Effectivity and Legitimacy of DDoS

Effectivity and Legitimacy of DDoS

Effectivity and Legitimacy of DDoS

There is no doubt that the growing use of non-voluntary botnets does make a significant difference in terms of the effectivity of DDoS attacks. Due to improvements in web security, it is questionable whether highly publicised events such as Anonymous’ Operation Payback in 2010 would have had any noticeable effect without their involvement. ³⁸ However, there is an ongoing debate whether it also makes a difference in terms of legitimacy whether users have clearly signalled their consent to the use of their equipment (as in the case of the LOIC) or whether it is used in a non-voluntary way, after being infected by malware. Sauter points out that the question of whether to automate server requests was already prevalent during the first phase of DDoS actions and that some technical possibilities were actively disregarded in order to “maintain a one-to-one participant to signal ratio.” ³⁹

For many scholars involved in hacktivism research, the legitimacy of DDoS hinges on the question of whether it should be considered a form of civil disobedience. Delmas is sceptical about including any form of hacktivism in this category since it would lower the level of commitment that she considers central to civil disobedience.⁴⁰ Sauter, on the other hand, makes an elaborate case for including DDoS under the category of civil disobedience by comparing it to offline forms of activism and developing a set of criteria for assessing the legitimacy of specific actions. One of these criteria concerns the use of non-voluntary botnets, which they regard as “a grossly unethical action”⁴¹ that impacts negatively on legitimate forms of activism. Celikates and de Zeeuw make the opposite case, arguing that non-voluntary botnets should be considered as legitimate forms of civil disobedience, since they reflect a

³⁸ Candice Delmas, “Is Hacktivism the New Civil Disobedience?”, Raisons Politiques, no. 1 (2018): 63-81, 70; Deseriis, “Hacktivism”, 144; Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of Lulzsec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency (New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2012), 117.

³⁹ Sauter, The Coming Swarm, 44.

⁴⁰ Delmas, “Is Hacktivism the New Civil Disobedience?”, 69.

⁴¹ Sauter, The Coming Swarm, 132.

transformation of activist strategies towards “algorithmic resistance.” ⁴² Fordyce makes a similar case involving a historical-critical reading of the concept of the automaton. ⁴³

Desiriis discusses the use of non-voluntary botnets from an ethical perspective, highlighting both the absence of user consent and the problem of intransparency when decisions about targets are delegated to a small “techno-elite.” ⁴⁴ However, rather than engaging in the debate about legitimacy and civil disobedience, he primarily treats botnets as a case in order to explore how the hybridity of contemporary socio-technical assemblages impacts upon anthropocentric notions of political agency. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between signifying and a-signifying components, as well as Simondon’s notions of transindividuation, he seeks to “grasp the evolution of the hacktivist DDoS from a collective human action that uses specialized software tools to achieve specific political ends to a process of transindividuation that is activated by unspecialized network resources.” ⁴⁵ From this perspective, it appears that the use of non-voluntary botnets for hacktivist purposes has “reversed the relationship between collective subjectivation and technological efficiency.” ⁴⁶ Rather than establishing a functional relationship between existing political struggles and technical means to promote this struggle, technicity itself becomes the site of politics.

Effectivity and Legitimacy of DDoS

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