It doesn’t look like the Feds had to break a sweat to get these guys. Many of the hackers had not done even a fair job of covering their tracks online and a few did not even seem to try (or know how). Some, astonishingly (or perhaps incredulously), claim they did not think what they were doing was criminal. The DDOS attack against PayPal last December, prompted by PayPal’s refusal to accept contributions for WikiLeaks, has emerged as the test case for the arrests. The Anonymous mob used a program with the typically juvenile name Low Orbit Ion Cannon to flood PayPal’s servers with packets.
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| You can take off the masks now, boys. |
As many of these NOT-Anonymous perps now make their defenses, the choices range from (1) I was just fooling around, (2) what Low Orbit Ion Cannon, officer? (3) I didn’t know it was illegal and (4) what I did was a form of political protest that has an honored history, like the civil rights movement.
I’ll brush aside defenses like one and two. We should talk about three and four, the ignorance defense and the political protest defense.
Ignorance of the law is never acceptable in court, and whether it will hold up in the court of public opinion is, I think, very doubtful. The actions of Anonymous, in their on-line taunts and tweets, clearly had the edge of lawlessness to them. To claim the hacking skills they touted, yet to remain ignorant of the rules of the road of the web (not to mention the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986) is facetious at best and laughable at worst. I think we can dismiss this one.
The attacks against government and other establishment sites, most in support of a POV tied to causes like WikiLeaks and Immigration Law, clearly showed a political agenda that Anonymous placed front and center. Can their actions be justified by the claim that they were fighting for a cause? Hacktivism, or White Hat Hacking, does indeed have a history of its own and we would be wrong to dismiss this without a hearing.
However I think it’s very wrong to put malicious, online vandalism on a plane with a civil rights sit-in (a claim specifically made by Keith Downey, one of the men arrested). Two key distinctions have to be made: one, civil rights protestors did not act anonymously. They took a courageous stand in full view and in full risk of the consequences. And two, the civil rights activists were ready to accept arrest and punishment as part of the protest; they did not seek to escape or hide behind subterfuge. Rather, they exposed injustice by submitting to it. No one in the Anonymous gang can claim this kind of courage or self-sacrifice.
I think both of these distinctions refute the excuses made by white hat hackers over the years. I applaud those who have resisted injustice by following the examples of Gandhi and King, and I refuse to taint their legacy by equating them with internet vandals who hide their identities and seek to evade the consequences of their actions.
(Downey's comparison to the civil rights movement was reported in the NY Times.)
2 comments:
I think that any private person or group who "hacks" into another computer system for whatever reason ( that is not to say that the Government should be allowed to do so indiscriminately )Is a terrorist and should be dealt with as such. If you have the skills to hack into another system then you know what you are doing and are doing it intentionally. The world relied on computers for far too much to have to deal with the consequences of someone messing with them for fun just because they can or because it works for their agenda.
If you are going to protest something do it out in the open. Do your research and contact the news people or the authorities. Stand up for what is right otherwise you disrespect those that stood up before you so you CAN.
Keith, you took the words out of my mouth. If you know you are hacking into something, chances are you shouldn't be doing it and should face the consequence.
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