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Wikileaks "Cyberwar"

Pardalis said:
And you should read the section about cybercrime.
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I am not disputing your characterization of the hackers' actions as "crimes." I'm saying I support nonviolent civil disobedience. If nonviolent civil disobedience involves breaking some laws, so be it. Those allegedly breaking the laws will be held accountable.
 
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Cl1mh4224rd said:
I support Wikileaks for the most part. I also feel that this DDoS'ing activity is out of line. That being said...

There's no Constitutionally protected "due process" for business decisions. Severing business ties with another entity does not require the arbitration of a state or federally sanctioned court.
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Point conceded.
 
babycondor said:
I am not disputing your characterization of the hackers' actions as "crimes." I'm saying I support nonviolent civil disobedience. If nonviolent civil disobedience involves breaking some laws, so be it. Those allegedly breaking the laws will be held accountable.
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And what exactly is "civil disobediance" in attacking private companies and individuals like Sarah Palin?
 
Alot of charities work with these credit card companies and Paypal, I myself give to the Red Cross and aid groups for Haïti with my credit card.

How is it civil disobedience to disrupt the functions of these companies?
 
Pardalis said:
Ah, so you lied.

But if it was hypothetically cyber-attacked, I'd still be not OK with it.
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Not quite. I lumped multiple events into one. Essentially, I confused the effects of one event to be caused by the other, mainly because I had forgotten the sequence until I looked it up. WL underwent a severe DDoS attack on the Sunday of the first leak, and then was taken off the internet due to political pressure, mostly from Joe Lieberman. There is argument over whether or not that actually represents political pressure, which is an argument I'd prefer not to get into.

WL was definitely attacked with a distributed denial of service attack, and has been before. I don't think that it's possible, though, to put up a DDoS of a scale that would force removal of a site, since it would require a constant attack of great magnitude. Removal takes complicit hosting services, which is the case here.
 
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A Laughing Baby said:
Right. I suppose you can say I'm guilty of misrepresenting things a bit. The progression of events was a severe DDoS on the day of the leaks (which didn't matter, as the cables were already in the hands of the press), followed by pressure from sitting senators to hosting services to remove hosting. They did, followed by other hosts, leading to WL needing to use proxy services. Not technically a cyber attack, but definitely the result of a protest of some sort.
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In my view, DDoS--whatever the target, and however ineffective the effort turns out to be--is a cowardly and distinctly uncivil means of protest.

The companies which have chosen to sever their connection with WikiLeaks had a right to do so. I'm not saying the firms made good business decisions in so doing. But there are plenty of ways other than DDoS for people to protest--choosing to not work with those companies, and letting the companies know why, for instance.
 
Pardalis said:
Which is a form of lying.
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Again, not quite. As you conveniently left out, I didn't do it intentionally, and when my error was pointed out to me, I corrected it.

And those "attacks" are perfectly legal.
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Distributed denial of service attacks were the same types of attacks that were used against Mastercard and Visa. In fact, it is listed as one of the three primary forms of cybercrime that directly target a computer or server by the very link you advised someone else in this thread to read. You can't have it both ways, which has been the essence of my point all along.
 
blue sock monkey said:
In my view, DDoS--whatever the target, and however ineffective the effort turns out to be--is a cowardly and distinctly uncivil means of protest.

The companies which have chosen to sever their connection with WikiLeaks had a right to do so. I'm not saying the firms made good business decisions in so doing. But there are plenty of ways other than DDoS for people to protest--choosing to not work with those companies, and letting the companies know why, for instance.
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And I agree. In any case that it is used, DDoS does more to harm the message of the people using it than the people being targeted, as it essentially makes a martyr out of the target. On top of that, it limits access, which is where it ceases to be similar to a picket line or boycott. I disagree with its use in any case, which is why I feel the need to point out that it was used against WL as well.
 
BenBurch said:
I think he thought you meant the only "attacks" were the businesses washing their hands of Wikileaks.
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The words in the quote of mine that he used were "a distributed denial of service attack," so I assumed he he was talking about, you know, the distributed denial of service attacks.
 
BenBurch said:
I think he thought you meant the only "attacks" were the businesses washing their hands of Wikileaks.
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Yes, wasn't it what he was referring to?

I've lost track of what he's talking about, that's what happens when one "lumps and confuses" everything together.
 
A Laughing Baby said:
The words in the quote of mine that he used were "a distributed denial of service attack," so I assumed he he was talking about, you know, the distributed denial of service attacks.
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Ah, so it's the second time you've lied.

What those companies did was definitely not "distibuted denial of service attack", as described in Wikipedia.
 
Pardalis said:
Yes, wasn't it what he was referring to?

I've lost track of what he's talking about, that's what happens when one "lumps and confuses" everything together.
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Despite your best efforts to make it seem otherwise, I feel that I've been relatively clear with what I'm saying. All I did was confuse a sequence of events and then correct myself when I realized my error.

What I was referring to was a distributed denial of service attack. Given your posts in this thread, especially those where you recommend people educate themselves on cybercrime, I would assume that you knew what that is. In case you didn't, though, a DDoS attack--put in simple terms--uses a botnet to swamp the connection to the target, making it difficult to impossible for a user to connect to the target for a limited amount of time (the time that the attack takes place). These types of attacks were used on WL and then later by Anonymous against Visa, Mastercard, etc. They are very much illegal, contrary to what you said right under a quote involving the phrase "distributed denial of service attack."
 
Let's read it together:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attacks

All this refers to attacks being made by individuals on an internet service to disrupt its ability to be used by its users.

A company that stops its own service to a customer is not "distributed denial of service attack", it's just plain "denial of service", which is what I was answering to, and is legal, unless you can prove that it breached some contract.
 
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