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I frankly wouldnt mind if the abortion opponents, or the climate change deniers, creationsists, flat earthers or any other such group decided to blow up a few politicians' careers by emptying their closets on Main Street.

As long as they actually do this instead of using the skeletons to blackmail the guy into submission i'm perfectly fine with it. We may not agree with their goals, but the side-effects of their activity would be positive. That's one crook out of the game - which can't be a bad thing.

Since the opposing groups would likely be employing a similar cleanup strategy, we might just end up with honest politicians with empty closets as a neat side-effect.

If things fell out that way, I'd agree 100%.

I just think that probably 90% of the current crop of politicians probably have SOME skeleton in their closet -- and it might not even be that they're a crook as much as something else that gets them voted out of office. An obvious possibility is to demonstrate that he or she is an atheist -- a HUGE fraction of people in the US won't vote for an otherwise qualified atheist. Is that a skeleton you feel would be justified in killing a politician's career?

This is also vigilante justice we're talking about, so an alleged skeleton could be someone posting an unsubstantiated rumor.

And keep in mind that there's absolutely no guarantee that the "replacement" who supports each group's agenda WON'T be a crook. Which means we're really talking higher churn, not higher integrity of politicians.

A reddit user quoted in the article: “Let’s pick ONE Senator of voted for NDAA/SOPA and destroy him like we’re doing for GoDaddy. Relentlessly investigate and find skeletons in his closet, money bomb is [sic] opponents, etc. It [sic] we could unseat someone and destroy their career it would have massive repercussions.”

What's new with that? That's gone on in politics since ancient Rome.

Yeah, sure. At some level there's no news there.

At the same time...pretty much anyone is likely to have SOMETHING in their Internet history that they wouldn't be proud of, or that can be taken out of context.

What I really worry about is if a group like Anonymous or LulzSec or similar gets involved, that the smearing could involve evidence PLANTED on servers (hacking into a server and getting all the emails out puts you in the same position required to modify or insert emails into that same server).

If it really stays at the level of exposing skeletons and donating to opponents, then yes, I'd have to agree.

Do we really want a group to model how to destroy a politician using data mining and potentially nefarious hacking, when it's an issue that WE support that they're being targeted for?

You seem to be assuming three things:

1. Industry does not know how to destroy a politician.

2. (And therefore) All politicians who have had their career destroyed (or marginalized) had it done fairly and as a natural consequence of their actions. Not because of Industry involvement.

3. Politicians are not also Industry players.

I believe you are wrong on all three counts.

Fair enough; I would say that I actually agree with you on all counts.

I would suggest instead that there's an armistice of sorts that keeps the damage to a minimum. If the gloves come off and everyone starts doing it, then there will be a (virtual) bloodbath.

It's also worth pointing out that if politicians started getting trashed by "vigilante groups" on a regular basis, it would further the current (stated) Tea Party agenda of discrediting government (in an effort to shrink the federal government to a point where it can be "drowned in a bathtub"). I KNOW there are supporters of this concept on HN; I don't really care to debate it, and I'm neither looking for a show of support or protest of the idea. I just want to make sure that it's an understood side-effect of discrediting politicians.

Bloodbath is in nobody's interest. There will be renegotiation. As for discrediting corrupt government, I think that's everybody's agenda.

It is a risk. But perhaps the Congress would decide that discretion was the better part of valor and back out of many issues that they really aren't adding alot of value to.

I live in New York, so one of my Senators is Chuck Schumer. He's a pretty good guy, but he loves the limelight. So he sticks his nose into anything that will get him on the local TV news. Right now, for example, he's very concerned about some some of caffeine inhaler that "the children" are going to be harmed by.

I'm pretty happy with him as a Senator, but I'd rather he think about things like SOPA/PROTECT-IP than caffeine mist. Maybe organized mass outrage would help in that area?

Hmm, I'm not as skeptical. At the very foundation, a democracy is about tending for the majority. As models like this become more popular there will be campaigns that you may not agree with, but as long as there are enough people opposed to the campaign it shouldn't be a problem.

If there aren't enough people opposing the campaign, well ... that's democracy.

Majority rule can become toxic by steamrolling minorities. For instance, just because the majority of the United States is caucasian doesn't mean the U.S. should pass laws favoring white people over other races. Incidentally one of the reasons why the Constitution inserted middlemen between citizens and legislative power was to prevent this sort of mob rule.

The founders didn't anticipate the Internet, though. If the internet mob (read: reddit) actually manages to start instilling fear in legislators and affecting laws disproportionately, it will be very interesting - and possibly frightening - to see what happens next.

Perhaps, but I'd like to think that the majority in a democracy would not push aside minorities.

Using your metaphor: There will be some caucasians that favor laws that benefit caucasians over others, but I would hope that the majority of caucasians would see that it is not ethical and not support such laws.

Your hope is not the human experience of 3,000 years. Freedom is the goal, democracy is just the mechanism, and the passions of democratic mob rule need to be tempered to protect freedom.

Well in the last 3,000 years there has never been the medium for the population to voice their opinions and collaborate at such a large scale. Civilizations were run by the rich, not the population.

My hope is that eventually people will accept 'net supported politics as a way to support true democracy.

If freedom is the goal, then freedom has to be the goal of the majority. Yes, democracy is a mechanism, but we have never truly seen a way for populations to organize politics on mass before.

Democracy in the past (and now) has been an act for representatives that can have their own agenda.

The problem is that the "majority" isn't a set thing, and in a "pure democracy", the reality is that the rabble-rousers loudest voices control the mob.

I've had the good fortune of observing the local occupy movement wreck the park that I like to eat lunch in. It started out like a bunch of people getting together in a little -- sort of like a festival concert. After a few weeks though, there clearly were 3-4 people "in charge". They give everyone lip service, but guide the agenda.

Regarding the ethics of the majority... from 1882 to 1968, nearly 200 bills were introduced making lynching a Federal crime. 7 presidents supported such legislation. Three (3) passed the house. None got through the Senate, thanks to the vice-grip of "Solid South" Senators.

Were all white folks in the South supporters of random mobs hanging black people? I hope not. But those random mobs had leaders, and the rest of the population was cowed into silent complicity.

The USA is not a democracy, it's a Constitutionally-limited republic. The reason for the House of Representatives (i.e., your "middlemen") isn't to prevent mob rule, but to recognize the simple practicality that there are too many people for a direct democracy to be workable. The Senate is there explicitly to block popular rule, it being a compromise to States' Rights.

The most important thing about the government of the USA, and the thing that serves to protect the minorities, is that the federal government is limited to a short list of explicitly enumerated powers (see especially Article I Section 8), and may only wield those in ways that respect the Bill of Rights.

And thus, every time someone advocates that the federal government take action that is not in that enumerated list, they erode those protections further.

Today, a few items in that enumerated list of powers that aren't very specific, especially the "interstate commerce clause", have become gaping breaches in our Constitutional protections, allowing our government the de facto power to do damned near anything it wants. If you're interested in protecting the rights of the weaker parts of society against abuse by the majority, the place to look is toward shoring up those abused parts of the Constitution.

Example: the federal government really has no general police power. Laws such as those under the "War on Drugs" are founded on the idea that drugs could conceivably be sold across state borders (even if they're not, in fact, but are actually grown at home for personal use -- see Gonzales v Raich). By allowing such absurd exaggeration of the definition of "interstate commerce", we've given the federal government license to terrorize citizens, strip us of our privacy, and in the end, give the USA the largest prison population -- by far! -- in the entire world.

When you don't like how a representative votes on issues, then you show it by not voting for that representative the next election. The proposal is for retaliatory action, akin to: "let's shoot his dog because he voted a way I don't like." The idea that anyone would try to ruin someone's life and career over his vote on one issue is a terrifying prospect and it doesn't belong in an open society. That kind of behavior degrades us all.

If you want to have impact, then boycott the other 149 companies who were on that list in addition to Godaddy. Why is no one doing that?

The idea is to focus limited resources on targets with a relatively higher chance of success.

I want to date all the girls, but ...

Excuses. It doesn't address the misguided idea of targeting representatives rather than the companies that deserve to be targeted.

If they want they can target TWO companies and focus their resources. My suspicion is, however, that Reddit and the internet as a whole does not have enough of a collective reach into the pockets of Comcast and other media giants, so they're focusing on some representative who probably makes half of what a programmer does in a year. It's poor. It's misguided.

Any of those groups can do exactly that and we can't stop it. We may as well use it to our advantage when ever possible.

The whole point of Anonymous is that the decision is correct by virtue of its happenstance.