What exactly is the relevant statute? As the other Ars article on the subject states, it's the digital equivalent of a sit-in.
> Whoever ... knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer ... shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.
> As used in this section ... the term “protected computer” means a computer ... which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication...
By my (not a lawyer) reading, the only real question is whether being overwhelmed with traffic can be called "damage".
Moreover, sit-ins are not legal either. If you choose to attempt to disrupt a place of business and you refuse to leave private property when asked to do so you can be arrested.
Of course you can be arrested for a sit-in, but you won't go to gaol for ten years.
It's clearly illegal. But I don't think anyone there has done anything such that 10 years in prison is an even remotely reasonable punishment. I would say it's a misdemeanor at worst, and it should carry something between community service and six months in jail.
And really, the sit-in analogy is probably better than that nonsense I just wrote.
It disrupts services while the attack is active. A sit in is the correct metaphor.
A single denied credit card transaction can easily exceed the $500 misdemeanor limit. And try telling a business that's operating on razor-thin margins that not being able to process credit cards for a day will "only make some sysadmins lose some sleep."
Could you expand on this a bit? I actually believe that it's very close to the same thing, but I'd like to hear your reasoning.
> Moreover, sit-ins are not legal either.
You are correct. This is why it's called 'civil disobedience.' Sometimes, the best way to change a law is to break it. And break it publicly. It doesn't mean that you'll be spared a sentence, but the idea is that the sentence is worth it.
EDIT: Anonymous has demonstrated an increasing political savvy and awareness, first via the protests against Scientology, but also with some smaller things that were tried that didn't spark such media coverage, like Operation CNTroll, for example. Characterizing all of Anonymous as being ignorant children is just wrong. Not all of them are doing things for political reasons, but the leadership most certainly is.
I'm watching Food, Inc. right now. Is the battle over food less or more important than Egypt? What about Tunesia? Different people value different causes differently. A healthy Wikileaks will probably affect my life more positively than a new Egyptian government will, but that doesn't make me less happy for them.
Wikileaks is just as important of a world issue as Egypt
is.
"Anonymous" is just a cloak that some folks put on from time to time. I supported Anonymous when they were fucking with Scientology. I opposed Anonymous when they were fucking with Mastercard and Visa. But it's not in any sense "the same" group.
I could go and rape a donkey and leave a note saying "Anonymous Did This" if I felt like it -- it wouldn't be in any sense the same group that did other things that Anonymous did though.
In this case, Anon believes (and I'm inclined to agree) that MasterCard made a business decision that not dealing with Wikileaks would be the better thing for them to do. However, a DDOS does two things: makes not serving Wikileaks an actual expense, and manages to bring their message to a wider audience. If anon had ran around just saying "MasterCard sucks," nobody'd care, but they've gotten tons of media coverage multiple times (like from this very article) covering their cause. Apparently they think that this is worth going to jail for.
I don't, and didn't participate. But that doesn't mean that I don't see their point.
Or more likely, they thought they'd never get caught.
It really boils down to whether a lack of access constitutes "damage". Denial of service happens "naturally" all the time, just not maliciously like this.
How is that a "risk" for the FBI? On the offchance it is proved legal then that's no skin off the FBI's nose -- they have plenty of other crimes to be investigating.
Very few sit-ins are protesting the same law (trespass) they're breaking.
Protesting censorship-via-government-pressure with censorship-via-DDoS is similarly nonsensical, a tantrum more than a statement.
Build censorship-resistant systems instead of more censoring weapons.
Your point about protesting the same law is a good one, it's the coverage that's really valuable. However, sit-ins are only one form of civil disobedience, and many of them are actually doing the thing that's illegal.
Reading the commentary, it seems that these guys were far from familiar with the game they were playing.
Furthermore, unless you were involved in the attack, how could you claim to know the point in the first place?
I didn't participate in any DDoS, but it's not like this stuff happens in secret. All you have to do is know where and how to look. It's not exactly secret where these kinds of things are organized and discusssed.
Indeed, and in a civilized society, there are rules against hijacking others' dollars and interfering with others' lawful commerce, no matter how just you believe your cause to be. Thus, what you call 'literally the point' is also the 'mens rea' for a criminal prosecution.
It seems that you place a much higher importance on following the law than I do; I don't disagree with what you're saying, but you seemingly imply that that's a bad thing.
Generally, following the law is good, but I hold no illusions that there's any connection between legality and morality.
Also, even if you get the desired headlines and attention, I don't think you score points against bad rules by violating good rules. I believe more people concluded Anonymous/Wikileaks are vandals and bullies from hearing about (or being affected by) the DDoS attacks, than came around to sympathy for Wikileaks.
So orthogonal from any 'letter of the law' analysis, it was an immoral and counterproductive thing to do.
If the 'sit-in' directly blocked the objectionable activity, a different analysis might apply. (And, more bystanders might be sympathetic.) But this, and most other 'sit-ins' I've seen, are just rudeness for attention. Moral and effective activists will choose other tactics.
And regarding: "its important enough that the consequences are irrelevant"
That way lies zealotry, madness, impotence, chaos. The real consequences always matter. The advocate who forgets, in their passion, that consequences matter becomes others' tool, often against their own interests.
I agree with your statement on its face, but there are certain times when it's okay to break the rules. Sometimes you have to do bad things to achieve good ends. No action is ever white or black, there are only shades of gray.
> If the 'sit-in' directly blocked the objectionable activity, a different analysis might apply.
They did disrupt. Maybe not as much as Anon would have liked, but they did.
Directly blocking the objectionable activity would be something like blocking a disputed eviction, or preventing the deployment of people/resources that are necessary to enforce a bad law. The disruption actually stops or reverses the objectionable activity, for the duration it can be maintained. That's targeted, and far more understandable as a (possibly) principled, non-hypocritical tactic.
Disrupting other things, because you hope to break your opponents with discomfort inflicted through uncivil means, is what crosses the line, a line beyond simply 'law'.
Not to nitpick but I hope you meant for this to be hyperbole. In general, the law (at least part of it, the parts that aren't purely for practical reasons such as 'everybody should drive on the right side of the road') purports to embody whatever is thought of as 'the moral common ground' of the society it is operating in. In the margin, the implementation can be debated (an epistemological problem of ethics), but prohibitions on and punishment of e.g. murder, rape and theft have a large and explicit moral component.
Also, I think that prohibitions and punishment say that they have a moral component, but that's largely due to making it easier for the populace to swallow. Opiate of the masses and all of that.
This doesn't mean that I think that there should be a world without rules, either. But these (at least America's) set of rules certainly don't come anywhere close to representing my morality or ethics.
(with claims as outrageous as these I feel like I'm being trolled, but there are at least two people upvoting you?)
No. I'm saying that by using 'morality' as the reasons for outlawing murder is used that way. In reality, it's very simple to derive the reason that murder is wrong: if we're all allowed to go around murdering each other, we'll have to watch our backs the entire time, and collectively, humanity will never move forward. Very utilitarian. No morality about it.
> Are you saying that measures against capital offenses, various forms of assault, protection of private property and enforcement of contracts "do not represent your morality or ethics"
Yes, I don't think that John Locke was the absolute end to philosophical thought. "Private property" and the accumulation of capital have been the root cause of a large amount of the injustices in the world. Greed is not good. Markets don't work.
> Pray tell, then what are your ethics?
I'm still working out the absolute details, but I'm most certainly in some part of socio-anarco land.
> (with claims as outrageous as these I feel like I'm being trolled, but there are at least two people upvoting you?)
It's because you're thinking on the surface too much. For example: America's rape laws are not in line with my morality. This isn't because I think rape is all good and fine, it's absolutely abhorrent. However, in the eyes of the law, an 18 year old and a 17 year old having sex is wrong, and the 18 year old will be branded a sex offender for life. This is wrong. I don't agree with it.
@2, I shouldn't say this but I'm getting downvoted left and right today anyway: why aren't you posting from North Korea if it's so great?
@4, this is in the margin. This discussion started with you claiming that "America's (presumable, most of the West's, or even most of the world's) set of rules don't even come anywhere close to representing your ethics", but the only thing you disagree with is some implementation detail (an implementation detail, oh irony, where the tradeoff between morality and utilitarianism was made more in the direction of utilitarianism - statutory rape serves to make prosecution easier).
I'm not saying that I'm utilitarian. Its just that morality can be used as a tool to produce policy that has nothing to do with morals: see the invasion of Iraq, for example. I think we're actually agreeing here.
North Korea is nothing like an anarchist society, and "if you don't like it, move" is not an argument anyway.
In this case, I brought up something that's an implementation detail, because it's an easier segue into the topic. There are other things that are larger, such as the mentioned private property issue.
I am okay with 'any kind,' _as long as it's a reasonable response_. For example, if you stepped outside right now and shot a cop, I'd think that you were a bad person, even though I dislike police. However, if some dude in Egypt right now shot a cop, I'd probably give him a high-five. Once the cops start shooting, your escalated response is justified.
The purpose of a sit-in is to stage a non-violent, disruptive protest which forces a response, typically being arrested, from a business owner or government. If there is no response because, for example, the business owner is too shamed to respond then either the disruption continues until the protesters demands are met or the protesters eventually give up. If there is a response, such as use of law enforcement, then there is the opportunity for the protesters and their cohorts to get the message out, raise awareness, and gain sympathy and support from the public at large.
Anonymity changes the equation entirely. Sit-in protesters blatantly flout the law and beg to get arrested, so as to demonstrate their conviction for the rightness of their cause and to gain publicity. Anonymous DDoSers aim only to disrupt, whatever message they have is lost to the public because nobody can know for sure who the people responsible (4chan also apparently DDoS'd minecraft.net for a while, what was the purpose of that? wikileaks itself was DDoS'd for sometime, what was the purpose of that? it's hard to say because these are just anonymous attacks rather than actual, disciplined protests). DDoS participants don't expect to get caught, let alone to be arrested, as witness the reactions of the folks in the main article.
An anonymous, or attempted anonymous, denial of service attack is more akin to throwing bricks through a storefront window or arson. It is disruption completely unmoored from personal sacrifice, civil disobedience, or the context of a cause.
It is thus properly a more violent form of protest than a sit-in and we have all the more reason to despise such things because of it.
Also, where do you get the idea that non-violent protest doesn't hurt the people being protested against? If someone chains himself to a tree about to be cut down, cutting the chain will disrupt the tree logging operation. Greenpeace isn't violent, but some people/organizations hate them, and with good reason. Gandhi wasn't violent, but he did cost the British a sizable chunk of their empire (which they'd arguably have lost anyway, but still.)
Now, DDoS is likely not as effective a protest as a sit-in, and it's entirely possible that most of the anons figured they'd never get caught - but that's not the point.
This does not mean that any form of disruption is analogous to a sit-in. If you know that you'll be arrested for a DDoS attack then certainly that's a sacrificial act (though to map closely to a sit-in you'd have to announce publicly what you are doing). However, even then that doesn't necessarily account for the damage participating in a DDoS can bring. Sit-ins rarely cause the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in business.
As it stands the debate is academic and the comparison is irrelevant. To date the number of DDoS attacks that have been carried out in public with full listings of the names and contact information of the participants is precisely zero.
You can hide behind a mask, or an IP, and you can throw your packets or your molotov cocktails at those folks you consider "the bad guys", securely smug in your knowledge that you're fighting the good fight. But that's an illusion. You're not Ghandi, you're not Rosa Parks. You're just another jerk with an ax to grind who doesn't have the guts to accept any consequences for his actions.
The reason sit-ins are lauded and DDoS's are shunned is because people who abuse the disruptive power of a sit-in to fight for worthless causes or their own self interest are simply sent to jail. Whereas most perpetrators of DoS attacks go uncaught.
Secondly, it doesn't matter if Anon once DDoS'd minecraft.net. Operation Avenge Assange had its motivations declared quite explicitly: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Avenge_As...
You could simply occupy space through other means such as placing a large heavy object in the store or place of business, but that would be considered 'dumping' and not a sit-in.