. They are also shot at with rubber bullets, hit with clubs, gassed with tear gas, and tazed. So I don't understand what Anon wants.
If the DDOS is being launched from the protester's own machine, I'm OK with that. The protester or protesters should, of course, be prepared for the consequences of their actions, such as being arrested and/or sued. However, if the DDOS is being launched through a botnet, on machines that have been compromised, then I'm not OK with this being a form of protest. There is no accountability, and the participants in the protest are not willing. It's (very) roughly equivalent to drugging and brainwashing thousands of people and then turning them loose on the streets. In general, though, I think that anyone who uses DDOS attacks should be subjected to a year of defending against them.
... Bernie Madoff has requested that Ponzi schemes be made legal.
Protesting is supposed to be a sacrifice done by a group of people to get attention on a specified topic. Having your computer do the protesting isn't a sacrifice. If you're going to shut down a service or someone's ability to go to work, you should at least have to make a sacrifice beyond the click a button.
1). Hmmm, I cannot access the site. It is being blocked by a protest. I think I shall investigate why they are doing this and possibly support their cause!
2). I can't get to my site. Those dumbass "protestors" are screwing up my time! If I had a hammer, I'd hammer them all like nails!
Which is more probable?
assume for one minute crowed prostate ... errr ... the other protaste and how the govermentZ deals. media-spin, tear-gas, batton stick wielding BSE-cow fed strong men and of course inflation. ... no demo. ... some laws down scaled, dear anonymous you sucks sh1tZ. the electron doesn't vote and doesn't take sides : )
no! turn off all electricity
now DDOS or DOS or whatever
It was to my understanding that you can protest to a point where you start causing private businesses/individuals loss of income and/or endanger their lives (such as blocking a sidewalk so people have to walk in the street). Is this invalid?
You can't block the doors to an abortion clinic to prevent anyone from accessing services. Typically the objective of DDOS is to prevent access to service, but in the case of just slowing it you still hit the issue of blocking. You can't legitimize blocking an abortion clinic by repeatedly lining up to talk to the receptionist. It might work for a while, but when you banned from the premise and continue to queue you'll soon be arrested. In the end it is merely the obstruction of services provided by the clinic that gets protesters arrested. Until they find a network equivalent way to stand at the side in a public area while holding and sign shouting their propaganda such attacks will, and should, remain illegal. Not that this will stop them from happening, but an attempt to legitimize this seems a bit silly. Particularly when most DDOS attacks utilize systems not owned by the attacker.
Yes, I do realize that Anonymous usually utilizes volunteers, and that is commendable. Still, when the legal fallout for their actions hits these volunteers they should be arrested (have their internet connection taken offline by their ISP for a few days, kin to 72hr max arrest w/o charge). Criminal prosecution of them seems a bit excessive, but civil lawsuits against them for losses should be applicable. This allows for a virtual version of the bad behavior we see at some physical protests while keeping the repercussions for their actions in step.
On a side note, would a mistyped domain name that shows a parody site be the online equivalent of burning an effigy? I miss the spirit Americans once had while expressing their disappointment in administration. What better says "I strongly disagree with your policies" then making a mock up of a politician and burning it in the public square whilst cheerfully pumping one's rifle, pitch fork or torch gleefully into the air?
How do I sign this petition??