I'm actually developing the website for a company that is booking passenger space on cargo ships to bring over 200-500 men and women with tourist visas from Jakarta, Mumbai, and Abidjan who have agreed to do the job in exchange for free room and board (which might be a tent in Times Square and two bowls of soup each day) until their visas expire.
This kind of sounds like indentured servitude, which is illegal in the US (INAL, but if you assist, you might be construed as aiding & abetting, even it is via a contract).
On another note, I'm guessing (let me repeat that: I'm guessing) the sorts that would resort to professional protesters are likely left-wing types trying to inflate their presence. The same types that routinely rail against monetary abuses in politics. If you want to protest fine. Have the balls to do it yourself, in person, instead of hiring a substitute.
In regards to the petition, no, it's not the same as an in-person protest. A protest is to make yourself & your issue heard. A DDOS does none of that. There is no message with a DDOS. It's impossible to convey a message to those people that are legitimately conducting commerce with the targets. i.e. preventing me from logging into my bank's website to pay my mortgage. In this example, you're not just hurting the institution, you're also hurting private innocent individuals. If anonymous takes down Chase or BofA, you're affecting tens of millions of private citizens trying to pay their bills, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc. Missing payments results in penalties, adversely affects credit scores which results in higher borrowing costs down the line. So no, it's not the same as an in-person protest, it's felony vandalism with the potential to cost innocent bystanders millions of dollars as a collective.
Just after I got out of the US Navy back in the spring of '99, I saw an ad in The Stranger, the local leftist weekly newspaper in the Seattle area. It's a good paper and is well respected in the Pacific Northwest as a decent alternative news source. I don't know if it still is, but it was then... anyway. A group of people put out an ad looking for folks with a military background for a protest against the powers that be. Being just the sort of dude they were looking for, and being completely unemployed, I looked into it. What they were looking for were people who were trained in CBR warfare, and "not that we're asking for it" access to gas masks and replacement filters for the masks. I was extremely uneasy with their general demeanor combined with what they were suggesting, so I turned them down.
What followed was the "Battle of Seattle", the 1999 WTO riots. After my contact with the bastards who ended up instigating the riot, I took the ferry across the Sound that fateful day with the bleak hope of warning the police that this wasn't just a run-of-the-mill protest, or at the very least seeing what the fuck was about to go down. By the time I got downtown, the unmistakable scent of tear gas was evident. My compatriots and I made our way to the top of a parking garage overlooking a section of downtown Seattle which was particularly populated with folks we recognized as anarchists. We watched them smash windows and cause mayhem. Meanwhile a couple blocks away, people who either truly believed in protesting the WTO or who were paid to sit there with gas masks on were pepper sprayed by the Seattle PD. Those who wore gas masks took a real beating. They took a beating in order to be a distraction to the police, while the anarchists had their way with businesses blocks away.
The moral to the story is, if you think your protest is organic, and it ends up being huge, it probably isn't organic. It's astroturf. Someone's bankrolling it. Things like the march on Washington lead by MLK are the exception rather than the rule.
Long story short, nothing is what it seems and the cake is a lie. If you think you are doing a good thing by joining a populist uprising, do your due diligence. Learn who they are and what they intend to do. Most of the time they want you for nothing more than cannon fodder.
