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Comment by leepowers | Hacker News Reader

My guess is someone wants to "send a message" to MIT and so they're attacking the most vulnerable, most exploitable part of MIT's infrastructure: a non-critical system run by student volunteers. I doubt it's anything personal against Alex or other MIT students.

Imagine if a thousand members of Anonymous staged a non-violent protest at MIT, marching across campus. This would inconvenience some students, possibly even prevent them from attending class. Should this protest be condemned as an unconscionable attack on students? Of course not. It's a perfectly acceptable form of civil disobedience. Why shouldn't this extend to online protests via DDoS?

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Why is it perfectly acceptable to inconvenience people from their studies? Man, this kind of attitude makes me want to encourage harsher penalties on people who pull this bullshit. You do your movement no favours when you inconvenience the same people you want on your side.

You must not live in the US, as we have freedom of assembly here

Just don't expect sympathy from anyone you've inconvenienced when that right is infringed upon.

There seems to be a common misunderstanding of what protest rights you have in the US. The first amendment does not give you the right to protest anything, at any point, in any manner that you want. In fact, the government has a duty to protect my rights if your protest in infringing on them. The Occupy movement is another group that completely failed to understand that fact. You are legally allowed to protest, but preventing someone from going to work or class is a quick way to get your protest shutdown. I don't think it is unreasonable to extend that same logic to DDoS attacks.

Civil disobedience is illegal by definition. DDoS attacks are illegal. Marching down the middle of the street is illegal. But are these acts immoral?

If they seriously infringe on the rights of other individuals, then yes I think they are immoral. Putting your own political motivations (no matter how righteous) above the rights of others is a selfish act.

Marching down the middle of the street is not illegal. Indeed, many fundamental cases of constitutional law note that the street is a "per se" public forum, i.e., the most public a forum can be, and is thus subject to the highest protections for speech.

Marching down a street and merely disrupting traffic is thus quite legal, however, if your marching causes dangerous disruptions to traffic (i.e., accidents), then it is not.

The easy answer if you want to march down the street is you tell city hall and get a parade permit. Did anybody tell MIT and apply for a packet storm permit?

You can't assemble if it infringes on any one elses right to get to a public destination.

I'm not a member of any movement, Anonymous or otherwise. The point I was trying to raise: civil disobedience is disruptive by nature and will inconvenience and annoy - but it is far from immoral. Why should a DDoS be considered any differently? The methods of physical and virtual protest are different but their ends are the same.

But methods matter, unless you want to argue that the ends justify the means. Which would be a bit of a stretch in this case, by the way, since the most likely ends range somewhere between nothing and causing a bunch of problems for people who have had nothing to do with this whole story.

> My guess is someone wants to "send a message" to MIT and so they're attacking the most vulnerable, most exploitable part of MIT's infrastructure: a non-critical system run by student volunteers. I doubt it's anything personal against Alex or other MIT students.

But they're not sending a message to MIT, because the systems they are attacking don't matter to the faculty or administration. They're just creating a mess for the student volunteers.

Who should blame the administration instead of the DDOS'ers.

And suppose they do. What then? MIT has already said an investigation will be conducted. Is the DDoS going to continue until it's finished? How does that help anyone? Or should the students demand heads immediately, without waiting for the full facts? How does that help?

Administration and faculty should care about students and they should listen to their students. If a service outage occurs and effects thousands of students I have no doubt faculty is going to be made aware of it - regardless of who is responsible for maintaining the service.

Maybe we are giving the attackers too much credit. They may not be sophisticated enough to understand the relationship between the system they're attacking and the rest of MIT's infrastructure. More likely this was low-hanging fruit, an easy to attack, ergo it was attacked.

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