Researcher makes the case for DDOS attacks.

[SteveRiley]

Interesting. http://www.zdnet.com/researcher-make...ks-7000034560/

To some people, a political mission matters more than anything, including your rights. Such people (the Bolsheviks come to mind) have caused a great deal of damage and suffering throughout history, especially in the last 100 years or so. Now they're taking their mission online. You better not get in their way.

Molly Sauter, a doctoral student at McGill University and a research affiliate at the Berkman Center at Harvard ("exploring cyberspace, sharing its study & pioneering its development"), has a paper calling the use of DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks a legitimate form of activism and protest. This can't go unchallenged.

...

She cites cases of DDOS attacks committed against Koch Industries, Paypal, the Church of Scientology and Lufthansa Airlines, some of these by the hacktivists who call themselves Anonymous. In the US cases of the attacks against Koch, Paypal and the Church, the attackers received prison time and large fines and restitution payments. In the Lufthansa case, in a German court, the attacker was sentenced to pay a fine or serve 90 days in jail; that sentence was overturned on appeal. The court ruled that "...the online demonstration did not constitute a show of force but was intended to influence public opinion."

This is the sort of progressive opinion, dismissive of property rights, that Sauter regrets is not happening here in the US. She notes, and this makes sense to me, that the draconian penalties in the CFAA [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act] induce guilty pleas from defendants, preventing the opportunity for a Lufthansa-like precedent.

Her paper: http://boingboing.net/2014/09/26/%66uckthecfaa.html

Lots of commentary on Bruce Schneier's blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archiv..._activism.html

[Feathers McGraw]

This is a really interesting topic, one of those where I can't quite pin down my position on it.

Just a few things to throw out there: I think it matters what you're attacking. I don't think it's easy to justify attacks on servers hosting information or opinions, such as blogs and wikis. In fact, I think attacking these types of sites should be illegal - it's important for democracy that people are allowed to say things that you disagree with, otherwise you're basically just left with mob rule. As for information, this old chestnut says it better than I could in my own words:

beware of he who would deny you access to information for in his heart he dreams himself your master

If you disagree with an opinion that someone is voicing, publish a counter-argument or just ignore the site - nobody is making you read anything!

When it comes to DDoS attacks against services though, I'm not so sure where I stand. The waters are muddied significantly by the fact that your ability to perform a DoS attack (or defend against one) depends on how much money and bandwidth you have.

Standing in front of a bank to prevent people from entering because you disagree with what that bank is doing is fine by me. Paying people to do the same is not.

What do you lot think?

[dibl]

Thanks Steve. It's a characteristic of the liberal left that once they think they know which policy would create a better world, they will happily use pretty much any level of coercion and undemocratic tactics to foist it on their fellow citizens. Apparently they all admire Lenin's rationalization for the chaos he created: "If you want to make an omelet, it is necessary to break eggs."

[Snowhog]

The difference here, with a DDoS vs a picket line, is that the picket line is passive (working on the assumption that the picketers are peaceful). Those desiring to pass through the picket line can do so. With a DDoS attack, users are prevented from accessing the service, so a DDoS attack is not passive; it is active.

A DDoS is designed to deny access; thwart commerce; prevent trade. It isn't friendly or peaceful.

[SteveRiley]

My rights end at the border of your body. And at your front door. And at your Internet connection. I really don't see a difference.

DDoS attacks are crimes because they should be. No one has the right to deprive another of life, liberty, or access. The important point of Sauter's argument is that the punishment proscribed by the CFAA is ridiculous. Unfortunately, that's lost in her zeal to squelch those with whom she's pissed. Rage makes people's brains go all goofy.

And Don, not all lilly-livered liberals think like she does

[Feathers McGraw]

My rights end at the border of your body. And at your front door. And at your Internet connection. I really don't see a difference.

That's fair enough. What's your opinion of retaliatory denial of service attacks? Taking your analogy further, if someone hits you and keeps hitting you, most would probably agree that at some point it becomes acceptable to hit back (although you should try and avoid/evade the attack first of course). The article touches on this a bit, but mainly talks about GCHQ DDoS'ing anonymous, which is a bit different to the church of Scientology doing it themselves, for the reasons stated in the article (no risk or oversight when GCHQ does it).

I've never done anything like this by the way, and don't plan on it... I just think it's interesting!

[Qqmike]

Does this get more complicated? Enumerate the many ways one (an individual, an entity) might effect a harmful action against an individual. Some ways are eluded to above. Another way is by force of one's wealth, that effect results (e.g., laws, corporate policies) that are unfavorable--harmful--to an individual or group of individuals. Wealthy (or well-to-do, or have sufficient resources to carry out a given mission) extremists have this power (the Koch brothers, ISIS, a malevolent dictator, a naughty CEO, and you can help list other examples here). "My rights end at the border of your body. And at your front door. And at your Internet connection." There are many ways to infringe upon those rights--some appear to be indirect at first.

[GreyGeek]

I agree, Steve, DDoS attacks are illegal, and rightfully so. I noticed Sauter's concerns over Koch and his money, but apparently she has no concern about Soros or his son, and their billions. Kansas, just south of Nebraska, has the honor of funding an "independent" candidate for senate. I guess it all depends on whose ox is being gored. I also noticed the word "despotism" being tossed around in the article and the comments.

@AlanS "Laissez-faire capitalism and legal despotism are the two sides of a coin."

I read an interesting essay about the "language of Despotism":



The Language of Despotism
by Bruce Thornton
Wednesday, June 25, 2014


Long before 1984 gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Orwell explains the reason for such degradation of language in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”


Tyrannical power and its abuses comprise the “indefensible” that must be verbally disguised. The gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and mass murder of the Soviet Union required that it be a “regime of lies,” as the disillusioned admirer of Soviet communism Pierre Pascal put it in 1927.


Our own political and social discourse must torture language in order to disguise the failures and abuses of policies designed to advance the power and interests of the “soft despotism,” as Tocqueville called it, of the modern Leviathan state and its political caretakers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy the transformation of meaning serves misguided policies that endanger our security and interests.


One example from domestic policy recently cropped up in Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent in the Schuette decision, which upheld the Michigan referendum banning racial preferences. In her dissent, Sotomayor called for replacing the term “affirmative action” with “race-sensitive admissions.” But “affirmative action” was itself a euphemism for the racial quotas in use in college admissions until they were struck down in the 1978 Bakke decision. To salvage racial discrimination, which any process that gives race an advantage necessarily requires, Bakke legitimized yet another euphemism, “diversity,” as a compelling state interest that justified taking race into account in university admissions.


Thus the most important form of “diversity” for the university became the easily quantifiable one of race. Not even socio-economic status can trump it, as the counsel for the University of Texas admitted during oral arguments in Fisher vs. University of Texas last year, when he implied that a minority applicant from a privileged background would add more diversity to the university than a less privileged white applicant. All these verbal evasions are necessary for camouflaging the fact that any process that discriminates on the basis of race violates the Civil Rights Act ban on such discrimination. Promoting an identity politics predicated on historical victimization and the equality of result is more important than the principle of equality before the law, and this illiberal ideology must be hidden behind distortions of language and vague phrases like “race-sensitive” and “diversity.”


Another example can be found in the recently released report from the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. The report is the basis for the government’s numerous policy and procedural suggestions to universities and colleges in order to help them “live up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.” Genuine sexual violence, of course, needs to be investigated, adjudicated, and punished to the full extent of the law by the police and the judicial system. But the “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” the Obama administrationis talking about is something different.


At the heart of the White House report is the oft-repeated 2007 statistic that 20 percent of female college students have been victims of “sexual assault,” which most people will understand to mean rape or sexual battery. Yet as many critics of the study have pointed out, that preposterous number––crime-ridden Detroit’s rape rate is 0.05 percent––was achieved by redefining “sexual assault” to include even consensual sexual contact when the woman was drunk, and behaviors like “forced kissing” and “rubbing up against [the woman] in a sexual way, even if it is over [her] clothes.”


The vagueness and subjectivity of such a definition is an invitation to women to abandon personal responsibility and agency by redefining clumsy or boorish behavior as “sexual assault,” a phrase suggesting physical violence against the unwilling. As one analyst of the flawed study has reported, “three-quarters of the female students who were classified as victims of sexual assault by incapacitation did not believe they had been raped; even when only incidents involving penetration were counted, nearly two-thirds did not call it rape.” As many have pointed out, if genuine sexual assault were happening, colleges would be calling in the police, not trying the accused in campus tribunals made up of legal amateurs and lacking constitutional protections such as the right to confront and cross-examine one’s accuser.


What matters more than protecting college women against a phantom epidemic of rape, then, is the need to expand government power into the social lives of college students, empowering the federal bureaucrats, university administrators, and ideological programs like women’s studies that all stand to benefit by this sort of coercive intrusion. This enshrining of racial and sexual ideology into law through the abuse of language has had damaging consequences, whether for the minority college students mismatched with the universities to which they are admitted, thus often ensuring their failure and disillusion; or for the young women encouraged to abandon their autonomy and surrender it to government and education bureaucrats who know better than they how to make sense of their experiences and decisions.


In foreign policy, however, the abuse of language is positively dangerous. Since 9/11, our failure to identity the true nature of the Islamist threat and its grounding in traditional Islamic theology has led to misguided aims and tactics. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, for example, the traditional Islamic doctrine of jihad––which means to fight against the enemies of Islam, which predominantly means infidels––has been redefined to serve the dubious tactic of flattering Islam in order to prevent Muslim terrorism.


Thus in 2008 the National Terrorism Center instructed its employees, “Never use the term jihadist or mujahideen in conversation to describe terrorists,” since “In Arabic, jihad means ‘striving in the path of God’ and is used in many contexts beyond warfare.” Similarly, CIA chief John Brennan has asserted that jihad “is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community,” despite the fourteen centuries of evidence from the Koran, hadiths, and bloody history that jihad is in fact predominantly an obligatory armed struggle against the enemies of Islam. The reluctance to put Muslim violence in its religious context reflects not historical truth, but a public relations tactic serving the delusional strategy of appeasing Muslims into liking us.


That’s why, to this day, the 2009 murders of 13 military personnel at Fort Hood by Muslim Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan are still classified as “workplace violence” rather than an act of terror.This despite the fact that Hasan––whose business cards had the initials “SoA,” “Soldier of Allah,” on them––shouted the traditional Islamic battle cry “Allahu Akbar” during his rampage. Or that in a presentation at Walter Reed Hospital, Hasan had put up a slide with the great commission to practice jihad that Mohammed delivered in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.’” This command to wage jihad was echoed in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, revered as a “Grand Sign of God” for his theological acumen, and by Osama bin Laden in 2001. Those ignoring this venerable jihadist tradition must use verbal evasions like “workplace violence” and “striving in the path of God” to hide the indefensible–and failed––tactic of appeasement that prevents us from accurately understanding the religious motives of Muslim terrorists, and the extent of the Muslim world’s support for them.


No foreign policy crisis, however, is more illustrative of the “regime of lies” and abuse of language to serve “indefensible” aims than the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The Arabs’ aim, of course, is to destroy Israel as a nation, a policy they have consistently pursued since 1948.

Since military attacks have failed ignominiously, an international public relations campaign coupled to terrorist violence has been employed to weaken Israel’s morale and separate Israel from her Western allies. An Orwellian assault on language has been key to this tactic.


Examples are legion, but one is particularly insidious, here seen in a New York Times headline from 2011: “Obama Sees ’67 Borders as Starting Point for Peace Deal.” The common reference to “borders” in regard to what is in fact the armistice line from the 1948 Arab war against Israel is ubiquitous. Yet there has never been recognized in international law a formal “border” between Israel and what the world, in another Orwellian phrase, calls the “West Bank,” because that territory has never been part of a modern nation. Its only international legal status was as part of the British Mandate for Palestine, which was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, and which was intended as the national homeland for the Jewish people. The Arabs’ rejection of the U.N. partition plan and their invasion of Israel in 1948 put the territory’s status in limbo once Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria, which the international community with a few exceptions refused to recognize. In 1967 Israel took it back in another defensive war against Arab aggression. Since then, its final disposition has awaited a peace treaty that will determine the international border.


This may sound like quibbling over careless language, but the dishonest use of “border” reinforces and encodes in peoples’ minds the big lie of the conflict––that a Palestinian “nation” is being deprived of its “homeland” by Israel, a canard that didn’t become current among Arabs and the rest of the world until after the 1967 Six Day War. And this lie in turns validates the common use of “occupation”––which implies an illegal invasion into and control of another nation, as the Germans did to France in 1940––to describe Israel’s defensive possession of territories that have long served as launch pads for aggression against Israel. Until a peace treaty, the territory known as the “West Bank”––more accurately Judea and Samaria, the heartland of historical Israel for centuries––is disputed, not “occupied.”


To paraphrase Thucydides, words like “borders” and “occupation” have had their ordinary meanings changed, and been forced to take meanings that serve tyranny and aggression. And we who accept those new meanings are complicit in the resulting injustice that follows

[eggbert]

The peaceful and tolerant left doing what it does best. I'd rather live in the United States of Koch than live in the fever-swamp "utopia" these nutcases dream of.

[SteveRiley]

That's fair enough. What's your opinion of retaliatory denial of service attacks? Taking your analogy further, if someone hits you and keeps hitting you, most would probably agree that at some point it becomes acceptable to hit back (although you should try and avoid/evade the attack first of course).

Self-defense in the physical world has one assurance: you can be certain that you're retaliating against your attacker. A couple years ago, my daughter and her friend were walking home with their bicycles. Some boys from their middle school jumped out from behind nearby bushes and attemped to knock over the girls and steal their bikes. What they didn't anticipate is that my daughter -- 13 at the time and probably only 70 pounds or so -- had spent the last year in a climbing gym and was one buff little girl. She beat the shopt out of both kids and then the girls ran -- with their bikes -- to our place. We called the police, they came and took a report, and praised McKenzie for defending herself. Then they went to visit the boys for some mild, ah, fear installation, heh.

Over the Internet, you can never be sure that you're actually attacking the true source. It's highly likely that the attacker is using some third party -- no doubt by exploiting one or more vulnerabilities -- to conduct nefarious actions on your systems. If you attack the presumed source, you could be equally guilty of breaking the CFAA. I never advise to "attack back."

[SteveRiley]

"My rights end at the border of your body. And at your front door. And at your Internet connection." There are many ways to infringe upon those rights--some appear to be indirect at first.

A properly functioning government, with mechanisms for self-correcting tendencies toward corruption, would go a long way toward minimizing these infringement methods.

[Snowhog]

A properly functioning government

Which, unfortunately, is an oxymoron.

[SteveRiley]

You'd rather have none at all?

[Snowhog]

Heck no! Total anarchy!? Not for me. But, a "properly functioning government" is not what most of them are.

[SteveRiley]

How's this for a start?

A New Constitution for America

ARTICLE I

With 100 percent public financing of national elections, the compulsion to fundraise for re-election is removed, allowing for more actual governing.

Members of the House of Representatives (understood, since 1789, as “the People’s House”) would be chosen every third year, not every other year; they would be ineligible for reelection after twelve total years in Congress. Members of the Senate would still be elected for a six-year term, but would be ineligible to run for re-election after two terms.

One could move from the House to the Senate, or vice-versa, even after twelve years in the one body. But to minimize the obvious underside of the lobbying business, all who have served in Congress are to be prohibited for five years after leaving office from obtaining financial compensation from any corporation, any industry or interest, that their actions while in Congress directly benefited.

Filibuster procedure could be modified as follows: In the case of an objection to proceeding to debate a measure, or to voting on an amendment or final bill, the three-fifths cloture motion required to overcome the objection is only to be applied by a national political party once per session of Congress. Otherwise, agreement of a simple majority of members will be sufficient to proceed to debate or to bring a bill to a vote. During a filibuster, a minimum of fifteen members must remain on the floor at all times.

Election Day becomes “Election Days” — three, to be precise, beginning on the weekend, so that more working people can get to the polls who are not casting their ballots by mail or other established means.

ARTICLE II

The President serves one six-year term, and is eligible to run for re-election only after six years elapse after the presidency has ended. It would thus be possible for a popular president to serve two terms — presumably to clean up the mess left by his or her successor. (The idea of a six-year presidency, it should be noted, has been tossed around for years. Allowing an effective president to resume his or her former office, in the Grover Cleveland mode, after a six-year hiatus, is a unique proposal. It could persuade some presidents to return to the House or Senate, too, which might not be a bad idea. John Quincy Adams enjoyed some of his best days in political life during nineteen years of post-presidential service in the House.)

That odd vestigial organ of the Constitution, the Electoral College, is gone, replaced by the Congressional District system for electing a president: one district, one electoral vote. Eliminating the corrupt instrument of gerrymandering is an improvement on democracy: with districts mathematically (not politically) constructed, the system becomes more representative than the general ticket plurality system (all the electoral votes of a state going to a single candidate). This option was discussed from time to time in early U.S. Congresses, so it, too, is not an entirely new idea. The District system was Madison’s preference from the start, according to his testimony as a retired ex-president.

On the subject of impeachment, the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” needs to be adjusted, removing the tepid “misdemeanors.” Given the specious (and purely partisan) cause upon which President Bill Clinton was impeached, and that knee-jerk Obama haters routinely bring up, we should be very careful not to impeach a president without just cause.

ARTICLE III

As in the alteration of the terms and re-election prospects of President, Representatives and Senators, the Supreme Court should not be a lifetime appointment. The partisan predictability of High Court decisions makes it desirable to limit court appointments to ten years.

ARTICLE Z

With the disappearance of those no-longer-meaningful clauses and amendments meant for governing an earlier American society, a new article re-clarifying the rights of citizens should be introduced. Here is where the promise of educational equality, clean energy initiatives, tax guidelines to render the super-wealthy super-patriotic and similarly urgent statements of principle (i.e., corporations are not people) belong. In accordance with Federal Poverty Guidelines, no wage earner who works full-time should be paid at a rate that leaves him or her in poverty. In pursuit of clean energy, the federal government should prioritize clean power plants, safe chemical facilities, and should enact laws, responsive to scientific knowledge, that encourage greater energy efficiency, reduced carbon emissions, groundwater safety and waste storage and treatment solutions.

A democratic republic. Either we are or we aren’t. When officers in charge of business conglomerates act against the public’s interest and exert undue influence over politics, capitalism is not an expression of freedom: it is deceptive practice aimed at bolstering the power and benefit of a privileged minority. Free enterprise is not the same as corporate welfare or government-corporate collusion. Occupy Wall Street came about as an expression of this principle; it is the Constitution, though, that should do the job of diffusing power responsibly and keeping people with power honest.

(from Salon.com)
Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
coauthors of Madison and Jefferson (Random House)