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The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet
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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
What is Hacktivism?
In The Coming Swarm, rising star Molly Sauter examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. The internet is a vital arena of communication, self expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, or people to unify, many will turn to the internet as a theater for that activity. As familiar and widely accepted activist tools-petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns and others-find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins? With a historically grounded analysis, and a focus on early deployments of activist DDOS as well as modern instances to trace its development over time, The Coming Swarm uses activist DDOS actions as the foundation of a larger analysis of the practice of disruptive civil disobedience on the internet.
- ISBN-101623564565
- ISBN-13978-1623564568
- PublisherBloomsbury Academic
- Publication dateOctober 23, 2014
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5 x 0.4 x 8 inches
- Print length192 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Questions about online protest tactics have never been more fraught-as the analog police militarize their response to legitimate dissent, so, too, have the Internet cops decided that any online protest is cyber-terrorism. Sauter's work places one of the most urgent political questions of the 21st century into much-needed context.” ―Cory Doctorow, EFF Fellow and co-editor of Boing Boing
“Do two wrongs ever make a right? Sauter deftly shows how the injustices of our asymmetrical media landscape motivate and in some ways justify illegal online attacks. How much collateral damage to the network, if any, is ethical when lives are at stake in the real world? And how does public perception of hackers both inhibit and enhance the effectiveness of their efforts? While there may be no easy answers, The Coming Swarm is a landmark contribution to a conversation that needs to be initiated right now.” ―Douglas Rushkoff, author, Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed
“While DDOS actions have only recently entered the public consciousness, they have a vibrant history in the realm of political activism. Drawing on disciplines from political philosophy to social movement theory, Molly Sauter illuminates the importance of DDOS actions to modern democratic discourse, and contextualizes them in the evolution of political activism as it has moved from the streets to their elusive online counterparts.” ―Jonathan Zittrain, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law Library and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
“The Internet has increasingly attracted passionate citizens who engage in disruptive acts of direct action to voice dissent. Erudite in its analysis and written with grace and style, The Coming Swarm is the definitive account on the DDoS campaign. Sauter's compact book covers vast ground to advance a compelling argument: the political use of DDoS merits recognition as civil disobedience. She deftly considers the tactic's history, the technological and cultural changes underwriting its contemporary manifestation, and the laws seeking to stamp out its existence. Theoretically informed and empirically rich her book is essential reading to understand the veritable explosion of online dissent today and why, given multiple threats, its future stands in peril.” ―Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University
“The Internet is changing the nature of civil disobedience. Molly Sauter's book is an interesting and important discussion of political denial-of-service attacks: what has come before, and what's likely to come in the future.” ―Bruce Schneier, Author of Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive and Schneier on Security
“In The Coming Swarm, Molly Sauter provides deep historical and philosophical context to online "denial of service" attacks, examining the participants' motivations and their portrayals in the media, whether as terrorist, hacker, artist, or nuisance.” ―Clay Shirky, Associate Professor, NYU, author of Here Comes Everybody
“The Coming Swarm is a thought-provoking little bomb of a book that raises issues activists in 2014 can't afford to ignore: virtual space is overwhelmingly privatized and corporatized and our right to protest is being unfairly impinged upon and criminalized online, with potentially devastating consequences for democracy.” ―Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Salon.com
“This book will set your mind thinking and help you challenge conventional thought. In a relatively slim volume it will take you through the history of DDoS and how it can have an impact before considering the role, style and methodology of DDoS-ing before ending up with defensive/responsive measures and the possible future of DDoS-ing. This is one of those great 'generalist' books that you could and should read even if you don't think you have a rebellious bone in your body.” ―Darren Ingram, Darren Ingram Media
“The Coming Swarm is thoroughly thought-provoking and meticulously researched (as one might expect from a peer-reviewed publication under the Bloomsbury Academic imprint). It will be an important contribution as more enlightened public policy makers try to understand digital culture rather than just contain it.” ―Sophia Stuart, PC Mag
“The scope of the publication is ambitious and the analysis trenchant ... This makes The Coming Swarm a valuable source for researchers, activists and even policymakers, and it should find specifically a home on the shelves of social movement and collective action scholars.” ―Leonie Maria Tanczer, Queen's University Belfast, LSE Review of Books
“Sauter provides history and analysis of 'distributed denial of service' (DDoS) actions, a tactic used by groups such as Anonymous in which numerous computers overwhelm a server with activity so as to disrupt its functioning. The author does the important work of documenting campaigns by activist collectives (e.g., Electronic Disturbance Theater, Anonymous) and examining DDoS actions in context and in relation to historical events (e.g., US Civil Rights Movement, WTO protests), in so doing extending understanding of communication technologies, political speech, and activism … Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.” ―D. Shepherd, Boise State University, CHOICE
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Bloomsbury Academic (October 23, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 192 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1623564565
- ISBN-13 : 978-1623564568
- Item Weight : 8.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.4 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,992,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #313 in Public Administration
- #1,309 in Media Studies (Books)
- #10,784 in Communication & Media Studies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Molly Sauter is a doctoral student at McGill University in Montreal in the department of Art History and Communication Studies. She holds a masters degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, and is an affiliate researcher at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her research is situated in socio-political analyses of technology and technological culture, and is broadly focused on hacker culture, transgressive digital activism, and depictions of technology in the media. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, HiLow Brow, io9, The American Behavioral Scientist, and the MIT Technology Review. Her research has been featured by Popular Mechanics, BoingBoing, the BBC, NPR, the CBC, Der Spiegel, and the Christian Science Monitor. She resides in Montreal, Quebec, and lives on the internet, blogging at oddletters.com and tweeting @oddletters.
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This is an important contribution to political theory, social movements and civic studies. Molly provides a nuanced argument for situating DDOS within a repertoire of more widely and traditionally accepted civil disobedience tactics. Her command of the relevant history, literature, and theory allows her to trace the fundamental qualities of disruptive political action, cutting through the nostalgic version of the civil rights movement and the confusing media and legal narratives that push political hacktivists into criminal and terrorist categories.
Once again, this is a work of political theory by an adept media scholar. She is not an apologist for DDOSers broadly. Molly is clear that DDOS's efficacy as disruptive political action has never been clear and is in fact on the path toward diminishing returns. Moreover, despite Molly's argument, we as a society may never successfully separate activist DDOS from criminal DDOS. The ethical boundaries under which legitimate civil disobedience occurs within this form of digital activism are hard to accomplish as the tools move away from one computer one voice, voluntarily and explicitly offered, toward passive participation or nonvoluntary botnets employed in protests.
In many ways, the metaphors to street protest and sit-ins break down in the online spaces, where there are no true public spaces in which freedom of speech and assembly can be practiced in legally sanctioned ways. Furthermore, DDOS actions don't clearly represent their political nature
And where does it extend? I recently asked Molly if she thought that giving money to big campaigns, trusting them to spend it wisely, was similar to offering your computer to an IRC channel to use for DDOS actions they deemed a priority. Using her theory, we can relate both of these resources—money and computing—to political speech. And she believes they are similar. However, there is a difference in cost. One hundred dollars costs someone $100, whereas the computing resources are negligible as they are part of the sunk cost of owning computers and paying for bandwidth. There is also a difference in risk. Giving money to a cause is a low cost activity. In many cases you can give money anonymously too, if privacy is important.
Thanks to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act though, participating in a DDOS action puts a person at risk of felony fraud charges with significant prison time and "damage" liability. The value and legitimacy of political action should not be based on either cost or risk, even though, as Molly points out in her book, personal cost and the threat of arrest are historically markers of public legitimization of dissent. The police and courts help draw attention to an action by reacting to it and your willingness to be put on trial demonstrates your respect for the law whilst also disagreeing with it.
DDOS activists do not have the luxury of facing "reasonable" risk though in their civil disobedience. The legibility of DDOS as political action is hard for observers less sophisticated than Molly. The dramatic consequences of the CFAA forces most arrests into plea bargaining in which the role of legal spectacle to legitimize the political action disappear: there is no "day in court" for the activists, rather they come off as guilt-admitting criminals, who are now not allowed to talk about the intention of their actions publicly due to the conditions of the plea deal.
This is Molly's other major contribution in this work: a cogent argument for reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in light of how it squelches what she argues should be understood as legitimate political speech acts in the form of DDOS actions.
Note: the book begins with a dense introduction as Molly outlines the theoretical, technical, and legal context of her argument, but this sets the stage for a highly readable journey through the evolution of DDOS as action and a healthy reminder of what civil disobedience is all about. Reading this book in the midst of the Ferguson and Eric Garner protests around the country, I was more reflective about disruptive action. What can we do online? Where should the direct and indirect actions go and how will they be judged? I'm both eager and worried for the future of digital activism, as I know Molly is.
[originally published on Goodreads]
It presents a global perspective of this phenomenon, broader in historical and geographical terms than related works by Gabriella Coleman and Parmy Olsen, while being more specific by focusing primarily on DDoS.
As I read it, Sauter's case is effective, that the laws (namely the CFAA and EPCA in the US, but also similar laws around the world) punishing Distributed Denial of Service actions impose sentences that are disproportionately punitive when compared to similarly disruptive forms of social action.
Well worth the read.
She's gone back to pre-Aonoymous DDoS activities in the late-90s, not only describing them but looking at the intentions of the protestors and how there activities are different from DDoS activities today.
She is also well-versed in physical protest activities and free speech questions and is able to compare them clearly to these same questions when it comes to the virtual world.
Where Coleman speaks in somewhere breathless tones and is almost heralding a new age of Internet-based activism, Sauter is more sanguine. She clearly sees that there are important questions of free speech and public property on the Internet and that these have grave implications for any type of protest. She also looks at the increased criminalization of DDoS activities in both law and in media and asks important questions about the effect this might have of future protests using this tool.
Where Coleman's focus was broad and fizzy, Sauter's is laser-sharp. While general readers might not like her techie tone that creeps up, hang in there, almost every technical discussion becomes clear in a paragraph or two.
I'm delighted with how Sauter packed some much into such a short book and highly recommend it.