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Comment by michaelchisari | Hacker News Reader

It's a form of civil disobedience, and hopefully people can organize legal and material support for those arrested.

In the past, civil disobedience was "we're accepting punishgment for {x} to demonstrate that doing {x} should not be punished."

The two modern defintions are:

(1) "they should get off because they meant well/are good people"

and

(2) "they should get off because {x} is acceptable"

Which definition are we using here? If (3), what is {x} such that it is acceptable? Is it any DDoS? Any DDoS against a large organization? Please be precise so we can know what kind of DDoS are acceptable and which kind aren't going forward.

I'm going to take a little bite at this, because I think it's an important question, though I don't think it only applies in the case of your imagined modern definitions. Civil disobedience has never been limited to "we're accepting punishment for {x} to demonstrate that doing {x} should not be punished." In many cases, it has been "we're accepting punishment for {x} to demonstrate that doing {y} should not be punished, or to demonstrate that doing [z] should be punished or stopped or whatever." The scope has always been wide, and activists rarely staged illegal sit-ins, for example, just to demonstrate that sit-ins shouldn't be illegal. So the question you pose has wide relevance. You can start to come at the answer in a variety of ways, but perhaps the first if sometimes insufficient criterion of justifiable civil disobedience might be that the illegal protest action should aim at preventing greater harm than it causes, and it should be action against organizations that are significantly responsible for the harm you want to prevent. I think that criterion is satisfied in this case; that is, I think much greater harm is caused longterm by the permanent restriction of funding for Wikileaks than is caused by temporary DDoS'ing MC, Visa, and Paypal.

Wow, what world do you live in? I am going to be blunt. In this instance there is NO justification for the DDoS period. Those other companies are doing business the way they do business and it is totally legal and totally above board. Using your logic, as long as I can justify in my mind that a "greater good" is coming out of it I am "in the clear". I will say it again, it is never right to wrong for a chance to do right. You can try to justify six ways to Sunday but in the end it is still wrong.

Very well said, and I hope you get upvotes for it.

I think a lot of the issue stems with many people here having a conception of political change as being possible with very little conflict, and I don't think that's true.

There is no easy, polite way to pressure those with extraordinary power to act differently. And sometimes you have to do things that are illegal (like sit-ins, digital or virtual).

And when you do, you can recognize they are illegal, but partake in them anyways, and even fight your charges on moral grounds, and that makes your disobedience no less civil.

> I think much greater harm is caused longterm by the permanent restriction of funding for Wikileaks than is caused by temporary DDoS'ing MC, Visa, and Paypal.

That makes sense only if MC, Visa, and Paypal have an obligation to help Wikileaks receive funding.

Do they? Why? Who else has that obligation? (Does discover have that obligation? How about Google Checkout?) How do we know?

Willingness to accept the punishment that the law dictates is what separates civil disobedience from... well, from regular old disobedience, I guess.

Are you claiming:

1) Part of civil disobedience is pleading guilty to all charges in court. If you don't do this you're just a lazy 'poser' of a protester.

2) People that commit crimes as part of a protest shouldn't be allowed to defend themselves

Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with defending yourself in court and using the courthouse as a pulpit to further your civil goals (i.e. why the law is unjust, why you shouldn't be punished, etc).

Willingness to accept punishment and taking steps to mitigate that punishment are two different things.

Indeed; it's important that those steps be honest and in good faith, however. (Unless the court system happens to be what they're protesting against, of course.)

Those engaging in these activities are not being disobedient, they're outright breaking the law for their own amusement.

Civil disobedience is breaking laws, or government directives, that you don't think are just. It is definitely breaking the law, but many people and thinkers see it as a valid form of resistance to unjust laws and governments.

I'm not sure how well it applies to this case, but civil disobedience in general is more than just "boys being boys".

I no longer have a dutch passport. This is because the dutch government has decided that all applicants need to present their fingerprints on application and these will be stored in some database.

This is against my feelings on how a state ought to be run and because of that I have decided to break the law. This affects me and nobody else. If there is a price to pay (fine, jail time) I will be the one paying it, nobody else. I think the big difference between civil disobedience and vandalism is that in the case of civil disobedience you are prepared to pay that price. In this case the moniker 'Anon' indicates to me that the people who are doing this at a minimum hope that they will get away with it without paying the price.

The dutch police are showing that that is not the case, it remains to be seen how eager and open the remainder of this group is to continue. If they sign each packet with their name then more power to them.

So they believe that not being allowed to DDoS is unjust? Otherwise I don't see how civil disobedience applies here.

Illegal sit-ins are often used as a form of protest. Would you claim that the protesters are protesting the fact that sit-ins are illegal (with a straight face)?

What makes you so certain of their motives?

Because that's what they say they're doing? They've been comparing themselves to a sit-in for a while now.

Sorry - if the guy was controlling a botnet, he can do his time just based on the massive numbers of computers he was illegal controlling.

Sure we might feel some underdog sympathy for wikileaks right now, but the people doing these ddos attacks are the exact same people who ddos other sites and cost a ton of money every year. No free pass - civil disobedience is not free of consequences, and nobody should seriously suggest that launching a DDOS against a major corporation is "fair"

The ddos perfomed by Anon is not done by illegaly controlled botnets. The Anonymous are volunteering their own computers for this activity.

Actually, there are also illegal botnets contributing, from some reports.

Wikileaks was under DDoS as well, wasn't there any illegal botnets involved?

Maybe. I don't know much about those who were DDOSing wikileaks, I know more about breaking rules 1 & 2.

I agree, but to go off topic a bit: judging by some of the responses to your comment, people seem to think that one of the criteria that an act has to meet in order to be legitimate civil disobedience is that it is followed by a passive acceptance of government punishment. Of course this is tautologically true depending on one's personal definition of civil disobedience, no true Scotsman and such, but would exclude a lot of history, such as the Underground Railroad.

The article did have a nice quote directed at that point of view, though:

"There may be many times when protestors choose to go to jail, as a way of continuing their protest, as a way of reminding their countrymen of injustice. But that is different than the notion that they must go to jail as part of a rule connected with civil disobedience. The key point is that the spirit of protest should be maintained all the way, whether it is done by remaining in jail, or by evading it. To accept jail penitently as an accession to 'the rules' is to switch suddenly to a spirit of subservience, to demean the seriousness of the protest...In particular, the neo-conservative insistence on a guilty plea should be eliminated." --Paul Flowers

Remember that half of civil disobedience is gracefully accepting the punishment. You can't break the law and then argue you shouldn't be punished because it was 'only civil disobedience'- that's not civil disobedience. If they really believe in their cause, they shouldn't need other people to save them from it.

The boy has confessed. He's still entitled to put on a defense, I take it. And he's still entitled to seek support for that defense. In any case, you can break the law, and then argue, in certain places and circumstances, and without self-contradiction (which I suppose would be the possibility you find problematic) that you shouldn't be punished because a) the law is unjust or unconstitutional, or b) breaking the law was necessary to prevent greater harm (though if I recall correctly the latter defense by necessity is not permitted in most cases of civil disobedience in the US).

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