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Two can play at that game

By Michael J. Smith on Monday December 6, 2010 05:48 PM

It always makes me happy, wildly giddily happy, when people fight back with whatever modest means are at their disposal:

Anonymous attacks PayPal in 'Operation Avenge Assange'

Anonymous has launched a broad-ranging campaign in support of Wikileaks, starting with a DDoS assault on a PayPal website.

The denial of service attack lasted for eight hours and resulted in numerous service disruptions, Panda Security reports [1]. The group [2], spawned from anarchic message board 4chan, first came to prominence with a long running campaign against the church of Scientology... [Anonymous] said on its website:

While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas....
Operation Avenge Assange [3] will incorporate a combination of political lobbying (writing to MPs etc), a consumer boycott of PayPal as well as practical support (mirroring) and advocacy for Wikileaks. The traditional denial of service attacks will also come into play with an assault against the ThePayPalblog.com. ®
Okay, okay, all you Grinches out there, I hear ya. This sort of thing is utterly futile -- until suddenly it isn't. Robin Hood didn't bring down the Plantagenet monarchy, either. But we still remember him.

Comments (13)

I understand the intent, but I'm also sympathetic to this argument:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/12/the_amazon_boyc.html

Obviously this is about Amazon, not PayPal, but I believe the circumstances were similar.

Even the futile should be undertaken. The enemy only has so many pieces on the board.

senecal:

It's political theater, or counter-Spectacle! Like marching nude and holding up the Cuban flag in a 4th of July parade. It pisses people off, and that's the joy of it.

It warms my heart. Thanks, /b/.

FB:

Did that just happen? Did someone actually post a link to econlog on SMBIVA, and not as a joke?

MJS:

Yes. Wonders never cease.

Picador:

The econlog guy is very confused. He kicks off his argument with the apparent assumption that Amazon was hosting Wikileaks out of altruism. He seems to be unaware that Amazon has any revenue streams or business divisions other than its bookstore. He also seems to be unaware of the DMCA provisions protecting ISPs like Amazon from liability for things their customers do on the Internet.

FB:

Econlog is great and all, but I much prefer Caplan's personal homepage:

http://www.bcaplan.com/

Was that so wrong? It seemed relevant to the matter at hand. Excuse me if I'm green to the SMBIVA social mores. Yeesh.

MJS:

No, no, not wrong at all. Just a little off the beaten track for us.

hapa:

DDoS is slowly gaining the same meaning as 'unfriend'

diamonddog:

It looks like they brought down the Swiss bank site they went after (postfinance.ch). It's been down for several hours. From what I understand they need more firepower for Paypal which was something of a bust on the first go. Considering that WL mirrors went from 100+ to over 800 in a very short time, surely the DDoS army is growing too. We may well see some giants taken down, if only for a few hours.

This Anonymous person(s) seems like a first class organizer.

I can has governmental transparency?

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