Molly sez, "For the past two years I've been researching activist uses of distributed denial of service actions. I just finished my masters thesis on the subject (for the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT). Guiding this work is the overarching question of how civil disobedience and disruptive activism can be practiced in the current online space. The internet acts as a vital arena of communication, self expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, people to organize, many will turn to the internet as the zone of that activity.

"Online, people sign petitions, investigate stories and rumors, amplify links and videos, donate money, and show their support for causes in a variety of ways. But as familiar and widely accepted activist tools--petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns and others--find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins? This thesis grounds activist DDOS historically, focusing on early deployments of the tactic as well as modern instances to trace its development over time, both in theory and in practice.

"Through that examination, as well as tool design and development, participant identity, and state and corporate responses, this thesis presents an account of the development and current state of activist DDOS actions. It ends by presenting an analytical framework for the analysis of activist DDOS actions."

This is a subject I've given some thought to -- after reading the introduction to Molly's thesis, I'm convinced that this is something I need to read in full.

DISTRIBUTED DENIAL OF SERVICE ACTIONS AND THE CHALLENGE OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ON THE INTERNET (Thanks, Molly!)

Mother Jones's Josh Harkinson has an excellent piece on the history of KnightSec, an Anonymous offshoot that publicized the Steubenville and Halifax rape cases, galvanizing both the public and police responses to both. The piece includes an interview with Michelle McKee, who is credited with swaying a critical mass of Anons to participation in KnightSec. The whole story is pretty incredible, especially where it spills over into the real world:

The video went viral, and the next Occupy Steubenville rally drew 2,000 people to the courthouse steps. Because MC brought the sound system, he ended up serving as the de facto master of ceremonies (which is how he ended up with his Twitter handle). As he played excerpts of the Nodianos video over the loudspeakers, he told me, people in the crowd grew so angry that he started to worry that they would riot.

When the Steubenville sheriff showed up, MC invited him up and grilled him about the case. In the end, he diffused the tension by giving the cop a hug. "I'm going to take this negative energy and turn it into a positive thing," he remembers thinking. "You've got to let the crowd vent."

And vent they did. For four hours, there was a catharsis of personal pain and grief that nobody in the small town could have imagined. Women who had been raped stood in front of the crowd, clad in Guy Fawkes masks, to share their stories. Some of them unmasked at the end of their testimonies as they burst into tears. Rapes at parties, date rapes, rapes by friends and relatives—their pent-up secrets came pouring out. "It turned into this women's liberation movement, in a way," MC recalls. "And it just changed everything. There was nothing anybody could do against us at that point because it was so real and so true."

Exclusive: Meet the Woman Who Kicked off Anonymous' Anti-Rape Operations

The first-ever wedding sanctioned by the Church of Kopimism (an officially Swedish church that reifies copying and characterizes file-sharing as a sacred act) was convened last weekend. It was a beautiful and awfully funny and joyous occasion, judging from the video. Here's Torrentfreak's Ernesto with more:

It was only a matter of time before the first Kopimist couple would become married, and last weekend this joyful union took place at the Share conference in Belgrade.

On stage, a Romanian woman and an Italian man were joined in a holy Kopimist act. Both promised to share the rest of their lives together and to uphold the highest sharing standards.

The Church was delighted to bring the news and commented: “We are very happy today. Love is all about sharing. A married couple share everything with each other.”

Like any other matrimony, a Kopimism marriage is bound by rules. The Church of Kopimism allows the couple to share their love with others, as long as those others don’t steal it. Most importantly, however, they have to copy and remix themselves.

“Hopefully, they will copy and remix some DNA-cells and create a new human being. That is the spirit of Kopimism. Feel the love and share that information. Copy all of its holiness.”

Or to put it in the words of another famous religion: “Be fruitful and multiply, teem on the earth and multiply in it.”

File-Sharing Church Weds First Couple

Jeroen Vader, the owner of PasteBin (a service that provides a simple way to share blobs of text, originally popular for sharing code-fragments and error messages, now also very popular as an anonymous repository for leaked documents and manifestos, especially those affiliated with Anonymous) has revealed that he sometimes shares his server logs with law enforcement agencies, and sometimes censors the material posted by Pastebin's users. People acting under the Anonymous banner and the People's Liberation Front have responded by creating a PasteBin clone called AnonPaste, running a free/open zero-knowledge PasteBin implementation called ZeroBin. AnonPaste's administrators claim that they will not censor or cooperate with law-enforcement, though as far as I can tell, there is no facility in ZeroBin for auditing the admins' adherence to these promises (that is, they could be censor-happy snitches and it wouldn't be easy to learn this fact or prove it to third parties). ZeroBin does have a facility for encrypting the data between the browser and ZeroBin, which means that to the extent that ZeroBin is free from defects, and the hosts of a ZeroBin instance have not added malicious (or incompetent) modifications, ZeroBin's administrators can't know what content is being hosted there.

AnonPaste's admins expressed their intentions in a press-release posted to their own service (of course!):

And so the PLF and Anonymous have teamed up to offer a paste service truly free of all such nonsense. Here is a brief list of some of the features of AnonPaste: 1) No connection logs, period. 2) All pastes are encrypted BY THE BROWSER using 256 bit AES encryption. This means there is no usable paste data stored on the server for the authorities or anyone else to seize. 3) No moderation or censorship. Because the data on our servers is unreadable by us (or anyone), the responsibility for the legality or appropriateness of any paste is the sole responsibility of the person posting. So there will be no need for us to police this service, and in fact we don't even have the ability of deleting any particular paste. 4) No advertisements. This service will be totally user supported through donations. Links for this are available on the web site. Paste services have become very popular, and many people want to post controversial material. This is especially so for those involved in Information Activism. We feel that it is essential that everyone, and especially those in the movement - have a safe and secure paste service that they can trust with their valuable and often politically sensitive material. As always, we believe in the radical notion that information should be free. SIGNED -- Anonymous and the Staff of the Peoples Liberation Front

Megan Geuss of Ars Technica has more detail:

Indeed, without the possibility of deleting information, authorities might argue the site poses a threat to personal privacy and institutional operations. Vader told Ars, "Here at Pastebin.com we think freedom of speech is very important, but we do think there should be some form of content moderation, because people do abuse paste websites, and if there is really no delete option, this could cause major harm." He added that yesterday his site released a "My Alerts" feature, which allows people to track names or keywords on Pastebin, so if illegal information shows up they can submit a takedown request to Pastebin in a timely manner.

And InfoWeek notes that ZeroBin has not been stress-tested against the kinds of DDOS and other attacks that might threaten AnonPaste's operation and philosophy of anonymity. As of this afternoon, access to AnonPaste has been on-and-off, suggesting there are still many hurdles for the endeavor to function at all.

Anonymous builds its own Pastebin-like site

Idlepigeon sez, "Canada's government has moved to call Anonyomous to testify before the House Affairs Comitte, over threats made to a minister who's been pushing to pass Bill C30---online surveillance legislation. In this very funny piece from the Globe and Mail's Tabatha Southey, the entire Internet shows up to testify."

Anonymous is so nebulous that for the federal government to call Anonymous to testify is almost to call the Internet itself – something the government may regret.

“I'd to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak today,” the first witness might say. “The threats against the minister are grave and on the advice of my consul, Mr. Fry, I'd just like to assure the minister that I … am never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna … ”

When political hacks subpoena online hackers, look out for :-(

(Image: Anonymous-Suit-black High Resolution PNG (2404 x 3890), a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from thinkanonymous's photostream)

Apparently inspired by the Polish parliamentarians who showed up for work in Guy Fawkes masks for the signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a US-driven secret copyright treaty), members of Bulgaria's parliament repeated the trick.

The MPs say they support copyright laws, but oppose ACTA over its possible turning into an instrument to limit freedom of speech, to control internet use, and to turn into an obstacle for the exchange of information and knowledge online.

On January 26, the Bulgarian government signed in Tokyo the international ACTA agreement, vowing to make downloading content similar to forgery of brands.

The agreement was sealed by Bulgarian ambassador to Japan Lyubomir Todorov, based on a decision by the Bulgarian cabinet taken hastily on January 11.

Bulgarian MPs Wear Guy Fawkes Mask to Protest ACTA (via Techdirt)