Anonymous Files Petition To Make DDoS Legal Form of Protest 323
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."
Re:DDoS affects comerce (Score:2, Informative)
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:Abusers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not going to fly (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
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:Mannequin Attack (Score:3, Informative)
You know, your ethics suck.
Re:Mannequin Attack (Score:5, Informative)
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.