Net Filtering and ECD

By Alex Schlotzer
15/09/09

Late last week there was a great story about anonymous online activists using electronic civil
disobedience to express their outrage at the continued effort to censor the Internet by Senator
Conroy and the Rudd Labor Government. The form of ECD utilized was the trusty old distributed
denial of service (DDoS) action, which was, reportedly, successfully used to stop access to a
number of the government's agencies' websites.

Of course there have been those that have questioned the legitimacy of using these kinds of tactics.
And for the most part they offer sound justifiable reasons for not using such methods of protest, or
at least not until all other means have been exhausted. This is always an appealing position to take,
committing to taking the already tried and true means of protest; more rallies, more letters to
Members of Parliament, more letters to the Editor, more calling talkback radio, more citizen action
groups and more meet ups. I'll admit that this is the bread and butter of running long running
campaigns, and especially when it is against the government and encumbent political party.

But what makes this story really interesting? It's that electronic civil disobedience, in the form of
the distributed denial of service (DDoS) action, was chosen to express the outrage of the
community, or part thereof anyway.

The DDoS caused no real harm. There was no website defacement or redirection and no other
indications that the security of the websites targeted had been compromised. Simply put; the only
'harm' caused by the DDoS was lost time in the government ability to spread its propaganda on the
Internet. And if reports are correct, though conflicting, the most time these sites were down for was
1 hour.

That is 1 hour out of 24 hours, leaving 23 hours for the government's propaganda to be available.
There is no indication of the 'cost' of the 'damage' done by the DDoS, or whether a server or
computer were harmed during the action. Maybe one of the website's technical staff got a paper cut?
We'll never know. But the action did do one thing, and the most important thing in my humble
opinion – it brought mainstream media attention on the debate about the government's proposed
blanket Internet censorship system. Even if for a couple of days.

Sure it gave Conroy more opportunities to nationally espouse his government's brand of propaganda
for a broken system of censorship. The government's position is seemingly about a blanket
censorship of the Internet, with no real criteria for determining what is banned. but it also gave
voice to the greater number of opposing opinions.

This is truly the first decent act of ECD in Australian cyber space since 2002/03 when the federal
Department of Education's websites were disrupted for 30 minutes. The action also helped illustrate
that ECD can be an effective tool which supports existing campaigns.

However, the bottom line is: It helped highlight the voices standing up for freedom of speech and
freedom of choice in what we access as adults on the Internet (albeit highly ineffective); and ECD
was the vehicle.