Anti-WTO direct action? (was: RE: Some inflammatory coverage of J18 and N30 hactivism)

["Me Uh, K." <pram512@yahoo.com>]

[: hacktivism :]

Partially [SNIP]ed for you convience.

--- Grugnog <grugnog@tao.ca> wrote:
> [: hacktivism :]
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> One thing to bear in mind is that the list can't
> really be 'responsible' for
> anything, as we don't really have any means to
> decide on anything, let alone
> really organise the nitty gritty of something (it's
> mainly a list for
> discussion - yes). So, any ideas resulting from the
> list are probably best
> being 'spawned off' into separate projects.

Obviously, I just made up the entire quote, a sort of
composite of some of the media I read regarding JED. 
The press doesn't like not having someone to blame
though, and as a result, tends to distribute
responsibility as they see fit.  ("Joe would talk to
us about why they would firebomb those chickens, so
we'll just say it was Joe's idea")
To be perfectly honest, we can't even decide how we
want to run our list, let alone what we should
discuss, what kind of action campaings we should
undertake, ect.

> This would, IMO be better for
> the project, and better for the list. There isn't
> really a problem with the
> list being 'associated' (as in 'resulting from
> discussions on the hacktivism
> list' in JED) with projects though IMHO as long as
> it is made clear we don't
> 'sponsor' or 'organise' a project.
just as a matter of curiosity, who is responsible,
leaglly speaking, for the list.  If we did something
really bad as a list, would Tao share in our blame?

> > and there's that whole
> > gray-area legality involved with intentionally
> > disrupting the functionality of someone's web
> > site.
> 
> True, in my opinion there are also some ethical
> issues involved with
> censorship, and tactical issues about it being more
> important to focus on
> getting our message out than stopping others.

I feel that all is fair in revolution and reform.  Of
course, I think the point of non-violent
(non-damaging) protest is to draw attention, both from
those you're protesting as well as the media.  If we
were to put our anti-wto website over theirs, we would
draw the attention of both those partiies (though the
press would be limited, specialty press -
hackernews.com, ect) and whoever is handling the
hacked site for the wto would be able, quite quickly,
to replace our modifications with a backup.  (of
course, we don't have to patch the hole, so we can do
it again, and again if we desire :)  If we were
interested in actually STOPPING the flow of
information, we would probably do something like break
in and physically destroy their boxen.  But that's not
very non-violent, is it?

> However both of these are in
> my 'fuzzy/slightly flexible' catagory, as in an
> life/death emergency (such
> as some of the ones in chiapas) it is OK to override
> them if we are looking
> for better alternatives at the same time.
> One thing that could get round this, for example
> would be to target the
> computers which are involved in internal movement of
> communications rather
> than publication of information. By blitzing IPs or
> mailboxes this coule be
> a radical disruption action, rather than one which
> could be misinterpreted
> as 'we don't want people to see this nasty
> information'.

that, unfortuantely, is beyond my capabilities, unless
their intranet is REALLY badly configured.  Of course,
there are other options (hostile respawning email,
ect), and I imagine other people have the ability.
No one said that if we were going to do something
hostile to their site the changes would be mutually
exclusive to the origonal site.  We could just post a
brief statement and a handful of links, and leave all
of their information intact and unaltered, in the air
of full-disclosure.

> Just 2@c
> 
> - Grug
> 
-mia k. (who could probably root your box, but doesn't
know any html:)

ps- Does anyone know if it's possible to work a cc:
into the mailto: tag in html?  If someone could send
it tov me, I'd be happy to do the gruntwork in working
out a webpage with a link to mail all of congress at once.
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