 Welcome everybody and welcome especially to Molly for joining us. Molly started out at the Berkman Center as a Berk turn as they're affectionately known for the intern a couple of summers ago and since then has collected a string of titles from various institutions in the Cambridge area. She is a Berkman Center fellow in addition to being a student of comparative media studies at MIT as well as a researcher at the Center for Civic Media and is here to share with us her really terrific work on DDoS distributed denial service. Hi everybody my name is Molly Sotter I'm a grad student in comparative media studies over at MIT and currently an RA at the Center for Civic Media and some of my fellow RAs are here because they're awesome. So what I'm going to be presenting to you today is a paper that I've been working on that is actually forthcoming in the American Behavioral Scientist in a couple of months on the impact of tool design on activist DDoS actions both tool design and media coverage and how these two factors come together to influence the relative success of an action how many people are involved what types of people are involved and what the impact of that protest action is on the world at large. So the action that I'm going to be focusing on is something called operation payback. So in November of 2010 as I'm sure most of you remember WikiLeaks and its five partner news organizations started releasing the so-called cable gate trove of diplomatic cables and there were over 250,000 of these cables that were eventually released and they caused a lot of people to become very angry and when some of those people who were in government got very angry other people who were involved in banks and ISPs reacted to that anger by declining to provide services to the WikiLeaks organization they said we're not going to give you the ability to process credit card donations we're not going to host your content and they started this very large financial blockade which very much crippled WikiLeaks's ability to function in what it was attempting to do. This blockade attracted a lot of attention from various activist D oriented bits of the internet including a group called Anonymous and I use the term group very loosely they're very much a highly fluid collective of internet users that started in the unmoderated image board of 4chan and if we want to go further into that history we can but I'm going to sort of gloss over it at that point. They had already been engaged in a operation called operation payback which was oriented against the MPAA and the RIA and other pro copyright organizations that had been previously engaged in a DDoS campaign against the Pirate Bay which we can also go into later but which I'm going to stop that explanation right there. So when the financial blockade started they were very happy to sort of expand the scope of operation payback to include something that they started to call operation Avenge Assange which was oriented towards these anti WikiLeaks organizations. This part of operation payback started on December 6th 2010 and lasted for four days and included targets including the swish banking service of post finance the Swedish prosecution authority every DNS the DNS provider the website of Joseph Lieberman mastercard various Swedish politicians visa paypal and amazon.com and there were other sites that were also involved. Some of these sites did experience downtime during this action but not all of the sites experienced downtime and the downtime was not in all cases significant sometimes it was just for a few hours. The actions undertaken by anonymous in this action should not be understood as unique events in the history of activism but rather as an evolution of digital activist tactics particularly in the realms of media manipulation recruitment and participant impact in this talk I'm going to argue that anonymous in operation payback expanded upon the use of DDoS tactics used by earlier groups in the 1990s while earlier activist groups like the electronic disturbance theater typically consisted of a tight activist core organizing a relatively small population of other media activists artists and special interest groups anonymous horizontally expanded that population dramatically and opened up the tools and mechanisms of active of this type of activism to the population of the internet at large so in this talk aren't you going to the next slide there we go so in looking at the design of how DDoS tools can impact participant populations and levels of diversity within that population I'm going to be looking at the design and development cycle of those tools and how they reflect changes in strategy and and in the activist space at the time that they were created so first I'm going to talk about what a DDoS action is because not everybody knows so we're going to go over it very briefly technically and legally and we're going to go over a bit of the history of how DDoS is used by activists because as I mentioned this is not a new thing this is definitely a thing that's been happening for going on 20 years now which is I think something that gets glossed over in a lot of the reporting about anonymous and operation payback and then we're going to get into an actual deep analysis of flood net which was a tool created in 1998 by a group called the electronic disturbance theater and then two different versions of the low orbit ion cannon DDoS tool because it went through varying iterations from basically 2006 to 2020 10 and see how those designs evolved and what we can learn from how the interface was designed and especially the different use of lexical tropes in the interface design the use of memes the use of imagery and that type of thing and then we're going to look at how media coverage fits into all this and what role the media plays in attracting people to these actions and how they consider the actions based on what the media says about them so first DDoS actions oh god it's full of bits uh raise your hand if you have a varying you think you're vaguely confident about what a DDoS attack is I love this audience for people who don't know and for people who aren't here to raise their hand um a DDoS attack is an attempt by a group of people or a group of computers controlled by one person to render one computer or one server inaccessible to other people who want to use it if you ever had a younger sibling and you went on a big road trip with your younger sibling I swear this metaphor is going somewhere it was okay if your younger sibling was behind you being like hey Kate hey Kate hey Kate he was doing that he could do it for a while and Kate wouldn't freak out because Kate's a strong individual but if all of his friends were there in the backseat of the car and they were all going hey Kate hey Kate hey Kate hey Kate hey Kate she probably wouldn't be able to take it for a very long time and might go I can't stand it and then fall over that's basically what happens to a server under a DDoS attack it's one computer asking for information is fine a server can handle that lots of computers asking for information very very quickly they can't really handle that so well and they crash and you get downtime which is theoretically the goal of a DDoS action there are a number of different ways that you can do this and I won't get into the technical specifics right now but one specific difference in how you can achieve this is you can do it with just you and your friends clicking the refresh button on a website over and over and over again which is actually how early DDoS actions were run in the early 90s when you could bring down a website doing that you can't do that anymore you can have volunteer botnets where people voluntarily download a program that hooks their computer to a central control server and that server controls the actions of those computers so that's a volunteer botnet or you can have a non-volunteer botnet which is the types of botnets that you usually hear about where where non-volunteer computers or innocent computers have been infected with some sort of virus that puts it under the control of a central server and these are the ones that are usually used in criminal extortion enterprises or other not so great efforts to extort money or intimidate people one thing I do want to make very clear is DDoS actions no matter why you're undertaking them whether it's because you have a political point to make or because you want to extort money out of somebody are very illegal in the US they are considered a felony and if you are thinking about doing one you should know that whether so I'm not going to get into a really deep analysis of how DDoS actions fit into the cfa at this point but I have lots of opinions about it and I'm more than happy to talk about it during the question period cfa the computer fraud oh the computer fraud and abuse act which is the central piece of anti hacking legislation in the US I have lots of opinions about that too and more than happy to share them so going into the history of how DDoS has been used in activism we can all laugh at the cats now actually that one is my favorite lol cat of all time there are two okay okay there are two major characterizations of DDoS within the digital activism sphere you have the sort of quote unquote old school conception of DDoS which is that it is a form of censorship this is sometimes called the digitally correct view of DDoS basically groups like the CDC which is the cult of the dead cow or hack divismo or other groups whose primary goal is to produce technology to enable people in who live in countries that repress the internet to get around that repression view DDoS as another way to stop the flow of bits and this is in their view not appropriate on the network the goal of the internet is to enable the flow of information and if you are stopping any information then that is bad if you are damaging the network in any way this is not something that they want to encourage on the other hand you have the view of what I call digitally enabled activists which are usually activist groups that have come to the internet in a second stage of their evolution and a group called the critical art ensemble fits into this category and they were one of the first groups to articulate what electronic civil disobedience was which is against something we can get into later because it's very complicated and also a spin-off group called the electronic disturbance theater which we'll be talking about later and they consider the internet to be an auxiliary platform for activism this is not where their primary activism lays it's off one of the founders of the electronic disturbance theater described distributed denial of service actions as a way to leave your computer protesting at home while you hit the streets to protest in the street so it's very much viewed as part of a holistic strategy of being online and being out in the physical world we are not we don't separate these two spheres instead we view them as part of a coherent strategy one thing that's important to note about these types of activists is that they view this type of activism as being a reflection of physical world activism so this is where you get the metaphor of DDoS is a sit-in which you've heard me talk about this before you know this is not something that I agree with this is not a metaphor that I think is actually useful but it is a very popular metaphor and is a very evocative way of describing what a DDoS action does and in this way these groups also separate themselves from other groups who have used DDoS as a tool of direct action so you have people who view DDoS as a sit-in which is essentially a way of directing media attention towards a specific issue and then you have other groups who have used DDoS as a way of actually affecting change in a system that they want to change these are groups like the electro hippies with the 1999 blockade of the world trade organization internal network during the that whole thing in seattle and then you have another case in 1994 which is the itoi toy war is another example of a direct action which was also a tool of media manipulation so that's an interesting mesh case and there is another case called the school heredia journal case in spain where action was taken to silence a certain publication as a tool of direct action so you sort of have three major schools of how this tactic is used anonymous is using this tactic in a way that melds these three approaches the both the approach of we want to be influencing things via technology that the old school hacktivists tend to embody and then you have the very media heavy approach of the electronic disturbance theater which is very interesting in influencing media attention and pushing media attention towards a specific issue and then you have the direct action we are just we are interested in disrupting systems and anonymous is a use of DDoS blends all three of these into one solidified approach which is a major innovation in the use of the tactic I could talk about the theory behind DDoS actions forever and I won't but if anyone I've written more papers about it and we can get more into the theory in the question session if you are interested this is the flood net tool developed by the electronic disturbance theater in 1998 this is the particular iteration of the tool that was used during the prozapatista actions that the electronic disturbance theater was involved in in the late 90s so a lot of the a lot of the functionality of like that we'll be looking at in the next couple of slides is already present in this tool because frankly you can only hurl bits out of server in so many ways and it's it's it's fairly simple there are a couple of things that I want you to look at I could use my laser pointer so one thing I want you to notice is there is a messaging functionality here and I don't know if you can see it but it says type your message here and then pick your target here and then send your message here what this means is when a computer requests something from a server and it's not there the server will generate an error log so the thing that you were supposed to do for this was say like human rights and then say like I want to ask the you could ask the White House this is the I think this is the president of Mexico's website you could ask that server for human rights and the the error message that was generated by the server would say human rights are not found on this server which is clever and this was a way to not just hurl bits at a thing which feels very impersonal but this was a way to communicate the outrage that the activists were feeling towards their target now the person if anybody was going to read that error log it was going to be the sys admin who has no control over any human rights really and so it's not very it's not actually intended to communicate to a person it's intended to communicate with the activist himself who gets to say I have yelled something I haven't just screamed incoherently I have shouted something and this is a way of building up sort of the identity of the activists who feels that they've done something so this was a very simple tool it exploited a java applet reload function if you're interested in the technical details and one other thing I want to notice is that this is a drop down menu the target list is not a free input you have to pick something that the edt has already decided they want to target so they are restricting what you are allowed to do with this tool and because this was also a web based tool they could control when it would go online so you they would schedule actions send out an email to their various mailing lists and say we are having an action on this day at this time against these things and then the site would go live and then you could participate but you had to participate on their scheduled terms this particular action that this screenshot is taken from uh eventually attracted uh about 18,000 participants was the claim by the edt and then they did open source the tool in 1999 they released the source code so lots of different organizations were able to use the flood net technology to stage their own actions the electro hippies used it in the wto action and a couple of other organizations also used it one other thing I want you to notice about this tool is the language that it uses use the applet below to send your own message to the air log of the institution's last symbol of Mexican neoliberalism of your choice that's really specialized language this is language that is meant to communicate with people who know what mexican neoliberalism is who know about the zapatistas who are aware of what is happening there's no education happening in this tool this tool is intended to appeal to people who are already involved in the cause there was that there was education that happened around the action but in this particular tool there is no education happening this is saying you know what's going on you should join us but if you don't know what's going on if you just happen to come across the website this language could be very not inviting this language could be very intimidating and you might be confused and you might not want to participate in the action so another thing that this does is you have to sit in front of your computer and press the button this is not automated and i mean it's automated and that once you press the button you can sort of let it run but you have to actually be there to press the button at the appointed time this is tied with how the edt wanted to justify their actions and have an ethical validity attached to their actions with which is very strongly tied to physical world activism and the one person one stream of signals sort of conception of activism you have one body equals one body in your march this is one body in a chair in front of a computer equals one stream of signals so they are tying the ethical validity of their actions to having a large number of people participating so this brings us to how anonymous uses d-dos and there are two major d-dos actions that anonymous has has sort of run over the past couple of years and the first is operation or project channel which is an anti-scientology campaign which i'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail right now because there's always been already been great scholarship about operation channel g and the second is operation payback slash avengers sange which i sort of gave the rough outlines of earlier in the talk like was originally developed by an open source developer who's known as pray talks i don't know his real name i think he's from russia he could be a shoe for all i know and a number of different tools were developed this tool was almost immediately forked in in various different versions and these different versions had different looks different fields different capabilities there was javascript loyke there's a loyke you can run on a jail broken iphone like there are lots of different versions of this tool that were developed over time when it first came about is very difficult to determine i'm going to argue later that it was developed sometime in 2006 and i will explain why but it was definitely used in 2008 during operation channel g and after that the forking sort of became more solidified into two very specific versions which could be downloaded from source forage or github which most of you are aware of by december 2010 which is when operation payback avengers sange started versions of loyke could be run on windows max or linux and android phones and iphone's there was javascript loyke there were other versions of like this was a very pretty popular tool and you could also run it from within a web browser but you didn't have to most of these versions were things that you could download and run on your own the most widely version widely downloaded versions of loyke in used in december 2010 were a version by someone named a batis chev i'm going to use their screen names because i don't know their real names so i apologize uh so there was the a batis chev version and the new era cracker version and these were the most popular versions of the tool used during operation payback and they were heavily linked in media coverage and they were heavily linked during the during the action inside irc channels as well they're both cued pretty closely to the original code that pretox had and even though i do not have access to pretox's original tool you can tell this based on how similar they are to each other and but there are very significant differences in the graphical user interfaces and the different features that each tool uses so i'm going to go over these differences sort of in detail a batis chev's version is the older one it was initially uploaded to source forage in mid 2009 and this is it uh you can see so i'm just going to give you a this is this is that one and this is the new era cracker version they look very similar they there's the same picture is right here uh though it has a different font um and it basically uses the same generalized gooey you've got the same color scheme you've got the same arrangement of boxes like it looks very similar basically what you do is you notice these are numbered they're you can't might not be able to see it from far away the steps are numbered you have one select your target two ready so you can actually skip all this if you want but so you select your target you type in a url or an ip address you don't need to know the ip address you can just know the url of the site then there are a bunch of customizable options which you don't have to do they come with their own defaults so you don't have to know what a timeout is or what an htt sub site is or what the hell this message function is you can just leave it and then just press this button that says i'm a charge in my laser and you press that and you let it go and that's it congratulations you're participating in a d-dos action um there are a couple of interesting things here so the low orbit iron cannon as some people who have talked to me earlier today know is from the video game command and conquer uh you can see up here they actually quote the game lower but i intended when harpoons airstrikes and nukes fail in the game this is like the boss weapon i've never played the game so i don't actually know what it does but it seems like a bad-ass to me the i'm a charge in my laser is a reference to a meme called the shoup de woop meme which had something to do with an anime that i'm not actually familiar with but it it was this this large robot thing that said i'm a charge in my laser and then it fired its laser and there was mass panic so it was a fairly inoffensive meme like it was popular people knew about it if you go on know your meme like you can see that there's lots of derivatives of it down here in the messaging functionality is something that i want you to pay attention to though this is the same messaging functionality as you see in the flood net tool this sends a message to the air log the default setting here says a cat is fine to desu desu desu desu i really do not recommend googling a cat is fine too uh and i know that a bunch of you are now going to it is a really rather distasteful bestiality rape meme um don't go don't just don't don't look at it this is one of those things on the internet that you just don't want to look at um and desu desu desu was also a sort of Japanese focused meme where it was something you said to people who were too much acting like they were Japanese and who they weren't it was desu maybe if you say desu more you will be Japanese that was that was the theme of it both of these also came out in 2006 at the same time that the i'm a charge in my laser meme came out but unlike the i'm a charge in my laser meme these never moved beyond 4chan they were too offensive especially the cat is fine too meme they were too offensive they were too out there and they never really moved past the confines of the very bizarre culture that occupies 4chan so this tool even though it was used in operation genealogy was sort of we can see that's focused on the 4chan anonymous culture set this is what it's it's meant to appeal to these are who it's going for the people who will understand a cat is fine too desu desu desu not only understand it but find it entertaining and think it's something that they want to download onto their computer compare this to the new era cracker version uh which was uploaded to github in september of 2010 we've got the same imagery here different font instead of doing the praetox thing down here it actually says like this is new era cracker's version it's mine um we have the same i'm a charge in my laser meme but down here the cat is fine too thing is gone the messaging function is still there but that we don't have any more scary beastiality meme we have you done goofed which is a fair a reference to a fairly popular meme which called the jesse slaughter meme um which was a a little girl uh went on the wrong parts of the internet and pissed off anonymous and anonymous started doing what they do sometimes just sending lots of pizzas to her house and very just harassing her on the internet her father made a video which was a it was a kind of an unfortunate video um in which he threatened to send the internet police after them and was in generally a very angry defensive father who also didn't really know what he was talking about um and in it he said you done goofed the consequences will never be the same so this was a very popular video this got picked up by gawker it was featured on abc news like people at in people who don't spend all their time on the internet actually knew about it so this is a actually a very accessible phrase and it's also the you can see it up here in the subheading of the program um it's also in it's inherently confrontational a cat is fine dude desu desu desu means nothing in terms of oppositional impact like if you see that if you are a sys admin and you see that in your error log it's going to look like nonsense to you and if you're going to use it as an activist it also means nothing in an activist context it's just vaguely intimidating nonsense this as actually a confrontation this is saying you screwed up you person i'm sending these bits to screwed up and this is why we are coming after you because you done goofed and the consequences will never be the same so this is far more activist oriented than the earlier default message text another thing that's really important so the previous version didn't only had one mode which was you have to target it you have to fire it yourself it was very much like flood net in that way up here we have fucking hive mind mode and it says that so i can totally say that um i'm just being thorough uh what hive mind mode does is it enables you to take your computer hook it up to an irc server and join a voluntary botnet you do not have to sit in front of your computer and follow targeting data and raid schedules for the however long you would have to sit there you just have to click this button hook it to an irc server and walk away that's it and then you can participate in the action so unlike flood net and earlier versions of like this opened up the participation base widely to people who didn't really know a lot about anonymous or 4chan who weren't really interested in following twitter targeting data because that was one of the primary ways in which raid schedules got released during operation payback was twitter and paste bin and but if you didn't know the right the the right channels to look at or the right twitter accounts which bounced all the time because twitter kept shutting them down um it was hard to follow so you didn't have to follow them you just had to click this button and then you could say i want to be part of this i want to participate but i don't have the time or the energy or the know how to actually participate so i'll just click this button and then go walk my dog and you could and that was a way to participate that was a completely valid way that was enabled by this tool oh that's where your target goes um so if you put in an ip address here the ip address pops up here this just says like you did it right you can you can put numbers into a field go you um yeah so that's it so what this does is it enables i love this picture uh it enables loyke and d dos to be much more effective as a tool of biographical impact and what biographical impact is is a concept in social movement theory that says that your participation in activism as an activist makes you more of an activist it says that you start to feel like you're an activist that you can participate in things and have an impact and then you go and you act like an activist and acting like an activist is two steps away from being an activist so what these two tools and especially what the second version of loyke did is it created a community of people who were participating in this action and as you make it easier for people to participate in these actions more people participate in these actions so hive mind mode enabled people who for whatever reason couldn't participate in actions before either because they weren't interested in anonymous culture or it was not accessible to them or because they didn't have the technological know-how to really figure out how to target this tool by themselves this enabled them to participate anyway there's also a huge culture of tutorial videos on youtube if you google loyke tutorial video on youtube you will find like dozens of them that just say this is how you install and target this tool and this is also engaging with that community and pushing out and the community is seeking to bring more people into it which is in part enabled because anonymous was getting further and further away from the recreationally offensive politics that it engaged in sort of pre-operation payback operation chanology marked the first time where anonymous started to move into sort of the active political sphere and operation payback sort of pushed that even further so we start to see people who wouldn't have gone near anonymous pre-operation chanology who wouldn't even had have known where to look they didn't go to those parts of the internet starting to be much more excited about participating in this group and having a say and having an affiliation with the group another thing that's interesting about hive mind is that it enables this sub summation of personal agency into the actions of the whole when you commit to this voluntary botnet you are you are just giving your computer to somebody it's not at it's not equivalent to handing your laptop to somebody in a coffee shop and saying i'll be back in 10 minutes but it's kind of close um you are saying i trust you to use my agency that i'm giving you in a way that i approve of so it again pushes this community of trust and internal negotiation onto anonymous and as people engage with the anonymous meme in this passive way they become more attached to the anonymous identity meme which is inherently about the power of the whole as embodied by a faceless entity there's none of all of us what is it one of us is not as as vengeful as all of us they have several what cruel one of us is not as cruel as all of us so that they have several sort of these slogans there's this one there's also we are anonymous we do not forgive we do not forget expect us and they're they're a basic identity comes from this concept of sort of it harkens back to sort of the biblical idea of my name is my name is legion for we are many anonymous gets its power from this faceless mass of fury and as people move in and out of that it strengthens the identity meme both broadly and individually so that's another really interesting thing about the hive mind mode the other thing that anonymous pushed during operation payback was this use of d-dos as a medium manipulation tactic and also the use of media as a recruitment strategy I do not know whether this was an actual conscious move on anonymous parts to use their the huge amounts of media attention as a recruitment strategy but it certainly ended up acting as a recruitment strategy the majority of media coverage of anonymous and operation payback was characterized by a market unwillingness and this is during the actual four days of operation payback it was characterized by a market unwillingness to critically assess anonymous as an activist group or operation payback as an as an activist action and there was rampant confusion about the facts on the ground I mentioned before that d-dos is very illegal nobody really knew that in December of 2010 and this is reflected in the media coverage one example that I can give you right now is this article from gizmodo which came out it came out december 8th so this is halfway through operation payback and it was basically a joel johnson wrote a brief column what is loyke it seems pretty harmless it says what is loyke it's a push button application right that can be controlled by a central user yes to launch a flood of killer internet packets with little risk to the user no this is wrong because adidas knocks everything offline at least when it works as intended the log file that would normally record each incoming connection typically just doesn't work also wrong and even if they do many loyke users claim that another user was on their network or that their machine was part of a botnet which I explained minus the computer owner actually knowing that they are participating this is a very like this article is actually pretty dangerous um it's outright saying things that are not true and this type of information was rampant both in the media and within the anonymous organization itself loyke is a it has a huge security flaw in it um which was actually discovered during the course of operation payback basically if you are going to be hurling malignant bits at a server to make it fall down you really don't want the person who runs that server to know who you are that would be bad for you uh so what people tended to do was they would run it through an anonymizer or they would there are various ways to hide your ip address from the people that you are hurling these bits at but because so many new users came into the anonymous fold during operation payback who were not only new to anonymous but kind of new to internet activism in general in the way that actually anonymous itself was new to activism they didn't know how to do this this was something that they didn't know how to do and people just didn't take any protective measures because like joel johnson were telling them they didn't need to because they said it was fine uh and actually the 16 people who are currently under indictment now called the paypal 16 um for operation payback uh were caught because paypal was storing the top 1000 ip addresses where the bits were coming from they had a big list and then they gave it to the fbi and then the fbi used it to arrest a bunch of people uh so this type of journalism was fairly common um another type of journalism that was present at the time was just wholesale quoting anonymous material that they were putting out there uh the washington post embedded like fully embedded a anonymous video on their website um just the whole damn thing uh there was a lot of screenshotting and quoting of anonymous calls to action just right in news coverage and direct linking to things like github and source forage and places where you could download loyke or uh tutorial videos online there was lots of this boing boing also linked to a lot of these different things um and a number time magazine also had information about raid scheduling uh like people didn't know where to get information because anonymous is an extremely horizontal organization and there is no press person to talk to there was a press irc channel but a lot of these reporters didn't know how to use irc and didn't know how to get to the channel and they didn't really want to go there anyway because it seemed scary and heckish um and so they avoided it and this led to modes of information collecting and modes of information distribution that included a lot of things that could be seen as condoning this action on the part of the mainstream press because why on earth would you directly link to a place where you can download loyke unless loyke is okay like why would the washington post do that like they did it because that's how internet journalism is developing you have this practice of direct linking because direct linking is usually awesome but in situations like this where people can be in real serious legal danger i would say that that needs to be severely reexamined and we can totally talk more about this later because it's a really deep issue and i do not have all the answers um sort of in conclusion because i really want to have time for questions because i'm really interested in what all of you have to say these are sort of the three main points that i'm making in this paper operation payback success was due to a confluence of technological community and news media factors technological in how they develop how they innovated on the design of d-dos tools to make them more accessible to a broader community and also enable more people with varying levels of technological skill to participate community in that base they endeavor to open up their community to people who were not previously involved as opposed to other previous digitally active activist organizations who are primarily concerned with giving already active participants added powers sort of congratulations you now have the superpower of d-dos um not so much in engaging in full-scale recruitment like anonymous did during operation payback and news media factors which we just went over and anonymous use of d-dos represents an innovation in participant population impact and tool design particularly um which is also influenced in how they deal with other aspects of their organization uh specifically with their new focus on leaking and information distribution and anonymous pushed the reframing of d-dos from a tool of direct action as i will disrupt this network and that will be my activism to media manipulation and biographical impact on the part of activists so pushing media coverage of stories and stories about d-dos to and then also impacting how activists think about themselves in the context of both activism and the organization specifically and that's it i'm done there's like i think that we're supposed to do the microphone oh no we got it okay cool okay i imagine that list from paypal is not available publicly no okay because i think it would be interesting to see how many come from you know anonymized vpns versus non and i think it could give you some more data to oh definitely skill at least as operationalized by hiding yeah when um when the raids were happening there were a few people who popped up on reddit and were like the fbi showed up at my house at five o'clock this morning because my six-year-old son participated in operation payback that was one reddit thread that got a lot of attention um just because it was like two yes well they have their own problems so i'm actually writing my thesis right now i try to stay away from the internet because the internet is a productivity sink and apparently i need to write a thesis to graduate i'm told that um so i would love to write my thesis unfortunately doing internet activism research is this constant game of catch up because things keep people don't stop it's like i have to write a paper about this you can't stop you can't keep doing things i can't update everything all the time um so unfortunately i've sort of dropped a temporal bar um at at a certain place and been like i will focus my research here i'm actually reading a lot about union organizing in the 1800s right now uh which shows you where my historical mind is at um uh yeah can you go back to slides to the yeah to this can you talk a little bit about how identified being identified plays into the activist mindset from a historical perspective yeah so this is something i'm really interested in um i initially got into this topic because i wanted to do my thesis on anonymity small a anonymity in activism because at least in the u.s especially in the west there's this knee-jerk reaction that if you are anonymous in your political activism you obviously can't be that serious about it and what anonymous does is it it a big a anonymous does is it challenges that preconception because it it's a it's in the name like we are anonymous like you do not know who we are um the sort of cultural predilection to preference identified activists comes very much from the 1960s civil rights movement and that school of of civil disobedience and particularly and then before that just throw who first articulated civil disobedience as something you did in and of yourself as a person and then you accepted punishment for it which privileges that type of activism to people who have the resources to get arrested have a trial go to jail and you know they won't lose their house or get fired or have their kids taken away from them um it very much puts activism on the on the shoulders of a very privileged class that is not everybody um and what the anonymous both big a and little a anonymous schools of activism are pushing is no you don't have to do that um it's not incumbent on the protester to accept punishment for an unjust for breaking an unjust law that is not necessarily how we need to do this we can do this by making this part of culture by making acts of resistance that are inherently playful and push against the state and push against these concepts of identity we can make that part of activism in the west and you see like it sort of really irritates me because it's like the federalist papers were written under a pseudonym like anonymous and pseudonymous activism has a huge history in the us yeah i think it's still worth making a big obviously a number of distinctions between the federalist papers and this and i think they're not and and but i and i think the key the key piece is that when something is done anonymously but there is very very serious content it then says we're not relying on our real name and our reputation that we're also going to put this content out there so the federal federalist papers isn't famous as a work of civil disobedience it's famous you know to a large extent for the content and the philosophy it expounded well now it was the work of civil disobedience i'm not saying it wasn't one but it's it wouldn't be significant solely as one and here i think that's a the distinction here is that it's a very it's the cheap action of saying not only are you not identified and you're escaping punishment if you haven't read this article and followed it too closely and made some mistakes there but that um but it's effortless that the so this is the slackivism argument with the amount of effort you're putting in is indistinguishable by someone by the act of someone whose computer was infected while they were off this is the slackivism argument the slackivism argument says that if the activism you're doing is cheap in terms of effort then it counts for less if you turn your twitter icon green in support of elections in iran you're not actually impacting elections in iran so who the hell cares um the people who care are the other people who turn their twitter icons green uh slackivism quote-unquote slackivism is one of those things that challenges the expectations of what activism is supposed to do a lot of people see activism as you are supposed to change something you are supposed to be offering an alternative you are supposed to be offering a solution you obviously can't just say that there's a problem or you can't just say that you care about something unless you are actually changing it but what slackivism is valuable for or clictivism if you want to use a less mean term um it's valuable for that biographical impact that i was talking about it's one thing on that because i think there's been studies now about i guess using eating organic food yeah that go in both directions that say on the one hand you know does eating organic food change your personal identity so that you are then subsequently more aware of these other things you actually do more acts in that direction or does it say oh i am so proud of myself i've done my good deal for the day sometimes i do something and sometimes now i can go and drive my hunger but this is where you get into the ladder of engagement issue where you have to get on that first rung and part of getting on that first rung is feeling like you can get on that first rung um so my view of sort of slackivism slash clictivism and the sort of easy activism that the internet has enabled is that it's widened that rung it's made it easier for more people to get onto that first rung of the ladder of engagement and then subsequently it will make it it makes it easier for people to move up that ladder because you do have to start at the bottom unfortunately um everyone has to start somewhere so even though this does not clicking the i'm a charge in my laser button doesn't give you the magical activism pill that turns you into the activism version of spider-man i guess the activism spider um it does start you somewhere and that is generally what i'm in favor of people starting somewhere i'm in favor of people starting at all um so in that sense i actually view this as a controversial and certainly able to be horrifically misapplied tactic but still useful tactic when undertaken in a considered and useful way so yeah um how would you compare the actions of anonymous and operation payback to groups such as uh the jester or the individual such as jester who were attacking wiki leaks and organization supporting wiki leaks so for those of you who don't know the jester is this guy who says that he is an army veteran from the special forces he is what is classified as a patriotic hacker um he's a guy who explicitly aligns his morals with pro-us anti specifically anti jihadist and anti anonymous and anti wiki leaks politics um he is very active in what i call wildcat d-dosses where i i don't know whether they're run through botnets or exploits but he takes down jihadist websites and anonymous oriented content on his own he doesn't claim to work with anybody else he explicitly claims to work by himself um and is very interested in this motive act motive activism which is like i took like he likes to post these things that are like tango down w w w dot jihadists are us dot com um and he he does that a lot um personally i think that wildcat d-dosses are not an ethic are not ethical actions and i don't think that his actions are ethical because they're primarily about about silencing content um he is not interested in communicating larger messages with his activism he's interested in taking content offline that he doesn't agree with which i don't think is an ethical use of the tactic my i have a whole talk about d-doss ethics which will take about 20 minutes and i'm more than happy to give a an abbreviated version of it to anyone who's interested um but generally i i don't think that the use of d-doss to simply abridge content online is ethical i do not think that every abridgement of content is inappropriate so if i don't like starbucks for any number of reasons and me and my friends want to express that by d-dossing starbucks dot com we are not abridging starbucks ability to communicate with the world at large because they you don't go to starbucks dot com for anything anyway um i'm not even stopping them from selling coffee um i'm not even abridging their business to the extent that a sit-in at starbucks would abridge their business so i so when when aimed against large corporate sites generally i don't think that d-doss actions constitute a nefarious abridgement of content uh now this center has done really great research on the use of d-doss by states and corporations to abridge and silence content and i highly recommend the 2010 paper by ethan zikerman and several other people who are sitting at this table because it's awesome uh it's all about how small media sites can be silenced through the use of d-doss by state actors and other and other actors who's goal it is to silence content to your question i don't think that the jester is necessarily on the up and up with his use of at least d-doss attacks to take down content because he's primarily interested in silencing opposition and not interested in actually engaging in protest um but he's a really he patriotic hackers are just interesting um over their mako okay so i i missed a little bit as i was running into the room to ask the question so i may this may have some of you this may have sort of builds on some of that but i wanted to push back a little bit on your on your characterization of fucking hivevine mode as joining a community um and as participation in a community because i think that um i mean i think of saying i have a computer with and some bandwidth and i'm going to let other people decide what to do with it as being much more of a decision to donate something um it's more akin to donating to an organization that then is going to spend that in ways that you may or may not understand i mean they're going to rep they're going to you're going to make some decision that they're good people that they're using it for something else right um and uh but i think that uh you know that actually the manual mode where you say i understand what's going on here i want to participate in this you know requires a type of communication that i think is actually much more like the kinds of behaviors that i would characterize as being within a community yep no yeah i definitely agree and i think that the reason the reason that is to push back on it in the reason i think it's a little bit important is because i think that one the participants and the the participants in fucking hivevine mode are not people who would consider themselves necessarily joining a community and i think that a lot of the people who are now being you know now like uh like being accused they're being accused by the government or people that are trying to prosecute them over dissipating in a community in ways that i think they don't think are fair and that i think i probably wouldn't think are fair i think that it's that you know it's it's much more akin to donation and so maybe that's just a different way you want to i don't know if you have thoughts about that or if that's something i i i definitely agree um i think that there's a stronger community involvement in people who are participating in them in the manual mode um my point with the hive mind mode is more that it opens up ways of accessing that community to people who would not necessarily be able to um so it doesn't necessarily forge a like an as strong community among those people but it enables them to participate in ways that were not possible before so it's not so much a building of a strong community but a opening up of doors to that community uh person sitting in front of me go you know whether you mentioned that mike was hosted at github and source forge and that uh your anonymous propaganda was hosted at youtube and so on do you know if there was any attempt by people who didn't agree with an anonymous or for the government or ever to try to remove those those things so loyke and tools like it are almost always listed as like stress testing tools because there's no difference between adidas tool and a stress testing tool really uh if you just if you download loyke and only used it to stress test your own servers it would be a stress testing tool um this is sort of like how uh head shops will sell glass pipes for tobacco only uh yeah you could that's probably not what you're buying that for but and sometimes they get closed down um i don't know of any official pressure against source forge and github i know that twitter was constantly playing a game of shut down the anonymous twitter account uh during those four days um they were also explicitly saying like we are having a raid at four o'clock on paypal.com you should you should aim your loyke there and participate that way so that it was much easier for the people who were talking to twitter to make the argument that that those accounts needed to get shut down um when you get into taking down programs from source forge and github or videos from youtube you run into more free speech issues that are harder to deal with but you also get a lot of video takedowns from uh from youtube as well uh yeah so kind of an overarching claim to talk i feel you made in a lot of ways was that anonymous was somehow escaping or shifting out of the strange otherized culture of fortune and similar parts of the internet and becoming something that was integrating you know respectable people who read the wall street journal or whatever right and that this was i'm being a little bit but yeah but precipitating some kind of demographic shift in the organization and i see the the indicators that that that might be happening but i'm wondering if there's actual like quantitative data suggesting that's true internally like how would you say the person who's done the most research on that has been biella colman okay who's done the most research on how the anonymous population has shifted and like that's where i get that's where those ideas come from in my research and so she has that she's got the anthropological and ethnographic data um i don't because i'm neither one of those things uh i have a similar question but um do we have a rough sense of how many people participate in the operation payback or i have download statistics for these two tools it's impossible for me to judge how many people participate in the actions parmi olson has made has made uh estimations in her book we are anonymous um i don't have reason to not believe those um but they're also based on self-reporting numbers from irc channels and like populations of irc channels at various times um so the download statistics were oh so this version the the new era cracker version from september 2010 to december of 2011 which is unfortunately the finest grain statistics that github will give me um this tool was downloaded over 80 000 times uh and this tool was downloaded uh the earlier version of the tool in december of 2010 was downloaded over 100 000 times in december uh which is up from over 30 000 times from the point it was downloaded to source forage to december of 2010 so there was certainly a lot of interest in the tools that were being used um obviously i cannot make a claim to how many of those people then installed and used the tool but these were popular programs these were programs that people were you were downloading a lot of from both source forage and github uh yes i have a question yes um so that's why i said yes okay so one question that i have is you were talking about media portrayals right and made this great point that anonymous doesn't have a central press contact yeah and the interesting thing is when you have an institution with the central press contact in your reporter writing about them you always have that central point to balance your coverage alpha like you may agree you may react against it but it's always orient around that one point for action with anonymous that's obviously complicated because not only do you not have a central point but people call themselves anonymous they're playful they do whatever they want they they make up videos to troll news organizations to embed them into different things or play around with different things how would you have you could you talk a little bit about how that playful dynamic that slightly figuring out their organization by creating and performing its own representation on the fly influences media portrayals in terms of giving journalists more or less latitude to work with more or less freedom to work with and constructing those stories yeah so i think it's really clear that at least in december of 2010 probably still now journalists do not know how to deal with these types of organizations this was apparent during the operation payback coverage this was apparent during the occupy wall street coverage where like every story was like started with a i don't know who to talk to so i'm just going to talk to random people and say that they're speaking for occupy and even though people in the occupy cancer like i do not speak for all of occupy i speak for me journalists had a very hard time sort of processing that information because that's not how they're used to covering protest organizations they're used to their being a press liaison who is like this is our message this is what we're saying this is when we're going to have things here's where you should show up to cover our action because they're interested in getting that coverage but these new types of protest organizations have a new have a different set of values which are primarily horizontal are about internal community organization with press coverage as a not a primary goal um so it's it's difficult for the press to figure out how to deal with this and the opening of the press channel was like a great thing it sort of enabled press who are interested to sort of talk to people who wanted to talk to the press who were articulate who could articulate things about anonymous that were difficult to sort of translate into the sort of normal way news gets covered um it was still really it was still really hard and was still really difficult because you didn't know who was telling you the truth who was lying to you they're just weird like the anonymous is just weird um and they're willfully weird and that's part of who they are and god bless them for that um but yeah they're weird and that weirdness doesn't always translate into take what i'm saying about politics seriously which is another problem that anonymous has as they try to push more into being a serious if alternative political organization um because there are definitely people in anonymous who are more affiliated with traditional activist groups who have experience in activism and digital activism and who are interested in making the group a political entity in an in an activist sense but there are other parts of the group that are like you are messing with how i with my lulls is serious this was a big problem right after operation technology and during operation technology when half when a big chunk of anonymous was like we are just here for the lulls we just want to troll people and mess shit up online where what's all this serious stuff like because operation challenge was initially like stop messing with our internet church of Scientology and then some other anti Scientologists activists came into the group and were like actually this is a serious thing and a big deal and there was a major conflict between that population and the population that just wanted to mess shit up online so this is this is an ongoing conflict within the group that is starting to fall on the side of the activists a little bit but is still a point of conflict David i really like the reading so you have your title and i really like the reading off of the technology back to the group and the politics and the cultural meaning of it which is fantastic i actually want to have you address the first part of it which is will lower iron cannon terrace apart so one of the aspects of traditional civil disobedience the reason you accept consequences excuse me is first let you thereby accept the rule of law you're not saying all laws just this one you object to and second of all has a very practical effect of raising the stakes sufficiently that people don't do it unless they're willing to go to jail so it's got to be if you're going to break the law it's got to be pretty important and this has it keeps one of the things that keeps chaos very easy to break the law without consequence so we now have a situation as you describe it in which the purposefully the it's been lowered to accept the the defaults press the button and you can now take down a site and it may be one that has content which you object to or it may be one that provides a service which you don't seem to object to so i'm wondering if these targets if the targets of anonymous were um i'm gonna make an assumption here and slap me down if i'm wrong if the targets of anonymous and the use of the cannon were less to your political liking so imagine that they're disrupting services that you actually care about and you'll like and you think you're doing good things in the world they're taking down global voices you know because whatever crazy it's some who knows i'm not suggesting they would but imagine that's the case um would you have the same would you be talking about this this the same way and if not is it going to are we going to survive well i probably can't answer the are we going to survive question that seems really big it's your title is it going to tear us apart so there are a couple questions in your question um to address the first question it's actually really hard to take down a website with a DDoS action now especially an all-volunteer DDoS action actually there is substantial evidence that there were non-volunteer botnets involved in operation payback and nonvolunt the use of non-volunteer botnets in my view sufficient substantially compromises the ethical integrity of an action um so imagine that the next rev is more effective yeah so this loik is actually not used much anymore because it's a dangerous tool to use um there are other versions of the tool that have come out once called hoik or high orbit ion cannon um there are also exploit based tools that are used that are far more effective um so in my paper on the ethics of DDoS actions one of my criteria is are you like it addresses the censorship criticism are you actually stopping speech or are you only stopping one flow of speech from an organization that has many different flows of speech and your global voices example is very akin to the uh escuelera journal example that i brought up briefly earlier which was a event in the late 1990s where there was a journal of basque political writing hosted by a ISP in spain um called the institute for global communications and this was at a period in spain when the basques were blowing shit up and killing some people and it was they were not popular and people thought that this website was affiliated with eta which is the extremely violent wing of the basque separatist movement um and a number of organizations got behind a popularly based DDoS action to force the IGC to stop hosting this website uh actually el país which is the major newspaper in spain got behind it briefly before they were like maybe we shouldn't be supporting the silencing of content online maybe that's not in our best interests um that that DDoS action was primarily based on impermanently implementing the effects of the DDoS action it said we want this content gone we are going to make the content gone until you make the content gone um it was primarily about silencing speech and content and that is ethically inappropriate so it's somebody who thinks that mooks are bad i withdraw the global voices example because it is not global voices it's a blog it exists so take an example where it's a service so it fits within your ethical guideline and it's somebody who thinks that online education is the devil's work so whatever reason it's atheist it's whatever that's still existing primarily online if we're going to go with an organization that i like say the recent DDoS actions against MIT uh that was i may not well that was against like i could still go to class like i still made it to my class even though the network was down so even though i couldn't get my even though i couldn't get online to MIT.edu i could still go to class it wasn't abridging the primary function of MIT as an organization it pissed off a lot of my friends who had to deal with it but i don't think it was an unethical use of the tactic i may not agree with why they chose to target MIT i may not think that it was a particularly appropriate action but i don't think that it was an unethical use of the tactic. So you're judging ethics here by well i'm not sure this is correct but there's two senses one is are the people doing it doing it properly with an ethical sense are they doing it for ethical reasons are they not taking down a critical function still go to class the other is um in are we headed towards there's a world in which everybody's acting ethically but it's an unlivable world institutions can't survive sites that we care about are hindered to the point where you know it's um these tools seem to enable us to get to that dystopia and i'm assuming it's a dystopia but i'd like to hear why it's not um if it's not so i don't think it's a dystopia because they're not that effective um they're just they're just not um i think that there is this arms race happening between people who are developing disruptive technology and people who are developing people and sys admins um so you get sys admins and the disruptors and they're in this arms race against each other and they maintain parity for the most part um where people who are interested in creating robust systems are continuing to work and people who for whatever reason have interest in in creating disruptive technology are continuing to work like neither one of them is stopping um people are not gonna or arbor networks is not going out of business anytime soon akamai is not going out of business anytime soon there's always going to be an interest in maintaining the robustness of the network just as there is always going to be an interest by various groups in disrupting the network so i don't think that we're headed towards some we're not barreling off a cliff but we are sort of barreling down an endless road like there have always been people who are interested in disrupting the system and there are always people who are interested in not disrupting the system i guess i just don't see it i don't i don't see it changing anytime soon i see this this tension between the people who don't like the way things are and the people who do maintaining yeah quick question um what impact has the arrest of sabu had on kind of anonymous as a community non-community every time you like people in subversive organizations get turned by the state a lot or turn out to have been plants from the police or like this happens more than a lot of disruptive organizations like to admit and every time it happens people are upset and it shakes the organization and sometimes it barely destabilizes the organization um i don't think anonymous is the type of quote unquote organization to be destabilized just because it is not an organization it is a culture and the sex pistols didn't kill punk um and the arrest of sabu is not going to kill anonymous just because you have an a bad event or sort of an exploitive event that happens within a culture doesn't mean that the culture is dead um yeah directly oh we're out of time i'm going to stay in this chair until people stop talking to me i'm going to touch the microphone