Some U.S. Political Tech Vets Don't Think Much of DDoS

Photo credit: Treviño

To dig even deeper into this question of whether distributed denial of service attacks are some sort of legitimate expression of civil disobedience, we asked a handful of people what they thought. The sample for our wildly unscientific micro-survey on DDoS might be politically diverse, but it is professionally homogenous: these are folks who at one point or another in their careers, were responsible for major web presences and web services for some of the biggest political candidates, publications, and advocacy groups in American politics. You might expect that these is a group of folks who are looking down the road at a future where their next political campaign or advocacy campaign might be even more of a target for DDoS attacks than they already are.

Our question was, admittedly, framed toward the extremes. ("What is our view of the use of DDoS by online activists? Great new tactic or dangerous?") But one takeway from our quick and dirty polling is that some of the folks behind online politics in the United States think that DDoS ranges from being an ineffective and misguided tactic to a frighteningly destructive idea. Though there were, to be sure, exceptions. After the jump, their responses. (Affiliations, where they're given, are just for identification; their words are their own.)

Soren Dayton was once a staffer on the 2008 McCain presidential campaign and is now with New Media Strategies:

DDoS is wrong on so many levels. On one level it is a form of vandalism and simply criminal. Second, it usually requires illegal behavior to even execute by hacking a range of insufficiently protected computers. On a higher level, it subjects people's moral judgments to threats by, in essence, a criminal techno-mob. 

By the way...the idea that DDoS could be a "great new tactic" is kind of shocking to me.

Markos Moulitsas put the "kos" in Daily Kos:

It makes me uncomfortable, for the same reason I feel uncomfortable at censorship attempts against Wikileaks -- it's a tactic that can be turned against me by hostile individuals. In my ideal world, Wikileaks wouldn't be under legal attack for doing what is clearly permissible under our Constitution, and thus supporters wouldn't have to retaliate with their own extra-legal tactics. 

Chuck DeFeo is on online strategist who was the "eCampaign Manager" for the 2004 Bush Campaign:

DDoS new?  Seriously, the left both in the U.S. and abroad has been using DDoS attacks against conservative sites -- including sites I managed -- for years.  A large DDoS attack targeted GeorgeWBush.com in the final week of the campaign.  Much smaller attacks targeted other conservative sites I managed regularly.

Kombiz Lavasany has a background in labor politics and formerly served at the Democracy National Committee and is now with New Partner:

DDoS aren't new but it's troubling to see them being used by activists for two reasons. First, launching a DDoS is fairly easy to do, so easy that in '09 we were watching people following the #iranelection twitter stream pointing to websites that would initiate requests to web servers hosting the websites of official Iranian government websites. That's when I realized how easy it had become to participate in a DDoS attack. Secondly, actually hiding where you're coming from is very difficult to do and some of the amateur "hackers" who download DDoS software and carry out attacks are going to end up in prison because they believe they're anonymous when they're not.

So while I think DDoS are minimally disruptive, I'm more fearful because I think some kid who agrees with me politically somewhere is going to initiate a DDoS attack and get arrested and make the rest of us look like hoodlums all for taking down the public end of a website for 30 minutes. And for those of us who work in politics, we've seen a ton of legitimate traffic take down websites. We're pretty good at pointing our domains at more robust servers like ActBlue when our own websites can't handle the traffic.

Cheryl Contee is partner and co-founder at Fission Strategy and co-founder of the blog Jack and Jill Politics:

It's clearly a dangerous and desperate tactic. I think there are other forms of protest available that are not the online equivalent of breaking shop windows and burning down city blocks.

Patrick Ruffini, partner at Engage, was once the "eCampaign Director" at the Republican National Committee and the webmaster on the 2004 Bush campaign:

Why is "great new tactic" an option here? This is a violation of the law and interference with legitimate communications is distasteful at a minimum. Now, Wikileaks sympathizers have gone beyond DDOSing to compromise usernames and passwords for as many as 1.5 million people on Gawker Media. 

Nicco Mele was Howard Dean's Internet operations director on his 2004 presidential campaign, and he's a co-founder and president at EchoDitto, as well as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School:

Great new tactic. No one was hurt; all damage was temporary and quickly reversed; there is a legitimate political argument for direct action given the circumstances; all participants in the DDoS attack were voluntary (in other words, no malicious botnets were involved).

Several people opted to stay anonymous. Here's an online strategist who works with major progressive advocacy organizations:

All a DDoS attack is is a tactic. Without a message, its a parlor trick. The only time anyone pays attention anymore is when they lose money and/or there's a tragic human story associated with it that can sustain itself.  The only difference between what the activists did and what the government and various financial institutions did to WikiLeaks, is that one has a law to protect it.  If they can use it effectively, without getting arrested, more power to them. Arresting Assange keeps the story alive, gives it a compelling protagonist, and allows the DDoS to be effective.

I myself, prefer to work within the laws of our country, but civil disobedience, has been a time honored tradition for causes for generations.  Just as someone chains themselves to a store door, or puts up a picket line, or sits at a lunch counter, or interferes with traffic, a DDoS attack works as well, as long as it has a compelling story attached to it. It gets people's attention. There are far more serious risks associated with it, jail time and worse, but at the end of the day, protest can't be about feeling good, it has to be about being effective. The media ignores marching in the streets. They ignore calls to Congress.

This new shiny object, a DDoS attack, will keep them focused for now. This too shall pass, at some point, it will be relegated to the halls of  the effective protest retirement home, just like street protests from groups they've already seen, tree chaining, Code Pink, giant puppets, and Hitler signs. The media will move on to Sarah Palin's latest tweet, or how Obama needs to compromise more and give the GOP a pony.

Another veteran of progressive online politics:

DDoS attacks are a bit amateur, as far as "hacker" tactics go. However, they have effectively drawn people's attention to their cause.

And another long-time online organizer on the left:

I don't think that much of the DDoSs.  I think it's unlikely to have a major impact on policy or win the DDoSers new followers, so as a strategy for political wins, I think it's likely to fail.  That said, I don't think of it as particularly "dangerous."  I'm much more concerned about the state actors who have pressured private companies to take Wikileaks' stuff down extrajudicially.  That does feel dangerous to me.  And FWIW, the thing that comes to mind immediately when I think about the DDoSers is the folks at the WTO protests in Seattle who broke windows and set cars on fire.  It's effective for showing that there are people who are very intensely upset about the policies they're protesting, but I hardly think McDonalds saw them as a threat, ya know?

A right-leaning vet of the politech industry:

This is not a new phenomenon.  People should quit treating it as if it is.

For more on the topic, over on Slate, Foreign Policy's Evgeny Morozov picks up the DDoS conversation. Morozov comes down on the side of the idea that, in some circumstances, service attacks are legitimate civil disobedience, though, "declaring that DDoS is a form of civil disobedience is not the same as proclaiming that such attacks are always effective or likely to contribute to the goals of openness and transparency pursued by Anonymous and WikiLeaks. Legitimacy is not the same thing as efficacy, even though the latter can boost the former."

And from the archives, you'll remember we floated ten ways of thinking about DDoS attacks as a form of political action.

(With Micah Sifry)