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Anonymous Files Petition To Make DDoS Legal Form of Protest
hypnosec writes "Anonymous has filed a petition with the U.S. Government asking the Obama administration to make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a legal form of protest. Anonymous has argued that because of advancements in internet technology, there is a need for new ways of protest. The hacking collective doesn't consider DDoS as a form of attack and equates it to hitting the 'refresh' button on a webpage. Comparing these attacks to the 'occupy' protests, Anonymous notes that instead of people occupying an area, it is their computers occupying a website for a particular period of time."
I think I could agree that hitting refresh over and over again on a website would be a valid form of protest. But wouldn't having a program do it for you be like using mannequins to occupy wallstreet?
The whole idea of the traditional protest is that people had to stand in a particular area to create problems for wherever they were standing. The limiting factor is that it requires people's time.
Having a fleet of computers continually access a site does not occupy people's time, but rather is an automated process, which is not a form of individual protest. I would imagine that having people hit websites manually, and pressing the refresh button cannot be classed as a DDos attack, and if it were, then they would likely be protected by the right to protest.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
I paid for the damn internet connection better believe they're my property....
This site claims to hate censorship, but it fawns over a group that protests against people it doesn't like by crashing their websites so that nobody can hear their free speech.
I work for a small hosting/cloud provider, and from experience, I can say that this is a form of attack. It can't be controlled is the worst problem, and it starts affecting many other people who are not involved in the 'protest', who just happen to be on the same shared server, cloud, or data center. Also, as for any argument that such an outcome would be the point of a 'protest', to raise awareness, but the problem is that most people affected by it wouldn't know anything about the source of the attack. Overall, a dDoS should not be a protected option in any form or for any reason. It is way too blunt, and as we build more onto the Web, it can become dangerous or even life-threatening to allow these attacks. It could be the same as allowing people to attack power stations or plants, which is certainly a crime(bordering on terrorism in this day).
I think Anonymous is missing the concept a bit here. You can protest a business with a sign and megaphone, but you are not allowed to stop people from patronising that business. Very rare is it that a DDoS doesn't affect somebodies business. Most often, it affects somebody not even related to who the attacker is intending. If you want to protest, there are non disruptive methods to use, DDoS shouldn't be one of them.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Nope. It's akin to a union strike or a mob of protesters having a sit-in and handcuffing themselves together to DENY ACCESS to some location. That's denial of service. It makes the people in control of that location, and sometimes the clients who are dependent upon it, very angry, sometimes violently so. The whole point of denial-of-access protests is that they DO have a social cost that forces people to take notice.
I hope, and expect, that the petition will be denied. What it means is that any entity with sufficient knowledge and resources (individual or corporation) would be permitted to flood the net with DDoS packets.
If such activity were legalized, by the same principle so would automatically-generated petitions. So would spam. So would noise pollution. It sets an extremely toxic precedent.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I also filed a petition - that I be recognized as the Queen of England. I think mine will be approved just before the one approving DDoSs.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If 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.
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.
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.
I paid for the damn internet connection better believe they're my property....
You paid for your half of the connection.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
So long as the anon-tards are ok with me blocking them in their houses with a fleet of ROVs. Same basic deal as what they are talking about: Using a ton of automatically controlled systems to deny access. If they aren't ok with it being done to them, in the real world, then why should we be ok with them doing it to others on computers?
The other thing about DDoS attacks is they almost always involve breaking the law anyhow, by using botnets. Unless you legally have access to 100% of the systems you are using AND the ToS of the providers allows you to generate traffic of the levels you do, then you are already in the wrong. Exploiting systems and using them for a botnet is not legal and it should be extremely obvious why.
These morons don't want a legit protest, because next to nobody agrees with them and they are lazy. If they went out for a physical protest, they'd get like 20 people to show up for one day and it'd be ignored. So they want to use sleazy, illegal, tactics to try and amplify their voice.
It also ignores the fundamental point of a protest. A protest is NOT to disrupt activity, particularly not to have just a couple people do so. It is to show large scale support or opposition for something. It is to let the public, and the government, know that a lot of people want something. It is impressive by its size.
If 250k people show up in a park and protest something, that is impressive, that is something to be noticed, respected. The large number of people makes it noteworthy. If I rent out a shitload of video and sound equipment so I can broadcast myself all over a park, and protest alone, that doesn't make it noteworthy, other than as to what an egomaniac I am.
They don't want freedom, they want tyranny, where they get to be the tyrants. A large segment of the public refusing to do business with a company because of their policies is freedom in its fullest. A small group of people shutting down a company's ability to do business because they don't like it is not.
...and are often convicted. It's kind of part of the deal. In most cases, if your protest doesn't break any laws, then it's not newsworthy. If DDoS were legalized, then we would just have a crappy, unstable internet. We would all be used to that and the fact that somebody DDoSed somebody else would be completely un-newsworthy. Political DDoSers would then necessarily move on to some other activity to get media attention. So this petition is pointless if not laughable. QED.
Shouting is a form of protest, how do you feel about a megaphone?
How would you feel about Opera's automatic page refresh option?
Hitting the key with some kind of mechanism for easy repetition?
If you believe a healthy society should have a way for people to demonstrate, to protest, you got to accept that this can only be done if they can be an inconvenience to someone. If all protests had to be done in some remote field where nobody is bothered by it, protests would be meaningless.
One of the best ways to create a repressive society is to get the plebs to suppress themselves. The company store is an oldie but goodie, get the workers to buy on credit all they want, then when they want to protest... that is just fine, just collect their due payments as per agreement. The houses for votes scandals was based on this, house owners are tied to their mortgage and so less likely to protest because they might miss a payment, neither can they move freely to a different area to chase jobs. Car ownership? The same, you need that car and it needs paying whether you are working or not. So you better make sure no strikes close the gates and keep those Saudi's happy by letting them run their sandy North-Korea with zero hassle so the petrol keeps coming. Just see how on occasion the Saudi's lower the oil price JUST before they are going to execute a child just to remind the west what the deal is. You get the petrol, we get to do whatever we want.
It is the UN trying to say freedom of speech can't mean saying stuff that upsets someone. No my dear Nazi, it means EXACTLY that, you do NOT need freedom of speech to say things that don't upset anyone. I can go to north-korea and Saudi Arabia and say "kittens are cute" and most likely nothing will happen to me. It is saying in the American South that gay marriage should be a basic right that you need freedom of speech protection. And MORE then just from the state (see top gear episode, the ONLY time the team was attacked by the locals) because that is a shameless US cop out.
Protesters are a hassle, so is a free society. It has always been clear that the easiest society to live in would be that of a benevolent dictator such as the fictional Patrician of Ankh-Morpork in the Discworld series. Pity such a person is so fucking rare as to be non-existent.
See how often fascism is excused by making the trains run on time. Sure, OTHER people might disappear for saying the wrong thing but my train is on time so that is allright then.
Freedom is messy, a hassle and inconvenient when others exercise theirs. Deal with it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
This is from apiece called "Letter from a Birmingham Jail". It was called that because he wrote it while in a Birmingham Jail for protesting. Oh well there goes my positive karma.
I am not against protests... In fact I highly respect someone for sacrificing their time and comfort, or sacrificing their health and freedom, for a worthy cause. It convinces ME that they really believe in their cause and maybe I and others should listen. Yeah real people can shut down service to a store or whatever by protesting in the way and forcing people to see them. But a single person can shut down a store in other ways too like with bomb threats. Do the ends justify the means? Is a DDoS attack really like protest at all!?? I don't think so. I don't see any human connection and what does it force people to see? Why should I pay attention to them when they do it in comfort and out of public view. If they can do it easily with no sacrifice of their own that I can see how can i tell if they are protesting or pranking?
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.
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