"As long as they don't break into other people's computers, launching DDoS should not be treated as a crime by default; "
Yeah, they should. Those attacks are the same as vandalism. They destroy some things that are hard to quantify, such as trust and image, as well as cost the companies money to attempt to mitigate the issue.
An analogy for you: What if all your (Anonymous) friends went to Wal-Mart and stood in line to buy something. Then when they got to the front they would fumble around in their pockets and say, "oh darn, I forgot my wallet", then they'd got out and come back in and do it again?
Would that be vandalism? Would it cost Wal-Mart money? Would Wal-Mart have to spend time dealing with the problem? Would it be illegal? Should it be? What if these anonymous strangers stood just stood outside and held up signs? Wouldn't the company hire someone to deal with them? Wouldn't that cost them money?
That is, indeed, illegal. In Japan, the crime is Disruption of Business (rough translation). In the US, as soon as the clerk wises up and tells you to leave, you're trespassing. It is also probably public nuisance and disturbance of the peace, and an enterprising DA could probably indict you for larceny.
But there's two or more of them doing it, with the intention of harassment. Ho ho ho, bad idea. Now we're up to conspiracy to commit racketeering.
Tech people seem to think that the law is a finite state machine, which has no memory and so cannot parse a crime out of a series of legal actions. Tech people are foolish about a lot of things.
It may be illegal in Japan. I'm not familiar with their laws. It's not in most U.S. states (laws vary location to location, yadda yadda.)
> you're trespassing.
Only if they come back after being told not to.
> It is also probably public nuisance and disturbance of the peace
These can somewhat statutorily vague, but the conduct here does not seem to match either of those (from Wikipedia):
> In English criminal law, public nuisance is a class of common law offence in which the injury, loss or damage is suffered by the local community as a whole rather than by individual victims.
The primary loss is WalMart's, and it is of hypothetical sales, of which there is no property right.
> Disturbing the peace is a crime generally defined as the unsettling of proper order in a public space through one's actions. This can include creating loud noise by fighting or challenging to fight, disturbing others by loud and unreasonable noise (including loud music), or using offensive words or insults likely to incite violence.
Er, no.
> larceny
Seriously? No good made it past the checkout counter.
> harassment
maybe. This only comes into play after repeated unwanted communication, (with some extension based on treatment of protected classes). If (as indeed suggested) people did this multiple times, this might be plausible.
> conspiracy
Only comes into play if there is an underlying illegality.
> Under RICO, a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering
Uh, no.
> seem to think that the law is a finite state machine,
It's obviously not, and I agree this is a problem. A series of legal actions can completely be a crime in the right context, and the courts and officers of the law consider such things. But here you've really given little to hang a criminal charge on.
Concert pianists are foolish about hamster care. They will chew right the hell through a cardboard toilet paper tube! what are you thinking, stupid pianist!
Audio engineers are foolish about contract law. It's called an implied-in-fact contract! IMPLIED IN FACT! It doesn't need to be spelled out in ink! Why do you always make this mistake, audio engineers?
Sanitation workers are foolish about bespoke tailoring. Functioning sleeve buttons don't work on off-the-rack clothes! You can't position the buttonholes until you've altered the jacket! Stop putting functioning sleeve buttons on those jacket and get back to collecting trash!
See, there, I can name three. What is your point? He didn't say tech people are simply foolish; he said they're foolish about a lot of things, and he's right, and you literally agreed with him the very sentence after you told him to stop.
Tech people sure are thin skinned. Way, way more thin skinned than audio engineers and san workers.
> What if all your (Anonymous) friends went to Wal-Mart and stood in line to buy something. Then when they got to the front they would fumble around in their pockets and say, "oh darn, I forgot my wallet", then they'd got out and come back in and do it again?
Here's another analogy (asked of someone who thinks that it's okay to do the above to walmart). Suppose I interfered with your ability to do your job via similar tactics? What if I just blocked your ability to get to work?
What? "You" are not walmart? So what? Are you more important than the folks who work at walmart? Are you more important than the folks who own walmart stock?
Heck - are you more important than the folks who want to buy something from walmart? You're not just costing walmart money, you're interfering with folks who want to buy things at walmart.
Such intereference may not be vandalism, but that doesn't make it acceptable.
Yes, in fact that should also be illegal, and in most jurisdictions it is.
You're allowed to form a picket line, but you're not allowed to physically prevent people from crossing it. And that's the way it should be -- if I feel like going to Wal-Mart then the opinion of fifty (or fifty thousand) random people on whether I should be allowed to do so or not really doesn't enter into it.
My general feeling is that there are many ways to be a dick which aren't illegal, only because nobody has thought of them yet. If you pulled this stunt one day you'd get away with it. But if people started doing it on a regular basis then either somebody would find a way to punish it using existing law or they'd pass a new law to deal with it. Because that's what we have laws for; to stop people from hurting others by being dicks.
DDosing is a brand new (on certain timescales anyway) way of hurting other people by being a dick. If it's not illegal then it should be.
I don't think you should qualify them based on either intention or consequences. Sit-ins and other civilized protest tools have both disruptive intentions and consequences.
I also think they are much closer to vandalism, but this is because of the technology of the act. If me and a couple of friends decide to hang around the entrance of a public institution and politely tell everybody who passes our opinion, that's civic protest. If we use any kind of tool to block the entrance door, no matter how briefly or cleanly, it's a crime.
Same with DOSes. There is a threshold which once passed makes the whole thing a crime. 100.000 people visiting a site? Civic protest. 100.000 clicking F5? Most likely civic protest. 1000 people using specialized tools which are designed to go over DoS filters? I dare say it's much easier to make the case that this is a crime.
Not only that, a DDoS can cost quite a bit in extra bandwidth costs (I've had a couple of small ones chew through a suprising amount). It's a bit more of a substantial repercussion in addition to hitting "brand", and often affects smaller companies proportionally more.
There is probably a reasonable separation between automated DDoS attacks and manual ones. If I convince 50 million people to click on CNN once at 3:17PM on a Tuesday then that's a reasonable form of protest IMO. If I rent a botnet for 24 hours and try and exploit some hole in your infrastructure then that's vandalism.
From a monetary standpoint they might cause the same amount of harm, but from a social standpoint a manual attack is a much harder target.
I say that the rulings and ideas here are... Backward.
I've seen a few times a website owner who asked that slashdot submissions be linked to a static page because of php content. Instead, slashdot posts directly to a php link, causing cpu, memory to go through the roof along with flooding the net channel empying quota. And he was powerless to stop it, because he couldn't even ssh into the machine.
We techies all know about the slashdot effect. How's it so much different, aside a tool called LOIC vs firefox and f5? Guess it does go down to intent?
Yes. If I put my hand on your shoulder, it could be friendly companionship or it could be assault. The physical action is the same; context is everything.
One thing about engineers I'm sure we all notice is we tend to think in terms of logical analysis: true or false, black or white. Real life is full of grey.
Look at the issue from somebody not versed in what has happened: because company X chose not to do business with somebody hackers love, hackers are shutting down company X on the internet.
That doesn't sound much like a sit-in. A sit-in doesn't involve botnets and thousands of people randomly dispersed around the globe.
Be nice if it were more like a sit-in, though. But there's just no room between "doing nothing" and "disrupting my business and my cash flow" -- at least none we seem to have found by now.
The author makes a great point that while there is all this nuance and distinction among people inside the story, for the vast majority of the apathetic this story, like all other ones, is going to be drawn like a comic-book, with good guys and bad guys. Time to wake up and figure out which box you're getting stuck into.
Anyone else sick of articles implying that anyone who doesn't want to support Wikileaks is "bowing to pressure" from some unnamed "they" (probably Republicans)? Wikileaks very much seems to have an anti-US agenda and I can totally understand why an American company would want nothing to do with them.
Stances regarding Wikileaks cross party lines. The current Democratic administration is against them, and I noticed some attempts by narrative-seeking media to pigeonhole support for Wikileaks as being the province of Tea Partiers. But lots of the US left like Wikileaks, so that doesn't work well. A slightly better division might be that the extremes of both the Left and the Right like Wikileaks to some degree, and the middle mostly doesn't. But support on the Right seems to be scattered throughout the span of extreme to moderate, possibly based on whether they think of Wikileaks primarily as attacking the Obama administration (them) or primarily as attacking the US (us).
I don't think you'll find many folks on the right supporting Wikileaks on the grounds that they're attacking the Obama administration. But you'll probably find some supporting them on the grounds of radical libertarianism.
It is very much an us-and-them-ism issue though. I find that to a great extent it breaks down upon whom you consider to be "us"; a funny-looking geek with bad hair and some kooky political ideas, or the United States Government.
It's a sad reflection on my own consistency that I'd be much more inclined to support Wikileaks if Assange weren't so damn creepy-looking. Something about him just makes me want to flush his head in a toilet.
They doesn't necessarily mean Republican. Remember, the one documented case of pressure we have in this whole saga was Joe Lieberman (a Democrat) pressuring Amazon.
As to your second point, corporations aren't patriotic, no matter how much you want them to be. If a corporation drops an account, its because the costs of holding the account are outweighing the benefits. Lieberman's pressure raised the costs of hosting Wikileaks to the point that Amazon was unwilling to continue hosting them.
Minor correction - Lieberman is a former Democrat, elected as an Independent after losing the Democratic primary, who happens to caucus with the Democrats, though for the life of me, I cannot understand they put up with him, since he often sides with the Republicans.
Evgeny's done a lot of writing on cyberactivism, and was one of the most outspoken critics of Haystack. Even when I disagree with him (which is a lot of the time) I think his articles are generally well-reasoned and well-researched. He comes from a foreign policy background, not engineering, but usually does his homework well.
This makes me apprehensive that a possible "sell" of this power would be "would you like us to get rid of most/all spam? With our new technology, we will have the ability to trace spam messages back to the source and take appropriate legal action."
On the other hand, I would imagine this will spark the digital DNA to rearrange chromosomes so that a distributed anonymous internet appears embedded in the current implementation to continue to avoid power wielders...
If adult content has been a driver of past innovation, will spammers be drivers of the future?
Corrupt officials in the US government must be overjoyed at how this is playing out. What is on the news? Is it:
a) That US tax dollars paid for a US "security" company to throw a boy-rape for stoned Afghan police recruits,
b) The US Government is engaging in censorship
c) Wikileaks' personal army of hackers is stealing credit card information.
We have the most damning release of information ever, and yet the media is successfully portraying this as a hacker issue. And we're all fucking making it happen.
Anonymous punished some bad corporate citizens for doing the wrong thing, and bullied some of them into doing the right thing. This is in direct response to the bullying Assange has gotten. Legal or not, it's sort of awesome to see bullies get bullied back.
Yeah, they should. Those attacks are the same as vandalism. They destroy some things that are hard to quantify, such as trust and image, as well as cost the companies money to attempt to mitigate the issue.