Frater 219's Journal: Imminent censorship of the Net predicted, film at 11

In the past few weeks, we have seen two high-profile cases where distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) has been used to obstruct controversial speech and punish the speakers. This is a growing threat to the freedom of the Internet, as people cannot feel free to speak their minds online when the threat of network destruction hangs over them.

In the first case, the litigious SCO has apparently been targeted for DDoS by someone (or, more likely, several) who thinks they're doing good for the open-source world. I personally believe that SCO is guilty of libel and other crimes. However, mob justice is no justice at all -- and as has been pointed out by wiser heads than mine own, cannot benefit the open-source community. SCO is crooked, but the way to handle a crooked company is with due process in the courts, not pitchforks and torches.

In the second case, the engineering firm Osirusoft has been attacked -- probably by spammers -- for its hosting of a number of DNSBLs, including one based on the SPEWS lists. (Contrary to urban legend, Osirusoft did not maintain SPEWS. Rather, it translated the SPEWS data set into a DNSBL and made it queriable on a nameserver. There are other SPEWS-based DNSBLs.) SPEWS is controversial because of three facts: it is anonymous; it has a policy of predictively listing network blocks of ISPs that fail to terminate spammers; and it has been for a time increasingly effective and widely used.

Some people (erroneously, in my opinion) believe that SPEWS practices censorship. Some people (correctly, in my opinion) believe that SCO practices libel and the perversion of justice. Yet the rise of denial-of-service as a means of speech suppression is both censorious and unjust. It is a tool by which anyone offended by a speaker can (with a modicum of technical knowledge) stifle that speaker and inflict upon him or her substantial costs. It is destructive both of property and of discourse.

My worry is that many have cheered these attacks, as a way of getting revenge upon unpopular targets. This trend of rising mob violence -- and violence it is, even if only against property and not persons -- threatens to destroy everyone's freedom to speak on the Net. Freedom is the freedom to be both unpopular and safe -- and it is as surely threatened by the lynch mob as it is by the government censor; nay, more so -- for the mob are more numerous and observant of that which offends them.

I ask those who have cheered these attacks -- is this the kind of Internet polity you want to have? Do you want criminal gangs of script-kiddies and spammers deciding what online speech is to be punished? For if you do not want this perpetrated against you, you are obligated not to countenance it when it is committed against others.