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."

Comments

Mannequin Attack

[dittbub]

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?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

we would, only we lack mannequins that can shout 99% and walk over a bridge

Re:Mannequin Attack

[AK Marc]

My favorite are the meatspace DDoS attacks. There was one in Dallas where the protesters went to a busy intersection, and walked around in circles around the intersection, obeying traffic laws, but the extra time for walk signals disrupted traffic timing, and everyone got a chance to stop and see the signs. There are lots of things people can do in meatspace that get in people's way that are explicitly legal. We just don't do it because we fear the law.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[icebike]

if legal, would be dominated by those with money and resources.

Or the biggest network of other people's compromised machines.

And lets face it, that is what this is really about: legalizing bot nets as a free speech issue.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Dahamma]

Not sure how effective that is in many big cities... try it in downtown Manhattan and no one would even notice because there are ALWAYS people crossing the street.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[marciot]

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?

Well, since most DDoS attacks use a botnet, it would actually be a lot like using a subliminal radio broadcast to hypnotize millions of people into showing up at a protest without their knowledge.

Yeah, this ought to be legal...

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

or have sex

This is /. You don't seriously think mannequin's can't have sex, do you?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Sentrion]

Your robot comment may have been meant as a joke, but there really is such a thing as a professional protestor. The going rate is reportedly $11/hr. 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.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[mysidia]

wouldn't having a program do it for you be like using mannequins to occupy wallstreet?

No, it would be like manufacturing a bunch of frankenstein's monsters, machines, programmed with only one goal in mind: hurt, disrupt, block.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[AK Marc]

You pick intersections that are important, but not otherwise full of people. Yes, cities with good public transport get lots of walkers, so that rules out, what, 2,3 cities in the US?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[mcgrew]

That hit close to home -- someone in Anonymous is an old Quake player that was familiar with my ancient, long-defunct site. I often joked about a DoS by repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a 33.3 modem there.

And when I made fun of a group of hackers (I was the Don Rickles of the Quake universe) they hacked my site and removed a picture of some Down's Syndrome kids I'd illustrated a story about them with. I'll bet I got more lulz from them hacking me than they did!

But actually, if you had a DDoS that wasn't a botnet but instead was millions of pissed off people intentionally slashdotting a site, how could that not be a valid form of protest?

I'm glad (and a little amused) to hear this.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[arekin]

Wait....Did you just say that an overseas company is being hired to protest outsourcing? Define Irony...

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Sentrion]

1984. It was a novel published in 1949 written as entertainment and perhaps as a warning against the suppression and manipulation of free thought, but today it is the most popular textbook in the world's top business schools. If you want to know why the Koch brothers were the ones behind OWS you should read it.

In all seriousness, the largest single donor to the movement was former New York Mercantile Exchange vice chairman Robert Halper, who was noted by media as having also given the maximum allowable campaign contribution to Mitt Romney.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

http://gawker.com/5850730/the-single-largest-benefactor-of-occupy-wall-street-is-a-mitt-romney-donor

Re:Mannequin Attack

[hermitdev]

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.

This kind of sounds like indentured servitude, which is illegal in the US (INAL, but if you assist, you might be construed as aiding & abetting, even it is via a contract).

On another note, I'm guessing (let me repeat that: I'm guessing) the sorts that would resort to professional protesters are likely left-wing types trying to inflate their presence. The same types that routinely rail against monetary abuses in politics. If you want to protest fine. Have the balls to do it yourself, in person, instead of hiring a substitute.

In regards to the petition, no, it's not the same as an in-person protest. A protest is to make yourself & your issue heard. A DDOS does none of that. There is no message with a DDOS. It's impossible to convey a message to those people that are legitimately conducting commerce with the targets. i.e. preventing me from logging into my bank's website to pay my mortgage. In this example, you're not just hurting the institution, you're also hurting private innocent individuals. If anonymous takes down Chase or BofA, you're affecting tens of millions of private citizens trying to pay their bills, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc. Missing payments results in penalties, adversely affects credit scores which results in higher borrowing costs down the line. So no, it's not the same as an in-person protest, it's felony vandalism with the potential to cost innocent bystanders millions of dollars as a collective.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Define Irony...

Like 'silvery' and 'coppery' but with iron.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[hermitdev]

And lets face it, that is what this is really about: legalizing bot nets as a free speech issue.

This is, with no doubt, the issue. However, this is not free speech. A better analogy than the GP offered with the cars would instead be: Anonymous barges into my house at gun point and forces me into the street to protest. I (in actuality my computer as a botnet slave) am not there willingly. I am being coerced or forced to protest.

Anonymous wants to use DDOS to exercise free speech and affect governmental policy? Fine, spam Congress with emails with your positions. That's what the rest of us do. (and wait for the canned form letter response via snail mail).

DDOS is not free speech. It's more akin to walking into the foyer of Congress armed to the teeth, holding everyone hostage, until Congress agrees to the hostage-taker's demands.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. This is from last spring's students protest mouvement in Montréal... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v93n7TuwpiU

Re:Mannequin Attack

[hermitdev]

But actually, if you had a DDoS that wasn't a botnet but instead was millions of pissed off people intentionally slashdotting a site, how could that not be a valid form of protest?

I'd propose that if it was actively performed by willing participants using their own hardware, yes, it could be perceived as a valid protest (and maybe would even require a sworn statement by each willing participant, acknowledging their participation in each staged "protest" in order to ensure honesty) . But, committing criminal activities to create a botnet that will then be used? No, that's a felony criminal act. I'm going to go off on a deep tangent here and postulate that the very same people that would think this is a valid form of protest also think that there's too much money in politics, yet also contributed to their candidate of choice, and possible a super PAC that is politically aligned.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[wierd_w]

*pedant

The CORRECT adjective is "ferrous"

Re:Mannequin Attack

[LordLucless]

No, not really - nothing about this proposition legalizes invading other people's machines and installing unauthorized software on it. Many of those Anonymous attacks were using LOIC, a piece of software that's basically an opt-in for a DDOS swarm. That's why they were caught so easily.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Zmobie]

Not necessarily saying I agree or disagree with DDoS being a valid form of protest, but a normal protest has the potential to do this as well. Considering if there is a swarm of protesters outside of BofA or Chase people have issues getting inside to use the bank and even if they do they are usually harassed in a lot of ways. Now, granted that a website DDoS can have much larger effects on more people and with a lot less effort on the protestors part, but hey the internet and technology is all about efficiency.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[icebike]

Seriously, what the hell is your problem?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[khallow]

There are lots of things people can do in meatspace that get in people's way that are explicitly legal. We just don't do it because we fear the law.

Or because we don't want to be rude to people who don't have anything to do with our protest.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, your ethics suck.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[electron sponge]

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.

This kind of sounds like indentured servitude, which is illegal in the US (INAL, but if you assist, you might be construed as aiding & abetting, even it is via a contract).

On another note, I'm guessing (let me repeat that: I'm guessing) the sorts that would resort to professional protesters are likely left-wing types trying to inflate their presence. The same types that routinely rail against monetary abuses in politics. If you want to protest fine. Have the balls to do it yourself, in person, instead of hiring a substitute.

In regards to the petition, no, it's not the same as an in-person protest. A protest is to make yourself & your issue heard. A DDOS does none of that. There is no message with a DDOS. It's impossible to convey a message to those people that are legitimately conducting commerce with the targets. i.e. preventing me from logging into my bank's website to pay my mortgage. In this example, you're not just hurting the institution, you're also hurting private innocent individuals. If anonymous takes down Chase or BofA, you're affecting tens of millions of private citizens trying to pay their bills, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc. Missing payments results in penalties, adversely affects credit scores which results in higher borrowing costs down the line. So no, it's not the same as an in-person protest, it's felony vandalism with the potential to cost innocent bystanders millions of dollars as a collective.

Just after I got out of the US Navy back in the spring of '99, I saw an ad in The Stranger, the local leftist weekly newspaper in the Seattle area. It's a good paper and is well respected in the Pacific Northwest as a decent alternative news source. I don't know if it still is, but it was then... anyway. A group of people put out an ad looking for folks with a military background for a protest against the powers that be. Being just the sort of dude they were looking for, and being completely unemployed, I looked into it. What they were looking for were people who were trained in CBR warfare, and "not that we're asking for it" access to gas masks and replacement filters for the masks. I was extremely uneasy with their general demeanor combined with what they were suggesting, so I turned them down.

What followed was the "Battle of Seattle", the 1999 WTO riots. After my contact with the bastards who ended up instigating the riot, I took the ferry across the Sound that fateful day with the bleak hope of warning the police that this wasn't just a run-of-the-mill protest, or at the very least seeing what the fuck was about to go down. By the time I got downtown, the unmistakable scent of tear gas was evident. My compatriots and I made our way to the top of a parking garage overlooking a section of downtown Seattle which was particularly populated with folks we recognized as anarchists. We watched them smash windows and cause mayhem. Meanwhile a couple blocks away, people who either truly believed in protesting the WTO or who were paid to sit there with gas masks on were pepper sprayed by the Seattle PD. Those who wore gas masks took a real beating. They took a beating in order to be a distraction to the police, while the anarchists had their way with businesses blocks away.

The moral to the story is, if you think your protest is organic, and it ends up being huge, it probably isn't organic. It's astroturf. Someone's bankrolling it. Things like the march on Washington lead by MLK are the exception rather than the rule.

Long story short, nothing is what it seems and the cake is a lie. If you think you are doing a good thing by joining a populist uprising, do your due diligence. Learn who they are and what they intend to do. Most of the time they want you for nothing more than cannon fodder.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Ukab the Great]

If DDOS is more akin to walking into the foyer of Congress armed to the teeth, holding everyone hostage, until Congress agrees to the hostage-taker's demands, then wouldn't that make John Boehner more akin to a script kiddie who uses LOIC?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Linsaran]

At $11/hr I know quite a few people that would be willing to stand around and get in people's way while they're trying to go about their business, errr I mean protest for you.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[rtb61]

The 'botnet' would still be criminal act and subject to full prosecution and considering the size of 'botnets' that's quite a few repeat offences and hence a real larger penalty will be applicable. The individual right of protest, not individual, is a very important part of any democracy, the attempt steal away this right in the vain attempt to feed the insatiable greed of corporations is the real crime that should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Re: Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with running bot nets. They are always illegal. This is about people who run LOIC and get 12 months jail. This is a real problem and is actually happening.
DoS attacks have already been deemed free speech in Germany. This really needs to happen.

This will not impact the illegality of virus botnets.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[TapeCutter]

they never read the EULA or the TOS

Who's controlling whom when you waste time reading that shit?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[magic maverick]

I wanted to mod you funny, but you're already +5. That's a funny funny story (and not at all insightful or informative.)

You either have no clue, or are just spreading agitprop (or conceivably both).

Re:Mannequin Attack

[dj_super_dude]

Weird conflicted feeling..... :)

I agree with you on the outset, (assuming I understand correctly...) that for example slowing traffic at already busy intersections, at busy times etc does have the effect of getting more people to see a message at the cost of inconveniencing people who perhaps are already on the side of the protesters or as you say have nothing to do with whatever the protest is about...

I don't think that cyber attacks are a great deal different. Let's make up a company, say Sarny, they make um... sarnies. For some reason many people who are savvy online don't care for the actions of Sarny and use a denial of service or something to make their online presence go slow which is their form of protest. In comes another consumer who doesn't know/care about Sarny's online activities, but they need to connect to the same website to get some kind of update or information, firmware, whatever.

In an ideal world (IDK is it the ideal outcome?) - people who would not know about the reasons behind the protest, become informed, and then join the protest, at which point above company realises the error of it's ways and consults with the community at large to make sure they can make everyone happy. (I know I know, not the usual outcome, but we can still dream). The upsides being that both the consumer is informed of an issue they may not have known about before, and the company realises that either intentionally or not, they need to do something to keep their customers.

Now, there are many many other outcomes we could invent, imagine or point to previous examples of, but one that springs to my mind (one I can't answer but would be interested to hear what people think), let's say that DDoS became a valid form of protest. How much of the population at large would be able to really understand what it means and what the ramifications are? What if the online protest seriously damaged the company to the point of causing great loss or even bankruptcy? How does the law deal with extended in person protests that might damage a company still trading?

I know there have been times my primitive brain would have said 'yay 'x' company went down to people power', but I do wonder what happens to workers, communities, and .... shareholders (*shudder* ;)

Anyway just some ramblings

Re:Mannequin Attack

[bogjobber]

The moral to the story is, if you think your protest is organic, and it ends up being huge, it probably isn't organic. It's astroturf. Someone's bankrolling it. Things like the march on Washington lead by MLK are the exception rather than the rule.

That's actually a really bad example. The march on Washington was organized by the AFL-CIO (it was technically called the March on Washington for *Jobs* and Freedom), the NAACP, CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and the Urban League.

In fact, most of the successful protests in the civil rights movement were not as spontaneous as you might imagine from folklore. Rosa Parks' refusal to sit at the back of the bus is often painted as a spur of the moment decision, but it was highly deliberate. Mrs. Parks was an active civil rights leader at the time, serving as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, a group that had long planned a bus boycott to apply political pressure to end discriminatory practices in public services.

There was actually an incident earlier in the year where a young African American woman refused to give up her seat in exactly the same manner as Mrs. Parks, but the NAACP decided not to use her as the figurehead for the bus boycott because she was a teenager with children out of wedlock. They figured that it would be difficult to rally the community around the girl, and that her illegitimacy would be an easy target for white criticism. Rosa Parks, a well-educated and wholly respectable citizen, was a much more useful figurehead.

Your advice is very, very sound, though. Mass protests are all organized by *somebody* and you better damn sure know every angle of the who, what, and why of the event you're attending before you jump in. Although sometimes it's difficult. I doubt most of the attendees in the Seattle WTO riots had any idea it was going to turn violent. The large majority of the people there were peaceful and had no idea the police and subversives would turn the whole damn thing into a battle.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Waccoon]

the extra time for walk signals

Wait... you mean those little buttons on the walk signal poles actually do something after all?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[fonske]

Did you know that "mannequin" is an old Flemish word for a taylor's dummy that had the figurative meaning "someone without character" or "someone on a leash"?
"mannequin" came originally from "manneken" - with manneken meaning "boy".
A well known manneken was "manneken pis", a boy that accidentally extinguished the burning fuse of bombs laid at the city walls of Brussels by having a leak on the fuse.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[drinkypoo]

There are lots of things people can do in meatspace that get in people's way that are explicitly legal.

To do it with the purpose of disrupting traffic might well be ruled illegal if push came to shove.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[tofarr]

A DDOS attack is like stealing a massive number of mannequins and filling wallstreet with them - aside from the theft, I bet it violates some zoning ordnance and litter laws...

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that? Because it was a leftist newspaper and a leftist group?

I bet you wouldn't have issue believing it if it were a right wing group. Seriously, grow up, realize that the left is full of just as big of dicks as the right is, no side is what anyone would call saintly.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[silentcoder]

>On another note, I'm guessing (let me repeat that: I'm guessing) the sorts that would resort to professional protesters are likely left-wing types trying to inflate their presence.

Odd, I would have guessed the exact opposite. Surely none of those people who show up at teabagger protests can actually BELIEVE that insanity !

Re:Mannequin Attack

[SoundGuyNoise]

Dey takin our jerbs!

Re:Mannequin Attack

[SoundGuyNoise]

Reminds of the time some people drove side by side down a California highway during rush hour, going exactly the 55MPH speed limit.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Hillgiant]

I believe we can forgive Anonymous Coward for being a little dense.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell did they get up to 55mph during rush hour?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Mattcelt]

It is if he had written "argenteus" and "cypreus". :-P

Re:Mannequin Attack

[iamwahoo2]

I believe that in the case of the previous Anonymous protests, the botnets were voluntary. Not "compromised" machines. That is a pretty important distinction. One could argue that DDOS gets a bad rap because it is often done with compromised machines, usually by a single person. In the case of anonymous, organizing a large DDOS required the cooperation of a lot of people who were willing to put their time and resources into carrying out the DDOS.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[iamwahoo2]

I think to clarify the position of Anonymous in this case, it is important to recognize that the DDOS attacks were not performed with botnets, or comprimised machines. Instead, they were performed by individuals volunteering their own time and resources. Not the time and resources of unsuspecting innocents. Does that change your opinion?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[iamwahoo2]

But being that they are able to use media to get their message across concurrently with performing the DDOS, doesn't that have the same effect as holding signs and chanting? I am not familiar with any situation in which their was not an abundance of information on why people were protesting. I would even argue that the DDOS attacks were usually accompanied by much more specific and clear reasons for protest than the Occupy Wall Street movement in which everyone seemed to be protesting something different.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the time they want you for nothing more than cannon fodder.

uhhhhh.... hadn't you just gotten out of the Navy?

The moral to the story is, if you think your protest is organic, and it ends up being huge, it probably isn't organic. It's astroturf. Someone's bankrolling it.

Did you follow the money? WAS it bankrolled by someone nefarious? Did you even look into it?. But you're right. If someone was HIRING you to protest, that's astroturf. Even if they're straight and up-front about what they're protesting. Out of curiosity, how much were they going to pay?

Re:Mannequin Attack

[tnk1]

It is in no way legal for protestors to block access to public roads and areas intentionally. When it happens, it is mostly a situation where it is a side effect of a large protest and the protestors are simply competing for space with the other users of that public space.

A DDoS attack is analogous to an attempt to specifically block a right of way on purpose. There is no need for them to close off access to the sites to get their message out.

There is also the situation where a DDoS does not use public lands or infrastructure to carry out the protest, which is generally what in-person protestors are using. For the protest to occur, it has to use bandwidth on privately owned networks to hit the site. In no way is it allowed for even meatspace protestors to trespass on private property, and almost all of the Internet is private property.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[tnk1]

DDoS is not a valid public protest. There's not even a question about that. It does not use public property or resources to protest, it also does not convey a message on its own, so no speech is actually being used to be silenced. Protesting a building of a corporation is done from the street, which is public property. The Internet is primarily private property.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[tnk1]

And completely legal for someone to move them out of the way, or hack at them with axes, for that matter. It's not meant to be a complete analogy.

Obviously, the point was that no one is actually performing a speech activity with a DDoS. Blocking of real-life sites is a tactic used by protestors to add impact, but it is only possible on the sufferance of the public authorities who have to balance the need to keep an open right-of-way, with the right of the protestors to use the public space. If the protest is done with the specific and stated intent of blocking public access, that would be illegal and the police would step in at a certain point.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[jxander]

Define Irony...

The opposite of wrinkly

Re:Mannequin Attack

[jonadab]

> But wouldn't having a program do it for you be
> like using mannequins to occupy wallstreet?

Even if you deploy the mannequins in and around the actual _doorway_ of the stock exchange (as opposed to camping out across the street or whatever), that's still only like a regular (non-distributed) denial of service attack.

A DDOS is more like stealing tens of thousands of mannequins from department stores all over the world and using them to block the door, except that still doesn't cover it, because people who want to get in can easily see what the problem is, and anyone who wants to bother to do so can pick up the mannequins and move them to clear a path.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[jonadab]

I know what it is. It's like hacking into the Omni Consumer Products computer and reprogramming all the ED209s to stop anyone from getting into a particular building -- but you program them to do it without killing anyone.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[odysseus_complex]

The real difference is that in a stand-in/sit-in the protestors aren't anonymous (pun not intended). It is far more effective if the group of people protesting have faces that the public can identify with. Otherwise the protestors are just a bunch of masked hooligans.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[painandgreed]

Why is that? Because it was a leftist newspaper and a leftist group?

I don't know if I would really call the Stranger a "leftist" paper. They typically support the gay, 20-something, and artists communities and therefore dislike things such as police brutality while taking up for the underdog if only to play devil's advocate. I'd just sort of call that normal rather than leftist. You say "leftist newspaper" and I get the idea of Marxist politics, red clothing, and stuff. Sure, the normal democrat is leftist to the average Glen Beck supporter, but I really wouldn't call them that.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[painandgreed]

The moral to the story is, if you think your protest is organic, and it ends up being huge, it probably isn't organic. It's astroturf. Someone's bankrolling it. Things like the march on Washington lead by MLK are the exception rather than the rule.

Well, no. You had unions, blue collar worker organizations, political groups from all over the world which did includes a fair number of conservative right wing ones also. What WTO in Seattle was is the result of European and world politics and protests coming to the USA. Anybody who knew what the WTO was knew we were headed for something. In the one prior to that in the lawless hellhole of Switzerland, they were overturning and setting fire to police cars. In the next one in Prague, there was full on combat in the streets, Molotov cocktails, rock throwing, etc. I saw videos and nothing like that could have happened in the US without the police just shooting people down. We simply aren't used to that level of violence. Of course, Prague had three protest parades, one for the leftists, one for the right wingers, and the one I saw video of that was specifically organized for people who just wanted to start some shit with the police. And there was a large group of people who just wanted to start shit. Ya Basta, 1,500 anarchists from Italy occupied a train until their representatives and the train companies came to a mutual agreement on the cost of driving them to Prague would be. Just to drive home the difference between European and American politics, when the train was denied entry into the Czech Republic, because who would let in a train with 1500 screaming anarchists going to protest, the ambasador from Italy showed up, talked to the people and the train and then walked back telling everybody he was re-entering the country and everybody should get off the tracks as the train and everybody on it was now part of his diplomatic envoy. I knew a marching band that sent themselves to many of those protests, working jobs, networking, and sleeping on people's floors, because that's what they believed in. They certainly weren't being bankrolled by anybody though and neither were most of the people at any of them.

What happened in Seattle was actually quite tame as far as WTO and G-number protests go, especially when you consider that the police did most of the damage themselves. Rubber bullets broke more windows than any protesters, the police even said so. Tear gas drifting across the town created more protests from people who had decided they wanted nothing to do with it when they were driven from their homes on Capital Hill, not to mention all the food in Pike's Place Market that had to be destroyed when police tear gassed there. The problem was aggravated because to get all the police to provide security, they called in lots of small town police (I know and have talked with some of them too.) whose idea of controlling a situation is to escalate violence until the police win. They were no means prepared or trained to handle an event like that and were told so before the event by both European police and protest organizers who were looking to minimize the violence.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Dahamma]

Yes, that is SO worth anyone's time. Make the post office line even slower and more painful than it already is, that will show the MAN! Most effective form of protest I have ever seen! Next I am going to go out and put pennies on the train track to try to destabilize the US currency!

Problem with this approach is that it requires a near 1:1 effort in terms of the resources used to people inconvenienced. AND you are mostly just inconveniencing the same people you want to convince to support your cause, which is usually counterproductive.

Reminds me of Critical Mass in SF - 1000 cyclists ride recklessly around the city once a month and clog up all of the traffic to try to raise awareness of cycling. Usually they just convince most of the people they inconvenience that cyclists are largely a bunch of arrogant self-important pricks. Which is unfortunate as I like cycling and prefer not to be lumped in with a few jackasses who think they are above the rules of the road just because their vehicle is self powered.

Re:Mannequin Attack

[HiThere]

FWIW, the Vietnam protests did eventually lead to the US withdrawal, though admittedly there were a lot of other elements also. But this was partially because the news was willing to cover the protests, and enough voters finally turned against the war.

OTOH, these days protests are not well covred. Media is segmented, so those who don't want to notice protests, don't see them. Etc. They probably don't have much effect currently. And the government has become quite adept at ignoring legal protests, as have other organizations. Boycotts require MASSIVE support to show any effect at all.

All that said, I'm not convinced that DDOS is a legitimate protest. It's clear that some effective form of protest is needed, but it needs to require significant personal effort of those protesting. And it also needs to be something that's difficult to ignore. Otherwise those with severe grievances will have no recourse but to ignore the laws...and frequently the laws are so unjust that that seems a reasonable action. But illegal actions have a tendency to escalate.

It's a valid problem, but I don't think the proposed solution is a valid solution. However, I don't have a better alternative to propose.

Not going to fly

[Cryacin]

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.

Re:Not going to fly

[Anonymous Coward]

The website is also an automated process. It is a battle of wills between computers. Not as good as a sit-in, but certainly not violent.

Framing it as a parallel to a sit-in does make it sound quite legitimate.

Requiring a non-automated process to refresh an automated website wouldn't do a whole lot, even with a drinking bird pressing the key. It is safe to assume they are using an automated system, but is there any proof? Is the speed of the DDoS action proof of automation?

Re:Not going to fly

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that, things you can effectively protest by physically being in a given space are effective for the reason that your presence blocks *other humans* from doing something. That is to say, there's an equality between what is being blocked and the means used to block it.

But in the case of pressing a refresh button: there is no human at the other end of the network whose work is blocked by you clicking refresh. Your protest is up against an automated process. When protesting by "occupying" a website, there is no longer a level of equality between the humans doing the protesting and the automated processes they're trying to obstruct. Using automated proceses for the protest levels the playing field.

Re:Not going to fly

[Cryacin]

As it would likely be a constitutional defence, I would imagine that it would be up to the defendant to prove that they didn't follow an automated process.

Re:Not going to fly

[phantomfive]

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.

And very often it is not legal, either. The whole point of civil disobedience is that you're willing to break the law and face the consequences rather than comply with something you feel is morally wrong.

Re:Not going to fly

[DavidClarkeHR]

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.

Right, because the idea behind striking should apply to a company that doesn't operate in a location where you can physically protest. The limiting factor here is bandwidth and processing power, and that's all that is being consumed on both ends.

Re:Not going to fly

[Dahamma]

Yeah, I'd think of it more like: it's legal to walk into an office lobby and talk to the receptionist. But it's not legal to stay in the office lobby harassing the receptionist after they have asked you to leave. That becomes trespassing an/or harassment.

Re:Not going to fly

[Stewie241]

So then... what... if I don't like your business I can hold a 30 day protect and DDoS your site? The thing with regular protests is that there is a point in which people lose interest and go home (generally). It takes a lot longer to get tired of a little bit of computer power being used to hit a site.

The thing that differentiates real world protests is that you have to care about an issue. You have to be willing to take time out of your day, or take time off of work or whatever in order to exercise your right to protest. Make DDoS a legal form of protest means that there is almost zero barrier to entry and people could potentially protest over things they don't really care about that much.

I get your point about the possible need for a way to protest organizations that don't have a physically accessible spot, but I don't think that this is the answer.

Re:Not going to fly

[multimediavt]

The difference is that, things you can effectively protest by physically being in a given space are effective for the reason that your presence blocks *other humans* from doing something. That is to say, there's an equality between what is being blocked and the means used to block it.

But in the case of pressing a refresh button: there is no human at the other end of the network whose work is blocked by you clicking refresh. Your protest is up against an automated process. When protesting by "occupying" a website, there is no longer a level of equality between the humans doing the protesting and the automated processes they're trying to obstruct. Using automated proceses for the protest levels the playing field.

See, I was wondering how they were going to draw a physical parallel to what they were doing that *WAS* a legal form of protest. The closest I could think of was a union mob blocking the entrance to a business, BUT that is illegal. You cannot legally protest by obstructing right of way (without a permit). Right of way also includes the entrance of a business to a road front in most states, for instance. So blocking where cars and trucks enter a property would be illegal. By blocking all/any IP traffic to a machine connected to the Internet wouldn't you be violating "virtual" rights of way and thereby be acting illegally in the same sense as the union mob?

Re:Not going to fly

[vux984]

The limiting factor is that it requires people's time.

Playing the devil's advocate here: the limiting factor of surveillance used to be that it required peoples time. Then they automated it. Now we have cameras everywhere in public recording everything. And they told -us- that it didn't violate our privacy and that it was the same thing.

So I kind of think the turnaround is fair play.

On the other hand aren't most effective DDoS attacks run by botnets... meaning the resources being used to conduct the 'protest' are effectively stolen. I don't see how a case for that being legal would ever work.

Re:Not going to fly

[Immerman]

Not necessarily. Orbital Ion Cannon does essentially the same thing with the consent of the computer users. Launching a DDoS with compromised computers would be a separate issue entirely.

Re:Not going to fly

[wisnoskij]

I was under the impression that protests were not supposed to disrupt people and businesses. I was under the impression that 1 or 5 peole could not stand in front of a Mcdonalds doorway and protest by not allowing an customers in. I was under the impression that sure a crowd could accidentally slow down business, it could not intentionally make it impossible for citizens to do legal activities, and could simply get their message across with words, signs, and obvious passion.

Re:Not going to fly

[DavidClarkeHR]

So then... what... if I don't like your business I can hold a 30 day protect and DDoS your site? The thing with regular protests is that there is a point in which people lose interest and go home (generally). It takes a lot longer to get tired of a little bit of computer power being used to hit a site.

The thing that differentiates real world protests is that you have to care about an issue. You have to be willing to take time out of your day, or take time off of work or whatever in order to exercise your right to protest. Make DDoS a legal form of protest means that there is almost zero barrier to entry and people could potentially protest over things they don't really care about that much.

I get your point about the possible need for a way to protest organizations that don't have a physically accessible spot, but I don't think that this is the answer.

In both cases, the observable fact is that time and resources are spent to deny access to other time and resources.

Your argument reminds me of the man who offers a woman $1,000,000 to sleep with him. She says yes, to which he replies how about fifty dollars, instead? She then says I am not a prostitute, what sort of woman do you think I am, offering me fifty dollars? ... to which he says we've established what type of woman you are, we're just haggling over price.

In other words, you are correct in all your points, and I don't disagree. I simply think this should be an option that is discussed - it may (or may not) be the answer - and it is a lot better than no action at all.

Re:Not going to fly

[mysidia]

and if it were, then they would likely be protected by the right to protest.

Then how about an army of people visiting a web page, with a javascript "button" that they are encouraged to repeatedly click on, with each click generating a series of 500 to 1000 HTTP requests within a couple seconds.

Re:Not going to fly

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

See, I was wondering how they were going to draw a physical parallel to what they were doing that *WAS* a legal form of protest.

As far as I can tell, the Greensboro Sit-Ins were legal.

The closest I could think of was a union mob blocking the entrance to a business, BUT that is illegal.

I believe that is illegal because of the national labor relations act, which does not apply to non-employees.

Re:Not going to fly

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

And very often it is not legal, either. The whole point of civil disobedience is that you're willing to break the law and face the consequences rather than comply with something you feel is morally wrong.

There is always someone who brings this up, who basically says that your protest doesn't count unless you are willing to risk jail.

Well, it ain't true. Here's one of the most famous examples: The Boston Tea Party - they wore disguises so as not to be recognized and avoid arrest.

Here's another: The Underground Railroad, widely cited as a form of civil disobediance in which none of the participants had any interest at all in being arrested.

Re:Not going to fly

[trdrstv]

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..

Isn't this what the filibuster has become ? If they can't be bothered to actively take the floor and present their case in person than why should we ?

Re:Not going to fly

[phantomfive]

It's not that they WANT to be arrested, it's that they believe enough in their principle that they are WILLING to be if it comes to that. Quite different than some of the whiny babies at modern protests.

Re:Not going to fly

[wierd_w]

The same could be said of any disruption of a vital business communication network via a protest.

Say for instance, a postal strike. The postal workers get paid 10$/hr, but the people who collect bills by mail get paid significantly more than that.

The disruption costs the postal employees their 10$/hr, and also costs the service's users significantly more than that.

The issue with a protest is to cause a disruption, to demand redress of greivances. That is exactly what is written. The degree of disparity between cost to the protestors against those that profit from the activity of those being protested, is completely irrelevent.

Consider, literal slaves protesting being slaves.

The people that make use of the slave labor suffer financial and time losses from the slave revolt. The slaves weren't being paid to begin with. The ratio against costs therefore approaches infinity.

Re:Not going to fly

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

It's not that they WANT to be arrested, it's that they believe enough in their principle that they are WILLING to be if it comes to that. Quite different than some of the whiny babies at modern protests.

Who exactly are these "whiny babies?" Seems to me that if they show up, then they are accepting the risks. Meanwhile the examples I gave are of people actively taking precautions not to be arrested and for which arrest plays no part in their plan of protest.

Re:Not going to fly

[phantomfive]

The idiots who whined when they got arrested for trying to block traffic while crossing the bridge lol

Seriously, if you haven't seen whiny babies at protests, you have your blinders on because I know you do pay attention these protests.

Re:Not going to fly

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The idiots who whined when they got arrested for trying to block traffic while crossing the bridge lol

Yeah, sure, sounds like projection to me.

Re:Not going to fly

[Tom]

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.

The whole point of this petition is that they consider the traditional protest to not be effective anymore and want a non-traditional form of protest. Don't forget that the business world is also changing and a strike or blockade at a hosting center has far, far less consequences than at a factory.

Re:Not going to fly

[Jason Levine]

The Boston Tea Party - They wore disguises but were still physically present there. Had the police (or the colonial equivalent) arrived, they would have been arrested and their masks would have quickly been removed.

The Underground Railroad - They didn't have an interest in being arrested, but they still risked it each and every day. Especially the Underground Railroad participants who lived in southern states where slavery was legal. What would have happened if they were found out? Certainly not a small fine and set free. They'd have been imprisoned or worse.

They didn't walk up to the police and say "Hey, arrest me", but they did risk imprisonment by being physically present.

Re:Not going to fly

[Jason Levine]

Exactly. Every business is going to have at least one person upset with them. It's a fact of life. Right now, if that person wants to block everyone from entering a physical store, he needs to recruit a lot more people. If DDOS is legal and he wants to block their online presence, he can just acquire a botnet, click a few buttons, and run a DDOS attack.

Not to mention, if a DDOS becomes "legal protesting", how long until a rival business finds one person with a gripe against their competitor and helps them set up a DDOS against the competitor? The person with the gripe is the one who launches the DDOS so it's a legal protest, right? The rival business just lent some "technical support" (most likely in a non-public manner).

Making DDOS a legal form of protest would be an idiotic move.

Re:Not going to fly

[phantomfive]

lol no doubt, every time I block traffic, I hate it when the arrest me. Those stupid pigs. lol

Re:Not going to fly

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

They didn't walk up to the police and say "Hey, arrest me", but they did risk imprisonment by being physically present.

Read how the OP (phantomfive) responded. He uses the exact same argument to come to the opposite conclusion - that occupy protestors who block bridges were actually whiners. It was, as I said in my original post, just a made up excuse to denigrate the protests of people he doesn't like.

I'd also say that DDOSers risk arrest too - we've seen a number of them arrested. It isn't as easy - but back in the day of the Boston Tea Party physical arrest wasn't so easy either, no helicopters, no cop cars, no radios, no handguns, no flashlights - all technologies that have enhanced police response with very little to enhance protestor's ability to evade arrest.

Re:Not going to fly

[david_thornley]

Not only does it require real time commitment, it gives me (as a member of the public) a chance to see who's protesting, read protest signs, and possibly ask a protestor about the issues. A DDOS on a website I use will have me annoyed that the website is slow. I won't even know it's a DDOS, let alone who's doing it and why.

Its not your packets

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike conventional protests, the protesting packets in a ddos are not your property.

Re:Its not your packets

[theNetImp]

I paid for the damn internet connection better believe they're my property....

Re:Its not your packets

[icebike]

I paid for the damn internet connection better believe they're my property....

You paid for your half of the connection.

Re:Its not your packets

[aaron552]

I think you would be on the phone to your ISP complaining about being under attack if I pointed my handy-dandy test rig at the public IP address you are using.

Aside from the fact that all those packets would likely just be instantly dropped by my firewall (I'm not running any public-facing services on my public IP), I wouldn't call my ISP about it. It's not their responsibility, their responsibility is simply to deliver packets destined for my public IP to my network (I could bring net neutrality into this here). If you did manage to DoS a public service I owned/ran, the sole responsibility for that would be on you.

Quantum Occupy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Full Retard

[Anonymous Coward]

So we're going to a form of protest to whoever can afford to allocate them most IP addresses to something?

Why are Slashdotters obsessed with Anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why are Slashdotters obsessed with Anonymous?

[Nyder]

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.

a website doesn't equal free speech.

Re:Why are Slashdotters obsessed with Anonymous?

[Qzukk]

"It's only censorship if the government does it"

Re:Why are Slashdotters obsessed with Anonymous?

[kiwimate]

Only in the narrowest possible definition.

Re:Why are Slashdotters obsessed with Anonymous?

[AK Marc]

Then why is it illlegal discrimination if a private person or business does it? Either the rights are attached to the person (regardless of who is trying to infringe them) or "rights" are restrictions on government and nothing else.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:No

[macraig]

What you've described is no different than the collateral social cost of traditional wage strikes and other peaceful denial-of-access protests. Is that collateral social cost so great that it justifies criminalizing the protests? That is what you are advocating.

Re:No

[DeSigna]

Consider:

Striking: a combination of denying your services (and only yours) to an employer with (usually) highly visible protests and PR to get the reasons for the strike out to the general public, thus gaining their support and pressuring politicians. In most locations, it is illegal to actively interfere with the employers' ability to do business beyond withdrawing your own labour and expertise - blocking access to sites, harassing customers, etc will probably attract police attention. If a group of other people decide to do the same, they've done it under their own steam and should not be coerced to do so.

DDoS: actively suppressing the target's ability to communicate and do business with very little cost or effort, and a high potential for serious collateral damage to the operations of completely unrelated individuals and businesses along the way. In some rare instances individual participants may volunteer their resources to the DDoS, but much more often a lot of traffic is coming from compromised systems. DDoS and systems intrusion are both already criminalised actions.

I'm 100% for the ability to protest or strike - I've done my share in the past. I'm 100% against bored kids getting their mates together to smash small websites into gravel "for the lulz".

You can argue that it'll only be used as a responsible form of protest against those that deserve it, at which time my eyebrows will climb my forehead and burrow under my hairline. The amount of effort required to "protest" is much too small, the relative damage against small operations and individuals far out of proportion. If we would like to see spam outfits "protesting" against Spamhaus' DNSBL resolvers, pro-X advocates "protesting" against the blogs of their pro-Y opponents, kids targetting the local donut shop because they're bored and want to give them a huge bandwidth bill, sure, lets allow legal DDoS. Perhaps we could allow governments to set rules on what constitutes "fair protest" to solve this problem? I'm not really warming to that idea either.

Re:No

[Obfuscant]

Much like the gastroenterology doctor upstairs from the doctor doing abortions isn't affected when a protest blocks access to the building.

That might be why it is illegal to block access during a protest.

If you share a building (or server) with the murderer,

Wow. Simply wow. You're equating a difference of agreement with someone and murder now.

Pick your friends well.

I use a web host and I have no idea who any of the other clients are. I have no real way of knowing that, without an exhaustive scan of every DNS record by domain name to see how many of them have the same DNS servers as I do. You're claiming that innocent people are guilty of murder because they don't know who else buys web services from the company they do.

I'm sorry, but that's just nuts.

Re:No

[AK Marc]

Wow. Simply wow. You're equating a difference of agreement with someone and murder now.

You've never heard protesters calling abortion doctors "murderers"?

Apparently I'm so old that nobody here remembers the protests.

Re:No

[3seas]

So what you are really saying is protest should only be legal if they can be ignored.

Re:No

[Hatta]

I work for a small hosting/cloud provider, and from experience, I can say that this is a form of attack.

Yes, and I bet the owner of a Woolworths in South Carolina would have said that sit-ins during the Civil Rights Era was a form of attack as well.

Re:No

[Hatta]

Strikes are the wrong analogy. The correct analogy are sit-ins. DDOS is legal behavior, requesting data from an HTTP server, done many times over. A sit-in is similar. It is legal behavior, visiting a place of business, done many times over.

Re:No

[bws111]

Being in a place of business for something other than what the business intends is not legal behavior, it is trespassing. The only reason sit-ins are effective at all is because of the media circus that accompanies the inevitable arrest of the protesters.

A more apt analogy is abortion clinic protesters, and courts have repeatedly found that while they can be near the clinics, wave their signs, whatever, they can NOT block access to the clinic.

Re:No

[Hatta]

Being in a place of business for something other than what the business intends is not legal behavior, it is trespassing

No it's not. There is no law that prevents me from walking into a Chick-Fil-A, standing in line, and saying "I'd like, a number hmm.... um... hold on... oh yeah I'd like marriage equality for homosexuals". They are free to kick me out after I do that, but before I do that I look just like a customer, and they can't ban customers if they want to remain open. Get a few thousand of my friends to do the same thing and we have the equivalent of a meat space DDOS, and it's perfectly legal.

DDOSs are identical. Requesting a copy of index.html is entirely legal. Getting a bunch of your friends to do the same is just as legal.

Re:No

[Obfuscant]

You've never heard protesters calling abortion doctors "murderers"?

We're talking about Anonymous and DDoS. You're equating the people they attack with murderers. And you're saying that anyone who shares a server with these "murderers" deserves the same consequences, which says that you think unknowingly sharing a server with someone you disagree with is as bad as murder.

Trying to paint this as an issue of being able to deal with murderers is hyperbole beyond reason.

Re:No

[AK Marc]

We're talking about Anonymous and DDoS. You're equating the people they attack with murderers.

No, you are.

And you're saying that anyone who shares a server with these "murderers" deserves the same consequences, which says that you think unknowingly sharing a server with someone you disagree with is as bad as murder.

No, the topic was someone else complained about collateral damage. Other threads in this topic discussed meatspace equivelents, so I tossed one out. Collateral damage is considered a "good thing" because the people hurt by it either bring more attention to the cause, or deserved the damage for sharing resources with the person so horrible that they deserved a boycott/protest.

That your logic doesn't work, and you are so knee-jerk about complaining that you can't think about what's being said doesn't mean that there is actually anything wrong with the idea I was trying to illustrate, nor the manner in which I did.

Re:No

[Obfuscant]

No, you are.

Then your comment about sharing servers was just a typo? Everyone else here seems to be talking about Anonymous, you seem to be the only one who has limited himself to a completely off-topic interpretation of the discussion.

No, the topic was someone else complained about collateral damage.

This "collateral damage" was from attacks by Anonymous on people with whom they disagree, so you've now just admitted that the topic wasn't abortionists after all. You said that if they shared a server with "the murderers" that they deserved the same fate. Thus equating the difference of opinion with murder, and innocent bystanders of being as bad as murderers.

That your logic doesn't work,

I'm not the one who is talking about murderers and the servers and deserving the same fate, you are. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you just forgot what you wrote and were too lazy to read you own posting to remember.

doesn't mean that there is actually anything wrong with the idea I was trying to illustrate, nor the manner in which I did.

If you can't see the problem in equating the targets of Anonymous and the people who share the servers with them with murder, then I don't doubt that you'd blame the messenger when your ridiculous position is pointed out.

Re:No

[AK Marc]

I'm not the one who is talking about murderers and the servers and deserving the same fate, you are.

You are the one talking about it. I used an analogy everyone can understand. You are refusing to take it as an analogy, and lying about what I meant.

If you can't see the problem in equating the targets of Anonymous and the people who share the servers with them with murder, then I don't doubt that you'd blame the messenger when your ridiculous position is pointed out.

I never did. You are lying again. I mentioned that meatspace access-blocking affects others, and those affected are "justifiably" blocked (according to the protesters). You are all hung up over the fact that abortion protesters call the doctors murders. Again, if you have an issue with that, why are you blaming the messenger? Oh, you are a lying hypocrite who is so emotionally invested in one or more of the topics discussed that you don't read past a word or snippet of phrase that sets you off that you refuse to read for comprehension.

DDoS affects comerce

[Q-Hack!]

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.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[thoughtlover]

I protest business(es) by not buying anything from them. Where you put your money is the most important form of democracy.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Bradmont]

In person protests also affect commerce. Last summer, in Montreal, there were weeks of protests with hundreds of thousands of people clogging the entire downtown core. It was incredibly disruptive for a whole lot of businesses.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Anonymous Coward]

Sit-ins aren't a legal form of protest either. It's trespassing; hence why people involved in a sit-in generally need to chain themselves up. It's a delay tactic that forces the police to go the extra step of bringing in some bolt cutters while they enjoy some extra face-time with the local media.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Janek Kozicki]

I protest business(es) by not buying anything from them. Where you put your money is the most important form of democracy.

That's capitalism, actually.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[gmuslera]

There are several kinds of DDoS, some that could be seen as a protest (i.e. making customers not being able to access a company, putting a big sign making them aware that that company is misbehaving in your opinion), and some that could be seen as vandalism (breaking windows, throwing chairs, or even launching Windows 8). A line must be drawn between both.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[davidbrit2]

Distributed Denial of Revenue attack?

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[sco08y]

In person protests also affect commerce. Last summer, in Montreal, there were weeks of protests with hundreds of thousands of people clogging the entire downtown core. It was incredibly disruptive for a whole lot of businesses.

Yes, and those protests are not free speech but civil disobedience. The first reality of civil disobedience is that you should expect to wind up in jail. The second reality is you probably deserve it.

Virtually all those protests do violate the rights of others. People really do have a right to go freely about their business, and you don't have any right to scream in someone's face.

In aggregate, society benefits from these protests and they're a necessary part of the political dynamic. Many times people just won't listen until you raise all hell.

But that's an appeal to the greater good, fundamentally arguing that the ends justify the means. They don't. If you've ever been part of those protests, you owe those people an apology.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Maow]

I protest business(es) by not buying anything from them. Where you put your money is the most important form of democracy.

I agree and add that $dollarsSpent > $votesCast in both quantity and quality.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[jakimfett]

My DDR game just made more sense...err...wait...sorry...wrong acronym...

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[jakimfett]

And they're illegal. And when they happen, people go to jail. If you haven't noticed, people have been going to jail in proven DDOS cases too. I'm glad you noted the similarity.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[AK Marc]

You can protest a business with a sign and megaphone, but you are not allowed to stop people from patronising that business.

That's simply not true. The good ol' protests (Before free speech zones and arrests for loitering and such during obviously political protests), you could have a protest with a thick line of people walking around a building. Nobody could get through without effort. It had the effect of a DDoS, including blocking access to stores sharing resources with the protested store.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Obfuscant]

There are several kinds of DDoS, some that could be seen as a protest (i.e. making customers not being able to access a company, putting a big sign making them aware that that company is misbehaving in your opinion), and some that could be seen as vandalism (breaking windows, throwing chairs, or even launching Windows 8).

The first example and last example are both vandalism. The middle example is hacking a site, which is not a DDoS.

Anonymous wants DDoS to be legal so they can attack sites they don't like (or rather, that anyone who claims to be acting under the guise of Anonymous -- i.e. anyone) for whatever reason they feel like it, or no reason at all, and not fear legal repercussions.

The problem with their "hitting the refresh button" argument is that it is 1) hundreds or thousands of "people" hitting the refresh button, and 2) many of those "people" have not consented to having their computers used for this "free speech" activity. There are many things that are reasonable to do when there are only one or two people doing them, but are unethical when more than a few do it. (I am going to ride around town on the bus just to sightsee. Imagine 60 people who are doing nothing but riding around town just to sightsee on the same bus. Nobody else can use the bus. Their taxes paid for the service, too, and they have a right to use it.) And using other people's property without their permission to exercise your free speech rights is theft, not to mention the theft of services from the website or server you are attacking.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Obfuscant]

Nobody could get through without effort.

The fact you can physically do something that is illegal doesn't make it legal. You are not allowed, legally, to prevent access, even if you can find enough people willing to do it. It's called "civil disobedience".

Now, if you are arguing that you CAN and SHOULD be able to legally block entrance to places of business you don't like, I'm sure there are a few anti-abortion groups that would love to have you as a member.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[mysidia]

when money=speech, then it is democracy too.

Money not equal to speech. You don't have full control over money.

You make deals to trade money/things.

The government forces you to give taxes to the government.

There are some things people do have to buy (like food, or the means to get food)

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[AK Marc]

Most crimes don't survive well with collective defendants. "I didn't block access. I was standing on the sidewalk. It isn't illegal to stand on the sidewalk." Much like twins in fiction get away with murder because both confess or claim the other one did it, and neither can be convicted, when "justice" would be served by convicting one of murder and the other of obstruction and perjury, and letting the two decide who serves which sentence, and putting both in prison for the longer term unless they can come to some agreement.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[AK Marc]

The government has equated money with speech. If you are free to speak (And you are) then you are free to give money to political candidates (though the candidates must follow rules). I didn't make that equality. I'm just passing on the fact that it exists. If you don't like it, then argue with the political parties.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Marxdot]

Capitalism != markets != capitalism.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Hatta]

You can protest a business with a sign and megaphone, but you are not allowed to stop people from patronising that business.

Sure you are. Act like a customer but don't buy anything. It's perfectly legal to window shop. Get a lot of people to window shop at once. If you get enough, you'll displace actual customers.

If you want to protest, there are non disruptive methods to use, DDoS shouldn't be one of them.

The whole point of protests is to be disruptive. If you can't be disruptive you have no leverage.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[bws111]

If the "whole point" of protests is to be disruptive, as you claim, then there is no reason for them to be legal at all. You have no right to be disruptive.

Of course the "whole point" of protests (effective ones anyway) is to make your message heard. You do have a right to say your message. Which is why DDOS attacks will never be legal - there is no message, only disruption.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Hatta]

If the "whole point" of protests is to be disruptive, as you claim, then there is no reason for them to be legal at all. You have no right to be disruptive.

Spoken like a true authoritarian. The right to "say my message" is of no value at all when my message can be simply ignored by those in power with no consequences. If it weren't for disruptive protests, we wouldn't have half the civil rights we have today.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[jeffasselin]

What's the point of a protest if it doesn't impact anything or anyone?

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[AK Marc]

Could you please explain to me what I said that requires the second. I don't think my argument "falls apart" other than when someone deliberately misinterprets it.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Obfuscant]

Most crimes don't survive well with collective defendants.

This statement makes no sense. Crimes don't "survive". Having multiple defendants does not make something that is normally illegal magically legal.

"I didn't block access. I was standing on the sidewalk. It isn't illegal to stand on the sidewalk."

However, you did block access to the facility by choosing to stand "on the sidewalk" in front of the door, which is a crime.

Much like twins in fiction

"Let's run the criminal justice system under the fanciful rules of fiction" is your argument now?

Blocking access to a facility is already a crime. It is a crime that should not be decriminalized, because then it truly would be legal for people to block the access to abortion clinics.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[AK Marc]

This statement makes no sense.

You understood enough to complain about it, so I don't believe your lie that it makes no sense. It does make less sense when you take it out of context, but it was clear it meant "it's hard to prosecute groups", which is exactly how you took it, despite it "making no sense."

However, you did block access to the facility by choosing to stand "on the sidewalk" in front of the door, which is a crime.

So standing on the sidewalk is explicitly legal, but doing so near a door is explicitly illegal? Could you clarify that point, please?

"Let's run the criminal justice system under the fanciful rules of fiction" is your argument now?

No. It was just the convenient example, if you think it's handled unrealistically in fiction, correct it for us.

"Let's run the criminal justice system under the fanciful rules of fiction" is your argument now?

So, standing on the sidewalk in an inconvenient location is illegal. What's the crime?

It is a crime that should not be decriminalized, because then it truly would be legal for people to block the access to abortion clinics.

Have you ever seen an abortion clinic protest? Even if it were legal to block access, most of them could be charged with assault. They don't just lock arms and block people. They wander around with signs, run up to people parking in the parking lot, and scream at them, hit the car, and push the person when they get out. I've never seen a protest where most of the protesters couldn't be arrested for assault.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[Obfuscant]

You understood enough to complain about it, so I don't believe your lie that it makes no sense.

I told you exactly why it makes no sense. It makes no sense, so the coment that it doesn't is a reasonable statement.

So standing on the sidewalk is explicitly legal, but doing so near a door is explicitly illegal?

No, BLOCKING ACCESS is illegal whether you are standing on the sidewalk or standing someplace else. Next you'll make up some nonsense about how it is legal to breath but it suddenly becomes illegal if you do it while standing "near a door".

if you think it's handled unrealistically in fiction, correct it for us.

Right. I'll copy edit all the published works of fiction because YOU can't tell the difference between fiction and real life.

So, standing on the sidewalk in an inconvenient location is illegal.

You rode the little yellow bus to school, didn't you? The crime is blocking access to a business. That it was done while "standing on the sidewalk" is your red herring.

Have you ever seen an abortion clinic protest?

I have. That's why I know it is stupid to argue that the "blocking access" laws, either physical or electronic, should be repealed. That would just make it legal to do things that are now illegal, and that most people (you excepted, it appears) think shouldn't be allowed.

Whether they are arrested or not is not the issue.

Re:DDoS affects comerce

[AK Marc]

No, BLOCKING ACCESS is illegal whether you are standing on the sidewalk or standing someplace else.

A single person acting alone can't be blocking access of an 8-ft wide door. If you try to prosecute a single person for blocking access, you'll be laughed out of court. "how could they physically block access" "It's impossible, case dismissed."

Not akin to hitting the refresh button.

[macraig]

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.

Re:Not akin to hitting the refresh button.

[dittbub]

Its more like a string of computers that handcuffed themselves together. When people do that its compelling; they are willing to sacrifice their time and comfort to make society aware of something. Protesting ought to be difficult. Otherwise we'd be in a world of mess.

Re:Not akin to hitting the refresh button.

[macraig]

It's already illegal to compromise computers that don't belong to you, so botnet DDoS techniques are already also illegal. But what if thousands of people coordinated computers they individually own to deny service/access to some domain? That shouldn't be criminalized.

Re:Not akin to hitting the refresh button.

[0xdeadbeef]

The point of those tactics is to generate sympathy for the protesters. People are supposed to think they are selfless and brave while the cops or goons who remove them are violent jerks.

A crashed website may evoke anger or schadenfreude, but never sympathy.

Re:Not akin to hitting the refresh button.

[Attila Dimedici]

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.

Of course, that is also illegal, which makes the petition by Anonymous stupid.

Re:Not akin to hitting the refresh button.

[Kielistic]

But it would not be illegal if they had enough support to enter the store and fill it to capacity while also forming a large line outside preventing other people from entering. That is also about the best physical analogy to a ddos that I can think of.

Re:Not akin to hitting the refresh button.

[mysidia]

having a sit-in and handcuffing themselves together to DENY ACCESS to some location.

This is why if you fear the possibility of someone protesting your business... essentials to keep on hand include: LRADs, pepper spray, tear gas, bolt cutters, handcuff keys

Re:Not akin to hitting the refresh button.

[Tony Isaac]

It's worse than that. The hackers commandeer computers that do not belong to them, using malware to infect and control other people's computers. So in addition to your union strikers handcuffing themselves together, they would also be handcuffing themselves to uninvolved bystanders to force them to participate in the strike.

Toxic precedent

[starfishsystems]

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.

I like their chances

[paiute]

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.

Clickity Click click clak finger cramp

[portwojc]

"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.

Re:Clickity Click click clak finger cramp

[Areyoukiddingme]

We do it much more simply. We don't have to click refresh. We just follow a link. Along with several million of our buddies....

The Slashdot Effect is alive and well.

Abusers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Abusers

[jakimfett]

And we have an AC who hit the nail on the head. Legalizing DDOS attacks as a form of protest will turn the internet into a warzone.

Re:Abusers

[Kielistic]

I doubt that would be as big of a problem as you make it out to be. First of all those resources cost a lot of money. Second, those data centres will have nice and easy to block IP blocks. Third, it would be the same as if Google hired a bunch of faux protesters to picket the Apple store; harassment from a single entity is easier to find legal help to stop.

Re:Abusers

[X0563511]

It isn't already?

OK, so it's not really a warzone. It's more like a no-mans-land where bandits prey on the weak and you get parasites if you don't wear good boots.

Re:Abusers

[UltraZelda64]

If a company DDoSes one of their competitors to hurt them financially, that is not protest and would no doubt be taken up in the courts.
Plus, they would probably end up hurting themselves far more, since people would find out what a sleazy company they are and avoid them.

Re:Abusers

[jakimfett]

As much as I'd like to agree with this, I just can't. The nature of "Anonymous" is that it's...well...hard to track them down. Meaning that yeah, there'll be news about how some skiddy gets dox'd and taken down by law enfourcement, but penalizing people for participating in a DDOS is really really hard.

If this crap actually gets pushed through (internet gods forbid), I'm putting all my sites behind CloudFlare.

Occupy public space

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Everything else, too, but also this..

[Brett Buck]

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.

Re:Everything else, too, but also this..

[X0563511]

The executive branch can suggest to the legislature a bill, just like anyone else can. Whether or not they take the suggestion is still in their power.

Lets also not forget executive orders and special powers, they muddy the water.

here's something to consider

[houbou]

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.

Re:here's something to consider

[UltraZelda64]

You talk as if they'll never see the light of day on the Internet again to spread their message. Sorry, but that's just not the case.

I wish...

[macbeth66]

... 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!"

Re:Analogy time!

[macbeth66]

I'm sorry, that's just idiotic. Yes, the sarcasm was detected, but still.

Or perhaps I should put sugar in your gas tank to protest your use of earth-damaging petro-chemicals.

I suppose you feel that the Nazis were just protesting that they had non-Aryans in their country.

It's got 12 billion signatures already

[Anonymous Coward]

;)

Slashdot unanimity? WTF?

[sirwired]

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.

The suppression of speech is not speech.

[sco08y]

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.

Re:The suppression of speech is not speech.

[ediron2]

Sit-ins are intrusive. Picket lines are intrusive. Lockouts are intrusive. Boycotts, tea parties, monkeywrenching: intrusive, intrusive, intrusive. One could argue that defending oneself against negative political cartoons gets in the way of controlling one's message: intrusive.

Shouting from atop a soapbox: intrusive.

Unfettered political speech / expression routinely gets messy. Several of these are reprehensible in comparison to pamphleteering and other more civilized methods of getting one's message out, but each has shown they have their places. Asymmetry (an imbalance of power) forces asymmetric counterattacks.

That's why these are common. Now we just have to debate whether it's entirely depressing or a necessary evil...

Re:The suppression of speech is not speech.

[ediron2]

Oh, and **ALL** are better than war. Nothing says intrusive like killing. Every political act, even the worst, is an attempt to resolve power struggles without warfare.

Nobody's fawning here...

[sirwired]

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.

Re:Nobody's fawning here...

[wonkey_monkey]

Anonymous has done some worthy things

More to the point, Anonymous has done many newsworthy things, and this is (borderline) one of them.

Not analogous

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Ya I'm ok with it

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Ya I'm ok with it

[mysidia]

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.

Big companies such as the MPAA/RIAA members, could easily afford to buy a large number of systems, and networks to use for launching attacks. If DDoS attacks were legal, they would like to protest the Peer to Peer file sharing sites, I am sure.

Re:Ya I'm ok with it

[Tom]

You are mixing various things up there.

Exceeding the TOS of your provider, for example, does not break any laws, only a contract. That's a huge difference - the consequence is you might lose your Internet, not a SWAT team breaking down your door.

Protests can or can not be disruptive. Often, it's a POV matter. Rosa Parks was certainly disruptive to some. Sit-in protests are one well-known form of peaceful, but disruptive protest. Heck, any large demonstration shuts down a couple roads for a few hours.
The difference is that protests are not merely disruptive. Shutting down the street is a side-effect or a means to your message. A DDoS, on the other hand, does not carry a message. By itself, it can not be a protest. However, it can be part of a protest.

Re:Ya I'm ok with it

[celle]

"...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."

      Yes, because the politicos know to ignore it will be disruptive to their next run for election.

"A protest is NOT to disrupt activity"

      Yes it is to disrupt activity. That's the point otherwise you are agreeing with the status quo by default. From a practicality standpoint, if it doesn't disrupt something, no one is going to care. The very nature of a protest is to disrupt since you are disagreeing with someone. Believe or not a in consumer to business point of view taking your money elsewhere is a protest and disruptive to the companies profits. Stop looking at protest halfway. Remember the independence of the US was an act of disruption protesting to the then political situation with England.

Political protesters get arrested...

[matt.m.munz]

...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.

Re:Anonymous isn't protesting anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

"Broke their own rules" ? What rules? I don't recall having ever seen, read, or even heard of this group ever having established rules.

Its not a group like in the movie "Fight Club". Its just a bunch of people who are like-minded in some ways. Its decentralized, there are no official join records or initiations or ceremonies or any of that happy horse-crap. Its just a bunch of people with common ideas who express their common ideologies by wearing the mask of V. Yes, some are a bit more extreme and crazy than the others, so you can't put a stamp on the entire collective group by the actions of a select few nutjobs that get busted by the feds.

And I've never liked that phrase "civil disobedience". Obedience basically means that one yields to orders from an authority figure. I was raised to believe that the government is supposed to yield to the instructions and orders from its authority figures; the people. When a government doesn't yield to its authority figures (IE, is disobedient), the people are hopelessly powerless to do anything about it. Protests are their only legal mode and means to fight.

Oh, how nifty

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I never thought...

[Sentrion]

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.

Physical protest is not Anonymous

[n2hightech]

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.

Just another bully tactic

[Anonymous Coward]

Most left-leaning political action is a form of bullying. Note: I said "action" not "speech".

1. 1. When unions strike, they block access to something that belongs to somebody else often with the real or implied threat of violence and/or property damage if their lines are crossed.
2. 2. When "activists" "occupy" something (an ROTC building on a college campus, or a bank on Wall Street, etc) they interfere with the rights of others to access and/or use a facility that belongs to somebody other than the "occupiers" with the real or implied threat of violence if they are ejected. Sometimes the threat is that they will use their allies in the press to circulate misleading video of their removal in the hopes that the public will be duped into bullying the ejectors
3. 3. When "Anonymous" does a DDOS attack, they are blocking other people from accessing something that the "Anonymous" people do not own, and in a manner that could be considered financially violent (particularly for a small business victim)

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

Not going to happen

[skyraker]

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.

Re:Not going to happen

[Marxdot]

Once you begin to disrupt the normal course of business or government, you are breaking the law.

Which laws?

Not likely

[FyberOptic]

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.

Don't you need to be 18

[drrilll]

to sign a petition?

Re:Terrible example.

[X0563511]

DDoSs can DAMAGE systems.

Then the system is already fucking broken.

DDOS isn't the problem

[asmkm22]

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 abo

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:Terrible example.

[UltraZelda64]

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.

MLK on the subject

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

The problem with the modern protester is that they are like spoiled brats screaming in the candy aisle. They also don't bother to read people like MLK, who himself said:

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.

Re:Shouting is a form of protest, how do you feel

[dittbub]

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?

Programs are people too

[Frankie70]

Just like companies.

Re:Terrible example.

[TapeCutter]

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.

I hope not..

[SuperDre]

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..

Re:Analogy time!

[wonkey_monkey]

Yes, the sarcasm was detected

The rest of your post suggests it wasn't.

interesting

[Tom]

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.

To carry the 'occupy' analogy one step further ...

[johnlcallaway]

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.

Just as a protest is orgainzed...

[3seas]

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.

Anon is showing its lack of legal knowledge....

[tokencode]

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.

Re:Terrible example.

[phageman]

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.

DDoS'ing a site is NOT a legitimate protest

[Wokan]

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.

LOL they don't get it.

[ZombieBraintrust]

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.

The botnet is the problem...

[purgedhalo]

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.

Where's the sacrifice?

[Ravaldy]

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.

Possible reaction to DDOSed site

[kaatochacha]

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?

Loss of Income?

[mlw4428]

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?

No, DDOS remains illegal.

[Nexion]

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?