Hacktivism, Anonymous & a New Breed of Protest in a Networked World
HACKTIVISM, ANONYMOUS & A NEW BREED OF PROTEST IN A NETWORKED WORLD Noah C.N. Hampson Introduction Early on the morning of November 30, 2010, WikiLeaks.org came under assault by a hacker known as ‚th3j35t3r‛ (The Jester).1 By launching what is known as a denial of service (DoS) attack with soft- ware of his own invention, The Jester overwhelmed WikiLeaks’ serv- ers with requests for information.2 WikiLeaks.org soon crashed, and remained down for over a day.3 Days before, WikiLeaks made interna- tional headlines by posting on its website roughly 250,000 classified documents stolen from the U.S. government.4 On his Twitter feed, The Jester claimed credit: ‚www.wikileaks.org — TANGO DOWN — for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, ‘other assets’ & foreign relations #wikileaks #fail‛.5 To get its web site back online, WikiLeaks promptly switched hosting providers and began renting bandwidth from Amazon.com.6 DoS and other attacks against WikiLeaks continued, but were unsuc- cessful.7 Shortly thereafter, however, Amazon ousted WikiLeaks from 1 Sean-Paul Correll, ‘Tis the Season of DDoS – WikiLeaks Edition, PandaLabs Blog (Dec. 4, 2010), http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/tis-the-season-of-ddos-wikileaks-editio/. 2 See Neil J. Rubenkind, WikiLeaks Attack: Not the First by th3j35t3r, PC (Nov. 29, 2010), http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373559,00.asp 3 See Correll, supra note 1. 4 See Scott Shane & Andrew W. Lehren, Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy, N.Y. Times, Nov. 29, 2010, at A1, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html.
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