Anonymous plans to occupy Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous plans to occupy Wall Street

itworld.com

82 pointsjfruh59 comments

> Its stated intent is to persuade as many as 20,000 people to camp out on the streets of Manhattan's financial district until the Obama administration meets its demands.

This seems a little incongruous, doesn't it? Shouldn't they attempt to be occupying some part of D.C. instead if that is their goal?

They may be championing some actual cause, but they have not articulated it well. Both the reasoning and the demands seem very unclear for a protest that is to occur two days from now.

http://twitter.com/#!/OccupyWallSt has only 2,000 followers. I highly doubt this will go very far.

DC marches to the beat of NYCs drum. Anon is just doing root cause analysis. Anon isn't a group so they aren't going to have consistent messages with spokespeople sticking to the talking points.

Nah. Unfortunately this seems like people are... well, stupid. People do understand that 'Wall St' is just metonymy, right? Wall St, literally the street, is somewhat meaningless. People can occupy the street but that's not actual going to stop financial trade because 'Wall St.' is just a figure of speech.

If it were a meaningless place, there wouldn't be such a strong police response. From the linked Huffington Post article, trial run activists were arrested without cause and released without charges. Contrast that with another reported protest where folks camped outside City Hall for three weeks with minimal response.

I imagine any mass protest in the Manhattan business district wouldn't be taken to kindly. Remember that the right to organize and petition for a redress of grievances is directed towards the government. You actually have no right to protest and impede traffic in private areas.

Wall St. is a public street. Built by, maintained by and policed by NYC.

If they're actually confining themselves to the sidewalk, maybe, but if they're impeding traffic that's cause for arrest.

It's not a meaningless place. It's heavily secured, because it's perceived to be a target for violence. But he's right; staging a protest there won't slow down trading.

This has nothing to do with Wall St, and everything to do with NYC cops being out of control. The NYPD uses similar tactics against innocent bikers and anyone else they don't like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUkiyBVytRQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IORuR5iRuxs

I've heard that the NYPD is even going after people practicing parkour now, though I haven't seen it on youtube yet.

(Full disclosure: I got picked up during one of these incidents. The judge dismissed all charges after the cop lied and I showed videotape proving it.)

Critical Mass is a bunch of thugs conspiring to break laws, obstruct traffic, and threaten and enrage the same people every legitimate bicyclist was hoping to coexist with. I'm no fan of violence but "corkers" should be arrested.

If that's the case, how come the cops find the need to lie about critical mass activities on a regular basis? Shouldn't the video tapes recorded by critical mass participants be evidence enough of their guilt?

It's quite strange how these "thugs" make every attempt to record themselves when they "break laws" and the cops try to stop them from recording.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aT9p36fgHU

I wonder - would the police also attempt to prevent the mafia from wiretapping their own phones?

Just curious, how did you get a videotape?

I wish I had an "Oh boy, here comes a police officer" button, which records the entire event. But obviously there is no such device.

I'm terrified at the idea of pulling out a cameraphone during any police interaction, due to the possibility of being prosecuted / imprisoned for violating their expectation of privacy. I'm relatively poor, and no one really cares what happens to me, so I wouldn't be able to fight the courts.

Another participant recorded the incident with a handlebar cam. She gave me the recording and offered me advice on how to fight the charges.

(Different topic, out of curiosity.) Why bother protesting anything at all?

I mean, we're both smart people. Surely we agree that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aT9p36fgHU#t=3m35s indicates the police can do whatever they want, and nobody really cares except the victim.

And there's really nothing to do about it, or any way to change it. Nobody cares about protests except the protesters.

I wish it weren't that way, but, given that things are that way, then why bother fighting?

Why go on living? You'll just end up dead.

Thought about it.

It's symbolic, like all protests.

Whatever the intelligence of the protesters, I seriously doubt any of them actually believe being a PITA in the street is going to inconvenience traders significantly.

Unless it's a diversion. Damn, I've been watching too many heist movies...

You don't have to go into the buildings to wind the traders up... www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6YB53wp5dA

How? What are they actually protesting? The existence of the banking industry? It seems like poorly informed reactionary tactics to me.

If you dig through their website, it looks like the common theme is "get money out of government", which is a rather vague goal and doesn't explain much.

Assuming they mean political finance regulations, who objectively determines when the goals are met? What kind of specific regulations do they want? You can't find this information anywhere.

This is more of a symbolic protest than a redress of grievances. People who have no idea how to solve problems and want one person to solve them all because they're holding up traffic in New York.

Silly thing about "getting money out of the government" is, where exactly do you think that money comes from anyway?

Did you see how a few months ago there was a patent carve-out explicitly for wall st firms because one company was causing them a bunch of trouble?

That wasn't patent reform on the merits, that was 'the money' and where it comes from.

I think the idea is to go out and try to do something proactive instead of sitting on one's ass and smugly criticizing from one's keyboard.

The US government is corrupt as hell. I'm not sure how anyone could see large numbers of people demonstrating against this corruption as anything but a positive development for our civilization. As any number of past movements have shown, the particulars of the message aren't what's important early on, it's getting people out of their houses and convincing them that they actually have power to create change.

People demonstrate in DC all the time. Everyone there is used to it and (perhaps more importantly) the police are pretty good at quelling things.

Obviously people demonstrate a lot in NYC too, but on a different scale.

I highly doubt the NYPD will be put off when a bunch of Anons have a sit-in.

No, they won't.

But compare their response with what you see in DC.

I'm just refreshed to see something is happening, a date, feet hitting the pavement. I hope it's a success with a huge turn out, and I hope people notice.

Even if the message isn't super clear, the feeling is, and if demonstrations like this gain momentum maybe people with a more clear message will realize action isn't impossible.

You really think D.C. is the place were decisions are made? Really?

Anyway these Anonymous are just kids and I don't think they understand problem - let alone the solution to the problem.

> Really?

Ad hominem attack in the guise of a question. Be nice.

> Shouldn't they attempt to be occupying some part of D.C. instead if that is their goal?

I was thinking that occupying Wall Street on a Saturday is pretty much guaranteed to go unnoticed.

Hope you prove me wrong Anon.

And on the wrong day to boot...

The demonstration is planned for Saturday ?

Look at how many turned out when Anon wanted people to come out to SF for the rail shooting for prior data. I think Anon is out of touch with the common people.

> Shouldn't they attempt to be occupying some part of D.C.[...]?

In the defenses-probing visit, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayUGOgFaCs8, they're "camping" right in front of Federal Hall, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Hall_National_Memorial, where the US government operated first after being Constituted. A symbol/place that I'm amazed the Tea Party hasn't seized upon, but I suppose the Koch brothers wouldn't like that.

Didn't start as Anonymous, started on Reddit[1] but seeded by AdBusters[2], a liberal "anti-consumerist" outfit. They're supposed to camp out on Wall St in New York for reasons that aren't really clear at all. It's basically every delusional Redditor on /r/politics slacktivism turned into reality.

They're supposed to be protesting something about banks, bailouts, corporate personhood, jobs, and other assorted /r/politics common whining points.They apparently weren't aware that very few of the evil big banks are actually on Wall Street and that the NYSE is just a vestige of history by now. The only thing that will happen is a lot of tourists will flock down and the street will get even more clogged than it is for traffic and some arrests. People try to protest here all the time. It's nothing new. Stick the word "Anonymous" on it though and for some reason people take it to be a big deal for some reason.

This is the coming together of the most extremist Chomsky acolytes and reactionary redditards all in one with some V for Vendetta masks. Huge parody potential except for the fact that they're doing it for themselves already. Quite hilarious.

edit: this sort of reminds me of the 2005 Greenpeace attempt[3] to stop open-air trading at the International Petroleum Exchange by flooding the floor of the exchange with loud buzzers and bells, but getting beaten back bloody literally to the curb by all the angry traders. This was right around Kyoto.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/occupywallstreet

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters

[3] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article515384.ece

I'm all for slacktivisim turning into real activism, whether or not this particular motion is well-thought-out.

So they should just start rioting instead, like many are predicting will happen sometime next year?

I haven't seen any predictions about rioting, but I probably read different news sources than you do.

Whereabouts? I'm curious.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1

I saw this going around a bit last month: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tax-the-super-rich-or-revol...

It is all speculation, so none of these predictions really should be called 'news,' but people have been known to riot over jobs or some proxy issue before. Also, if you dismiss a protest for being silly, ineffective, and stupid in these sort of circumstances, how are you not advocating riots? They are going to protest under the banner of 'Occupy Wall St.,' with a list of issues that boils down to 'generally pissed off.' I can definitely see how a group like that could start rioting at some point if they feel their efforts were ignored.

I was more interested in the claims made in #Ref#Ref. It looks like the exploit needs server-side Javascript execution in order to work. (edit: Nevermind, no it doesn't, that was confusion on the part of people that had written articles after reading other peoples' articles.) I don't see a lot of the stodgy old Wall Street web-facing systems (or even internal systems) supporting something like that.

It also looks like it requires a working SQLi on the target site, which means that before it can even be used, someone's going to need to find a nice exploit on the target, and if they find that, then using RefRef to take down the target is kinda pointless.

Shucks. I was almost hoping to see a cool new exploit here.

edit: Bah, it's even more simple than that. It uses an SQLi to run the MySQL "benchmark" function an absurd (99999999999) number of times, according to the code I found. Not only that, but it's just benchmarking a simple text string; they could have given MySQL something much more gnarly to chew on if they'd wanted.

"Patching" against this attack should be as easy as adding an htaccess rule for any requests containing "select+benchmark" and then restarting MySQL.

Son, I am disappoint.

I am not sure if this is the whole thing http://www.refref.org/p/refref.html but it does not seem very sophisticated

edit: #refref seems to refer to multiple tools, but looking at this screenshot http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-v_gCKJilPLw/TjPob43lXiI/AAAAAAAACo... is also trivial.

Yeah, that's what I found too. I think you beat my edit by a few seconds. :-)

It looks like several versions have been written, but they're probably all based on the same basic concept. The "Javascript" version that people were referring to is probably the screenshot you posted, which would be trivial to launch with a few Ajax requests.

I will point my finger and laaaaaugh if this manages to take down any Wall Street websites.

Since they have a lot of members, bringing down a website is still possible (even if they simply click refresh continuously).

Now, about the tool, assuming they are really smart (they aren't) they would make a bookmarklet which would have to be clicked while Wall Street website is open. This would allow all kinds of things to be done, including Ajax requests.

If #refref tool is hosted on another domain, same-origin policy would prevent Ajax from happening. Most likely, in that case they are simply creating a bunch of IFRAMEs and refreshing them with javascript.

> ...same-origin policy would prevent Ajax from happening.

Actually, it doesn't! I decided to try this out for myself a while back. You can get or post a request to any resource at another domain, you just don't get to see the contents of the results. But the request itself works just fine, and you'll even still get to know when the request is complete.

I'm a bit confused as to why Anonymous would be targetting Wall St. According to opensecrets.org, only three corporations (AT&T, UPS and Goldman) make the top 25 list of donors.

The vast majority of big donors seem to be unions, with professional associations (trial lawyers, realtors, AMA) coming in a distant second.

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A

I'm sure this will not come as a surprise to you, but the progressive populist narrative does not have a 1:1 correspondence to reality.

"Bought by hard and soft dollars, disloyal, incompetent, and wasteful interests have usurped our nation’s civil and military power, spawning a host of threats to liberty and national security."

This. At least some people are trying to do something about it. What have you done lately for your country?

I live on Wall Street, as do many other hard-working New Yorkers. The Financial District isn't just fat-cat bankers and hedge fund managers these days. I don't expect that interfering with people's routines is an effective way to win their hearts, regardless of the intentions of the protest.

And I think that it is very good that the Wall St. will be reminded that they have their money as a result of wealth transfer from middle class. They produce nothing but losses and we socialized those losses. There should be protests there daily reminding them that. Bankers havent added any value to the society, they destroyed it. To say any different is not to comprehend the current economic crisis.

When buying and selling is regulated, regulators are the first thing to be bought and sold.

The only way to stop govt from giving money to the politically powerful is to not let govt have money.

Regulatory capture is like conservation of momentum; if the situation satisfies the constraints, the results will happen, no matter how much one might like otherwise, no matter how much better things would be if those results didn't happen.

Isn't Deutsche Bank the only bank with HQs still on Wall Street?

Is it just me or do you get a download forced upon you when you open the page? Mine is called 'ayUGOgFaCs8' and it's contents look executable.

Why Saturday?

Why not during normal trading hours which are 9:30-4, Monday through Friday

increased police presence during normal trading hours. Have you tried to enter wall street on the weekdays? It's a mess

But who will pay attention on a Saturday?

The message is not clear at all.

Bought by hard and soft dollars, disloyal, incompetent, and wasteful interests have usurped our nation’s civil and military power, spawning a host of threats to liberty and national security

This is true. So If I were such interests, I would try to find a way to allow mainstream media to stigmatize anyone making such claims, such that anyone expressing these ideas can be sidelined.

A good, violent, riot in NYC should do it.

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