Another Anonymous DDoS arrest!

Yet Another person has been arrested over the Anonymous attacks on Amazon, Mastercard and Visa.  The Telegraph reports, in an article entitled New arrest over Anonymous' pro-WikiLeaks attacks, that a 22 year old human (I've removed the prejudicial gender) (though perhaps it shouldn't be huMAN either.  Maybe huwoman!  But then that would be the same but different.  Um... Huperson, that'll do!) from Cleveland has been arrested in connection with the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the offending web sites.  It seems ironic to me that the authorities are desperately searching for ways to prosecute and intimidate people who they feel have made any attempt to interfere with the legitimate use of the internet.  But hang on a minute!  Who is being prosecuted for disrupting WikiLeaks?  Is the federal government of the United States being arrested and imprisoned for instigating a giant assault on WikiLeaks?  No!  Are Mastercard or Visa being inconvenienced for illegitimately preventing WikiLeaks doing legal business on the internet?  No!  Are Amazon being fined for illegitimately disrupting WikiLeaks' perfectly legitimate business activities?  No!  These companies are waging a kind of internet war all of their own.  And I bet if one investigated the matter that WikiLeaks would be squeaky clean and the likes of the Bank of America and Amazon that they could be found to be breaking the law in many ways.  I'm just voicing a suspicion you understand.  It is a suspicion born of experience though.

Many years ago I wrote some software similar to the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (the software used for the DDoS) to bugger up people's web servers.  I knew it wouldn't have a major effect whilst it was only me that was operating it.  But at the time it seemed like a perfectly legitimate activity.  I simply entered a URL and set the software running and it would repeatedly request the web page.  And software can do that pretty fast!  Why did I do this?  Because I was getting too much SPAM!  After a while of getting annoyed I realised that no one would do anything about this so I aimed to put a pointless load on the websites that benefitted from the SPAM.  Well it kept me happy for a while.  It strikes me that when organisations like Amazon and PayPal (yes they are another guilty party) abuse their high and mighty position to cow-tow to the all powerful governments and cause great hardship to other people that it may just be reasonable in a "democratic" sort of way for people to inundate their servers with requests.

Considering that one person running one piece of software will make virtually no difference to the offending web site it seems very democratic for everybody to have some of this software and they can effectively "vote" against a company by firing it at them.  If only a few people were upset nothing much would happen but if thousands objected then the offending company would have to at least deal with the problem.  It always seems so unfair to me that companies like the Bank of America or Amazon can take offensive action against someone and actually cause serious harm but if someone retaliates they will get arrested.

Its not that I think this sort of retaliatory action is simply a good thing in itself.  I actually think it is a bad thing to interfere with other people's web sites.  We have to be consistent here (unlike the US government).  Internet freedom should be protected vigorously.  But that is the point.  Amazon and Visa and ... etc ... acted illegitimately and curtailed someone else's freedom.  What they should have done was to have followed the law and if WikiLeaks were judged by a court of law to be acting illegally then they could quite legally withdraw their services.  Simples!  But No!  Those cronky companies took the law into their own hands.  I find that seriously objectionable.  So when someone does the same kind of thing to them (but so miniscule compared with their offence) I applaud them for standing up against these megalomanic, self-important, arrogant, bigoted, control freak bullies.

WELL DONE ANONYMOUS!