Floodnet's back - and it still doesn't make sense.

Karmin Karasic - you may not know the name. But you might know the Electronic Disobedience Theater. For those who don't she was one of the main protagonists of the Floodnet movement of 1998, where they "excercised their rights of freedom of speech and artistic expression". To put it another way, they knocked a bunch of sites offline in protest at various forms of repression, torture and censorship. Hang on - they're censoring censorship with more censorship? Artistic logic has never been too hot in recent years, and now Floodnet is returning.

Spot another flaw in the following missive taken from one of their websites -

FloodNet was Art, not hacking. FloodNet never accessed or destroyed any data, nor tampered with security, nor changed websites, nor crashed servers.

Yet, two paragraphs down..

As the target...was automatically reloaded, surfers could also upload server log messages, like "human_rights not found on this server."

Wait - last time I checked, messing with server log messages without permission isn't allowed.

And now the American election trail is hotting up, Republican sites like http://www.rnc.org/ and http://www.georgewbush.com/ are in for a rough ride from the Black Hat Hackers Bloc.

"We want to bombard (the Republican sites) with so much traffic that nobody can get in," said CrimethInc, one of the Bloc's members. It's one of several groups planning to distribute software tools to reload Republican sites over and over again. These FloodNet programs are similar to hackers' distributed denial-of-service attacks, which overwhelm a server with thousands and thousands of simultaneous requests for information.

It's okay though, because it's "not hacking".

Yeah, right.

Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, or EDT, is apparently releasing a FloodNet program of his own...presumably for the election run-up. Despite Karmin Karasic stating that the EDT was done with for good.

How do we benefit from knocking these sites offline? Nothing is guaranteed to whip up the sympathy vote from fence-sitters who want to see some action taken against the "nasty hackers" that threaten to engulf the whole internet (which, you can guarantee, would be the line that the Bush party would retaliate with). Better to let the truth speak out and let everyone see the lies for themselves, than hide them and miss the point completely.

I leave the final word to The Pull, co-founder of the online political action group

"If you feel that you must shut up someone through intimidation or false accusations or any other method -- you are not relying on the superiority of the truth.

People can not condemn censorship and then embrace it."

Paperghost

Links:
The original Floodnet
A gathering storm
Electronic Civil Disobedience returns