41–47 of 47 posts
whilst i agree with their protesting of our governments unnecessary proposals on censoring australia, their methods are not helping. a ddos attack on the government only gives the government more ammunition to paint the average protester as a criminal or someone who is trying to harm the government. a peaceful protest is far more effective.
Voting for these people would seem a good protest -- http://www.pirateparty.org.au/
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It would be like punching mist. Hell, if someone gets in jail for being part of anonymous (or, more accurately, for participating in a DDoS advocated by people under the banner of anonymous, or even more likely for having their wifi used by someone to participate in such a DDoS), it will just make all the others more angry. Fighting them would be like fighting tor, or bittorrent; highly distributed, highly decentrali…
>It would be like punching mist. Ask Dmitriy Guzner his opinion on that, though you'll have to wait until he's released from prison. You might help him with his $37,500 fine too. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/scientology_ddos_gui... http://www.scribd.com/doc/23263853/Dmitriy-Guzner-Sentencing...
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Useless. They wouldn't find anything on the kid's computer, in all likelihood he clicked a link on an anonymously created website that ran a script from his browser. Once he's released all he need do is post his story on a blog and he'll be international news within a month.
Can you name the US Anonymous member that was imprisoned for a year and fined $37,500 for DDoS ing the Scientology website ?
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>It would be like punching mist. Ask Dmitriy Guzner his opinion on that, though you'll have to wait until he's released from prison. You might help him with his $37,500 fine too. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/scientology_ddos_gui... http://www.scribd.com/doc/23263853/Dmitriy-Guzner-Sentencing...
Yeah. One person.
one is all it takes apparently
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I'm wasn't suggesting that they'd use Tor itself for the DDoS, only that through it they can hide their traces.
AFAIK anons don't have access to botnets and such, they flood from their own computers. Their sheer number makes it 'distributed'. Like when they modified the Times most influential person ranking, it was just a lot of people running an auto-voter on their machine.
As an example, the anti-Scientology protests were reported under the catch-all banner of Anonymous, but the people organizing it and hitting the streets were also from rival forums such as Something Awful. Funny enough, the protest movement is completely different from (and at odds with) the original catalyst: other Anons DDoSing Scientology websites for using the DMCA to take down a video on YouTube. As someone mentioned earlier in the comments, one core motivation is trolling, or "lulz," so under this so-large-its-useless umbrella term "Anonymous," there are groups sabotaging one another just because it's funny.
The core people organizing* these DDoS attacks come and go, but they are a dedicated few who have the time and skills to design such programs to distribute to the masses. As in the Time magazine hack, it was respectably sophisticated (this article does it justice: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-ha...). And yes, this core group does have botnets, as well as excellent social engineering skills to motivate *channers to download and execute their software.
I love watching people and organizations of all varieties underestimate just how tenaciously annoying they can be.
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I'm not wishing to argue that labeling Anonymous as a terrorist orgainsation would be a good thing (it would be monumentally retarded, which is why I also think there's a good chance it will happen at some point, I have little faith in government common sense these days) but this problem of how to handle these distributed non-orgnaisations that we see today is quite relevant to the way governments were/are trying to…
Kudos for watching The Power of Nightmares , but did you miss the part where they pointed out [b]that these organizations are largely fictional and used as a tool by governments to appear more necessary than they are[/b]? The government isn't working on how to deal with fictional "flat, loosely organized and decentralized groups", it's working on how to make it look like we need government protection from the ultimat…
To try and clarify my view a bit, IMO the terrorist "groups" we hear about today are more like Anonymous than they are like the fictional villainous organisations one might see in a James Bond movie, i.e. they're not even really organisations at all, they're just individuals or tiny groups, barely associated with each other at best, who happen to have similar positions on certain issues. But I wanted to make this point without sounding like I thought Anonymous should be branded as terrorists, because I don't.
I get that after 9/11, the entire western world's governments went well overboard, amazingly allowing the military industrial complex to write their own cheques, using scare tactics to allow this to continue. I knew this full well long before I saw The Power of Nightmares. Before I say what else I have to say, I again don't wish my position to be misconstrued, I'm not advocating for the usual government policies, I'm aware of how insignificant the threat of terrorism is when compared to other threats of the day that face our society and I usually find myself pretty firmly on the social-libertarian side of just about any debate. As you say: "these organizations are largely fictional" (emphasis added) and I totally agree. I cannot reconcile any view that we do not need some degree of vigilance when it comes to (the no doubt few and far between) individuals and small groups that are out there and do wish to perpetrate terrorist acts.
So following on from this, yes, terrorism is an overinflated menace and it continues to be overinflated for numerous reasons, most of which revolve around certain areas of government and private industry partners who have vested interests in keeping the public scared in order to maintain power and profit. But some part of the overreaction to terrorism does come from a place of honestly thinking they're doing the right thing, misguided though they may be. Some very small part of the usual government reaction to terrorism is - in my mind - sanctioned and required because terrorism while a largely overinflated boogie man, does none the less still exist. I don't wish to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I thinks its only a matter of time before Anonymous gets labelled a terrorist organisation to increase the counter measures / invasive laws that can be used against them. Disrupting Goverment sites and services would be considered as an attack as per the Australian Terrorism definition: (e) seriously interferes with, seriously disrupts, or destroys, an electronic system including, but not limited to (i) an informatio…
terrorist act" means an action or threat of action where: (a) the action falls within subsection (2) and does not fall within subsection (2A)...
The list of things you cite is from subsection (2). However, subsection (2A) reads: (2A) Action falls within this subsection if it: (a) is advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action; and (b) is not intended: (i) to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person; or (ii) to cause a person's death; or (iii) to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking the action; or (iv) to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.
It's pretty clear to me that this sort of action falls within both subsection (2) (as you pointed out) and subsection (2A). The latter means it wouldn't be within the definition of "terrorist act".