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

[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

[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

[arekin]

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

Re:Mannequin Attack

[Anonymous Coward]

Define Irony...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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

[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.