The 24-hour Athenian democracy

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileaks

The 24-hour Athenian democracy

Dec 8th 2010, 11:48 by B.G. | WASHINGTON

I'M AWARE of your need to stay anonymous, but I have to be able to describe
the scope of this movement. Can any of you tell me where you're typing from?
I am talking to members of a group called bAnonymousb, using a web-based
collaborative text-editing service. It is the first such interview for all of
us, and their answers begin to collide on the page. One member comes from
Norway; another shows surprise, then offers that she is from New Zealand.
Another writes that group members come from Nepal and Eastern Russia. They
all speak through pseudonyms, but I don't even know which psuedonym comes
from what country because shortly after I read these answers, someone who
calls himself bTuxb erases them all and writes

We are Everywhere. We are everyone. We are Anonymous.

Members of Anonymous, whoever they are, have in the last week taken offline
websites run by Postfinance, a Swiss bank that closed the account of Julian
Assange, founder of WikiLeaks; PayPal, an online payments processor that
halted donations to WikiLeaks; and the Swedish prosecutor who has brought a
case against Mr Assange. As I followed some "anons" over internet relay chat
(IRC) on Tuesday, they voted among themselves not to attack the bUK metro
policeb. I'm not sure which website they were referring to. After I left the
chat, they turned their attention to lieberman.senate.gov, the website of the
American senator Joe Lieberman. According to Sean-Paul Correll, a threat
researcher at Panda Security, that site was down, briefly, at 7:11 US Eastern
time on Tuesday. Logs from the chat room the group was using indicate that
for some time all of senate.govbthe website of every American senatorbwas
either down completely or slow in many parts of the world. What all of these
sites have in common is that their owners have in some way impeded the work
of WikiLeaks or its founder, Julian Assange.

Anonymous is not WikiLeaks, and the more famous whistle-blower does not seem
to be pulling the strings. Nor, in fact, does anyone. At any point, anybody
can show up in one of several IRC conversations and make a case for a target.
Whoever else is there registers a vote, or an argument. During the attack on
Mr Lieberman's site, anons argued that America's .gov domains would be
difficult to take offline, and therefore were not a worthwhile target. One
anon pointed out that the Senator does not do business through his website.
One wrote, simply, that the site was down in Germany, and that they were all
going to jail.

But there is order, of a sort, within Anonymous. Anons, though they know each
other only by their pseudonyms, develop trust over time through constant
participation in the organising chats. The power of the group lies in a piece
of software called a blow-orbit ion cannonb. Do not be put off by this scrap
of jargon; an ion cannon is a fictional weapon used in fictional space epics.
But the very real software allows someone to volunteer his own computer and
network connection as part of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack,
a coordinated mass of requests that can crash a web server. Traditionally, a
DDoS comes from personal computers that have been illegally loaded with
software and tethered to a single command server as part of a bbotnetb. The
low-orbit ion cannon is, essentially, a volunteer botnet that Anonymous uses
to take down websites.

About ten people, called bOPsb, are able to launch an attack. If any OP
abuses his powerbif he fails to heed what anons call bthe hive mindb in IRC
conversationsb the other OPs can lock him out of the chat. If any anon fails
to be inspired by the target, she can remove her own computer from the
volunteer botnet, reducing its effect. Anonymous is a 24-hour Athenian
democracy, run by a quorum of whoever happens to be awake. It's hard even to
define Anonymous as a bgroupb, since not all members participate in all
projects. The attempt to take down Mr Lieberman's site, for example, is part
of an effort called boperation paybackb, a demonstration of support for Mr
Assange. According to Mr Correll,

Anonymous does not have a typical hierarchical government, but each mission
does have a self-appointed dedicated organising body. This organizing body
begins the process of setting up the necessary infrastructure, recruiting new
members, researching/identifying vulnerable targets, media outreach, and
more. However, the organizing body is free to change (and has changed) as the
mission evolves day to day. I have observed at least one takeover when the
greater group was not happy about what the organisers were doing. Steve (from
TheTechHerald) and I had asked the Pirate Party to issue a statement asking
Operation Payback to stop their attacks and resort to legal measures of
protest. Many organisers agreed, but the greater bulk of the Anonymous group
did not. They became extremely angry at the organisers and temporarily took
control of the entire campaign, even releasing their own statement to the
media.  Anons do understand their limitations. The ones I talked to know that
to take down a Swedish prosecutor's website does not halt the prosecution in
Sweden. They described their motivations, variously, as trying bto raise
awarenessb, bto show the prosecutor that we have the ability to actb and
bdamage and attentionb. This is all that a denial-of-service attack can do:
register protest. It is not cyberwar. It is a propaganda coup. And it's
limited to a limited set of websites: vulnerable, but important. Or, as an
anon put it while discussing targets yesterday,

Paypal and visa are unbeatable, so do is Everydns, and interpol will rape all
of us, Postfinance is the most able to suffer our rage, who the **** is
lieverman?  He's just a senator. Almost became vice-president, once. It was
years ago.