The changing face of protests in the digital age: on occupying cyberspace and Distributed-Denial-of-Services (DDoS) attacks

Abstract

On 7th January 2013 the Anonymous hacking collective launched a White House petition asking the Obama administration to recognize DDoS 1 attacks as a valid form of protest, similar to the Occupy protests. The 'Occupy' movement against financial inequality has become an international protest phenomenon stirring up the debate on the legal responses to acts of civil disobedience. At the same time, online attacks in the form of DDoS are considered by many as the digital counterparts of protesting. While the law generally acknowledges a certain level of protection for protesting as a manifestation of the rights to free speech and free assembly, it is still unclear whether DDoS attacks could qualify as free speech. This paper examines the analogies between offline protests and DDoS attacks, discusses legal responses in both cases and seeks to explore the scope for free speech protection.

“I Did What I Believe Is Right”: A Study of Neutralizations among Anonymous Operation Participants

“…Some participants outwardly stated their desire to fight for the common good and to be the vehicles for justice. It became clear that fighting for a cause to better society or to help others was also construed as an act of protest or civil disobedience (Jordan & Taylor, 2004;Karanasiou, 2013) and could be characterized more so as expressive hacking and not criminal hacking (Hampson, 2012). The denial of the victim was the third most common neutralization.…”

“…Examples of trolling include ordering numerous pizzas to be delivered to a certain location, using SPAM, or calling the police about a fake crime that warrants the SWAT team to respond. 3 A DDoS or denial-of-service attack involves the disruption of services by overloading a system with traffic from numerous sources (Karanasiou, 2013). For example, a website may be targeted, making it a challenge for the web server to manage all of the incoming activity at once.…”

Avoiding the internet of insecure industrial things

“…The anticipated ubiquity of networked devices embedded in infrastructure is exemplified by two current examples: smart cities and industry 4.0. The smart city movement 37 envisages urban infrastructure being upgraded to enable services like intelligent mobility 38 (e.g. congestion management, smart traffic lights, connected and autonomous vehicles) or smarter crime prevention, detection and prosecution (e.g.…”

“…The smart city movement 37 envisages urban infrastructure being upgraded to enable services like intelligent mobility 38 (e.g. congestion management, smart traffic lights, connected and autonomous vehicles) or smarter crime prevention, detection and prosecution (e.g.…”