In his famous treatise On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau argued that individuals can promote justice by disobeying the law. History is replete with examples of civil disobedience. Mohandas Gandhi used civil disobedience to achieve independence in India. Using civil disobedience, Martin Luther King won a Nobel Prize for his work in the US civil rights movement, claiming "You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice." South Africans used it to abolish apartheid. Women marched, had hunger strikes, and went to jail in order to gain the right to vote during women's suffrage. The Boston Tea Party used it to express their frustration having to pay taxes without representation, leading to the War for Independence. Examples of smaller civil disobedience abound in most every activist ideology. (In other news, UK students smash Treasury and Supreme Court buildings as parliament triples tuition fees.) But how do we determine when civil disobedience is and is not justified? Is following the law and abiding by the purported social contract always moral? Is it ever acceptable to break the law if the law is against our conscience? Are these hackers justified in attacking what even UN Human Rights head suggests is censorship?
FTA:
ORGANISERS of the group behind cyber attacks on mastercard.com and other websites have vowed to extend their campaign to anyone with an "anti-WikiLeaks agenda". In an online chat with Agence France-Presse, organisers of "Anonymous" said thousands of volunteers were taking part in their defence of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, whom they described as a "free-speech martyr"...
Anonymous launched its first distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack on Saturday, taking down PayPal's official blog, ThePayPalBlog.com, for at least eight hours. Since then they have targeted the websites of other companies that have severed ties to Assange or WikiLeaks, including Mastercard and the Swiss Post Office bank.
The website of the Swedish prosecutor's office pursuing Assange on allegations of sex crimes was also hit, as was the website of the lawyer representing two Swedish women in the case. "The current target is mastercard.com, but anyone that has an anti-Wikileaks agenda is within our scope of attack," they said in the online chat with AFP...
"Operation Payback stands for free speech and no censorship, which is also what Assange is going for," they said. "The general motivation is freedom of information/speech, which is currently under attack...
In a classic DDoS attack, a "botnet" of zombie computers, machines infected with viruses, are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming its servers, slowing service or knocking it offline completely.
Hackers sets sights on WikiLeaks opponents
DISCUSS!
Original posting by Braincrave Second Life staff on Dec 12, 2010 at http://www.braincrave.com/viewblog.php?id=402
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