For the last year and a half or so, I’ve been studying the use of distributed denial of service attacks in activism. This is part of a larger analysis of the practice of civil disobedience in an online context, an exploration which has taken me into hacktivism in the 1990s and early 2000s, doxxing and human flesh search on the Chinese internet, and Anonymous in the present day. Last year I wrote a paper on the evolving design of activist DDOS tools, and how changes in those designs affected the participant population in a number of different actions over the course of a decade and a half. This year I want to push forward on a ethical framework for these actions, something that will allow for an analysis of the aims, methods, and outcomes of these actions, and a judgement on the ethics of the action, and (hopefully) the long-range political viability of the tactic and civil disobedience online as a whole.
Distributed denial of service attacks are attractive forms of digital civil disobedience for several reasons: they present low technological barriers to participation, have a potential for high biographical impact among first time participants, and have recently attracted large amounts of media attention. The goal of this project is, using a stable of six historical case studies, to present an ethics of DDOS actions, and by extension, an ethics of online civil disobedience. The case studies will include such examples as the IGC attacks in Spain in the late 90s, Electronic Disturbance Theater actions in the early 2000s, and the Anonymous-led Operation Payback attacks in 2010, each of which present a unique confluence of technological, political, legal and operational factors allowing for a full spectrum of ethical analysis. The ethical analysis will cover property rights, free speech, public versus private spaces online, participant responsibility, legal consequences of protest, and technological changes.
An interesting thing to consider in this analysis, when compared with the use of denial of service tactics in the “real world,” is the overwhelmingly corporatized/privatized nature of the network. This means that while IRL denial of service actions (such as sit ins) take place in a primarily legally-dictated environment, digitally-mediated DDOS actions take place in an economic- and corporate-dominated landscape. This will have strong implications for the theoretical base of my analysis.