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Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

I think you make the mistake of thinking that all protest activity should be about making friends or increasing your reputation and good standing.

Often it's just as much about hitting back as hard as you can. Now you can argue the merits of that, but we have crossed a major threshold here: The internet has taken down the websites of two of the largest credit providers in the world, two weeks before Christmas.

If that isn't an exertion of grassroots power in the internet age, I don't know what is. The implications are boundless. Visa, and Mastercard probably didn't think twice about canceling Wikileak's payments. I doubt their risk assessment would have been the same if they had known this would result.

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Internet? Grassroots?

The Internet hasn't taken down anything. A small group of geeks have taken upon themselves to take down a few targeted websites. No due process, no rule book, no accountability, just naked use of force.

If I'm following correctly, I'm supposed to believe that a staff member of an elected official asking about the activities of a private company is an abuse of power but a small group of unelected geeks representing no one but themselves are to be commended for actively disrupting the activities of a private business.

I'm not aware of previous grassroots movements being democratically elected. Nobody elected the suffragists, for instance. That's not really how movements work.

OK. But I didn't intend to conflate my questioning of the use of 'grassroots' with my point about accountability.

I think the term 'grassroots' suggests a much more widespread and visible 'movement' than the tiny number of Anonymous members taking part in the DDOS attacks.

Usually a movement is 99% supporters of the cause and 1% activists. You don't think radical actions for transparency is a widely supported movement or widely known?

I think WikiLeaks may hurt some supporters, but I think amongst those sympathetic to the cause - it can only help them increase in numbers, awareness and influence. Hats off to them.

Are we talking about Wikileaks' disclosures or are we talking about the DDOS attacks?

There is certainly an argument to be made for government transparency but I fail to see how MasterCard, Visa, and Paypal, and so on are the organizations that should be pressured in order to bring about improved government transparency.

And no, I don't think that 'radical actions for transparency' is a widely supported movement and regardless of our disagreement on the term 'widely' I don't think DDOS activities are effective, appropriate, or justified in the furtherance of better government transparency.

I wasn't talking about orgs - but the ethos at the intersection of transparency, internet culture, etc. - which I think must be admitted to have quite an overlap.

I'm using widely to mean between 5% to even 20% of people - perhaps if you briefly talked with them about it. It's not a subject like religion where people are hard fast - I've already talked to many in their 60's who think WikiLeaks is overall doing good things and likes to see "the man" take a hit. Unless you're right-winger who already overuses "treason" in your political discourse - I think there's room for debate on this issue with WikiLeaks gaining some legitimacy.

Small note; Wikileaks is not anonymous. The DDOS-en have nothing to do with Wikileaks, the organization.

I'm hesitant to liken Anonymous to revolutionaries but to be honest, almost all revolutions were started in a "small group" that was relatively insignificant (that was unelected), and then grew in size and gathered acceptance.

Again with the due process and rules: do you think when the French people stormed the Bastille during the French Revolution, there was any semblance of rules or accountability? Hell no. It was the "naked use of force". Did it have bad consequences? Some. Did it have good consequences? I think you know the answer.

You've stripped away all the particulars in order to equate the overthrow of a multi-century monarchy with disruption of a few websites.

Yes, we've got two examples of 'disputes'. But that doesn't get us very far. Can you finish the analogy for me?

You are suggesting that the DDOS activities are indicative of an attempt to overthrow what in favor of what?

My point was that the properties of this small scale protest (or tantrum depending on however you look at it) that you deride are actually pretty similar to most other protests.

You suggested that it was similar to the French Revolution. In what way is it similar other than they both involved 'protest'? And if that is the similarity you were trying to make, then why confuse the issue by bringing in the concept of revolutionary war?

Is there a French Revolution version of Godwin's Law?

This is the third time in a short period I've seen Godwin's Law used as a way to discount serious discussion online. Are we really so uncomfortable with the concept of metaphor or the importance of remembering and analyzing serious events? We're discussing censorship, freedom, etc and 20th-century history is off limits?

I'm not trying to 'discount' serious discussion, I'm suggesting that comparing DDOS attacks on commercial websites to the French Revolution is not serious discussion.

Reaching for a Nazi analogy or a French Revolution analogy should be done sparingly and with careful consideration.

Now you are suggesting that I'm arguing that 20th-century history is off limits. This sort of wild over-generalization is the antithesis of 'serious discussion'.

Perhaps you think comparisons to something like the French Revolution are unjustified merely because the scope of the current turmoil is nowhere near as wide (yet), but all revolutions have to start somewhere. If the US goes for another two or three presidential elections without significantly affecting the patterns of increasing corporate control over politics and the post-9/11 erosion of civil liberties, we may find it easier to draw such comparisons.

One thing I think we can all agree on: if the next revolution comes any time soon (ie. next few decades), it will start online.

There seems to be a lot of confusion between the Wilkileaks disclosure and the DDOS attacks.

The disclosures can be debated within the terms of government transparency and public policy, but the DDOS attacks were all about a small group of private individuals attacking private companies because they disagreed with how they ran their business.

The two issues are related by a common party, Wikileaks, but other than that they aren't even in the same ballpark. My comments were about the DDOS attacks and not the Wikileaks disclosures. You seem to be talking about the disclosures.

What Wikileaks is doing is called journalism. I wouldn't compare that to revolution, even if they are both rare these days.

What Anonymous is doing is an attack, and its only justification so far is the attempted suppression of Wikileaks' journalism. Suppression of rights like the freedom of the press are among the best justifications for revolution. So, while the current DDOS probably isn't the start of a revolution, it is the kind of thing you would expect to see in the opening stages of a modern revolt in an industrialized society, before things get to the physical violence.

Freedom of the press is about protecting the press from the government. It is not about forcing private companies to run their businesses according to the diktats of small group of anonymous geeks.

Well wikileaks would not have the problems it does if the government would not have interfered.

The government stepped in and `advised` the private companies that it wouldn't be in their best interest to continue doing business with wikileaks. Even though nothing illegal on the part of wikileaks has been proved.

Taking away the freedom of press doesn't mean shoot the leader in the head and imprison all the rest.

If they manage to isolate you enough , they've succeeded in taking away your freedom.

Visa and MasterCard cannot act in isolation from the government: They form a duopoly that requires regulation, and they are subject to quite a bit of it. As felixmar pointed out elsewhere in the thread [1], they have gotten favors from the government that have been exposed by the very leaks at issue. It doesn't take actual evidence of a specific request from the government to establish that the government influenced their decision to change their minds about doing business with Wikileaks.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1985128

I should have been clearer on the "20th-century" part, I meant that Godwin's law is used to question analogies to something which happened during the 20th century i.e. not too long ago.

The parallels aren't that far-fetched. During the early days of the French Revolution, everybody was pissed but no one could agree at what. Everyone wanted change, but no one could agree what that change should look like.

More pointedly, it was a time of great cultural upheaval. A slough of philosophers emerged, each advocating a worldview distinct from, but related to, the other. New ideas began to take hold, and a populace that was previously insulated against the spread of information began to be exposed to new ideas. Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu brought new ideas to the national dialogue, while dissatisfaction with the Three Estate system (monarchy, church, everyone else - government, corporations, everyone else) led to widespread unrest. All of this happened during an economic crisis where the irresponsible spending of the French Crown had all but bankrupted the nation.

Have a read for yourself. The parallels are there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Pre-revolutio...

Also, people were literally starving to death. In the words of my awesome European History teacher, "Happy meals were 18 dollars."

I think that makes a big difference. Nobody is going to start a revolution if they have enough to eat and a place to live.

Are you serious? "No due process, no rule book, no accountability, just naked use of force." You defined the terms, and were supplied with the French Revolution as an example.

You were the one who ran that horse into the ground, trying to insert gravitas that was never intended, so stop with the "Godwin's Law" rolling-of-the-eyes.

Gravitas? My 'terms' could be used to describe a bar brawl. There was no attempt to insert gravitas.

The French Revolution wasn't exactly an orderly process aimed at any coherent attempt to overthrow any particular thing in favor of any other particular thing. In fact, it was a huge mess. Much of the early French Revolution seemed a lot like an attempt to force a constitutional monarchy (like the English Magna Carta did), and a lot of the late French Revolution consisted of self-appointed dictators having people summarily executed, or trying to conquer Europe.

Agreed, but I'd say an even better analogy is the Boston Tea Party. It was politically-motivated act of vandalism by a small group against a corporation.

History is written by the victors. All this fuss around payment systems and Amazon can remain as act of vandalism by pile of 4channers. I personally think they've chosen the wrong methods.

like trowing tea in the sea is super responsibly and grown up. I also bet it affected more the small businessman than the British gov

bye-bye karma :)

This is how lots of protests work, and they get the same criticism.

If one hundred thousand people decide to stop traffic in new york or disrupt the air port in London these are a tiny fraction of citizens (they don't have to be citizens), unelected with no rules. They all might have different ideas about why they are there and it may be impossible for anyone to lead them to stop.

There may be some inherently bad things about mobs, but there is nothing inherently good about them. You could have hundreds of thousands take to the street in support of fascism just as easily as freedom of information.

Worrisome as they are though, chaotic mass protests seem to be an important part of the democratic process.

There is a difference between "peaceful assembly" and targeted disruption of private businesses.

You can't just slap the word 'protest' on any activity in order to justify it.

There is a difference, but not all protest is peaceful assembly. Some of it is disruption of private business.

The Boston Tea Party, for instance, was hardly a peaceful assembly.

The Boston Tea Party was also an attack on private property not just the government.

> No due process

There is some poetic justice in the symbols of American finance the world over being taken down without 'due process' after America has done lots of things without 'due process' the world over.

That said I feel sorry for those that depend on VISA/Mastercard for a living.

For every person that has been killed in Illegal wars, been subjected to torture, extradited without so much as a hearing or simply snatched off the street in Europe or other places in the world 'due process' would have mattered a lot, and that's people we're talking about, whose lives were utterly ruined at the call of a 'small group of politicians' not websites.

That is how protests work.

A small group of elected aristocrats single handedly took sites off of the Internet because they didn't like it, even though the content was not illegal and was protected under the First Amendent. "just naked use of force". The difference is, were supposed to be holding the government accountable.

I have no problems. I'd love to see this hurt Visa and Mastercard. Get them and Paypal and Amazon to grow a pair and tell the government that WL isn't doing anything illegal. Is it classy? Is it in the best interest of proper discourse? No. But come on, we're past that point.

A small group of geeks have taken it upon themselves to defend a website through the only means they have.

Assange is rapidly becoming a persona non grata in most of the first world countries because he challenges their authority and methods. Wikileaks is being strangled by a DoS on its resources both human and material.

We should all be doing whatever we can with whatever resources we have to prevent Wikileaks from dying. Yes, you can contact your congressman, but honestly, is that really going to do any good? You can speak out and hold protests, but the media will only continue to marginalize your cause or worse, ignore you entirely.

The methods being employed for these DoS attacks are obviously not legal, but what other recourse is there? And as for them being unelected, I will put my voice behind them right now. The people I actually took the time to elect don't give a shit.

There is what is legal and what is right. I will always fight for what is right; legality be damned.

"We should all be doing whatever we can with whatever resources we have to prevent Wikileaks from dying."

It is never right to do wrong for a chance to do right. The ends do not justify the means in this case. Your argument is fallacious in that you can apply that reasoning to everything in life.

No due process, no rule book, no accountability, just naked use of force.

That's a neat description of the actions taken against wikileaks. The USG and its allies have declared war on wikileaks using means both fair and foul, the friends of wikileaks are simply fighting fire with fire.

Ironically, this will be a major boost to Amazon's Christmas sales, since they don't rely on securecode.

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