131–140 of 168 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vote with your own dollars, sure. Boycott Mastercard, sure. But interfering with others' legal expression and commerce is just repeating the same injustice that was done to Wikileaks, and damaging innocent bystanders. Leave their dollars alone.
Getting innocent bystanders involved is literally the point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you actually trying to make some moral equivalence between people who participated in a DDoS of a credit card processor because they disagreed with that company's policies and the people risking their lives protesting in Egypt? Seriously?
Struggle is struggle. Wikileaks is just as important of a world issue as Egypt 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> such a contention is intellectually and morally bankrupt. 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…
Sit-ins are inherently sacrificial acts. 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 respo…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best way to change the laws about distributed denial of service is to participate in DDoS attacks? We're going off the rails here.
I think you're onto something. The FBI, by raiding everyone involved in this, is taking the risk of setting a precedent whereby protest-DDoS is proved legal. If the ACLU or other organization throws lawyers at this, its likely that it will be determined that the CFAA does not actually make DDoS, in circumstances where the user only activates a DoS tool on their computer with permission, illegal. It really boils down…
It's funny that Mastercard can't defend against an attack that my home router is capable of defending against. (A big limit on connections per /24 per minute should solve this problem. So will using a smart webserver or frontend proxy that doesn't care how many idle connections there are. Then all you have to worry about is bandwidth saturation rather than your servers crashing.) But the lesson here is, when you visi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sit-ins are inherently sacrificial acts. 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 respo…
If you're smart and know that using your home PC for DDoS attacks is likely to result in trouble for you, a DDoS attack is no less sacrificial than a sit-in (in fact, due to the propaganda against "hackers", you're quite likely to get a harsher sentence). 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,…
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.
TWO %REAL% GUNS POINTED AT ME I love this part. It's obvious that, for the first time in the lives of these Anons, sh%t actually got real. (I don't mind any downvotes you see fit to give me, I have always found it laughable when Anons expect to break the law and suffer no consequences. Whether or not it is a good law has no bearing, that's not how civil disobedience works.)
I'm not a fan. These are guns we are talking about, not paperwork. Paperwork is the shit that's real, guns are just there to make you feel helpless. And also to kill you.
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Yeah, I don't agree with that. If it's a paper in the mail that says "we know it's you", I'd be pretty scared. If it's a policeman at the door saying "come in for questioning", I'd be shitting my pants. If it's three policemen saying "we've come to take all your PCs", I'd be confused and seriously contemplating future involvement with the group. If it's a bunch of thugs breaking the door, grabbing my pcs, iphone, xbo…
Entering with an armed team is SOP, mostly to protect policemen. These are just guys doing a job, in the vast majority of cases a good and just job, who want to go home to their wives and children in the evening. Some (most) raids could theoretically be done by just knocking on the door; but sometimes some crazy man will start shooting back, or running away, or try to destroy evidence. Rush-entry raids with flashbang…
I'd at least suggest holstering the weapons until they're needed and weighing the probability of encryption against the probability of forceful self-defense, case by case. If for some reason there's reason to believe that the person is working next to both a loaded gun and an encrypted disk, sure, treat it as a hostage situation and call swat or the wiretappers in. I don't think that's the norm, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't agree with that. If it's a paper in the mail that says "we know it's you", I'd be pretty scared. If it's a policeman at the door saying "come in for questioning", I'd be shitting my pants. If it's three policemen saying "we've come to take all your PCs", I'd be confused and seriously contemplating future involvement with the group. If it's a bunch of thugs breaking the door, grabbing my pcs, iphone, xbo…
Entering with an armed team is SOP, mostly to protect policemen. These are just guys doing a job, in the vast majority of cases a good and just job, who want to go home to their wives and children in the evening. Some (most) raids could theoretically be done by just knocking on the door; but sometimes some crazy man will start shooting back, or running away, or try to destroy evidence. Rush-entry raids with flashbang…
1. Do you really want to live in a society where a visit from the police means a busted door just in case? If things degenerated so badly, the police has already failed, and failed hard. I mean Rwanda/Congo hard.
2. Since we both know this is not the case, and most visits from the police are done in the old-fashioned knock-on-the door manner, we have to wander if a pimpled faced computer hacker has _any_ quality making him more dangerous then average. I suppose a bureaucrat might go and say hacking was an act of terrorism and terrorists use bombs, but for any sane person it's pretty clear he is not above average. He's scraping the bottom of the barrel, statistically speaking.
I therefore tend to conclude that the busting of the doors is uses as a deterrent. A message for the Anonymous that if you play with fire, you'll have FBI agents with guns in your room.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Entering with an armed team is SOP, mostly to protect policemen. These are just guys doing a job, in the vast majority of cases a good and just job, who want to go home to their wives and children in the evening. Some (most) raids could theoretically be done by just knocking on the door; but sometimes some crazy man will start shooting back, or running away, or try to destroy evidence. Rush-entry raids with flashbang…
I'm sorry, but this is FUD. I have at least two objections to what you say (for the record, I'm not american). 1. Do you really want to live in a society where a visit from the police means a busted door just in case ? If things degenerated so badly, the police has already failed, and failed hard. I mean Rwanda/Congo hard. 2. Since we both know this is not the case, and most visits from the police are done in the old…
Re: 1, maybe I didn't make it clear enough in my original post, but indeed in general police do knock on the door, so I think we agree on this point - raids are the exception rather than the norm, but my point was that if there is any doubt at all whether or not a raid would have any advantages, then the raid option will be chosen over the knock-on-the-door option.
With this clear - re: 2, and in the specific case of computer crime, raids are SOP because suspects have a high probability of destroying evidence; at least here in the Netherlands (and policy here are, to put it mildly, not the Wild West type) this is the reason and practice. There have already been a number of cases where suspects (in child pornography cases) were literally forcefully pulled from behind a computer because they were deleting files as soon as they got wind of the police.
So yes, in case of computer crimes, entering with force does make sense (maybe not always - there have also been cases of 16 year olds where the police showed up when they were in school).
We don't know the real circumstances of these raids. Maybe there was a deterrent/revenge component (which would be illegal and undesirable), we don't know. Point is that the knee-jerk reaction(s) I was replying to are just that, and lacking any nuance. Many interests have to be weighed and safety of police officers and having a reasonable chance to save evidence are some of the factors that have to be weighed against the interests of the suspects. This may sound, in the limited context here, like I'm advocating a police state and anyone who knows me IRL knows that I usually am on the far opposite of that; but some force on entry is not a big a deal as some people make it out to be.
My (admittedly long-windedly made) point: no you're not being oppressed because the police put a hole in your door in the course of investigating your malicious disturbance of someone else's business.