Tom Watson on DDoS Anonymous Attacks

By John Ballard

Tom Watson is among my few heroes. Five years ago he was instrumental in orchestrating a blogswarm in support of Mukhtaran Bibi, a young Pakistani woman who was sentenced to be executed following a gang rape in accordance with the savage mandates of tribal laws and customs. He is too modest to advertise himself, but as co-founder of Drum Major Institute his peers (check the link, scroll down all the way) place him among the Who's Who of what I would call many of the right people.

In the wake of the Wikileaks flap he put up a clearly-worded response not calculated to win points with any particular interest other than that of sticking to good principles. (I see it attracted a string of comments I have not yet read.) This recent fallout, the distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), is the subject of his latest post, Denial of Service, Denial of Speech.
His analogy of DDoS as a molotov cocktail bears serious reading.

On a cold morning in February, 1989 the telephone woke me at dawn with the news of a denial of service attack on the newspaper I worked for as deputy editor. Here's how that particular DoS worked, in technical terms for all you geeks out there:

Two men threw a pair of Molotov cocktails through the front windows of The Riverdale Press in the Bronx, gutting the newspaper's editorial offices and shutting down the building for five months.

Those men, like the group that declares it is defending Wikileaks and its leader Julian Assange, were anonymous. And like the anonymous attackers of Amazon, Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, they were attempting to silence without consent or recourse the commercial speech of an institution they disagreed strongly with. They believed their cause was a just one, based upon a gross and unlawful insult, as well as their deeply-held beliefs.

In their case, it was the strong conviction that author Salman Rushdie should die for the religious blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, and that a newspaper that defended Rushdie's First Amendment rights in the United States to sell his book in any bookstore in the land must be silenced and shuttered. Who can doubt that these men (never caught) believed their cause was a just one, and that The Riverdale Press deserved to lose its editorial voice using the most expedient technology available (firebombs)?

Rather than parse the rest, the reader is referred to the link.
It's short and sweet, driving home two easy to grasp points:

1. Easy anonymity lacks courage and obscures ideas
2. You don't stand up for free speech by using a muzzle.

What's not to understand about that? Most readers will get it at once, but as with inflammatory issues some will remain in denial of the two valid points, consistent with the first two of Jeff Jarvis' Bill of Rights in Cyberspace

I. We have the right to connect.
II. We have the right to speak freely.