In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
1–10 of 68 posts
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#2The newly released affidavit was offered in support of a search warrant for the home of an Arlington, Texas couple and their son, who were among the July 19 targets, and have not been charged. The house was the source of 3,678 packets in about two-and-a-half hours starting December 8.
So they're going to arrest a kid for sending an average on one packet every two seconds, over the period of two-and-a-half hours?
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#3The newly released affidavit was offered in support of a search warrant for the home of an Arlington, Texas couple and their son, who were among the July 19 targets, and have not been charged. The house was the source of 3,678 packets in about two-and-a-half hours starting December 8. So they're going to arrest a kid for sending an average on one packet every two seconds, over the period of two-and-a-half hours?
They probably won't arrest him. I'm a bit surprised that this was enough to even get a search warrant...
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#4The newly released affidavit was offered in support of a search warrant for the home of an Arlington, Texas couple and their son, who were among the July 19 targets, and have not been charged. The house was the source of 3,678 packets in about two-and-a-half hours starting December 8. So they're going to arrest a kid for sending an average on one packet every two seconds, over the period of two-and-a-half hours?
They probably won't arrest him. I'm a bit surprised that this was enough to even get a search warrant...
Considering that most DDOS attacks come from zombie bots installed on programs when people Torrent, I'm suprised that there were arrest made based on IPs
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#5The newly released affidavit was offered in support of a search warrant for the home of an Arlington, Texas couple and their son, who were among the July 19 targets, and have not been charged. The house was the source of 3,678 packets in about two-and-a-half hours starting December 8. So they're going to arrest a kid for sending an average on one packet every two seconds, over the period of two-and-a-half hours?
If you assume an MTU of 1500 bytes, then this kid sent about 5.25MB worth of data.
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#6To echo a good question posed in the comments of the original article.
"what is the digital equivalent of civil disobedience and protest?"
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#7To echo a good question posed in the comments of the original article. "what is the digital equivalent of civil disobedience and protest?"
Here's the thing with Civil Disobedience: you take a certain amount of risk when you do it. In fact, if there is no risk, there's little point in the "disobedient" action at all. So when these guys go to jail for DoSing a server, they've actually partially succeeded. Now when a majority of the populace cares that they've been punished for their actions, and believes the disobedience was a just action against an invalid law, then they'll have actually succeeded.
Put another way (and translated into meatspace), environmental protesters don't win when they chain themselves to a tree to stop it from being cut down. They win when they are confronted by the authorities, hauled off to jail, and covered by the media, making people aware of their protest. Simply blocking access to the site and hoping there will be no repercussions is basically pointless.
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#8To echo a good question posed in the comments of the original article. "what is the digital equivalent of civil disobedience and protest?"
Maybe LOIC is it? If one part of civil disobedience is sending the state a stream of low-level "law-breakers", it's relatively successful, because now the government is wasting time and resources arresting people who sent 5 megabytes of packets somewhere.
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#9I'm not necessarily against feds going after DDOSers, but this is a shameful, politically motivated retribution.
The "crime" here is not sending packets to DDOS PayPal but criticizing the goverment. The goverment is in turn showing they're not afraid to destroy lives of those who do.
DDOS attacks are pretty much an epidemic on the internet. I'm pretty sure every major company like Google or Microsoft or Amazon has to deal them on a regular basis (http://mashable.com/2009/12/24/ddos-attack-amazon/ for just one example of an attack that was actually successful and well publicized).
Huge botnets make it relatively easy to launch an attack.
This is not some new fact - existence of bots, DDOS attacks on many hosts, that's been known for years and yet this is one of the few times where feds lifted a finger to combat it and certainly the first time where it's done on such a scale and based on such a flimsy evidence and small transgressions like an individual running a DDOS tool (which, by itself, is not nearly enough to bring a website down, it only works if many people are doing it at the same time).
This is not a coincidence and not really that surprising - you fight the goverment, the goverment will fight you.
Re: In ‘Anonymous’ Raids, Feds Work From List of Top 1,000 Protesters
#10Wouldn't most of these ip addresses be in a bot net?